Hawking Says Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution

movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting: "'At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race,' Hawking said. In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, 'an external transmission phase,' where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. 'But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,' Hawking says, 'has grown enormously. Some people would use the term evolution only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.'"

Comments

Re:Anthropologists have been saying this for a whi

[smoker2]

The entire way interactive web pages are written now seems like a giant kludge, when for many things it seems like it'd be simpler to just write an app in C++ or Java or whatever, run it on the remote server, and display it remotely on the user's computer.

What do you think is going on now ? You CAN write your app in whatever language will run on the server. HTTP is merely the popular protocol that's used to transmit data back and forth. The clue is in its name. It is tolerant of delays and dropouts (due to its underlying transport mechanism) and has the concept of sessions. Apache isn't written in HTTP, it's C. MySQL is written in C and C++. Java is Java. What do you suggest instead ? A networked X session ? HDMI over continental distances ? RDP ?

Web browsers are web browsers, not dedicated to your proprietary application. So get on with it and write your server app. But write a client too, don't try to shoehorn an application meant for interpreting and displaying text into being your perfect client. Google Earth is a client server app, that seems to work just fine. There are a myriad of FPS games that work just fine too. Just let everybody else know what port you'll be using for your dedicated app, and be prepared for a fight if something else is already using it. There aren't unlimited ports, there are a lot, but there was a big IP space when IPv4 started. Look how that's turning out. So you would be sensible to use an existing protocol for transporting your data. This has nothing to do with what language your client server app is written in.