I doubt that opt-in copyright will be stricken from the records - the rest of the world uses it, it would create a legal nightmare for any company that spans US/international borders.
Perhaps the real thrust is to force a 'compromise' deal, either to get a hard and fast limit of 95 years agreed (for when Mickey Mouse needs extending) or even to try and reduce that period of time.
When you're shooting against the wind, you have to build in some compensation in order to hit the target...
I *think* the programming model will be sort-of-like CORBA, with 'messages' being sent from a central despatcher (the G5 probably, though it could be another APU). I think the messages will be self-contained program+data though - they've even called them APUlet's. The OS then schedules them to be executed on the first available APU.
The message is the data, but the code will be bundled along with it, and when it's finished, it'll send another message back to the despatcher (or 'return' some value, depending on how you view these things). In a traditional messaging system, the code is fixed. In this paradigm you get to change the code as well as the data - could be a nightmare to debug, but the flexibility is staggering.
So, yes, I think messaging systems will be the way this pans out. I wonder if Apple R&D are at this moment chained to a Cell, porting Darwin...
All the programs that run on PC architectures expect certain things to be in place - they expect a single fast central CPU. They expect that good cache usage is important for performance. They expect to have access to gobs of RAM. Etc. Etc. The PS2 (and by extension the cell) is completely different.
Consider a different architecture. You have a job that consists of multiple things to do. Some of these can be easily parallelised, others are mainly sequential. Divide it up so the parallel ones are coded separately, maybe with some IPC to synchronise to some clock.
For a sequential part (say rendering the object list of a scene back to front to gain occlusion) the approach that worked for me on the PS2 (which is logically similar, if significantly less powerful) was to divide the job into tasks. Each task (say, one per object in the above) gets its own bit of code and knows about the data that it needs to perform its task.
The key thing is that the Harvard separation of code and data just isn't, on a PS2. You set up a DMA chain that loads the program into the processor, then streams the data through the program on the processor, lather, rinse, repeat. Make the chain self-submitting and you can effectively forget about that chunk of code now, it'll just happen.
This is still doing things sequentially (but we've agreed that this is a sequential task, right?) - the point is that it's being done highly efficiently within the architectural constraints. You have a dataflow architecture and even sequential code can hit the performance limits if you code to the architecture.
The Cell looks even more powerful, in that you can chain execution modules together, so you can load code into APU's 1,2,3,4 and stream the data through 1,2,3,4 automatically before it's considered 'done'. This was possible on the PS2, but... awkward. It'll keep the effective instructions/clock down because you're effectively pipelining your software... Nice idea.
The PS*3* will have (an expected 4, actually) cell processors inside. The PS2 has an embedded MIPS core and a couple of (pretty cool for the time) vector processors. The Cell is a much more advanced version of the PS2 ideas.
The original PS2 design was for a dataflow architecture - the Cell is a continuation (and significant evolution) of the theme. Interestingly enough, if this *does* take off it may be that the best programmers of tomorrow turn out to be the PS2 low-level guys, who've already written the algorithms that are about to be important.
In the PS2, the MIPS chip was there mainly to do the simple stuff, all the heavy lifting was done on the 2 vector processors, and they were designed to have programs uploaded into them and data streamed through them using a very flexible (chainable) DMA engine. Sounds similar (if in a limited sense) to the Cell chip itself.
I've done this sort of thing before - had to have things that run under linux, Irix, SunOS, and windows. It's not really hard as long as you start out with the idea that things are going to be system-dependent. I had directories with Makefiles in that called directories (some ours, some 3rd-party) Makefiles etc. etc. You just need to put the thought in ahead of time.
My solution was to have the top-level Makefile set a variable based on running the 'uname' command, and then 'include' the definitions that worked for the platform, based on the variable name (we were running gcc and gmake on all the platforms, although the windows one was cross-compiled under Linux. Believe it or not, this was easier!)
So, CC, CXX, JAVA, LD, RM, AR, RANLIB etc. etc were all defined within the platform-specific file, and the main Makefile looked pretty clean. All you have then are the #ifdef statements in the source code. It did get to the point where for one project we simply had different source code for the Windows variant, and the platform-specific Makefiles copied the correct file into place before trying to compile the module in question...
Looking back at the posts I'm making on/. these days leads me to believe I've become an old fart. Oh well. Happens to the best of us [grin]
Sure, the airlines hand out customs forms on the flight, but how can they "collect" it as you claim is required when you never give those forms to them ?
The forms are standardised and haven't changed in years - they ask for a single address you will be staying at. No-one I know has a problem with this.
The author of the article was asked for a complete list of places and names of people with whom he was staying, to be written on a blank piece of paper, by a security guard at Gatwick airport - this is in the UK, btw. I would have baulked as well.
I've been travelling to the US from the UK every year for the last 10 (three times this year), in varying classes, and I've never been asked for anything like this.
"We caution that this study does not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between restricted sleep and obesity (but) investigations demonstrating success in weight loss via extensions of sleep would help greatly to establish such a relationship."
Noting that states A and B appear to have a mutual relationship does not mean that A implies B, it could just as easily mean that B implies A, or even that the statistics are skewed by something else...
If it turns out that fat people have more trouble sleeping than thin ones, then they would sleep less, but trying to force them to sleep more (drugs perhaps) would not necessarily decrease their weight...
But then, for lowly consumers, when is it the technology that matters ?
At the end of the day, you want something nice in your living room, and a flatscreen TV fits the bill. Personally I prefer a projector (nothing like an 8' image to give you a sense of cinema:-) but both free up a huge area of floorspace and don't intrude. The LCD looks nicer when it's not on...
I'm typing this on a 23" Apple Cinema Screen LCD display, which I bought because it was gorgeous. Simple as. The fact that for significantly less cash I could have had 2 CRT's and a slightly larger screen real-estate didn't matter (which is saying something for me - I like having lots of windows open at once...). Looks matter:-)
The main flaw I can see in this is that as soon as it has been 'cracked' (which could be as simple as re-digitising the stream being sent to the video device), it can be reformatted into an MPEG2 / H264 stream and put onto BitTorrent. The simple fact is that it only needs to be broken *once*, and *everyone* can get it.
The movie business is going to hit the same wall as the audio business did, and the solution the audio business came up with (well, more accurately, were forced into) was to make the downloading of songs relatively cheap (under $1). As soon as it's not worth it to go through the hassle of copying the data, it is once again a viable product. At the moment, the movies are not viable products...
Yes I know - Susan Calvin. Damn. Eventually I'll realise the preview button is there for a reason. I was just too annoyed at the hubris of the story...
This is not a "really smart" story, it's a fantasy. It's too many ill-informed people (with too much time on their hands) that have seen "I, Robot". It even reads like some of the 'Susan Calvert' Asimov stories.
There is a world of difference between programming something to *act* as though it has emotions, and something actually having an emotional or original response. The former is no different to calculating a spreadsheet, the latter has to do with independent and original experiences and actions - implying intelligence and self-awareness. No computer today, no matter how well programmed, is as self-aware as a house fly. We don't grant flies legal rights.
The closest we've come to simulating intelligence, or at least produced non-programmed behaviour in computers are the neural networks coded up where the instructions ("program") are held within and are a function of the dataset rather than the construct. Even neural nets are simply matrix equations, albeit non-linear usually, and are thus completely deterministic. The typical neural network has less than 1000 nodes within it, the human brain has 100 billion neurons on average (with 10-50 times that many glial cells). The phrase "does not compare" doesn't even come close.
I've just read a few of these out - the one that caused the most laughter was the 'shrinking water molecules' one. Looks like the Planck constant isn't, at least for hairdressers:-)
I'm sure the condom story will cause the most general hilarity though - shades of 'Riotous Assembly' by Tom Sharpe - which I heartily recommend if you want people to wonder why you suddenly burst out laughing...
The real issue of course is that the general public ("sheep") will believe anything a man in a white coat ("doctor") tells them. Scepticism is a vanishing but valuable trait:-( Perhaps if science were more popular/emphasized more at school, the problem might alleviate, but there's no votes in improving the education system in 15 years time...
Not that I have anything to do with a geolocation project, you understand [grin]
I did a pilot test for the Weather Xchange folks a couple of years back, and was monitoring the temperatures around the UK and making mpeg movies of location-averaged temperature snapshots - a bit like time-lapse photography. I've just moved to the US and the computer with the movies is on a ship somewhere, but it did look pretty cool (no pun intended:-) to see patterns of hot and cold move around the country over time...
[Warning - this post assumes that Global Warming is indeed a problem. It also presupposes we might be able to do something about it]
A picture comes to mind. A birthday party, where one child has already eaten a large quantity of cake, but wants all the rest subdivided equally. Not getting this result from the adults present, she throws a tantrum....
The US (and all the developed world) have exploited the natural resources of the world during the creation of their relatively-advanced technological society. Why should those who have been gentler towards the planet suffer the same consequences ? The US is not held to any harder regulations than any of the other developed countries, but it refuses to turn from its' self-indulgent and destructive path.
There will be more hurricanes next year; each will be stronger. There will be more of an 'El Nino' effect. The great farm areas of the American interior will suffer the consequences of this misguided 'screw-tomorrow' policy, and starving US children will curse their grandfathers stupidity and arrogance.
Or maybe not. The thing is that the risk-assessment of any course of action is the probability of the consequences multiplied by the effect of the consequences - and the potential downside here is enormous. Irrespective of the probability of the risk, it makes sense to limit the risk further, and that is what is not happening.
What US-observers see is a blind lemming-like tendency to rush towards oblivion with no provision for being wrong. Kyoto is not enough. Kyoto is a damage-limitation exercise - triage, if you like - that will need to be reviewed and tightened in various areas before it will be effective.
Global Warming does not require everywhere to heat up, it simply states that the average temperature will increase, thereby releasing more phase-space for the atmosphere to explore, and exposes us all to more-extreme weather - weather that was unavailable before the average temperature rose. Those extremes will kill people.
It never ceases to amaze me that people can dismiss a rise in temperature of (say) 1 degree C as nothing worth bothering about. I can barely conceive of the energy required to raise the average temperature of a *planet* by a degree C.
I must have got a dozen or so of these in the last few days, my spam appears to go in phases... either I'm in dire need of sexually-enhancing drugs, about to die from malnutrition, or they're all just after my CC details...
It's just a blanket 'attack'. Email is cheap, and they're not trying to be smart because they don't need to be.
I take it you missed where I said 'effectively' in the sentence ?
Evolution is a theory. Mutations happen. Some are bad, some benign, some are good. A fraction of those that are good are heritable. A fraction of those heritable ones will result in the same mutation in offspring. Once a threshold for sustainable replication has been achieved, the mutation can be said to be prevalent, and it will then rapidly spread through the population modulo selection barriers such as geography. I do understand these things, but the observable phenomena is identical to evolution 'effectively trying to' do something about a situation.
That's not a counter-argument... I'm not even sure where to start...
No species evolves in a vacuum, and evolution (effectively) is constantly trying to find the most advantage for the species within a given environment. Even laying aside the argument that just because one thing is increased doesn't mean another is decreased (some creatures have good sight, good smell, and good hearing, for example), it is the environment, not the species that dictates what path evolution takes a species.
Consider a massively pungent environment, where all smells are rendered undetectable against the background within a metre or so. If you hunt over large distance, your species will likely only use smell for identification within social groups. Sight, hearing, maybe sonic radar, whatever will become far more important, and therefore more prominent to your species.
Consider the opposite - a constantly foggy environment. Here sight (unless you evolve a radio-sense) will be pretty useless, smell and hearing will take control.
The real world is neither of the above extremes, but given the prey and lifestyle of any given species, it is highly unlikely to ever result in a *real* stagnation in evolution. Even if so (hah!) there is more to it than just evolution at work - if you read Stuart Kauffman's 'The origins of order' (and you manage to finish it, which took me a few tries), he derives theories that both place limits on what evolution can acheive, and shows how jumps can be made from the stable state to a worse or better state across fitness landscapes.
People think that apes/chimpanzees/whatever are less evolved than humans, which is rubbish. People are more intelligent, but apes are just as evolved - a human wouldn't survive anywhere near as long as a great ape in the ape's natural habitat. Evolution and environment go hand in hand.
The article is essentially saying 'we found the smoking gun'; that light-sensitive cells originated within the brain, and migrated slowly outwards to form eyes. Ergo, the famous Darwin reasoning 'any form of eye is an evolutionary advantage, and therefore given even a truly-awful eye you would expect it to develop over time into something useful' is at least plausible. Evolution at work within a large-enough population.
I remember reading in 'PCW' back when I was at school (20 years or so ago:-) of a graphical demonstration (written in Mac Basic) of the evolution of an eye lens, using statistical population approximation to demonstrate that once even a slight advantage is gained, the population moves towards a better and better eye. It drew the lens on the screen as it was being calculated iteration by iteration - fascinating stuff. I ported it to my Atari XL/Turbo Basic - Macs were a little out of my price range:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that opt-in copyright will be stricken from the records - the rest of the world uses it, it would create a legal nightmare for any company that spans US/international borders.
Perhaps the real thrust is to force a 'compromise' deal, either to get a hard and fast limit of 95 years agreed (for when Mickey Mouse needs extending) or even to try and reduce that period of time.
When you're shooting against the wind, you have to build in some compensation in order to hit the target...
Simon
Hmm - short answer: Don't know :-)
I *think* the programming model will be sort-of-like CORBA, with 'messages' being sent from a central despatcher (the G5 probably, though it could be another APU). I think the messages will be self-contained program+data though - they've even called them APUlet's. The OS then schedules them to be executed on the first available APU.
The message is the data, but the code will be bundled along with it, and when it's finished, it'll send another message back to the despatcher (or 'return' some value, depending on how you view these things). In a traditional messaging system, the code is fixed. In this paradigm you get to change the code as well as the data - could be a nightmare to debug, but the flexibility is staggering.
So, yes, I think messaging systems will be the way this pans out. I wonder if Apple R&D are at this moment chained to a Cell, porting Darwin...
Simon
All the programs that run on PC architectures expect certain things to be in place - they expect a single fast central CPU. They expect that good cache usage is important for performance. They expect to have access to gobs of RAM. Etc. Etc. The PS2 (and by extension the cell) is completely different.
Consider a different architecture. You have a job that consists of multiple things to do. Some of these can be easily parallelised, others are mainly sequential. Divide it up so the parallel ones are coded separately, maybe with some IPC to synchronise to some clock.
For a sequential part (say rendering the object list of a scene back to front to gain occlusion) the approach that worked for me on the PS2 (which is logically similar, if significantly less powerful) was to divide the job into tasks. Each task (say, one per object in the above) gets its own bit of code and knows about the data that it needs to perform its task.
The key thing is that the Harvard separation of code and data just isn't, on a PS2. You set up a DMA chain that loads the program into the processor, then streams the data through the program on the processor, lather, rinse, repeat. Make the chain self-submitting and you can effectively forget about that chunk of code now, it'll just happen.
This is still doing things sequentially (but we've agreed that this is a sequential task, right?) - the point is that it's being done highly efficiently within the architectural constraints. You have a dataflow architecture and even sequential code can hit the performance limits if you code to the architecture.
The Cell looks even more powerful, in that you can chain execution modules together, so you can load code into APU's 1,2,3,4 and stream the data through 1,2,3,4 automatically before it's considered 'done'. This was possible on the PS2, but
Simon
The PS *3* will have (an expected 4, actually) cell processors inside. The PS2 has an embedded MIPS core and a couple of (pretty cool for the time) vector processors. The Cell is a much more advanced version of the PS2 ideas.
Simon.
The original PS2 design was for a dataflow architecture - the Cell is a continuation (and significant evolution) of the theme. Interestingly enough, if this *does* take off it may be that the best programmers of tomorrow turn out to be the PS2 low-level guys, who've already written the algorithms that are about to be important.
In the PS2, the MIPS chip was there mainly to do the simple stuff, all the heavy lifting was done on the 2 vector processors, and they were designed to have programs uploaded into them and data streamed through them using a very flexible (chainable) DMA engine. Sounds similar (if in a limited sense) to the Cell chip itself.
Simon.
I've done this sort of thing before - had to have things that run under linux, Irix, SunOS, and windows. It's not really hard as long as you start out with the idea that things are going to be system-dependent. I had directories with Makefiles in that called directories (some ours, some 3rd-party) Makefiles etc. etc. You just need to put the thought in ahead of time.
/. these days leads me to believe I've become an old fart. Oh well. Happens to the best of us [grin]
My solution was to have the top-level Makefile set a variable based on running the 'uname' command, and then 'include' the definitions that worked for the platform, based on the variable name (we were running gcc and gmake on all the platforms, although the windows one was cross-compiled under Linux. Believe it or not, this was easier!)
So, CC, CXX, JAVA, LD, RM, AR, RANLIB
etc. etc were all defined within the platform-specific file, and the main Makefile looked pretty clean. All you have then are the #ifdef statements in the source code. It did get to the point where for one project we simply had different source code for the Windows variant, and the platform-specific Makefiles copied the correct file into place before trying to compile the module in question...
Looking back at the posts I'm making on
Simon.
No, it's you that's wrong.
Sure, the airlines hand out customs forms on the flight, but how can they "collect" it as you claim is required when you never give those forms to them ?
The forms are standardised and haven't changed in years - they ask for a single address you will be staying at. No-one I know has a problem with this.
The author of the article was asked for a complete list of places and names of people with whom he was staying, to be written on a blank piece of paper, by a security guard at Gatwick airport - this is in the UK, btw. I would have baulked as well.
I've been travelling to the US from the UK every year for the last 10 (three times this year), in varying classes, and I've never been asked for anything like this.
Simon.
Just in case you're not: the slot at the top isn't a PCI slot, it's the DIMM slot...
Simon
Yes. It would.
Noting that states A and B appear to have a mutual relationship does not mean that A implies B, it could just as easily mean that B implies A, or even that the statistics are skewed by something else...
If it turns out that fat people have more trouble sleeping than thin ones, then they would sleep less, but trying to force them to sleep more (drugs perhaps) would not necessarily decrease their weight...
Simon
But then, for lowly consumers, when is it the technology that matters ?
:-) but both free up a huge area of floorspace and don't intrude. The LCD looks nicer when it's not on...
:-)
At the end of the day, you want something nice in your living room, and a flatscreen TV fits the bill. Personally I prefer a projector (nothing like an 8' image to give you a sense of cinema
I'm typing this on a 23" Apple Cinema Screen LCD display, which I bought because it was gorgeous. Simple as. The fact that for significantly less cash I could have had 2 CRT's and a slightly larger screen real-estate didn't matter (which is saying something for me - I like having lots of windows open at once...). Looks matter
Simon.
The main flaw I can see in this is that as soon as it has been 'cracked' (which could be as simple as re-digitising the stream being sent to the video device), it can be reformatted into an MPEG2 / H264 stream and put onto BitTorrent. The simple fact is that it only needs to be broken *once*, and *everyone* can get it.
The movie business is going to hit the same wall as the audio business did, and the solution the audio business came up with (well, more accurately, were forced into) was to make the downloading of songs relatively cheap (under $1). As soon as it's not worth it to go through the hassle of copying the data, it is once again a viable product. At the moment, the movies are not viable products...
Simon.
You might want to read 'State of fear', especially if you're a 'global waming' sceptic (Michael Crichton would appear to be...)
Simon.
Well, it wasn't me, but I did get 9 on that test :-) Still pretty dismal perfomance...
Simon
Yes I know - Susan Calvin. Damn. Eventually I'll realise the preview button is there for a reason. I was just too annoyed at the hubris of the story...
Simon
This is not a "really smart" story, it's a fantasy. It's too many ill-informed people (with too much time on their hands) that have seen "I, Robot". It even reads like some of the 'Susan Calvert' Asimov stories.
There is a world of difference between programming something to *act* as though it has emotions, and something actually having an emotional or original response. The former is no different to calculating a spreadsheet, the latter has to do with independent and original experiences and actions - implying intelligence and self-awareness. No computer today, no matter how well programmed, is as self-aware as a house fly. We don't grant flies legal rights.
The closest we've come to simulating intelligence, or at least produced non-programmed behaviour in computers are the neural networks coded up where the instructions ("program") are held within and are a function of the dataset rather than the construct. Even neural nets are simply matrix equations, albeit non-linear usually, and are thus completely deterministic. The typical neural network has less than 1000 nodes within it, the human brain has 100 billion neurons on average (with 10-50 times that many glial cells). The phrase "does not compare" doesn't even come close.
So, in short, what a load of rubbish.
Simon.
Normally there'd be a bunch of AIFF files ready to drag/drop - with the schizophrenic nature of the disk, it'll be interesting to see what happens...
Simon
I've just read a few of these out - the one that caused the most laughter was the 'shrinking water molecules' one. Looks like the Planck constant isn't, at least for hairdressers :-)
:-( Perhaps if science were more popular/emphasized more at school, the problem might alleviate, but there's no votes in improving the education system in 15 years time...
I'm sure the condom story will cause the most general hilarity though - shades of 'Riotous Assembly' by Tom Sharpe - which I heartily recommend if you want people to wonder why you suddenly burst out laughing...
The real issue of course is that the general public ("sheep") will believe anything a man in a white coat ("doctor") tells them. Scepticism is a vanishing but valuable trait
Simon
You could try 'http://hostip.info/', and if it gets it wrong, add yourself when you find out :-)
Simon
Not that I have anything to do with a geolocation project, you understand [grin]
:-) to see patterns of hot and cold move around the country over time...
I did a pilot test for the Weather Xchange folks a couple of years back, and was monitoring the temperatures around the UK and making mpeg movies of location-averaged temperature snapshots - a bit like time-lapse photography. I've just moved to the US and the computer with the movies is on a ship somewhere, but it did look pretty cool (no pun intended
Simon.
[Warning - this post assumes that Global Warming is indeed a problem. It also presupposes we might be able to do something about it]
A picture comes to mind. A birthday party, where one child has already eaten a large quantity of cake, but wants all the rest subdivided equally. Not getting this result from the adults present, she throws a tantrum....
The US (and all the developed world) have exploited the natural resources of the world during the creation of their relatively-advanced technological society. Why should those who have been gentler towards the planet suffer the same consequences ? The US is not held to any harder regulations than any of the other developed countries, but it refuses to turn from its' self-indulgent and destructive path.
There will be more hurricanes next year; each will be stronger. There will be more of an 'El Nino' effect. The great farm areas of the American interior will suffer the consequences of this misguided 'screw-tomorrow' policy, and starving US children will curse their grandfathers stupidity and arrogance.
Or maybe not. The thing is that the risk-assessment of any course of action is the probability of the consequences multiplied by the effect of the consequences - and the potential downside here is enormous. Irrespective of the probability of the risk, it makes sense to limit the risk further, and that is what is not happening.
What US-observers see is a blind lemming-like tendency to rush towards oblivion with no provision for being wrong. Kyoto is not enough. Kyoto is a damage-limitation exercise - triage, if you like - that will need to be reviewed and tightened in various areas before it will be effective.
Global Warming does not require everywhere to heat up, it simply states that the average temperature will increase, thereby releasing more phase-space for the atmosphere to explore, and exposes us all to more-extreme weather - weather that was unavailable before the average temperature rose. Those extremes will kill people.
It never ceases to amaze me that people can dismiss a rise in temperature of (say) 1 degree C as nothing worth bothering about. I can barely conceive of the energy required to raise the average temperature of a *planet* by a degree C.
Simon.
I must have got a dozen or so of these in the last few days, my spam appears to go in phases... either I'm in dire need of sexually-enhancing drugs, about to die from malnutrition, or they're all just after my CC details...
It's just a blanket 'attack'. Email is cheap, and they're not trying to be smart because they don't need to be.
Simon
I take it you missed where I said 'effectively' in the sentence ?
Evolution is a theory. Mutations happen. Some are bad, some benign, some are good. A fraction of those that are good are heritable. A fraction of those heritable ones will result in the same mutation in offspring. Once a threshold for sustainable replication has been achieved, the mutation can be said to be prevalent, and it will then rapidly spread through the population modulo selection barriers such as geography. I do understand these things, but the observable phenomena is identical to evolution 'effectively trying to' do something about a situation.
Simon
That's not a counter-argument... I'm not even sure where to start...
No species evolves in a vacuum, and evolution (effectively) is constantly trying to find the most advantage for the species within a given environment. Even laying aside the argument that just because one thing is increased doesn't mean another is decreased (some creatures have good sight, good smell, and good hearing, for example), it is the environment, not the species that dictates what path evolution takes a species.
Consider a massively pungent environment, where all smells are rendered undetectable against the background within a metre or so. If you hunt over large distance, your species will likely only use smell for identification within social groups. Sight, hearing, maybe sonic radar, whatever will become far more important, and therefore more prominent to your species.
Consider the opposite - a constantly foggy environment. Here sight (unless you evolve a radio-sense) will be pretty useless, smell and hearing will take control.
The real world is neither of the above extremes, but given the prey and lifestyle of any given species, it is highly unlikely to ever result in a *real* stagnation in evolution. Even if so (hah!) there is more to it than just evolution at work - if you read Stuart Kauffman's 'The origins of order' (and you manage to finish it, which took me a few tries), he derives theories that both place limits on what evolution can acheive, and shows how jumps can be made from the stable state to a worse or better state across fitness landscapes.
People think that apes/chimpanzees/whatever are less evolved than humans, which is rubbish. People are more intelligent, but apes are just as evolved - a human wouldn't survive anywhere near as long as a great ape in the ape's natural habitat. Evolution and environment go hand in hand.
Simon.
The article is essentially saying 'we found the smoking gun'; that light-sensitive cells originated within the brain, and migrated slowly outwards to form eyes. Ergo, the famous Darwin reasoning 'any form of eye is an evolutionary advantage, and therefore given even a truly-awful eye you would expect it to develop over time into something useful' is at least plausible. Evolution at work within a large-enough population.
I remember reading in 'PCW' back when I was at school (20 years or so ago
Simon