I have this bookmark that I keep in my browser just for circumstances like this. This is it. The disappointing thing is, I don't even listen to Pink Floyd.
That's the idea. Of course, mRNA splicing sites are way harder to find than blocks of code (the sequence is described probabilistically, in essence), and it's subtly different between species. Fortunately it's not even remotely Turing-complete; it's closer to a context-free grammar, on the level of parenthesis matching. Which is evaluated in a probabilistic order. With Turing-complete compiler macros. (It's true: all living organisms are secretly written in PL/I.)
Actually I absolutely agree with you—I just wish we could see the patent to make sure that they were actually patenting their innovations, not trying to claim all forms of sketch-based image search input.
Nah, they could easily make up for it in volume. We don't know that the IE users had the same regularity of patronage as the Chrome users. A few dedicated Chrome users might make up for a large number of IE users who drop by once and never return. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest there are people repeatedly visiting a puzzle site to continually not solve puzzles there, regardless of how bored they are!
I think the thing that really trips people up is that there isn't a separating line. There most assuredly is still a difference between the ridiculous and highly abstracted antics of humans, and those of other animals, though. Culture is what makes us artificial; it is that from which we artifice (from ars + facio: to put/do through art and skill.) I would like to propose this be called the Love versus Rockets counter-objection.
Using a computer instead of another form of entertainment or distraction while on a trip is not directly equivalent to a more expensive hotel. It entails eyestrain, engages the mind in certain ways, and creates a barrier between the user and his or her environment. I am arguing for moderation on the behalf of mental and physical health. And yes, that includes talking to other human beings, not just reading from a book instead of saturating yourself with the hundreds of little distractions that come with reading something on a computer.
Given that you seem to think that spending your entire life glued to a computer is "a good habit" "depending on the individual" even when such always extends to include entertainment, and decided that encouraging someone to be independent of computing was evidence of a "deficiency" in "dealing and managing with flows of information," I really would not recommend trying to claim that your reductionist viewpoint is more sane. You're not a cog in a machine, Rakishi; you don't have to worry about "pissing away" the next fifty years of your life.
Go find out for yourself! Here's some prior art. It's not very good (it doesn't understand the concept of edges like MS's stuff does), but unfortunately the article doesn't have a link to the actual patent to tell if it's specific enough... the link that should go to the patent goes to the app on the Windows Phone site. (Certainly, the algorithm is impressive, though.)
Humans are unique amongst organisms in that we've gone through this fantastically elaborate arms race with ourselves—much moreso than any other genus on the planet. Yes, we've needed to kill off the occasional lion or mammoth, but for the most part we've been competing against other tribes of pink-skinned bipeds, at least for the past while. The difference between 'artificial' and 'natural' is, then, the result of that hyper-evolved arms race. There aren't too many other species that we know about with substantial levels of intelligence (predominantly, birds, cetaceans, and primates) and of them, only the chimpanzee has been caught teaching its children how to carve spears. Perhaps the rest know something we don't—like how to have a good time. (That being said, it seems that whenever someone decides to publish something on the topic, the bias seems to be toward breaking down the barrier. But it's not a bad one.)
In biology the definition of what is artificial versus what is natural is particularly obvious, but not where I placed it in the previous post; agriculture is natural (essentially random) processes responding to human pressures. Only when we start mucking around in a plant's genes and begin inserting chunks of DNA with the wrong GC content and sharp corners does the process become truly synthetic.
Well, certainly there are subsections of said market.:)
I'm pretty sure the code has been automatically generated and automatically minified. Hence the illegibility. I'm pretty sure though that when a puzzle is solved, the duration can't be more than a whole HTTP interaction (which, I guess, is a few more packets than just a single ping, so perhaps the combined metric of latency and bandwidth can have a substantial effect.)
Please, tell me what planet you are from; I wish to learn more about what you believed you were responding to, and how it relates to what I wrote. While you're at it, I'd also like to know when English became a common noun, what exactly it means to be "cold of help", and why you didn't go the extra mile and point out that these prefixes are Latin and hence common to quite a few languages.
Language evolution, much like the evolution of species, is directed by the most prominent and immobile uses (such as prescriptivists and recorded history), and by the most common usages amongst the masses. I do believe that makes you a bit of a hypocrite.:)
About your last name—might I ask how "VerBeek" came about? Couldn't you just go with the slightly-rarer but less-likely-to-be-confused "Ver Beek"? I don't know that much about Dutch genaeology or nomenclature, but it appears to me that it's the more conservative form anyway.
Attention, much like sleep and radiation dosage, does not add in a linear fashion like money. Contiguity matters.
As for habits: we should not let ourselves be completely subject to them. That's a great way to find yourself unproductive, evolutionary unfit, and having lived a repetitive and dull life. What exactly are you arguing for, here? That no one should ever suggest that living life in eternal comfort is a bad thing? This isn't a conversation about taking rights away or anything; if the guy's that desperate, then I would heartily endorse getting his own tablet or a LiveCD like everyone else has, just so he can retain more control over things. If he's only going away for a night or two occasionally, and the trips aren't too stressful, taking any action is excessive.
Well, not many engineered microorganisms are supposed to be pettable. (The running joke at iGEM is that if it doesn't find landmines or do soil detoxification, it's not even really an engineered microorganism.)
I do like your theory of IE as a base, from which people must migrate away. There are of course exceptions to user intention: the archetypal benevolent sysadmin "who takes away the dangerous blue 'e' " being one of them.
That being said, intelligent people don't just automatically migrate away from IE. Informed, interested people with a meaningful investment in the security of their computers do. Inherently that includes an age bias, an interest in computers (which is not the same as an interest in solving math puzzles, or even in programming!), and potentially an interest in the aesthetics of one's computing experience (which many, many highly capable mathematicians completely lack.) So I still don't think that numerical intelligence is well-correlated with browser of choice according to this category.
I'm amused how much ire that simple comment stirred up. For the record, I had made the assumption that the trip was going to be relatively short, and that the asker couldn't handle a day or two of, as you've called it, 'inefficiency'. If we're talking about week-long trips or extremely frequent trips then I completely understand, but the whole amount of productivity being lost if the trips are short is really relatively trivial when compared against the total amount of intellectual productivity he'll have in his entire lifetime. Wouldn't that strike you as just a little bit obsessive?
A dial-up modem in Britain takes about half a second, at most, to communicate with a server in Korea. (This is a generous over-estimate calculated from my experience with badly-coded Doom multiplayer servers.) No action on the part of the user in the game can cause a cumulative latency effect; the Javascript communicates with the server at regular intervals asynchronously to preserve the game's play state. Here is the code. Note where and how the XMLHttpRequest objects are used.
The maximum effect that latency can have on the game is that half a second, doubled to represent the start and end of the game. This cannot account for the additional 30 second difference in solving time between Chrome and Internet Explorer users, even if the figure of one half-second is underestimated by a factor of five. I have played the puzzles, and no, I cannot see where latency could come into play. Bandwidth, yes; that could slow down the loading time immensely, but not latency.
As for browser users in academia... well, that's a little more disappointing than you might imagine, but not entirely off, and I do agree with that idea as a whole. Gotta go now; will continue this chat later.
I think that really depends on the length of the trip. If it's a two-week-long adventure, then yes, you're right that my suggestion is unreasonable. Not so much if it's just an over-nighter; this is something that can get you sacked (as some other comments higher up on this story have testified) and really shouldn't be done just on a whim.
Yes. Post-nature began shortly after the invention of agriculture. Given that, I think that if they tried to build a zoo they'd... just have to point people to the nearest farm.
Postnatural. Postnatural is just a word. It is used in a sentence like this: "this bread sure is postnatural." What is this PostNatural business? Are we implementing a class for a non-artificial version of a post?
(I tried to join the local Grammar Nazi chapter, but they got upset when I pointed out that they were actually just garden-variety syntactic fascists.)
I have a better solution: learn to read a book, and work off your information overload addiction. The asker stuffs his life full of technology because it is empty. He should confront that emptiness.
You want SeaMonkey. Modern Gecko, archaic memory management model. Required system specs page says 128 MB of RAM and 233 MHz Pentium. It even sits in your system tray if you ask nicely enough. Not exactly pretty by modern standards, but I gather that's not your highest priority.
That's certainly an informative piece—so thank you—although I think I can resolutely say that while Apple didn't steal it from Xerox, they did definitely steal it from PARC:
Then, in exchange for the opportunity to invest in a hot new pre-IPO start-up called "Apple," the Xerox PARC commandos were forced — under protest — to give Apple’s engineers a tour and a demonstration of their work.
That being said, I don't completely trust the article by Mr. Landley being quoted, because it perpetuates the misunderstanding that Windows was purely derived from Xerox and the Macintosh; this is annoyingly in ignorance of VisiCorp Visi On, and that Windows was already under development when the consumer GUI market consisted of the Lisa and Visi On.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this bookmark that I keep in my browser just for circumstances like this. This is it. The disappointing thing is, I don't even listen to Pink Floyd.
That's the idea. Of course, mRNA splicing sites are way harder to find than blocks of code (the sequence is described probabilistically, in essence), and it's subtly different between species. Fortunately it's not even remotely Turing-complete; it's closer to a context-free grammar, on the level of parenthesis matching. Which is evaluated in a probabilistic order. With Turing-complete compiler macros. (It's true: all living organisms are secretly written in PL/I.)
Actually I absolutely agree with you—I just wish we could see the patent to make sure that they were actually patenting their innovations, not trying to claim all forms of sketch-based image search input.
Nah, they could easily make up for it in volume. We don't know that the IE users had the same regularity of patronage as the Chrome users. A few dedicated Chrome users might make up for a large number of IE users who drop by once and never return. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest there are people repeatedly visiting a puzzle site to continually not solve puzzles there, regardless of how bored they are!
I think the thing that really trips people up is that there isn't a separating line. There most assuredly is still a difference between the ridiculous and highly abstracted antics of humans, and those of other animals, though. Culture is what makes us artificial; it is that from which we artifice (from ars + facio: to put/do through art and skill.) I would like to propose this be called the Love versus Rockets counter-objection.
Using a computer instead of another form of entertainment or distraction while on a trip is not directly equivalent to a more expensive hotel. It entails eyestrain, engages the mind in certain ways, and creates a barrier between the user and his or her environment. I am arguing for moderation on the behalf of mental and physical health. And yes, that includes talking to other human beings, not just reading from a book instead of saturating yourself with the hundreds of little distractions that come with reading something on a computer.
Given that you seem to think that spending your entire life glued to a computer is "a good habit" "depending on the individual" even when such always extends to include entertainment, and decided that encouraging someone to be independent of computing was evidence of a "deficiency" in "dealing and managing with flows of information," I really would not recommend trying to claim that your reductionist viewpoint is more sane. You're not a cog in a machine, Rakishi; you don't have to worry about "pissing away" the next fifty years of your life.
Go find out for yourself! Here's some prior art. It's not very good (it doesn't understand the concept of edges like MS's stuff does), but unfortunately the article doesn't have a link to the actual patent to tell if it's specific enough... the link that should go to the patent goes to the app on the Windows Phone site. (Certainly, the algorithm is impressive, though.)
Humans are unique amongst organisms in that we've gone through this fantastically elaborate arms race with ourselves—much moreso than any other genus on the planet. Yes, we've needed to kill off the occasional lion or mammoth, but for the most part we've been competing against other tribes of pink-skinned bipeds, at least for the past while. The difference between 'artificial' and 'natural' is, then, the result of that hyper-evolved arms race. There aren't too many other species that we know about with substantial levels of intelligence (predominantly, birds, cetaceans, and primates) and of them, only the chimpanzee has been caught teaching its children how to carve spears. Perhaps the rest know something we don't—like how to have a good time. (That being said, it seems that whenever someone decides to publish something on the topic, the bias seems to be toward breaking down the barrier. But it's not a bad one.)
In biology the definition of what is artificial versus what is natural is particularly obvious, but not where I placed it in the previous post; agriculture is natural (essentially random) processes responding to human pressures. Only when we start mucking around in a plant's genes and begin inserting chunks of DNA with the wrong GC content and sharp corners does the process become truly synthetic.
Well, certainly there are subsections of said market. :)
I'm pretty sure the code has been automatically generated and automatically minified. Hence the illegibility. I'm pretty sure though that when a puzzle is solved, the duration can't be more than a whole HTTP interaction (which, I guess, is a few more packets than just a single ping, so perhaps the combined metric of latency and bandwidth can have a substantial effect.)
I do, too, to be quite simply honest. I just don't think it's a good thing that we're so dependent on it!
What, changing tactics already?
Please, tell me what planet you are from; I wish to learn more about what you believed you were responding to, and how it relates to what I wrote. While you're at it, I'd also like to know when English became a common noun, what exactly it means to be "cold of help", and why you didn't go the extra mile and point out that these prefixes are Latin and hence common to quite a few languages.
Language evolution, much like the evolution of species, is directed by the most prominent and immobile uses (such as prescriptivists and recorded history), and by the most common usages amongst the masses. I do believe that makes you a bit of a hypocrite. :)
About your last name—might I ask how "VerBeek" came about? Couldn't you just go with the slightly-rarer but less-likely-to-be-confused "Ver Beek"? I don't know that much about Dutch genaeology or nomenclature, but it appears to me that it's the more conservative form anyway.
Attention, much like sleep and radiation dosage, does not add in a linear fashion like money. Contiguity matters.
As for habits: we should not let ourselves be completely subject to them. That's a great way to find yourself unproductive, evolutionary unfit, and having lived a repetitive and dull life. What exactly are you arguing for, here? That no one should ever suggest that living life in eternal comfort is a bad thing? This isn't a conversation about taking rights away or anything; if the guy's that desperate, then I would heartily endorse getting his own tablet or a LiveCD like everyone else has, just so he can retain more control over things. If he's only going away for a night or two occasionally, and the trips aren't too stressful, taking any action is excessive.
Well, not many engineered microorganisms are supposed to be pettable. (The running joke at iGEM is that if it doesn't find landmines or do soil detoxification, it's not even really an engineered microorganism.)
I do like your theory of IE as a base, from which people must migrate away. There are of course exceptions to user intention: the archetypal benevolent sysadmin "who takes away the dangerous blue 'e' " being one of them.
That being said, intelligent people don't just automatically migrate away from IE. Informed, interested people with a meaningful investment in the security of their computers do. Inherently that includes an age bias, an interest in computers (which is not the same as an interest in solving math puzzles, or even in programming!), and potentially an interest in the aesthetics of one's computing experience (which many, many highly capable mathematicians completely lack.) So I still don't think that numerical intelligence is well-correlated with browser of choice according to this category.
I'm amused how much ire that simple comment stirred up. For the record, I had made the assumption that the trip was going to be relatively short, and that the asker couldn't handle a day or two of, as you've called it, 'inefficiency'. If we're talking about week-long trips or extremely frequent trips then I completely understand, but the whole amount of productivity being lost if the trips are short is really relatively trivial when compared against the total amount of intellectual productivity he'll have in his entire lifetime. Wouldn't that strike you as just a little bit obsessive?
A dial-up modem in Britain takes about half a second, at most, to communicate with a server in Korea. (This is a generous over-estimate calculated from my experience with badly-coded Doom multiplayer servers.) No action on the part of the user in the game can cause a cumulative latency effect; the Javascript communicates with the server at regular intervals asynchronously to preserve the game's play state. Here is the code. Note where and how the XMLHttpRequest objects are used.
The maximum effect that latency can have on the game is that half a second, doubled to represent the start and end of the game. This cannot account for the additional 30 second difference in solving time between Chrome and Internet Explorer users, even if the figure of one half-second is underestimated by a factor of five. I have played the puzzles, and no, I cannot see where latency could come into play. Bandwidth, yes; that could slow down the loading time immensely, but not latency.
As for browser users in academia... well, that's a little more disappointing than you might imagine, but not entirely off, and I do agree with that idea as a whole. Gotta go now; will continue this chat later.
I think that really depends on the length of the trip. If it's a two-week-long adventure, then yes, you're right that my suggestion is unreasonable. Not so much if it's just an over-nighter; this is something that can get you sacked (as some other comments higher up on this story have testified) and really shouldn't be done just on a whim.
Yes. Post-nature began shortly after the invention of agriculture. Given that, I think that if they tried to build a zoo they'd... just have to point people to the nearest farm.
Postnatural. Postnatural is just a word. It is used in a sentence like this: "this bread sure is postnatural." What is this PostNatural business? Are we implementing a class for a non-artificial version of a post?
(I tried to join the local Grammar Nazi chapter, but they got upset when I pointed out that they were actually just garden-variety syntactic fascists.)
I have a better solution: learn to read a book, and work off your information overload addiction. The asker stuffs his life full of technology because it is empty. He should confront that emptiness.
You want SeaMonkey. Modern Gecko, archaic memory management model. Required system specs page says 128 MB of RAM and 233 MHz Pentium. It even sits in your system tray if you ask nicely enough. Not exactly pretty by modern standards, but I gather that's not your highest priority.
That's certainly an informative piece—so thank you—although I think I can resolutely say that while Apple didn't steal it from Xerox, they did definitely steal it from PARC:
Then, in exchange for the opportunity to invest in a hot new pre-IPO start-up called "Apple," the Xerox PARC commandos were forced — under protest — to give Apple’s engineers a tour and a demonstration of their work.
That being said, I don't completely trust the article by Mr. Landley being quoted, because it perpetuates the misunderstanding that Windows was purely derived from Xerox and the Macintosh; this is annoyingly in ignorance of VisiCorp Visi On, and that Windows was already under development when the consumer GUI market consisted of the Lisa and Visi On.
And yet no one was beaten up when Windows, OS/2, and Amiga Workbench showed up with the same feature set and user experience.