DNA looks a lot like your standard computer program, including what is noted in the parent post. You'll also note that it has a compression algarithm (the fact that it's a double-helix is a form of compression that puts human-built lossy compression to shame, even though DNA is lossless!). It runs on a base 4 number system.
Besides the physical, lossless compression noted above, it also has a sort of internal lossy compression, which essentualy builds the fractal-like attributes of an animal it describes. To see how, consider an idea based in the early days of computing and chaos theory:
To play what is known as the Chaos Game, you will need graph paper, a pencil, and a coin. However, results are best with a computer that has a random number generator. Pick a point at random on the graph. It doesn't matter where. Put a point there. Now think up two rules, a heads rule, and a tail rule. A rule can be something like "move up 4, left 5" or "move 20% closer to the center". When you flip heads on the coin, use the heads rule, and on tails, use the tails rule. Put a point where it tells you to move to. Then flip again, and again, and again, until you're sick of flipping.
You will find that you will not get a random pattern of dots, but a very structured pattern; a fractal. The more iterations, the sharper the image gets.
The scientists first trying this then tried to do the reverse: Given an image, how can you create rules that will make that image? Without getting into the details on how this is done, it turns out that the more fractal-like the image is, the simpilar the rules will be.
I beileve that our DNA is basicly a chaos game thats been running for millions of years. Our bodies (and those of any other animal or plant) reak of fractals. Our brain is a fractal. Our fingerprints are fractals. Our blood stream and nervous system are fractals (note how similar they look to the branches of a tree).
Thus, DNA has this beautiful lossy compression system for describing the bodies it creates. Describing each and every piece of something would make it bloated and prone to error. Instead, it is taken care of with a maximum ammount of elegance.
I thought the article was way too dogmatic. All the author had to say was "this proves evolution" and we basicly got the entire thing. Why is the author wasting our precious time on this crap?
I'd love to see the evidance. I don't believe evolution, though I distance myself as much as possible from creationists because I think they're a bunch of corupt church-goers who know even less about the Bible then they do science. I want to see some links. The web is supposed to be the giant hyperlinked space where you can instantly tune out dumbed-down crap like this and get the real meat of the story if you so desire. I wish people would use it more.
The Bible is not a scientific text book. I've heard people say otherwise (usualy in overly broad terms like "the Bible is a guide to the universe"), usualy idiots who know even less about the Bible then they do science. Saying that billions and billions of galaxies with billions and billions of stars can be summerized in a book of any size is just stupid. "Testing our faith" stuff, as you mentioned it, is also just dumb.
The Bible is there for as a guide, but the universe itself is something we have to discover for ourselves. One of those things were dinosaur bones.
The biggest problem here is the puddles. Specificly, where can they form? On land, the sun's rays (espcialy in the primordial thin atmosphere) easily destroy the chemicals nessary. In water, the solution is easily diluted and broken up.
Every single theory assumes things that were proven before. Those theories the new thery is based on assume things that were proven before. And so on, way back down this big huge chain of theories down to four underlieing assumptions of physics. These unserlieing assumptions are not proven at all, but obvservational evidance shows that they are probably right. Also, the fact that theories higher up the chain seems to give them credibility. However, that does not change the fact that science basicly has faith in the fact that those assumptions are correct.
Science is, ultimatly, based on faith, but it is one that has held up well over time and other evidance.
------
Re:I see a battle like Star Wars going on.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
I've been thinking more along the lines of Babylon 5. Last year was a lot like season 3:
The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed.
And all hell breaks loose. Reminds me a lot of DeCSS, absurd patents, and other such giant corperate mischief. Just replace "Babylon Project" with "Internet" and "peace" with "freedom", and you'll see what I mean.
Heres a mutilated version of season four's opening:
It was the year of fire . . . It was the year of chaos . . . It was the year of great sadness . . . It was the year of joy . . . It was the year we took back what was ours.
Is this what 2001 will be like? I can only hope.
------
Re:I'd rather read about Microsoft
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
development work on the original version of MSDOS
Practicly stolen from Tom Peterson.
Windows 1.0
Just a port of Mac OS to an IBM box, and a poor one at that.
cut down version of a 1970s operating system then I'd go buy myself a PDP 11 or boot up that C/PM machine in my attic.
Unlike Win95/98/ME, which is based on DOS, and still has code from the early '80s (you're a few years more advanced! Horray!). At least Linux was a total rewrite of that 1970s OS, and that its base OS was much more solid to begin with.
------
Open Source != Free Software
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
Free Software and Open Source are not the same thing, despite their various similarities. Their underlieing philosophies are diffrent, even though they often come to similar conclusions.
The GPL is only there to create a psedo-copyright-free environment, i.e., "uses copyright against itself". The goal of the GPL was not to protect works with copyright; it was to protect works from copyright.
This is a country which has built itself up on the image of the man alone and unhampered, the cowboy, going out to stake his claim on territory and land.
Get yourself out of the hole. Anyone spouting this "American Dream" nonsense needs to be wacked over the head with a cluestick.
That being that the artist is allowed to stake a claim on an intellectual area, that he has created, in this case music, and then sell the rights as he sees fit.
Which would be a relevent thing to say if the artist somehow had control over the music. They don't. Big Evil Co. does. Big Evil Co. gets the cash while the artists gets squat. It's copyright laws that are creating this situation.
Read the article. It's not forcing online music to be free (of the beer variety), just that they are forced to sell it online under some government terms (read article for details).
The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.
But the only reason that copyright exists is because United States government (or any other government) said it exists. Read this.
In any case, I'm not sure copyright is a Good Thing (tm) anymore. It might have been OK when teh constitution was made, but I don't think it's nessary anymore.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# He never said how many submissions you could
# make!:P
for($day = 1; $day
if($day < 10) $day = "0$day"; if($hour
$DATE = "2001-03-$day $hour:$min:00";
# Connect to Slashdot's comment quene, put $DATE in comment, submit
} } }
It's not perfect, but Windows is worse for sheer bloat. Pure X is worse for usability, but I don't think it's an issue when combined with GNOME/KDE (IMHO, they both look too much like Windows, esepcialy KDE).
non standard package formats
Which is why I switched to Debian. I'll never go back.
distro installers
The eye-candy ones like Red Hat and Mandrake are at least as good as Windows. At a recent installation fest of my local Linux Users Group, the president said he'd rather do a SuSe install then Windows 98.
dizzying array of symlinks, config files and a bloated, needless/dev/ directory
It just takes some getting used to. You'll like all of these things once you get to know them. Better then playing hunt-the-registry-key.
redhat 7.0 distro
Red Hat != GNU/Linux. I wouldn't say that Red Hat is the Microsoft of GNU/Linux, but they do make me nervous sometimes.
Outlawing Free Software (or even its basterdized form, Open Source) would be nearly impossible. This is simply because most of the underlieing Internet runs Free Software.
Apache has 60% of the web servers. Sendmail is 90% of mail. And BIND has nearly 100% of DNS. Now go tell congress that a great majority of the top.com's can't run *BSD anymore and see how far you get.
Free Software is everywhere, you just don't see it much. Outlawing it would be nearly impossible.
I doubt they can pass laws against open-source programs . . .
A year ago or so, back when I believed the myth of the anarchistic Internet, I would have agreed. Not any more. There's got to be something that can still shock me, but MS getting a few "stratigic investments" in congress to outlaw Free Software doesn't hit that level.
The current status of both Freenet and Alpine is not good enough for widespread use as a P2P network.
And why not? Ignoring useability issues (which are going away very fast), Freenet scales up much better then anything else I've seen. It's only when scaling down (where it's at now, unfortunatly) that it has problems.
Freenet does not use automatic splitting. Many of the more high-level developers advocate having automatic splitting, but the coders of the ugly internals believe it may do more harm then good. It may never be implemented.
In any case, Freenet uses encryption to protect anoynimity, along with going through proxy through proxy through proxy through proxy to get your information (and does so without too much of a performance hit, though it's not exactly HTTP).
2) Sharing a directory of files is cumbersom, in that it requires insertion. Sharing files on Freenet requires to you duplicate your MP3s... or insert them all, and delete the native filesystem versions... that would makes most people nervous.
A definiate problem, but a nessary one to maintain plausable deniability. Actualy, you need to keep your native filesystem version, too, unless you don't want them anymore. However, I don't think this will be a problem with 20GB hard drives for
Gnutella scales upward poorly and is only mediocre at scaling downward. Freenet is horrible at scaling downward (where it is at right now, unfortunatly), but I have yet to see a better system for scaling upward.
The best thing we can do for Freenet right now is advocate its usage to freinds, then insert/request content. Especialy requests.
There are C (two, actualy), C++, and Python implementations. I believe the Python one is lagging way behind but the C++ and one of the C versions is reasonably up-to-date (but still very developmental). Someone is also working on getting the Java implementation to compile with GCJ, which compiles Java source into native machine code.
Slashdot Mirror
DNA looks a lot like your standard computer program, including what is noted in the parent post. You'll also note that it has a compression algarithm (the fact that it's a double-helix is a form of compression that puts human-built lossy compression to shame, even though DNA is lossless!). It runs on a base 4 number system.
Besides the physical, lossless compression noted above, it also has a sort of internal lossy compression, which essentualy builds the fractal-like attributes of an animal it describes. To see how, consider an idea based in the early days of computing and chaos theory:
To play what is known as the Chaos Game, you will need graph paper, a pencil, and a coin. However, results are best with a computer that has a random number generator. Pick a point at random on the graph. It doesn't matter where. Put a point there. Now think up two rules, a heads rule, and a tail rule. A rule can be something like "move up 4, left 5" or "move 20% closer to the center". When you flip heads on the coin, use the heads rule, and on tails, use the tails rule. Put a point where it tells you to move to. Then flip again, and again, and again, until you're sick of flipping.
You will find that you will not get a random pattern of dots, but a very structured pattern; a fractal. The more iterations, the sharper the image gets.
The scientists first trying this then tried to do the reverse: Given an image, how can you create rules that will make that image? Without getting into the details on how this is done, it turns out that the more fractal-like the image is, the simpilar the rules will be.
I beileve that our DNA is basicly a chaos game thats been running for millions of years. Our bodies (and those of any other animal or plant) reak of fractals. Our brain is a fractal. Our fingerprints are fractals. Our blood stream and nervous system are fractals (note how similar they look to the branches of a tree).
Thus, DNA has this beautiful lossy compression system for describing the bodies it creates. Describing each and every piece of something would make it bloated and prone to error. Instead, it is taken care of with a maximum ammount of elegance.
------
I thought the article was way too dogmatic. All the author had to say was "this proves evolution" and we basicly got the entire thing. Why is the author wasting our precious time on this crap?
I'd love to see the evidance. I don't believe evolution, though I distance myself as much as possible from creationists because I think they're a bunch of corupt church-goers who know even less about the Bible then they do science. I want to see some links. The web is supposed to be the giant hyperlinked space where you can instantly tune out dumbed-down crap like this and get the real meat of the story if you so desire. I wish people would use it more.
------
The Bible is not a scientific text book. I've heard people say otherwise (usualy in overly broad terms like "the Bible is a guide to the universe"), usualy idiots who know even less about the Bible then they do science. Saying that billions and billions of galaxies with billions and billions of stars can be summerized in a book of any size is just stupid. "Testing our faith" stuff, as you mentioned it, is also just dumb.
The Bible is there for as a guide, but the universe itself is something we have to discover for ourselves. One of those things were dinosaur bones.
------
The biggest problem here is the puddles. Specificly, where can they form? On land, the sun's rays (espcialy in the primordial thin atmosphere) easily destroy the chemicals nessary. In water, the solution is easily diluted and broken up.
------
Every single theory assumes things that were proven before. Those theories the new thery is based on assume things that were proven before. And so on, way back down this big huge chain of theories down to four underlieing assumptions of physics. These unserlieing assumptions are not proven at all, but obvservational evidance shows that they are probably right. Also, the fact that theories higher up the chain seems to give them credibility. However, that does not change the fact that science basicly has faith in the fact that those assumptions are correct.
Science is, ultimatly, based on faith, but it is one that has held up well over time and other evidance.
------
I've been thinking more along the lines of Babylon 5. Last year was a lot like season 3:
The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed.
And all hell breaks loose. Reminds me a lot of DeCSS, absurd patents, and other such giant corperate mischief. Just replace "Babylon Project" with "Internet" and "peace" with "freedom", and you'll see what I mean.
Heres a mutilated version of season four's opening:
It was the year of fire . . . It was the year of chaos . . . It was the year of great sadness . . . It was the year of joy . . . It was the year we took back what was ours.
Is this what 2001 will be like? I can only hope.
------
development work on the original version of MSDOS
Practicly stolen from Tom Peterson.
Windows 1.0
Just a port of Mac OS to an IBM box, and a poor one at that.
cut down version of a 1970s operating system then I'd go buy myself a PDP 11 or boot up that C/PM machine in my attic.
Unlike Win95/98/ME, which is based on DOS, and still has code from the early '80s (you're a few years more advanced! Horray!). At least Linux was a total rewrite of that 1970s OS, and that its base OS was much more solid to begin with.
------
Free Software and Open Source are not the same thing, despite their various similarities. Their underlieing philosophies are diffrent, even though they often come to similar conclusions.
------
. . . since they basicly riped *BSD's networking layer right out and put it in Windows. That could have never worked if it was under the GPL.
Please, no flame wars about BSD vs GPL. I'm sick of them.
------
The GPL is only there to create a psedo-copyright-free environment, i.e., "uses copyright against itself". The goal of the GPL was not to protect works with copyright; it was to protect works from copyright.
------
Slight correction. It's Mrs. Rosen.
------
This is a country which has built itself up on the image of the man alone and unhampered, the cowboy, going out to stake his claim on territory and land.
Get yourself out of the hole. Anyone spouting this "American Dream" nonsense needs to be wacked over the head with a cluestick.
That being that the artist is allowed to stake a claim on an intellectual area, that he has created, in this case music, and then sell the rights as he sees fit.
Which would be a relevent thing to say if the artist somehow had control over the music. They don't. Big Evil Co. does. Big Evil Co. gets the cash while the artists gets squat. It's copyright laws that are creating this situation.
------
Read the article. It's not forcing online music to be free (of the beer variety), just that they are forced to sell it online under some government terms (read article for details).
------
The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.
But the only reason that copyright exists is because United States government (or any other government) said it exists. Read this.
In any case, I'm not sure copyright is a Good Thing (tm) anymore. It might have been OK when teh constitution was made, but I don't think it's nessary anymore.
------
Err, slight problemn with HTML formating. Should be more like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl# He never said how many submissions you could
# make!
for($day = 1; $day < 31; $day++) { for($hour = 0; $hour < 23; $hour++) { for($min = 00; $min < 59; $min++) {
if($day < 10) $day = "0$day"; if($hour < 10) $hour = "0$hour"; if($min < 10) min = "0$min";
$DATE = "2001-03-$day $hour:$min:00";
# Connect to Slashdot's comment quene, put $DATE in comment, submit
} } }
------
# He never said how many submissions you could
# make!
for($day = 1; $day if($day < 10) $day = "0$day"; if($hour $DATE = "2001-03-$day $hour:$min:00";
# Connect to Slashdot's comment quene, put $DATE in comment, submit
} } }
------
This sentance conatins five words.
------
X
It's not perfect, but Windows is worse for sheer bloat. Pure X is worse for usability, but I don't think it's an issue when combined with GNOME/KDE (IMHO, they both look too much like Windows, esepcialy KDE).
non standard package formats
Which is why I switched to Debian. I'll never go back.
distro installers
The eye-candy ones like Red Hat and Mandrake are at least as good as Windows. At a recent installation fest of my local Linux Users Group, the president said he'd rather do a SuSe install then Windows 98.
dizzying array of symlinks, config files and a bloated, needless /dev/ directory
It just takes some getting used to. You'll like all of these things once you get to know them. Better then playing hunt-the-registry-key.
redhat 7.0 distro
Red Hat != GNU/Linux. I wouldn't say that Red Hat is the Microsoft of GNU/Linux, but they do make me nervous sometimes.
------
Outlawing Free Software (or even its basterdized form, Open Source) would be nearly impossible. This is simply because most of the underlieing Internet runs Free Software.
Apache has 60% of the web servers. Sendmail is 90% of mail. And BIND has nearly 100% of DNS. Now go tell congress that a great majority of the top .com's can't run *BSD anymore and see how far you get.
Free Software is everywhere, you just don't see it much. Outlawing it would be nearly impossible.
------
I doubt they can pass laws against open-source programs . . .
A year ago or so, back when I believed the myth of the anarchistic Internet, I would have agreed. Not any more. There's got to be something that can still shock me, but MS getting a few "stratigic investments" in congress to outlaw Free Software doesn't hit that level.
------
The current status of both Freenet and Alpine is not good enough for widespread use as a P2P network.
And why not? Ignoring useability issues (which are going away very fast), Freenet scales up much better then anything else I've seen. It's only when scaling down (where it's at now, unfortunatly) that it has problems.
------
Freenet does not use automatic splitting. Many of the more high-level developers advocate having automatic splitting, but the coders of the ugly internals believe it may do more harm then good. It may never be implemented.
In any case, Freenet uses encryption to protect anoynimity, along with going through proxy through proxy through proxy through proxy to get your information (and does so without too much of a performance hit, though it's not exactly HTTP).
------
1) Not searchable
Being worked on.
2) Sharing a directory of files is cumbersom, in that it requires insertion. Sharing files on Freenet requires to you duplicate your MP3s... or insert them all, and delete the native filesystem versions... that would makes most people nervous.
A definiate problem, but a nessary one to maintain plausable deniability. Actualy, you need to keep your native filesystem version, too, unless you don't want them anymore. However, I don't think this will be a problem with 20GB hard drives for
------
Gnutella scales upward poorly and is only mediocre at scaling downward. Freenet is horrible at scaling downward (where it is at right now, unfortunatly), but I have yet to see a better system for scaling upward.
The best thing we can do for Freenet right now is advocate its usage to freinds, then insert/request content. Especialy requests.
------
There are C (two, actualy), C++, and Python implementations. I believe the Python one is lagging way behind but the C++ and one of the C versions is reasonably up-to-date (but still very developmental). Someone is also working on getting the Java implementation to compile with GCJ, which compiles Java source into native machine code.
------