Because the kind of creature that can thrive enough to propagate a new subspecies in that extreme environment won't find that environment elsewhere. Except perhaps in a very rare case of serendipitous mutation that's good across such extreme ranges of conditions. Which probably won't compete well with its cousins who are adapted only for the local environment, without the "carrying costs" of the unused adaptations.
This experiment is the basis for labs to investigate all these questions. Especially as microfluidics and MEMS get more flexible, complex and easily programmable, and neural/electronic/optic interfaces give us better interfaces for "visualizing" the produced data.
Oh, and most psychedelics (like LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, phenethylamines, etc) are nontoxic. Their action is theorized to result from signal interference (noise) and consequential effects. This "bench" is an excellent harness in which to research those systems.
But there is a show-stopping ethical question of whether these experiments are any more acceptable on this neuron net than they would be on a whole, live, natural organism of the species. Especially when the experiments use human neurons, that issue is essential. Of course that hasn't stopped (or even entered into) this experiment's performance. But that's because the lab for those ethical experiments, our society, is hopelessly unscientific and crude.
Er, that article is content republished on their website from their paper edition:
From issue 2607 of New Scientist magazine, 08 June 2007, page 29
Their Web editor certainly has been introduced to "the Way of the Internet". All the ads on the page are linked to their targets.
Lack of linking isn't lack of imagination, it's lack of competence, like leaving out the job/interest of a named source, or any failure to cite. Especially in a scientific (if pop) journal, there's no excuse.
And FWIW, I didn't scream. I kvetched and specified an improvement. What did you do? Came up with an excuse to lower our expectations, rather than a way to get more of the minimum performance.
The article speculates a lot about potential applications in human tissue. But what species' neurons are in the experimental network? And why don't these very superficial science articles reporting on a real journal entry actually link to the article they're discussing?
Frank is a Democrat. But it's Republicans who stop government from interfering with your personal life, trusting the individual to make or break their own lives. Unless you're a "sinner".
Frank is Gay. Maybe he knows something about keeping the government out of people's personal lives that isn't just a campaign slogan.
I almost bought a new Mac Powerbook Pro (UXGA) for about $1500, instead of an exactly equivalent HP for about $1600. But then I realized that the Mac has only one mouse button. I want to use the notebook primarily for Ubuntu, but dualbooting into OSX doesn't make up for having to press some key combo instead of a right mouse button or in combination with the only button to make "left+right" work.
If Apple made a two-button touchpad with a cap for "Mac mode" that spanned both buttons, triggering on either, then I'd buy the Mac. They look nicer than the HP, and match the world's new iPod style.
There are plenty of software only codecs that don't compress, like G.711. The fact that TDMS is hardware, and is a physical layer rather than application layer encoding, is irrelevant to the falsity of the statement that all codecs compress. TDMS shows that even high bandwidth video can be encoded but not compressed. And it shows that sometimes size isn't as important as a cheaper codec (and downstream data processing) that handles uncompressed data at full bandwidth.
There are plenty of video codecs, such as most container codecs (like MPEG4), which don't compress encapsulated data that's already compressed. Their generalization is a mistake.
If I ripped off _The Sword of Shannara_, itself a ripoff of Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_, to make my own online game, and Terry Brooks sued me because he didn't give me a license, would Tolkien or Turbine sue me for ripping off _Lord of the Rings_?
Evolution is the process in which species change through mutation across generations. Mutations that are more fit to reproduce in their environment reproduce more, and remain more plentiful in those new environments. Mutations that are less fit reproduce less, and decrease in numbers in those new environments. The least fit mutations in species leave those species extinct in the new environments.
Fitness is relative. "Tolerance" vs "dependence" is a human projection, a human value judgement of the mere fitness to survive long enough to reproduce, and perhaps further survival to enhance the offspring's chances to reproduce. I don't know of any studies according to that human interpretation of mere survival data, and I don't know in what scientific terms I'd look for one. The relationships described as "tolerance" seem hard to define specifically, even if they include the effects that tend to prevent an organism from reproducing. While dependence does seem more easily defined, some causality between the depended environmental element and the dependent organism, dependence does not seem at all easily mutually excluded from "tolerance". One man's meat is another man's poison.
People are pretty resilient. But we don't have any evidence that the Earth's surface has been as radioactive as is Chernobyl since chordates evolved. And we've got pretty good evidence that the human environment has never been so radioactive. While we've got loads of evidence that so much radiation is extremely toxic to humans, probably enough to make the species extinct. We'd have to be a lot different to survive, especially in competition with other species (such as insects) which are fitter.
Evolution is very gradual, but each generation has to be fit enough to survive to reproduce. When the environment changes more quickly than the slow evolution can allow adapted organisms to be born (or hatched, etc) to reproduce, their species goes extinct with them.
If we nuke more places as big and as badly as we did in Chernobyl, not only will the radiation threaten us, but our collapsed ecosystem will threaten our extinction. We show plenty of signs of ignoring the risk, as we build more nuke plants and weapons. And we show clear signs that we will nuke each other to compete for essential resources, like oil, water, power, or even fetish land (eg for religion or "manifest destiny").
We have to get a lot smarter about the uncaring nature that evolved us. The measures are pretty stark, for all the marbles. Instead, we act like we'll just inherit the Earth no matter what, because we promised ourselves that we would. If cockroaches could talk, they might tell us how wrong we are. If they were dumb enough to tip off the competition who's handing it over to them.
The article makes some serious errors in overgeneralizations. It says that all codecs have in common that they make bitstreams shorter for transmission. But not all codecs compress (or otherwise reduce) their data. Some codecs transmit uncompressed raw data, increased in size by adding encoding data. For example, HD video monitors connected by HDMI (or DVI) use TDMS encoding not for compression, but to increase reliability in transmitting large raw data streams (10.2Gbps) quickly enough (340MHz) over cheap HW.
And though humans learned stone tools remarkable close to finally learning to load CD-ROMs, the stone tools were paleolithic ("old stone"), while the CDs were at worst neolithic ("new stone"). Someday we'll look at the modern era as a new age, probably "hualic", or "glass" age. These silicon chips and glass fibers have changed us as much as we've changed the glass from which we make them.
Just for kicks, I note that we've encoded the Si atoms into the new tools that define our age.
Many contaminated animals will be sterile. Most of the mutated offspring will fail to survive to birth. Most of the rest will die before becoming fertile age. Most of the rest will be sterile. Most of the rest will repeat the process, leaving mutated genetic lines to expire quickly.
But some tiny fraction might survive mutated but fit to the new environment. They will be horrible beasts unable to survive anywhere else.
Until we contaminate the rest of the planet, which their families will inherit instead of ours.
This guy is wiretapping the entire country, already found guilty in Federal court of dozens if not thousands of felony violations of the FISA. Nixon had tapped only a few, and he was staring straight at impeachment.
What the hell does it take to impeach a criminal tyrant as awful as Bush, anyway?
You can make 2D, 3D, whatever graphics you want: as long as it runs on the existing OS support for the PPC, which just writes to a framebuffer. That PPC is a little faster than most x86 chips, but the x86 chips all offload their graphics to accelerated "VGA" (and OpenGL etc) chips. While the PPC is also busy doing a lot of other stuff to support the Cell's complex functions.
When someone ports OpenGL to the Cell's SPU(s), that will make it faster than any x86/VGA/OpenGL machine today. But that's time consuming, complex, and the RSX already does all that, if the Hypervisor is just opened.
That's my point exactly. Apple, which is experienced at managing releases for maximum benefit to developers and consumers, does it the way that I said. The novices, who are releasing unusable SW, spending time on releasing instead of making it usable, are doing it wrong. Those bugs show they are reinventing all kinds of wheels, even on the newish OSX platform where there are existing solutions for almost all of those problems.
Their pride is prompting a careless move that will have costs to them and their users. The grey is a sign of wisdom, which is valuable, and beats youthful naivete.
If games cost $20, or $5-10 or even $40 instead of Sony's $50-80, then you'd see a lot of people installing the loader. Especially if it were packaged as a single/few clicks, dead simple, even if that were on a separate medium. If the process is improved so the same CD/DVD/BD/memstick could install the loader, then install the game (or game loader, etc) to the HD, so it's really simple, then the market would be substantial. The larger market for cheaper games, especially the more diverse games, perhaps enhanced by more easy copying, could be bigger than the market for expensive Sony games (especially once the cheap competition reduces the market for expensive ones), even if there's a barrier to entry in installing the loader.
The substantial market for Xbox and other console hacks/mods, that the console vendors spend lots of time, money and bad PR aggressively hunting to extinction, demonstrates that Linux games, even requiring a (one time) upgrade with some complexity, would be legitimate competition to XMB games - if the price is right.
Remember that competition doesn't have to threaten a larger market share to be worth destroying. Just threaten to take a larger market share than the cost of destroying it consumes.
That's possible. I think the nature of each stakeholder helps define the boundaries among them.
FWIW, the two Apple versions of Alpha/Beta/Release distinction are pretty close. This "public OO.o/OSX Alpha" release is very different from them. And it's reckless, tuned to promote (and disclaim) "early code", abandoning project control info.
Yes, except that I'm specifically asking for a new driver for the RSX, ported from XMB to Linux. Ritger said they wouldn't port their Linux driver, which wasn't even a subject because no one ever said such a thing existed already.
More to the point, continuously asking nVidia and Sony for a Linux RSX driver, by a whole community, can pressure "no current plans" into "we've now made a plan". Which could accommodate the specific compromise I mentioned, without threatening Sony's essential interests.
I know understanding the issue and the process that published interviews and feedback play in affecting the issue is too sophisticated for Slashdot readers, but here's some help. We want better platforms, not just official pablum from vendors.
The theory of the "antibrain" was first articulated in the 1980s by lazy, tripping Deadheads in LI, NY. It says that bad habits, wrong ideas, stupidity is incarnated in braincells/connections just like the brain stuff we think is better. So selective brain damage of the brain material that makes us dumb is worth an equal amount in brain growth. Destroying the antibrain is as good as growing the brain.
Now we're seeing some confirmation by actual scientists.
Antibrain theorists also believed that abusing drugs and alcohol that kill braincells or break connections while exercising that antibrain matter could direct the damage at that antibrain matter. Probably by increasing bloodflow. So "drinking to forget" while wallowing in bad memories while drunk could work. Luckily we have lots of volunteers for this line of research.
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No hard feelings - it's just a disagreement. But I do think poetry should be accurate, even when imprecise. Poetry is effective, even when misused.
Because the kind of creature that can thrive enough to propagate a new subspecies in that extreme environment won't find that environment elsewhere. Except perhaps in a very rare case of serendipitous mutation that's good across such extreme ranges of conditions. Which probably won't compete well with its cousins who are adapted only for the local environment, without the "carrying costs" of the unused adaptations.
This experiment is the basis for labs to investigate all these questions. Especially as microfluidics and MEMS get more flexible, complex and easily programmable, and neural/electronic/optic interfaces give us better interfaces for "visualizing" the produced data.
Oh, and most psychedelics (like LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, phenethylamines, etc) are nontoxic. Their action is theorized to result from signal interference (noise) and consequential effects. This "bench" is an excellent harness in which to research those systems.
But there is a show-stopping ethical question of whether these experiments are any more acceptable on this neuron net than they would be on a whole, live, natural organism of the species. Especially when the experiments use human neurons, that issue is essential. Of course that hasn't stopped (or even entered into) this experiment's performance. But that's because the lab for those ethical experiments, our society, is hopelessly unscientific and crude.
Their Web editor certainly has been introduced to "the Way of the Internet". All the ads on the page are linked to their targets.
Lack of linking isn't lack of imagination, it's lack of competence, like leaving out the job/interest of a named source, or any failure to cite. Especially in a scientific (if pop) journal, there's no excuse.
And FWIW, I didn't scream. I kvetched and specified an improvement. What did you do? Came up with an excuse to lower our expectations, rather than a way to get more of the minimum performance.
I wonder what the artificial memory seemed like to the critter in the jar. Probably something like "whoa, I'm tripping!"
The Schneidics Institute needs one of these labs for nemory experiments. Or maybe it needs not to have one, and never know the difference.
The article speculates a lot about potential applications in human tissue. But what species' neurons are in the experimental network? And why don't these very superficial science articles reporting on a real journal entry actually link to the article they're discussing?
Frank is a Democrat. But it's Republicans who stop government from interfering with your personal life, trusting the individual to make or break their own lives. Unless you're a "sinner".
Frank is Gay. Maybe he knows something about keeping the government out of people's personal lives that isn't just a campaign slogan.
No, CODEC stands for "coder/decoder", of which de/compression is only one kind of encoding.
As the article said, as I said, as the TMDS article to which I linked said.
Dude, I want a notebook with two mouse buttons for Ubuntu on its trackpad.
I almost bought a new Mac Powerbook Pro (UXGA) for about $1500, instead of an exactly equivalent HP for about $1600. But then I realized that the Mac has only one mouse button. I want to use the notebook primarily for Ubuntu, but dualbooting into OSX doesn't make up for having to press some key combo instead of a right mouse button or in combination with the only button to make "left+right" work.
If Apple made a two-button touchpad with a cap for "Mac mode" that spanned both buttons, triggering on either, then I'd buy the Mac. They look nicer than the HP, and match the world's new iPod style.
There are plenty of software only codecs that don't compress, like G.711. The fact that TDMS is hardware, and is a physical layer rather than application layer encoding, is irrelevant to the falsity of the statement that all codecs compress. TDMS shows that even high bandwidth video can be encoded but not compressed. And it shows that sometimes size isn't as important as a cheaper codec (and downstream data processing) that handles uncompressed data at full bandwidth.
There are plenty of video codecs, such as most container codecs (like MPEG4), which don't compress encapsulated data that's already compressed. Their generalization is a mistake.
If I ripped off _The Sword of Shannara_, itself a ripoff of Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_, to make my own online game, and Terry Brooks sued me because he didn't give me a license, would Tolkien or Turbine sue me for ripping off _Lord of the Rings_?
Evolution is the process in which species change through mutation across generations. Mutations that are more fit to reproduce in their environment reproduce more, and remain more plentiful in those new environments. Mutations that are less fit reproduce less, and decrease in numbers in those new environments. The least fit mutations in species leave those species extinct in the new environments.
Fitness is relative. "Tolerance" vs "dependence" is a human projection, a human value judgement of the mere fitness to survive long enough to reproduce, and perhaps further survival to enhance the offspring's chances to reproduce. I don't know of any studies according to that human interpretation of mere survival data, and I don't know in what scientific terms I'd look for one. The relationships described as "tolerance" seem hard to define specifically, even if they include the effects that tend to prevent an organism from reproducing. While dependence does seem more easily defined, some causality between the depended environmental element and the dependent organism, dependence does not seem at all easily mutually excluded from "tolerance". One man's meat is another man's poison.
People are pretty resilient. But we don't have any evidence that the Earth's surface has been as radioactive as is Chernobyl since chordates evolved. And we've got pretty good evidence that the human environment has never been so radioactive. While we've got loads of evidence that so much radiation is extremely toxic to humans, probably enough to make the species extinct. We'd have to be a lot different to survive, especially in competition with other species (such as insects) which are fitter.
Evolution is very gradual, but each generation has to be fit enough to survive to reproduce. When the environment changes more quickly than the slow evolution can allow adapted organisms to be born (or hatched, etc) to reproduce, their species goes extinct with them.
If we nuke more places as big and as badly as we did in Chernobyl, not only will the radiation threaten us, but our collapsed ecosystem will threaten our extinction. We show plenty of signs of ignoring the risk, as we build more nuke plants and weapons. And we show clear signs that we will nuke each other to compete for essential resources, like oil, water, power, or even fetish land (eg for religion or "manifest destiny").
We have to get a lot smarter about the uncaring nature that evolved us. The measures are pretty stark, for all the marbles. Instead, we act like we'll just inherit the Earth no matter what, because we promised ourselves that we would. If cockroaches could talk, they might tell us how wrong we are. If they were dumb enough to tip off the competition who's handing it over to them.
The article makes some serious errors in overgeneralizations. It says that all codecs have in common that they make bitstreams shorter for transmission. But not all codecs compress (or otherwise reduce) their data. Some codecs transmit uncompressed raw data, increased in size by adding encoding data. For example, HD video monitors connected by HDMI (or DVI) use TDMS encoding not for compression, but to increase reliability in transmitting large raw data streams (10.2Gbps) quickly enough (340MHz) over cheap HW.
And though humans learned stone tools remarkable close to finally learning to load CD-ROMs, the stone tools were paleolithic ("old stone"), while the CDs were at worst neolithic ("new stone"). Someday we'll look at the modern era as a new age, probably "hualic", or "glass" age. These silicon chips and glass fibers have changed us as much as we've changed the glass from which we make them.
Just for kicks, I note that we've encoded the Si atoms into the new tools that define our age.
Many will die from radiation poisoning.
Many contaminated animals will be sterile. Most of the mutated offspring will fail to survive to birth. Most of the rest will die before becoming fertile age. Most of the rest will be sterile. Most of the rest will repeat the process, leaving mutated genetic lines to expire quickly.
But some tiny fraction might survive mutated but fit to the new environment. They will be horrible beasts unable to survive anywhere else.
Until we contaminate the rest of the planet, which their families will inherit instead of ours.
But Clinton... er, duh.
Impeach Bush.
This guy is wiretapping the entire country, already found guilty in Federal court of dozens if not thousands of felony violations of the FISA. Nixon had tapped only a few, and he was staring straight at impeachment.
What the hell does it take to impeach a criminal tyrant as awful as Bush, anyway?
You can make 2D, 3D, whatever graphics you want: as long as it runs on the existing OS support for the PPC, which just writes to a framebuffer. That PPC is a little faster than most x86 chips, but the x86 chips all offload their graphics to accelerated "VGA" (and OpenGL etc) chips. While the PPC is also busy doing a lot of other stuff to support the Cell's complex functions.
When someone ports OpenGL to the Cell's SPU(s), that will make it faster than any x86/VGA/OpenGL machine today. But that's time consuming, complex, and the RSX already does all that, if the Hypervisor is just opened.
That's my point exactly. Apple, which is experienced at managing releases for maximum benefit to developers and consumers, does it the way that I said. The novices, who are releasing unusable SW, spending time on releasing instead of making it usable, are doing it wrong. Those bugs show they are reinventing all kinds of wheels, even on the newish OSX platform where there are existing solutions for almost all of those problems.
Their pride is prompting a careless move that will have costs to them and their users. The grey is a sign of wisdom, which is valuable, and beats youthful naivete.
Get with the program, larvae!
If games cost $20, or $5-10 or even $40 instead of Sony's $50-80, then you'd see a lot of people installing the loader. Especially if it were packaged as a single/few clicks, dead simple, even if that were on a separate medium. If the process is improved so the same CD/DVD/BD/memstick could install the loader, then install the game (or game loader, etc) to the HD, so it's really simple, then the market would be substantial. The larger market for cheaper games, especially the more diverse games, perhaps enhanced by more easy copying, could be bigger than the market for expensive Sony games (especially once the cheap competition reduces the market for expensive ones), even if there's a barrier to entry in installing the loader.
The substantial market for Xbox and other console hacks/mods, that the console vendors spend lots of time, money and bad PR aggressively hunting to extinction, demonstrates that Linux games, even requiring a (one time) upgrade with some complexity, would be legitimate competition to XMB games - if the price is right.
Remember that competition doesn't have to threaten a larger market share to be worth destroying. Just threaten to take a larger market share than the cost of destroying it consumes.
That's possible. I think the nature of each stakeholder helps define the boundaries among them.
FWIW, the two Apple versions of Alpha/Beta/Release distinction are pretty close. This "public OO.o/OSX Alpha" release is very different from them. And it's reckless, tuned to promote (and disclaim) "early code", abandoning project control info.
Yes, except that I'm specifically asking for a new driver for the RSX, ported from XMB to Linux. Ritger said they wouldn't port their Linux driver, which wasn't even a subject because no one ever said such a thing existed already.
More to the point, continuously asking nVidia and Sony for a Linux RSX driver, by a whole community, can pressure "no current plans" into "we've now made a plan". Which could accommodate the specific compromise I mentioned, without threatening Sony's essential interests.
I know understanding the issue and the process that published interviews and feedback play in affecting the issue is too sophisticated for Slashdot readers, but here's some help. We want better platforms, not just official pablum from vendors.
The theory of the "antibrain" was first articulated in the 1980s by lazy, tripping Deadheads in LI, NY. It says that bad habits, wrong ideas, stupidity is incarnated in braincells/connections just like the brain stuff we think is better. So selective brain damage of the brain material that makes us dumb is worth an equal amount in brain growth. Destroying the antibrain is as good as growing the brain.
Now we're seeing some confirmation by actual scientists.
Antibrain theorists also believed that abusing drugs and alcohol that kill braincells or break connections while exercising that antibrain matter could direct the damage at that antibrain matter. Probably by increasing bloodflow. So "drinking to forget" while wallowing in bad memories while drunk could work. Luckily we have lots of volunteers for this line of research.
How about a different, more realistic headline for normal people, not lawyers:
"Teacher Must Go Through Two Trials For Being Attacked by Popup Porn Ads, Possibly 40 Years in Jail"
OK, smart AC guy, tell me how it's modified, in terms of specs for modifying a 7800 driver to make it work on PS3 Linux.