Just like I believe that we will get cybernetically enhanced I also think genetic modifications will happen. In the beginning probably just modifications of somatic cells like in gene therapy. For example, they have already demonstrated that green-red color blindness in male macaques can be cured by gene therapy. Bevause of this it is likely that the same technique could be used on adult humans to get the UV vision of birds. When this is common the next logical step is germline modifications... I think this future is far more likely than yhe molecular marker assisted selection of complex traits suggested in this article. Especially brcause you might loose a lot good with the bad if you start selecting on complex traits.
If fixing the standard model leads to a way for us to utilize the zero point energy, this discovery might just lead to a new way to blow things up. And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
This sounds like the background plot for "Plan9 from outerspace"... althought there it was a chain reaction from cleaving photons or something...
let's just look out for zombies anyway...shall we?
Re:a small and simple php script interpreter?
on
The PHP Singularity
·
· Score: 1
Thanks! The FreeBSD port may definitely give some hints and according to it, the number of dependencies are lower (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=^php53-5.3.14&stype=name). One of the OSes that I try to build in is Plan9 with APE (ANSI POSIX ENVIRONMENT) and then some of those things are also not part of it, but I have managed to go through the configure phase so it might be possible.
I do however have to generate mkfiles myself and the BSD makefiles did not seem to give information about the minimal core in the sources to generate the "php" binary. I am suspecting the "main" directory and "sapi/cli" and possibly "ext/posix" to be part of the absolute minimal core. Anything else?
Another system I am looking at is a musl libc-based linux system.
a small and simple php script interpreter?
on
The PHP Singularity
·
· Score: 1
Is anyone aware of an alternative php interpreter that does not require tons of external dependecies? I have been playing with porting various stuff to less usual operating systems and PHP has definitely been one of the most dificult things I have undertaken. It requires quite a lot of other packages to first be ported.
Sure. As long as there would be a selective pressure for such a behavior. There are however some caveats: cats do not have the best "starting material" (like hands) to evolve into something that would benefit from such things (crows on the other hand could be a rather interesting bet...). There are tons of examples of how sub-optimal evolution really is (how our eyes for example evolved from a proto-eye which limited the possible end result, whereas other independently evolved eyes have much better "design") because it builds on a previously existing part (adapted for something else). After writing this answer I realized that I missed pointing out the most obvious: the "housecat" will be long dead when the "university math professor evolved from housecats" exists just like the proto-apes that were the ancestors of us and the other modern apes are long extinct.
I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages?
Its spelling is horribly mismatched with pronunciation, and its morphology has a lot of irregularities (e.g. irregular verbs).
Apart from this, however, English has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, it is a "mutt language" being a primarily Germanic language (with some Celtic remnants) with a massive Latin influence (via French) . Other languages either de-Germanized (like French) during the Roman empire to become fully "latinized" or remained on the other side of the border (actually pretty cool that the linguistic borders still follow the borders of the Roman empire).
This gives it a unique advantage compared to many languages, and in addition to that the very pragmatic and tolerant attitude within English-speaking cultures towards its language and towards non-native speakers of it is really a great feature for an international language. In fact, many international companies have "Bad English" as company language (which often means that native Brits with peculiar accents need to slow down during meetings... Americans can normally speak like they always do).
If we are to play "how should we change the way we communicate", I would rather like to rally against the standard alphabets and propose strict phonetic spelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) with a possible augmentation using notations to indicate emphasis and melody. This would put the spoken language first and the written second with some clear advantages (especially for dyslectics). Closely related languages like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish would basically be groups of dialects with no clearly defined official borders (now with official spelling rules, the written variants of those languages look quite different). Litterature would be given an entirely new dimension where people easily can read exactly how things should be pronounced in different dialects or even made-up languages. (I remember being a bit annoyed about not being able to imagine how the dialect written out in the Innocent Mage books actually should be pronounced/sound like, which probably required some native English cultural background).
Well... in fact having a diversity can be pretty good. A lot of our thought process is based on associations and if you know a couple of languages (for me Swedish, English, Dutch and German - in order of proficiency) you also know that nuances are very hard to translate - there is simply no 1:1 perfect relationship between certain concepts within different languages. Those ambigous meanings and cultural associations are a fundamental part of the thought process. I am all for having English as a "lingua franca" and it should definitely be considered a second official language in most countries (especially within the EU institutions). On the other hand, there is a great strength in having different frameworks to form your thoughts in and, given this perspective, coming from a different language is clearly an advantage.
As a European citizen (Swede) working in another country (Belgium), I have often felt that there are a couple of things that actually would do well to get centralized at a EU level. One such thing would be the social security number. All the sillyness that you have to go through before you get a local ID card and then that you have to carry two ID cards, one for each country, makes it rather strange. Especially upon repatriation when social security is transferred and you somehow have to show that the person with one ID is the same as the one with the other ID.
There are several other examples of stuff that are still national that simply would be better to put at a federal level (and other things that would be better to transfer down to regional level).
I wish we had a set of permissively licensed libraries for Linux that would make it possible to produce statically linked proprietary programs. Those would never have had the issues with old library dependencies and such... in fact the longer I think about it the more I get convinced that the development of dynamic linking was a big mistake (fuelled back in the days by the requirements of X) - the whole DLL/.so/whatever dependency hell would not have existed if everything was statically linked.
Using phages as treatment would be awesome!
My main concern about the old-school antibiotics is their lack of specificity and with the rise of metabiomics, it is getting more and more apparent that the complex flora of bacteria in our gut regulates a lot of our physiology and psychology (in fact, the gut is one of the most neuron-dense organs sometimes called the "second brain"). Secondly, phages are open for genetic design so we could further improfe their efficiency, specificity and safety as treatment.
I really wish that some real effort would be put into this kind of drug development.
There are interesting correlations between excessive antibiotics use (in some regions the prescribe antibiotics even against stuff not caused by bacteria, which is just crazy) and a wide range of health problems.
What has been discovered lately is that we have a very complex ecosystem of bacteria in our gut and only a small fraction of those bacteria can be cultured (which caused an underestimation of the complexity). Thanks to the high-throughput sequencing technologies of today, we now have a far better idea of this complexity, which will give us a better idea of which specific species that may be useful for treatments. Unappealing as it may be, we will have to accept "shit transplants" until we figure out a way to identify and culture those specific bacteria that we need to transplant.
What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?
In comparison to the Trusted Computing, this embedding of IE10 in Win8 is the lesser of Evil Plans. If regulators should be looking at something, it would be to require that OEMs allow their consumers to unlock the computers and add new security certificates.
Otherwise we might get a situation where it is VERY difficult to install something different on a "Win8 certified" computer. This might not be a problem for those already in the game (there would brobably be ways to "root" the computers the same way one now has to jump through hoops to install something different on a phone), but for the curious starting with a dual boot with Ubuntu, this could be a huge issue.
Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s.
Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before.
As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.
Indeed... I am currently living in Belgium and did not know that there was an ISP DNS block to the pirate bay (I just checked again and it worked)... coincidentally I am using the google DNS:es.
It seems like a rather toothless way of blocking access to a specific site.
Perhaps the return of Inferno and the Dis VM? It was the original competitor of Java and we could always dream about it having a comeback (perhaps with an update of Limbo to Go or similar).
There is already the Android variant replacing the Dalvik VM with Inferno (the Hellaphone)...
You mean openSPARC ( http://www.opensparc.net/ ) and openRISC ( http://openrisc.net/ ). I thought there was a MIPS and a Power-based open hardware project too but I could not find it right now.
No they would get power in proportion with their popularity (and the insanes also get represented in such a way that they actually have to argue for their beliefs). What the threshold does right now is to give disproportionate amount of power to a party that gets over the hurdle.
This is what happened in Sweden last year, a nationalist-populist party managed to get into parliament and got the whole parlamentary balance disturbed. During the elections there had been two major coalitions: the red-green (communists, green and social democrats) and "the alliance" (liberals, christian democrats, "moderates" (market liberals, value conservative), and "center" (farmer- and small company party)).
The "alliance" won in such a way that they have but 1 seat from absolute majority, but if the red-green and the nationalist populists go together they can block the government. For obvious reasons the nationalist populists tries to make as much use of this position as they can...
First, I just want to give a great kudos to the Inferno developers who made this new Inferno-based Android. I am really impressed by what you guys have accomplished.
For those that critizise the UI:
They even mention that in the youtube video that the UI at the moment is based on Tk which is outdated. An idea that I got was that perhaps an EFL ( http://www.enlightenment.org/ ) port/binding to limbo would be the perfect match. 1) Language-wise: In contrast to its competitors GTK and QT, it is based on C rather than C++. 2) EFL already has its uses in embedded UIs, including phones. 3) Ideology-wise: EFL is permissively (BSD) licensed and fits nicely with the Android userland (Apache) and Inferno (MIT/X) licensed parts.
I find the definition on when a system should be counted a GNU system is quite confusing. If it is the coreutils that determines it, Arch linux users can quite painlessly transplant GNU coreutils with busybox ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48187 ) or heirloom ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48399 ) equivalents. Is it a dependency on Bash-isms in init scripts and other stuff for running the system, then the Debian-derived distros should be out of the definition since they have moved on to Dash and Gobo linux is using zsh if I am not mistaken.
Is it glibc that determies if a system is a GNU system? This one is more difficult to replace, but Android is using bionic, there are uClibc and musl libc linux variants out there.
If it is binutils and gcc that determines if a system is a GNU system, a lot of the BSDs would also be considered GNU systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like I believe that we will get cybernetically enhanced I also think genetic modifications will happen. In the beginning probably just modifications of somatic cells like in gene therapy. For example, they have already demonstrated that green-red color blindness in male macaques can be cured by gene therapy. Bevause of this it is likely that the same technique could be used on adult humans to get the UV vision of birds. When this is common the next logical step is germline modifications... I think this future is far more likely than yhe molecular marker assisted selection of complex traits suggested in this article. Especially brcause you might loose a lot good with the bad if you start selecting on complex traits.
If fixing the standard model leads to a way for us to utilize the zero point energy, this discovery might just lead to a new way to blow things up. And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
This sounds like the background plot for "Plan9 from outerspace"... althought there it was a chain reaction from cleaving photons or something... let's just look out for zombies anyway...shall we?
Thanks! The FreeBSD port may definitely give some hints and according to it, the number of dependencies are lower (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=^php53-5.3.14&stype=name). One of the OSes that I try to build in is Plan9 with APE (ANSI POSIX ENVIRONMENT) and then some of those things are also not part of it, but I have managed to go through the configure phase so it might be possible. I do however have to generate mkfiles myself and the BSD makefiles did not seem to give information about the minimal core in the sources to generate the "php" binary. I am suspecting the "main" directory and "sapi/cli" and possibly "ext/posix" to be part of the absolute minimal core. Anything else? Another system I am looking at is a musl libc-based linux system.
Is anyone aware of an alternative php interpreter that does not require tons of external dependecies? I have been playing with porting various stuff to less usual operating systems and PHP has definitely been one of the most dificult things I have undertaken. It requires quite a lot of other packages to first be ported.
Sure. As long as there would be a selective pressure for such a behavior. There are however some caveats: cats do not have the best "starting material" (like hands) to evolve into something that would benefit from such things (crows on the other hand could be a rather interesting bet...). There are tons of examples of how sub-optimal evolution really is (how our eyes for example evolved from a proto-eye which limited the possible end result, whereas other independently evolved eyes have much better "design") because it builds on a previously existing part (adapted for something else). After writing this answer I realized that I missed pointing out the most obvious: the "housecat" will be long dead when the "university math professor evolved from housecats" exists just like the proto-apes that were the ancestors of us and the other modern apes are long extinct.
I'm genuinely curious; why do you consider English to be the Windows 95 of languages?
Its spelling is horribly mismatched with pronunciation, and its morphology has a lot of irregularities (e.g. irregular verbs).
Apart from this, however, English has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, it is a "mutt language" being a primarily Germanic language (with some Celtic remnants) with a massive Latin influence (via French) . Other languages either de-Germanized (like French) during the Roman empire to become fully "latinized" or remained on the other side of the border (actually pretty cool that the linguistic borders still follow the borders of the Roman empire).
This gives it a unique advantage compared to many languages, and in addition to that the very pragmatic and tolerant attitude within English-speaking cultures towards its language and towards non-native speakers of it is really a great feature for an international language. In fact, many international companies have "Bad English" as company language (which often means that native Brits with peculiar accents need to slow down during meetings... Americans can normally speak like they always do).
If we are to play "how should we change the way we communicate", I would rather like to rally against the standard alphabets and propose strict phonetic spelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) with a possible augmentation using notations to indicate emphasis and melody. This would put the spoken language first and the written second with some clear advantages (especially for dyslectics). Closely related languages like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish would basically be groups of dialects with no clearly defined official borders (now with official spelling rules, the written variants of those languages look quite different). Litterature would be given an entirely new dimension where people easily can read exactly how things should be pronounced in different dialects or even made-up languages. (I remember being a bit annoyed about not being able to imagine how the dialect written out in the Innocent Mage books actually should be pronounced/sound like, which probably required some native English cultural background).
Well... in fact having a diversity can be pretty good. A lot of our thought process is based on associations and if you know a couple of languages (for me Swedish, English, Dutch and German - in order of proficiency) you also know that nuances are very hard to translate - there is simply no 1:1 perfect relationship between certain concepts within different languages. Those ambigous meanings and cultural associations are a fundamental part of the thought process. I am all for having English as a "lingua franca" and it should definitely be considered a second official language in most countries (especially within the EU institutions). On the other hand, there is a great strength in having different frameworks to form your thoughts in and, given this perspective, coming from a different language is clearly an advantage.
I found it strange that an aim in the roadmap was to support the latest GNU binutils [1].. I hope they are trying to adress that piece of GNU dependency too. There is the FreeBSD-project libelf/elftoolchain [2, 3] that could be interesting... [1] https://www.bitrig.org/index.php?title=Roadmap [2] http://wiki.freebsd.org/LibElf [3] http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/elftoolchain/
As a European citizen (Swede) working in another country (Belgium), I have often felt that there are a couple of things that actually would do well to get centralized at a EU level. One such thing would be the social security number. All the sillyness that you have to go through before you get a local ID card and then that you have to carry two ID cards, one for each country, makes it rather strange. Especially upon repatriation when social security is transferred and you somehow have to show that the person with one ID is the same as the one with the other ID. There are several other examples of stuff that are still national that simply would be better to put at a federal level (and other things that would be better to transfer down to regional level).
I wish we had a set of permissively licensed libraries for Linux that would make it possible to produce statically linked proprietary programs. Those would never have had the issues with old library dependencies and such... in fact the longer I think about it the more I get convinced that the development of dynamic linking was a big mistake (fuelled back in the days by the requirements of X) - the whole DLL/.so/whatever dependency hell would not have existed if everything was statically linked.
No, REAL experts use $FAVORITE_TOOL_OF_POSTER, clearly. Someday when you're all grown up you'll see the clear advantages of $FAVORITE_TOOL_OF_POSTER.
export FAVORITE_TOOL_OF_POSTER=acme
Using phages as treatment would be awesome! My main concern about the old-school antibiotics is their lack of specificity and with the rise of metabiomics, it is getting more and more apparent that the complex flora of bacteria in our gut regulates a lot of our physiology and psychology (in fact, the gut is one of the most neuron-dense organs sometimes called the "second brain"). Secondly, phages are open for genetic design so we could further improfe their efficiency, specificity and safety as treatment. I really wish that some real effort would be put into this kind of drug development. There are interesting correlations between excessive antibiotics use (in some regions the prescribe antibiotics even against stuff not caused by bacteria, which is just crazy) and a wide range of health problems.
What has been discovered lately is that we have a very complex ecosystem of bacteria in our gut and only a small fraction of those bacteria can be cultured (which caused an underestimation of the complexity). Thanks to the high-throughput sequencing technologies of today, we now have a far better idea of this complexity, which will give us a better idea of which specific species that may be useful for treatments. Unappealing as it may be, we will have to accept "shit transplants" until we figure out a way to identify and culture those specific bacteria that we need to transplant.
What I wonder is what the differences are between the PA-RISC design from HP and the various ARM chips. They are both RISC types and I am sort of surprised that HP does not go with its own CPU architecture. What is the "magic sause" in ARM?
In comparison to the Trusted Computing, this embedding of IE10 in Win8 is the lesser of Evil Plans. If regulators should be looking at something, it would be to require that OEMs allow their consumers to unlock the computers and add new security certificates. Otherwise we might get a situation where it is VERY difficult to install something different on a "Win8 certified" computer. This might not be a problem for those already in the game (there would brobably be ways to "root" the computers the same way one now has to jump through hoops to install something different on a phone), but for the curious starting with a dual boot with Ubuntu, this could be a huge issue.
Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s. Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before. As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.
Indeed... I am currently living in Belgium and did not know that there was an ISP DNS block to the pirate bay (I just checked again and it worked)... coincidentally I am using the google DNS:es. It seems like a rather toothless way of blocking access to a specific site.
and LLVM
Perhaps the return of Inferno and the Dis VM? It was the original competitor of Java and we could always dream about it having a comeback (perhaps with an update of Limbo to Go or similar). There is already the Android variant replacing the Dalvik VM with Inferno (the Hellaphone)...
It might be different now, but before the NDK / bionic libc had issues with C++
You mean openSPARC ( http://www.opensparc.net/ ) and openRISC ( http://openrisc.net/ ). I thought there was a MIPS and a Power-based open hardware project too but I could not find it right now.
No they would get power in proportion with their popularity (and the insanes also get represented in such a way that they actually have to argue for their beliefs). What the threshold does right now is to give disproportionate amount of power to a party that gets over the hurdle. This is what happened in Sweden last year, a nationalist-populist party managed to get into parliament and got the whole parlamentary balance disturbed. During the elections there had been two major coalitions: the red-green (communists, green and social democrats) and "the alliance" (liberals, christian democrats, "moderates" (market liberals, value conservative), and "center" (farmer- and small company party)). The "alliance" won in such a way that they have but 1 seat from absolute majority, but if the red-green and the nationalist populists go together they can block the government. For obvious reasons the nationalist populists tries to make as much use of this position as they can...
First, I just want to give a great kudos to the Inferno developers who made this new Inferno-based Android. I am really impressed by what you guys have accomplished. For those that critizise the UI: They even mention that in the youtube video that the UI at the moment is based on Tk which is outdated. An idea that I got was that perhaps an EFL ( http://www.enlightenment.org/ ) port/binding to limbo would be the perfect match. 1) Language-wise: In contrast to its competitors GTK and QT, it is based on C rather than C++. 2) EFL already has its uses in embedded UIs, including phones. 3) Ideology-wise: EFL is permissively (BSD) licensed and fits nicely with the Android userland (Apache) and Inferno (MIT/X) licensed parts.
I find the definition on when a system should be counted a GNU system is quite confusing. If it is the coreutils that determines it, Arch linux users can quite painlessly transplant GNU coreutils with busybox ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48187 ) or heirloom ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48399 ) equivalents. Is it a dependency on Bash-isms in init scripts and other stuff for running the system, then the Debian-derived distros should be out of the definition since they have moved on to Dash and Gobo linux is using zsh if I am not mistaken. Is it glibc that determies if a system is a GNU system? This one is more difficult to replace, but Android is using bionic, there are uClibc and musl libc linux variants out there. If it is binutils and gcc that determines if a system is a GNU system, a lot of the BSDs would also be considered GNU systems.
I'm sure this knowledge was a big influence on who Mrs. Ballmer chose as a mate.
I thought that was the 800 pound Gorilla? Clear proof that hominids are sexually compatible ;)