The yeast speciation is akin to the 'speciation' of different breeds of dogs, some of which can't mate with each other. Which ID doesn't have a problem with. I'd recommend you understand the issue more before posting. I'm a habitual skeptic, and I consider there enough on the subject for me to argue it either way. So let me explain argue the other side for you.
Balls roll downhill. De-volution, so to speak, is mathematically probable. Mutations occur at a certain rate (hence genetic disorders) -- which doesn't have anything to say for or against ID. Nor does, say, two species being created from a bottleneck effect. These are mathematical certainties.
Nor is speciation caused by selective breeding (in fact, that is "intelligent design").
The point where ID and evolution differ is when beneficial features are added to a creature. Deletion of data within a short time is not problematic, nor is splitting a genetic base. Creating 'content' within a brief timespan is where ID and evolution differ, with ID saying an intelligent mind is necessary to add the information to the genetic code.
Remember, I haven't sided with ID, I'm just explaining their logic: Slow evolution (gradual accumulation of mutations followed by speciation) is much more mathematically likely than a fast event causing multiple beneficial mutations all at once. The odds of a single mutation being beneficial are astronomically low. (Many kill their hosts, preventing an accumulation of a mutation reservoir.) The odds of multiple beneficial mutations happening at once, especially in interlockingly beneficial ways, especially in the tiny timescales of evolution in the recent period, especially on such a wide scale, is shockingly low. This is the observation that created ID. There has never been an observed random mutation that increased genetic information, which is interesting.
If you pulled a handle on a slot machine at Vegas and you got a jackpot, is the machine rigged? You can't say. If you pull it several more times and you get jackpots as well, you begin questioning if the process is actually random. Evolutionists dogmatically claim there is nothing suspicious going on, ID says that statistical measures are rigging the game. Evolutionists claim ID people have no proof, ID points at the t-tests and other statistical measures, and they go back and forth.
It depends. There are recalcitrant people that won't accept anything as evidence.
But I think a reasonable person could look at a new species evolve from a random process, without intelligent intervention, and conclude that ID had been proven false.
It might very well happen. The monkey that started walking being a great example.
>>The problem is just that - Evolution *has* been caught on tape. And then you dismissed it "I'm not talking about microevolution", because it wasn't what you wanted to see.
Sigh... Intelligent Design IS EVOLUTION. Genetic drift (aka microevolution) isn't contested even by fundamentalist Christians. Where did corn and brocolli come from? Selective breeding. I'm talking about the creation of a new species. If one can observe it in the wild, then ID is proven false. It's not a complicated concept.
Did your bio teacher never explain the difference between micro and macro evolution?
>>Intelligent Design has no such empirical test - the theory that we're being pulled down by tiny invisible fairies is in fact a scientific theory in a way that I.D. isn't, because I can design a test to disprove it.
No. Put up video cameras over a large area. Observe a new species evolve. ID is proven false, there you go. For those sticklers that would claim the hand of God was behind it, demonstrate it mathematically.
There you go, it's falsifiable.
It's not even unfeasible. Given the rate of speciation is currently about one per 100,000 years, and given that we have more than 100,000 species on the planet, by simple probability a new species should be arising each year. Most are probably uninteresting or unnoticed, but with enough survelliance it shouldn't be hard to capture on tape. Show the random mutation that caused it, and the resulting speciation from pressures or bottlenecking events. Done.
ID is certainly falsifiable. The harder question is verification. Suppose speciation happens. Maybe an entire herd of horses in Kansas spontaneously grow wings. Is that the result of an intelligent mind or a random process?
Yes, I know all about punctuated equilibrium, speciation, etc. I don't need a lecture on the subject; I'm not a fundamentalist Christian.
Darwin's "slow gradual change" is still taught in schools, which the fossil record doesn't (probably) support (with some tolerance being granted from a very spotty fossil record). If you want to yell about something, yell about that.
Intelligent Design is the claim that punctuated equilibrium is mathematically unlikely without a designer. As I said, ID can be reduced to signal analysis so it is 'scientific' in that it can be shown to be false if random processes can be demonstrated to be sufficient to do evolution.
>>ID or creationism does not incorporate new data and does not deal with observable phenomena at all.
Sure, let's switch to Empirical Mode.
Observable phenomena? You mean vestigal limbs, etc.? Sure. But you forget that ID claims that evolution exists (which is something that people keep forgetting about -- it's not fundamentalist creationism).
The point where ID better koshers with observations than life as a collection of random processes is how bloody well designed something the human body is. There's an unaccountably low amount of vestigal processes, especially in processes that would have no competitive advantage.
In the transport of certain chemicals across the intestinal membrane, the body goes through a multiple step process in packaging a protein, then undoes it all, then does it exactly again. When I saw this pathway I was like, "Ah -- a vestigal chemical pathway. Neat."
The girl in front of me at UCSF wrote "WTF??" on her notes when she recorded this. Think about it for a second... if life is a collection of random processes, why are people shocked when they see something that is essentially a random process that happens to work, and has no competitive disadvantage that would cause it to be bred out? Because the human body is bloody well "designed". There should never be a "Why?" asked in medicine, since a Why? implies a creator, but it is asked all the time in medical school.
As it turns out, the girl asked, and as it turns out that that intermediate step was critical for transport. And the same gene does the process on both sides, instead of having one gene for each. So it was well designed after all.
Seriously, talk to medical or pharmacy students. A surprising number both believe in evolution, and believe the human body is designed. The whole ID argument gets too bogged down by fundamentalists and people thinking evolution was invented by the devil. ID IS EVOLUTION Sigh... they are not in conflict, only the motive force for evolution.
It depends which process you are talking about. Nature is chaotic. Random mutations to the DNA are random (ish), which is what you talk about when you consider it as a signal.
Intelligent design's criticism of evolution is that Darwin's gradual change over time doesn't seem to match the fossil record very well. All religious issues aside (which is hard for most people, so bear with me), ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings. Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve. In fact, given the large number of species on the planet, even given the long time scale for evolution, odds are pretty high that evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved. (And no, I'm not talking about microevolution.)
There is not much difference between swift evolution proponents (that speciation can occur quickly) and ID. ID simply states that if swift evolution is the case, then there must be intelligence involved. This theory actually is 'scientific' (i.e. falsifiable) in the sense that it can be examined in information theory. DNA is a signal that has random processes applied to it, etc. If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals, then ID is false since ID's basic premise is that it is impossible for a complex singal to arise spontaneously.
I seriously get aggravated at the editorializing on Slashdot sometimes. It amazes me how people can post while being ignorant of the actual debate.
All done in a shell script. When running I'd have terminal up with all the students logged in, that would refresh every 10 seconds or so. When someone would log in our out, it'd beep and print the name near the bottom. Hostnames are all pretty regular at UCSD so you could always tell what lab they are in, and the computers in labs were all numbered sequentially. If you were a nerd you could make a map of each lab.
On a related note, Dr. Bennet Yee a prof at UCSD now working at Google, did a pretty cool hack when I was in his class. His laptop was GPS enabled, so whenever he'd turn it on, it'd grab GPS coordinates, then after reverse engineering mapquest's query string (this was before Google Maps, of course) he'd grab a map of the area around where he was, then would upload it to the class web page. It was called the Bennet Tracker, and was very useful for telling if your professor was hanging out at the coffee cart by Mandeville, or in Chicago, or whatever.
I also wrote a tool (when I was TAing a lower division class) that would figure out the physical location of the students logged in to the server. Mainly I used it to stun and amaze my students, as they'd sit a row behind me in the lab, and I, without turning around, would say, "Hi Sean."
But it was also useful when we had a rash of cheating incidents to be able to build a graph of which students had been sitting next to each other, even in other areas of campus. This group of two and this group of two were both sitting next to each other, and had diff-zero code for one entire.cc file? Yeah.
Except they were right about the level cap being raised to 70 and the blood elves being the next race for the horde. They had a backstory which may or may not be real, involving the blood elves infiltrating the horde for nefarious purposes.
A friend of mine showed me a week or two ago a password protected post on his guild's forum. It stated blood elves would be the new horde race and dranei the new alliance race. It also said that northrend would be a 80 man raid with 40 alliance and 40 horde working together with the Argent Dawn to take down Arthas.
I dunno about the rest, but the blood elves at least turned out to be right.
The new class is supposed to be the spellbreaker, with talent trees doing different crazy things. One is a talent that turns you into an evolving ooze (once every 10 minutes you become immune to the school of magic that just affected you). Talents for raising resists to different schools of magic, etc.
They are free in the sense that they are looking for "customers" half the time so they can share with the world how awesome their 'supercomputer' is. It's how they get more funding. "We cured 2 cancers with a 1000TFlop grid, so we could cure 10x more with a 10x more expensive one.";)
So when Sun comes a-knocking, it's not nearly so appealing since it's not, you know, free and all.
>Companies doing genetics research (say, researching gene therapy) tend to need > lots of compute time doing massive searches and comparisions of genetic > databases.
Except that's exactly the problem. You have this massive database. You can't just wave a magic wand and have the database appear on Sun's Grid. You have to upload it to them. Which takes, what, weeks? Years? Sure, maybe then their computation will be 10x faster, but you've lost the game from the start.
The performance comparision for the Sun Grid is: Time to Upload Data + Time To Compute + Time to Download Data
vs
Local Time to Compute (since the data is already on your servers, presumably)
When you look at it this way, the Sun Grid becomes a lot less attractive.
Real grids solve this in various way, with data routing algorithms controlling where data is pushed out to -- but it works because your local computers are on your own grid with a high speed interconnect to the other players. Sun isn't part of your own Grid, so you can't employ these data routing strategies. And presumably Sun won't accept crates of DVDs in the mail and manually upload them to their server farm.
They're also in competition with the (free) academic grids.
>If that was your point, why did you lead off with the rhetorical regarding a > quantity one order of magnitude greater? ("Do you really think a petabyte is a > lot of space?")
It used to be. My point I guess is that a petabyte used to be an unimaginable amount of space. Now it's possible for a prosumer to buy 1PB of disk space for about $20k or so. That doesn't address the issue of infrastructure, but anything that your local video editing dilletante can afford doesn't color me impressed any more.
>Well this raises the question, while doing your work/research how do you store > a year's worth of data (if you even do)? Tape? Tape/Cartridge library (like > Sony's PetaSite)? Online?
My master's thesis was on making really large scientific visualization datasets manageable. Imagine the hassle of trying to load such a dataset into a workstation to visualize it. How many hours over gigabit ethernet do you need? How many DVDs would you need to burn? Instead, what I developed was a system where the full dataset was first compressed, but in such a manner the dataset was still randomly accessable. The uncompressed dataset was never written to disk, since my code was a layer in the I/O component of the simulation software. The compressed dataset remained on SDSC's file store. Next we ran an algorithm over it developing a map of the dataset finding interframe correlations. That map was sent to the workstation, which would then asyncronously pull in chunks of the dataset by iterating across the map. It let us work with these massive datasets in close to real time.
The Penny Arcade guys, even though they made fun of WOW GMs in their comic, actually had a positive experience with a GM when they accidentally sold some items. The GM restored them.
> Although your post barely warrants the dignity of a reply, I feel that it is my > duty to help stop the spread of such nonsense.
This reminds me of the squawking that mainstream media does whenever someone dares to accuse them of tilting to the left. =)
> Your maniacal focus on "The (evil) Left" is quite hypocritical. If you don't > believe that "The Right" doesn't have just as much influence, if not more on > the education of school children, then you are sadly mistaken. Remember > "Intelligent Design"?
The GP's criticism was completely valid. The Left TEACHES irrational thinking. TEACHES IT. It's not even a consequence of the muddle-headed way they approach life, they directly teach kids to deny reality and believe in contradictions. Why are we failing in our schools? I'd argue the decline of American education is due largely to an influence of ESL kids skewing the curves, but the real decline, if anything, is attributable to the breakdown of scientific thought in our schools.
My AP Biology teacher, Mr. Rick Halsey, was kind of a hippie/liberal sort. But he had a keen, keen mind, and was one of the greatest teachers I've ever had. But he brought in a lecturer (from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, IIRC) to talk about Intelligent Design (this is back in '93, when nobody had heard of it). Why? Why would he do that if he personally believed ID was wrong? Because he felt that intelligent minds should be exposed to every idea possible. Even if you disagreed with ID, it could stretch your mind in a new direction, and make you consider things you'd never thought of before. THAT was the thing that rational minds do, to cultivate a true scientific mode of thought.
Rather than what we have today, which is Republicans tuning in to FOX News/Druge Report and Liberals watching ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/MSN, people should consciously expose themselves to multiple viewpoints on every subject. I trust nothing I hear on the news... but the news is still valuable to provide starting points to my own research on a story. I don't make up my mind on something until I've read at least one decent article on each side of the fence.
I challenge liberals to read State of Fear, and Republicans to read the articles on RealClimate.org. I challenge Republicans to subscribe to the ACLU newsletter, and liberals to subscribe to the NRA's. Our current climate of intellectual provincialism cannot continue.
No, the point is more that lil old me (and I don't really bother with file sharing/torrents) could fill have a terabyte rather incidentally. For example, I have many gigs of WOW screenshots, which I suppose I could run a batch compressor on... or not -- I have a terabyte of storage!
I picked up 1TB for next to nothing. I'd have bought less hard drive space, but less would have cost more. So if 1TB is sort of the ho-hum consumer standard, 1PB doesn't excite me all that much.
I'm used to working with scientific datasets up to 13TB in size, so, lesse, I could hold a whopping 76 runs on this 1PB server. Eh, thats about half a year's worth of data.
> Shockingly, there have been > discrimination cases based upon religion, race or appearance that are > being upheld because "private" churches or schools can make any > requirements on their "clubs" they want. Historically, the protection > has been that any organization that receives federal funding cannot > discriminate, but the new rules blow this away.
Shockingly?? People and groups are free to associate any way they like. If the Jewish religion wants to only allow in members who have been circumcised, it is their constitutional right to, no matter how non-Politically Correct it might be.
The alternative is to have the state grossly overstepping its bounds and violating the first amendment (you know, the one that allows the free excercise of religion). If a church doesn't want to do something against its tenets because it's not politically correct (or goes against whatever is currently vogue in our culture, same thing) -- and this is how a church SHOULD act, i.e., with a timeless standard of conduct, at least since 30AD or so -- the government has no right ordering it to do so.
The cutting off of federal funds on groups like the Boy Scout and Catholic Charity groups was a bludgeon used way to often to coerce religions into following a politically correct way of living. Fortunately, many of these groups held to their beliefs, and if the tide is shifting so that the government can again fund them, all the better, as long as all religions are given an equal shake. I don't mind Catholics getting funding for their homeless shelter as long as the Muslim place down the street gets the same opportunity.
Imagine someone trying to join your personal circle of friends, and then suing you when you don't let them in (for whatever reason).
Do you really think a petabyte is a lot of space? Each of my PCs has a pair of 500GB drives in it, which we picked up for next to nothing due to a sweet mail in rebate offer from maxtor. (Well, it WILL be sweet if they ever send us the rebate, but I digress...)
It kind of blew my mind when I realized I had a terabyte of storage in my computer. Then I checked my disk space and realized it was half full already. I've had it for less than one month, WTF? =)
>- because some of them were not only wearing headscarves but actively promoting their beliefs in school, > and this is not allowed here.
You don't consider that problematic? Again, I think Americans have a much stronger sense of Freedom of Religion than Europeans.
And yes, at my high school we had several religious clubs (for various denominations/religions). My church, after I was in college already, actually ran an after school program at the school. In America, the current view is that as long as the government doesn't give preference to one religion over another (i.e., that anyone would be allowed to form a club or run a program) it's allowed.
Read up on the CM-1 and CM-2 then get back to me on that one.
They are NOT clustered computers.
Modern parallel computers are either vector machines, or more commonly just large numbers of off the shelf CPUs. This is quite different from the CM-1's approach which was to have CPUs barely capable of doing anything, but linking them together in unique geometries to accomplish tasks. It was a neat idea but not altogether very practical.
If the guy says that everyone is using that idea now, he'd be lying.
> How many different levels of incompetance do you get from the US. How many posts have their been recently > about the US administrations handling of Katrina?
How about the US's handling of Rita?
Note the drastic difference between Texas and Louisiana. Something like 15% of New Orleans police abandoned their posts during Katrina. A nursing home was abandoned to let the old people drown inside. Looting and incompetence (especially from Mayor Nagle who couldn't even follow his own emergency plans just in the exact case what happened happened) were rife. Vs Texas where the only serious problem was that unfortunate accident with the oxygen tanks exploding on a Nursing Home bus, which was just that -- an unavoidable accident.
> Talking about corruption - hows Tom Delay going at the moment?
There's corruption and incompetence in any government, but the US has the lowest levels of any large government. The UN is a poster child for exactly the opposite.
>I'm not saying the UN is not incompetant or corrupt, I'm just saying the US isn't exactly pure
You don't need to be 'pure'. What does a perfect government look like anyway? No matter what decision you make, 50% of the people will disagree with you anyway -- sometimes violently.
But the US has done a fine job of running the various components of the internet they do. Turning it over to the UN couldn't do anything but have it go downhill. Look at the monstrosity that is WIPO and say that the UN has a good track record on the internet.
> I believe it may be hard to understand for deeply religious Americans. But the same must understand that > those proeminent headscarves were quite an insult to French values. To put it bluntly, and in my opinion, > those headscarves mean "we dot not want to mingle with you native-born French". That's not the way one > minor children is supposed to behave in the Republican schools here.
Indeed. Religious values are indeed an insult to the French way of life.:p
> Aren't there any state-run schools in the US or elsewhere where the children must all wear the same > uniform? Has this anything to do with true freedom of speech or faith?
State-run schools (aka public schools) in the US generally don't require uniforms, but some of them do. Which has nothing to do with wearing religious symbols. It is a violation of the Bill of Rights to prohibit a student from wearing a crucifix or yamaka, in fact. The only time there's been real contention is with the Sikhs, since they traditionally wear a little dagger, which is against the zero-tolerance policy on weapons in schools. It was an interesting problem.
For all the media attention on abuses of the Bill of Rights, that gets so much press, it gets so much press exactly because it IS such a big deal to Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
The yeast speciation is akin to the 'speciation' of different breeds of dogs, some of which can't mate with each other. Which ID doesn't have a problem with. I'd recommend you understand the issue more before posting. I'm a habitual skeptic, and I consider there enough on the subject for me to argue it either way. So let me explain argue the other side for you.
Balls roll downhill. De-volution, so to speak, is mathematically probable. Mutations occur at a certain rate (hence genetic disorders) -- which doesn't have anything to say for or against ID. Nor does, say, two species being created from a bottleneck effect. These are mathematical certainties.
Nor is speciation caused by selective breeding (in fact, that is "intelligent design").
The point where ID and evolution differ is when beneficial features are added to a creature. Deletion of data within a short time is not problematic, nor is splitting a genetic base. Creating 'content' within a brief timespan is where ID and evolution differ, with ID saying an intelligent mind is necessary to add the information to the genetic code.
Remember, I haven't sided with ID, I'm just explaining their logic: Slow evolution (gradual accumulation of mutations followed by speciation) is much more mathematically likely than a fast event causing multiple beneficial mutations all at once. The odds of a single mutation being beneficial are astronomically low. (Many kill their hosts, preventing an accumulation of a mutation reservoir.) The odds of multiple beneficial mutations happening at once, especially in interlockingly beneficial ways, especially in the tiny timescales of evolution in the recent period, especially on such a wide scale, is shockingly low. This is the observation that created ID. There has never been an observed random mutation that increased genetic information, which is interesting.
If you pulled a handle on a slot machine at Vegas and you got a jackpot, is the machine rigged? You can't say. If you pull it several more times and you get jackpots as well, you begin questioning if the process is actually random. Evolutionists dogmatically claim there is nothing suspicious going on, ID says that statistical measures are rigging the game. Evolutionists claim ID people have no proof, ID points at the t-tests and other statistical measures, and they go back and forth.
It's fun.
It depends. There are recalcitrant people that won't accept anything as evidence.
But I think a reasonable person could look at a new species evolve from a random process, without intelligent intervention, and conclude that ID had been proven false.
It might very well happen. The monkey that started walking being a great example.
>>The problem is just that - Evolution *has* been caught on tape. And then you dismissed it "I'm not talking about microevolution", because it wasn't what you wanted to see.
Sigh... Intelligent Design IS EVOLUTION. Genetic drift (aka microevolution) isn't contested even by fundamentalist Christians. Where did corn and brocolli come from? Selective breeding. I'm talking about the creation of a new species. If one can observe it in the wild, then ID is proven false. It's not a complicated concept.
Did your bio teacher never explain the difference between micro and macro evolution?
>>Intelligent Design has no such empirical test - the theory that we're being pulled down by tiny invisible fairies is in fact a scientific theory in a way that I.D. isn't, because I can design a test to disprove it.
No. Put up video cameras over a large area. Observe a new species evolve. ID is proven false, there you go. For those sticklers that would claim the hand of God was behind it, demonstrate it mathematically.
There you go, it's falsifiable.
It's not even unfeasible. Given the rate of speciation is currently about one per 100,000 years, and given that we have more than 100,000 species on the planet, by simple probability a new species should be arising each year. Most are probably uninteresting or unnoticed, but with enough survelliance it shouldn't be hard to capture on tape. Show the random mutation that caused it, and the resulting speciation from pressures or bottlenecking events. Done.
ID is certainly falsifiable. The harder question is verification. Suppose speciation happens. Maybe an entire herd of horses in Kansas spontaneously grow wings. Is that the result of an intelligent mind or a random process?
Yes, I know all about punctuated equilibrium, speciation, etc. I don't need a lecture on the subject; I'm not a fundamentalist Christian.
Darwin's "slow gradual change" is still taught in schools, which the fossil record doesn't (probably) support (with some tolerance being granted from a very spotty fossil record). If you want to yell about something, yell about that.
Intelligent Design is the claim that punctuated equilibrium is mathematically unlikely without a designer. As I said, ID can be reduced to signal analysis so it is 'scientific' in that it can be shown to be false if random processes can be demonstrated to be sufficient to do evolution.
>>ID or creationism does not incorporate new data and does not deal with observable phenomena at all.
Sure, let's switch to Empirical Mode.
Observable phenomena? You mean vestigal limbs, etc.? Sure. But you forget that ID claims that evolution exists (which is something that people keep forgetting about -- it's not fundamentalist creationism).
The point where ID better koshers with observations than life as a collection of random processes is how bloody well designed something the human body is. There's an unaccountably low amount of vestigal processes, especially in processes that would have no competitive advantage.
In the transport of certain chemicals across the intestinal membrane, the body goes through a multiple step process in packaging a protein, then undoes it all, then does it exactly again. When I saw this pathway I was like, "Ah -- a vestigal chemical pathway. Neat."
The girl in front of me at UCSF wrote "WTF??" on her notes when she recorded this. Think about it for a second... if life is a collection of random processes, why are people shocked when they see something that is essentially a random process that happens to work, and has no competitive disadvantage that would cause it to be bred out? Because the human body is bloody well "designed". There should never be a "Why?" asked in medicine, since a Why? implies a creator, but it is asked all the time in medical school.
As it turns out, the girl asked, and as it turns out that that intermediate step was critical for transport. And the same gene does the process on both sides, instead of having one gene for each. So it was well designed after all.
Seriously, talk to medical or pharmacy students. A surprising number both believe in evolution, and believe the human body is designed. The whole ID argument gets too bogged down by fundamentalists and people thinking evolution was invented by the devil. ID IS EVOLUTION Sigh... they are not in conflict, only the motive force for evolution.
It depends which process you are talking about. Nature is chaotic. Random mutations to the DNA are random (ish), which is what you talk about when you consider it as a signal.
Yes, I recommend you Google Peppered Moths. And read what it says.
Intelligent design's criticism of evolution is that Darwin's gradual change over time doesn't seem to match the fossil record very well. All religious issues aside (which is hard for most people, so bear with me), ID is falsifiable if someone can demonstrate a creature evolving through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings. Gradual evolution can be falsified if one can show a creature rapidly evolve. In fact, given the large number of species on the planet, even given the long time scale for evolution, odds are pretty high that evolution in action will be caught on tape, so to speak, at some point, and then the question resolved. (And no, I'm not talking about microevolution.)
There is not much difference between swift evolution proponents (that speciation can occur quickly) and ID. ID simply states that if swift evolution is the case, then there must be intelligence involved. This theory actually is 'scientific' (i.e. falsifiable) in the sense that it can be examined in information theory. DNA is a signal that has random processes applied to it, etc. If you can demonstrate that random processes and death can create higher order signals, then ID is false since ID's basic premise is that it is impossible for a complex singal to arise spontaneously.
I seriously get aggravated at the editorializing on Slashdot sometimes. It amazes me how people can post while being ignorant of the actual debate.
All done in a shell script. When running I'd have terminal up with all the students logged in, that would refresh every 10 seconds or so. When someone would log in our out, it'd beep and print the name near the bottom. Hostnames are all pretty regular at UCSD so you could always tell what lab they are in, and the computers in labs were all numbered sequentially. If you were a nerd you could make a map of each lab.
This is novel how?
.cc file? Yeah.
At UCSD we've had this for ages.
On a related note, Dr. Bennet Yee a prof at UCSD now working at Google, did a pretty cool hack when I was in his class. His laptop was GPS enabled, so whenever he'd turn it on, it'd grab GPS coordinates, then after reverse engineering mapquest's query string (this was before Google Maps, of course) he'd grab a map of the area around where he was, then would upload it to the class web page. It was called the Bennet Tracker, and was very useful for telling if your professor was hanging out at the coffee cart by Mandeville, or in Chicago, or whatever.
I also wrote a tool (when I was TAing a lower division class) that would figure out the physical location of the students logged in to the server. Mainly I used it to stun and amaze my students, as they'd sit a row behind me in the lab, and I, without turning around, would say, "Hi Sean."
But it was also useful when we had a rash of cheating incidents to be able to build a graph of which students had been sitting next to each other, even in other areas of campus. This group of two and this group of two were both sitting next to each other, and had diff-zero code for one entire
Except they were right about the level cap being raised to 70 and the blood elves being the next race for the horde. They had a backstory which may or may not be real, involving the blood elves infiltrating the horde for nefarious purposes.
A friend of mine showed me a week or two ago a password protected post on his guild's forum. It stated blood elves would be the new horde race and dranei the new alliance race. It also said that northrend would be a 80 man raid with 40 alliance and 40 horde working together with the Argent Dawn to take down Arthas.
I dunno about the rest, but the blood elves at least turned out to be right.
The new class is supposed to be the spellbreaker, with talent trees doing different crazy things. One is a talent that turns you into an evolving ooze (once every 10 minutes you become immune to the school of magic that just affected you). Talents for raising resists to different schools of magic, etc.
Overall, I guess they could be interesting.
They are free in the sense that they are looking for "customers" half the time so they can share with the world how awesome their 'supercomputer' is. It's how they get more funding. "We cured 2 cancers with a 1000TFlop grid, so we could cure 10x more with a 10x more expensive one." ;)
So when Sun comes a-knocking, it's not nearly so appealing since it's not, you know, free and all.
The Civilization board game which is based on the Civilization computer game which is based on the Civilization board game.
=)
> It's a small market, but not nonexistant. ...
>Companies doing genetics research (say, researching gene therapy) tend to need
> lots of compute time doing massive searches and comparisions of genetic
> databases.
Except that's exactly the problem. You have this massive database. You can't just wave a magic wand and have the database appear on Sun's Grid. You have to upload it to them. Which takes, what, weeks? Years? Sure, maybe then their computation will be 10x faster, but you've lost the game from the start.
The performance comparision for the Sun Grid is:
Time to Upload Data + Time To Compute + Time to Download Data
vs
Local Time to Compute (since the data is already on your servers, presumably)
When you look at it this way, the Sun Grid becomes a lot less attractive.
Real grids solve this in various way, with data routing algorithms controlling where data is pushed out to -- but it works because your local computers are on your own grid with a high speed interconnect to the other players. Sun isn't part of your own Grid, so you can't employ these data routing strategies. And presumably Sun won't accept crates of DVDs in the mail and manually upload them to their server farm.
They're also in competition with the (free) academic grids.
>The NES was released in 1987 IIRC.
I don't think so. I have Nintendo Tennis (a great game, actually) which is copyright '84.
'87 was like the high point of NES, with Final Fantasy and SMIII coming out around then.
>If that was your point, why did you lead off with the rhetorical regarding a
> quantity one order of magnitude greater? ("Do you really think a petabyte is a
> lot of space?")
It used to be. My point I guess is that a petabyte used to be an unimaginable amount of space. Now it's possible for a prosumer to buy 1PB of disk space for about $20k or so. That doesn't address the issue of infrastructure, but anything that your local video editing dilletante can afford doesn't color me impressed any more.
>Well this raises the question, while doing your work/research how do you store
> a year's worth of data (if you even do)? Tape? Tape/Cartridge library (like
> Sony's PetaSite)? Online?
My master's thesis was on making really large scientific visualization datasets manageable. Imagine the hassle of trying to load such a dataset into a workstation to visualize it. How many hours over gigabit ethernet do you need? How many DVDs would you need to burn? Instead, what I developed was a system where the full dataset was first compressed, but in such a manner the dataset was still randomly accessable. The uncompressed dataset was never written to disk, since my code was a layer in the I/O component of the simulation software. The compressed dataset remained on SDSC's file store. Next we ran an algorithm over it developing a map of the dataset finding interframe correlations. That map was sent to the workstation, which would then asyncronously pull in chunks of the dataset by iterating across the map. It let us work with these massive datasets in close to real time.
The Penny Arcade guys, even though they made fun of WOW GMs in their comic, actually had a positive experience with a GM when they accidentally sold some items. The GM restored them.
> Although your post barely warrants the dignity of a reply, I feel that it is my
> duty to help stop the spread of such nonsense.
This reminds me of the squawking that mainstream media does whenever someone dares to accuse them of tilting to the left. =)
> Your maniacal focus on "The (evil) Left" is quite hypocritical. If you don't
> believe that "The Right" doesn't have just as much influence, if not more on
> the education of school children, then you are sadly mistaken. Remember
> "Intelligent Design"?
The GP's criticism was completely valid. The Left TEACHES irrational thinking. TEACHES IT. It's not even a consequence of the muddle-headed way they approach life, they directly teach kids to deny reality and believe in contradictions. Why are we failing in our schools? I'd argue the decline of American education is due largely to an influence of ESL kids skewing the curves, but the real decline, if anything, is attributable to the breakdown of scientific thought in our schools.
My AP Biology teacher, Mr. Rick Halsey, was kind of a hippie/liberal sort. But he had a keen, keen mind, and was one of the greatest teachers I've ever had. But he brought in a lecturer (from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, IIRC) to talk about Intelligent Design (this is back in '93, when nobody had heard of it). Why? Why would he do that if he personally believed ID was wrong? Because he felt that intelligent minds should be exposed to every idea possible. Even if you disagreed with ID, it could stretch your mind in a new direction, and make you consider things you'd never thought of before. THAT was the thing that rational minds do, to cultivate a true scientific mode of thought.
Rather than what we have today, which is Republicans tuning in to FOX News/Druge Report and Liberals watching ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/MSN, people should consciously expose themselves to multiple viewpoints on every subject. I trust nothing I hear on the news... but the news is still valuable to provide starting points to my own research on a story. I don't make up my mind on something until I've read at least one decent article on each side of the fence.
I challenge liberals to read State of Fear, and Republicans to read the articles on RealClimate.org. I challenge Republicans to subscribe to the ACLU newsletter, and liberals to subscribe to the NRA's. Our current climate of intellectual provincialism cannot continue.
No, the point is more that lil old me (and I don't really bother with file sharing/torrents) could fill have a terabyte rather incidentally. For example, I have many gigs of WOW screenshots, which I suppose I could run a batch compressor on... or not -- I have a terabyte of storage!
I picked up 1TB for next to nothing. I'd have bought less hard drive space, but less would have cost more. So if 1TB is sort of the ho-hum consumer standard, 1PB doesn't excite me all that much.
I'm used to working with scientific datasets up to 13TB in size, so, lesse, I could hold a whopping 76 runs on this 1PB server. Eh, thats about half a year's worth of data.
> Shockingly, there have been
> discrimination cases based upon religion, race or appearance that are
> being upheld because "private" churches or schools can make any
> requirements on their "clubs" they want. Historically, the protection
> has been that any organization that receives federal funding cannot
> discriminate, but the new rules blow this away.
Shockingly?? People and groups are free to associate any way they like. If the Jewish religion wants to only allow in members who have been circumcised, it is their constitutional right to, no matter how non-Politically Correct it might be.
The alternative is to have the state grossly overstepping its bounds and violating the first amendment (you know, the one that allows the free excercise of religion). If a church doesn't want to do something against its tenets because it's not politically correct (or goes against whatever is currently vogue in our culture, same thing) -- and this is how a church SHOULD act, i.e., with a timeless standard of conduct, at least since 30AD or so -- the government has no right ordering it to do so.
The cutting off of federal funds on groups like the Boy Scout and Catholic Charity groups was a bludgeon used way to often to coerce religions into following a politically correct way of living. Fortunately, many of these groups held to their beliefs, and if the tide is shifting so that the government can again fund them, all the better, as long as all religions are given an equal shake. I don't mind Catholics getting funding for their homeless shelter as long as the Muslim place down the street gets the same opportunity.
Imagine someone trying to join your personal circle of friends, and then suing you when you don't let them in (for whatever reason).
Do you really think a petabyte is a lot of space? Each of my PCs has a pair of 500GB drives in it, which we picked up for next to nothing due to a sweet mail in rebate offer from maxtor. (Well, it WILL be sweet if they ever send us the rebate, but I digress...)
It kind of blew my mind when I realized I had a terabyte of storage in my computer. Then I checked my disk space and realized it was half full already. I've had it for less than one month, WTF? =)
>- because some of them were not only wearing headscarves but actively promoting their beliefs in school,
> and this is not allowed here.
You don't consider that problematic? Again, I think Americans have a much stronger sense of Freedom of Religion than Europeans.
And yes, at my high school we had several religious clubs (for various denominations/religions). My church, after I was in college already, actually ran an after school program at the school. In America, the current view is that as long as the government doesn't give preference to one religion over another (i.e., that anyone would be allowed to form a club or run a program) it's allowed.
Read up on the CM-1 and CM-2 then get back to me on that one.
They are NOT clustered computers.
Modern parallel computers are either vector machines, or more commonly just large numbers of off the shelf CPUs. This is quite different from the CM-1's approach which was to have CPUs barely capable of doing anything, but linking them together in unique geometries to accomplish tasks. It was a neat idea but not altogether very practical.
If the guy says that everyone is using that idea now, he'd be lying.
> How many different levels of incompetance do you get from the US. How many posts have their been recently
> about the US administrations handling of Katrina?
How about the US's handling of Rita?
Note the drastic difference between Texas and Louisiana. Something like 15% of New Orleans police abandoned their posts during Katrina. A nursing home was abandoned to let the old people drown inside. Looting and incompetence (especially from Mayor Nagle who couldn't even follow his own emergency plans just in the exact case what happened happened) were rife. Vs Texas where the only serious problem was that unfortunate accident with the oxygen tanks exploding on a Nursing Home bus, which was just that -- an unavoidable accident.
> Talking about corruption - hows Tom Delay going at the moment?
There's corruption and incompetence in any government, but the US has the lowest levels of any large government. The UN is a poster child for exactly the opposite.
>I'm not saying the UN is not incompetant or corrupt, I'm just saying the US isn't exactly pure
You don't need to be 'pure'. What does a perfect government look like anyway? No matter what decision you make, 50% of the people will disagree with you anyway -- sometimes violently.
But the US has done a fine job of running the various components of the internet they do. Turning it over to the UN couldn't do anything but have it go downhill. Look at the monstrosity that is WIPO and say that the UN has a good track record on the internet.
A yamaka is a traditional Jewish Headpiece.
:p
n -religious-apparel/
> I believe it may be hard to understand for deeply religious Americans. But the same must understand that
> those proeminent headscarves were quite an insult to French values. To put it bluntly, and in my opinion,
> those headscarves mean "we dot not want to mingle with you native-born French". That's not the way one
> minor children is supposed to behave in the Republican schools here.
Indeed. Religious values are indeed an insult to the French way of life.
> Aren't there any state-run schools in the US or elsewhere where the children must all wear the same
> uniform? Has this anything to do with true freedom of speech or faith?
State-run schools (aka public schools) in the US generally don't require uniforms, but some of them do. Which has nothing to do with wearing religious symbols. It is a violation of the Bill of Rights to prohibit a student from wearing a crucifix or yamaka, in fact. The only time there's been real contention is with the Sikhs, since they traditionally wear a little dagger, which is against the zero-tolerance policy on weapons in schools. It was an interesting problem.
And, yeah, in France it's illegal to wear a crucifix or yamaka to school:
http://txfx.net/2004/02/10/france-continues-to-ba
For all the media attention on abuses of the Bill of Rights, that gets so much press, it gets so much press exactly because it IS such a big deal to Americans.