The acts of altruism humans demonstrate are more complex than bees' honeycombs. Those behaviors also vary between individuals, and among groups, so it's not "hardwired" - at most, it's one of many congenital options from which humans can select.
Your last comment about my "reflexive cries of immorality and blasphemy" shows that you didn't understand anything about what I said about morality. In fact, it's clear that you just reflexively blurted some baseless gibberish when you saw me talk about morality, because I didn't even mention anything about "blasphemy". And what I said about morality was that it's not exclusive of neural neurology. I hope no one is led astray by your rhetoric, because it has nothing to do with mine.
No, it's clear that you have failed to understand my straightforward post.
I didn't say that either sex or eating is doing wrong. What I pointed out was that Vedantam reported that altruism seems a "mere" nervous system function, and "therefore" not higher morality suppressing selfishness:
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
And that Vedantam's exclusion of moral faculties from "basic brain function" is stupid, and not supported by either the research or any sensible model of either morality or neurology. Nevermind that the research doesn't distinguish at "basic" brain function from learned behavior incarnated in synapses, which I also pointed out.
If you want to turn that into a rant against puritans, I'm glad to help. But if you want to rant against some strawman that isn't even me, you're all alone out there.
Running OO.o on OSX "just as well" as running OO.o on Linux could also be written "just as poorly". I use OO.o just fine on Linux, so I therefore could use it just as well on OS X. I might have problems switching to another OSX app with its different GUI paradigm, or installing X11, but that's not what I was asking about.
If I'm right about the OO.o cross-platform equality, thanks for clarifying. Otherwise, please help me get it.
For one, the research doesn't show that altruism is "hardwired", despite what Shankar Vedantam writes in the Washington Post. The brain has very little "hardwired" responses, especially for such complex and abstract behavior as "altruism". There are organs, nerve bundles, and the like, and surely some consequential neural connects at all scales of influence are determined by human genetics in a very consistent behavior (eg, the 12 cranial nerves). But even those "hardwired" connections aren't well understood, nor are the possibilities that environment after conception can make them very different.
For another, just because altruism stimulates (some of) the same brain parts that sex and good food stimulate, doesn't mean that altruism is not "higher moral behavior". If higher moral behavior didn't stimulate neurons that we feel as pleasure, then higher moral behavior wouldn't feel good. Why not? Does god hate pleasure? Must all pleasure come from doing wrong? What kind of sick, immoral person thinks like that?
This is just another journalist copout: we're not really good, or even responsible for what we do, because "we're wired that way". It's stupid, immoral, and should feel awful. But journalists like Vedantam and their editors seem to like it.
I know how the Internet works: I was an ISP while local loop speeds jumped from 1200bps through 1.5Mbps.
The Internet is multiply interconnected. Its total capacity, across multiple routes between points, is plenty high, while faster routers and more optical backhauls keep latency low. But backbone consolidation trends by the increasingly monopoly telcos/cablecos are reducing the interconnects, making bottlenecks. That's the main upgrade they're trying to avoid, or get even more heavily subsidized, by whining that it's "impossible".
Or maybe you can explain to me why Japan, S Korea and others who are serious about a broadband economy don't have the upstream problems you say.
So the original OO.o Mac port ran just as well on Mac as the Linux version ran on Linux, but it required (extra to MacOX) X11, and its GUI didn't match the rest of the Mac - but the GUI was the same as the Linux version. The NeoOffice fork looks like a Mac (and doesn't require X11), but it's not as fast or stable as OO.o itself running on Mac. Right?
Does OpenOffice run on Mac/OSX as well as it runs on Linux? Why split the "free office" market with NeoOffice, especially when both packages need more critical mass to fix bugs (apparently, NeoOffice even more)?
I'd like to see high-end, or any-end cars that won't start unless their driver's cellphone Bluetooths the car with positive breathalyzer results. Maybe after even one conviction for DWI/DUI.
Even if they get someone else to pass the test, that person might take the wheel instead of the drunk, especially motivated by knowing they put the drunk behind the wheel.
That is exactly the same BS ruling that killed MP3.com back in 1999 when the original Diamond Rio Flash/MP3 mobile player changed the world. What gives the government the right to tell you what you can do with the data you bought for the express purpose of playing it yourself?
Hell, in the US, even CDs have been allowed to be loaned to friends, played at parties, like analog records always were. These copyright exceptions to outlawed monopolies and free speech are only rationalized by protecting some return on investment, not making a crazy fortune on a 3.5 minute fad.
My "digital cable" TV coax has at least enough bandwidth to push at least 2 or 3 MPEG-2 movies to my TVs at 4Mbps each, plus 8Mbps download on the segregated Internet bandwidth. I'd gladly take the total 20Mbps as download, especially when the TV is off (which would be most of the time with that bandwidth available).
DSL and telco fiber has to compete with that, or install their own coax (plus fiber, probably). Verizon has FiOS for 20-30-50Mbps, but Optimum cablemodems deliver 30Mbps (plus the 4Mbps TV channels).
In other words, ISPs have the bandwidth (or their bizmodels and net infrastructure is too 1990s to survive to satisfy modern consumers). They're just screaming as usual to get exceptions to market demand, while they build cartels and monopolies on government subsidized infrastructure. It was all BS when 9600bps, then 19.2Kbps, then 33.6Kbps, then 56Kbps, then the jump to 1.5Mbps they said was impossible, now the 3-6-8-20-30Mbps. The fact is that these bandwidth investments not only get cheaper every time the market demands it, at higher prices, to many more customers. The bigger bandwidth makes more apps possible, apps closer to the ease and appeal of watching movies, without even the infrastructure and licensing investments to produce/buy more TV channels to sell people. Plus it gives the ISP the infrastructure to deliver on-demand movies and live events that are wildly profitable, and sell even more subscriptions, plus the "triple play" including telephone.
ISPs want all that, plus exceptions to further subsidize them when they do provide the bandwidth. Every time, it's the same. But this time, we can google for their whining the last time it was "impossible".
That's a pretty good cover story. Really they had to radiation-shield the pentagram that locks down the devil at its center, with lots of authoritarian human bodies to absorb the extremely high frequencies that scorch souls.
These scenarios are nonsensical because we don't understand them. The Universe, though, is not nonsensical. So it's most probable that we don't understand the universe.
Yet. What you have not come to grips with is the idea that this science that limits humans, limits the Universe, is wrong. Or, less flame-filled, incomplete. Which is what science is about: continuing to test drive the real Universe to update our roadmap, until they correspond precisely and accurately.
We've already got a few hundred years perspective on science to know that the "state of the art" is both freedom from past ignorance, and today's chains. And we're talking about 3 trillion years in which to improve it.
Now, if you've got science which proves that c will always be the limit on how fast we can get between points in space, I'd like to see it. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. Even that informed belief, I suppose, could be wrong. But there you've got to prove it to get me to believe it is true. While all I'm saying is that FTL etc could be true in the future.
Anonymous conceited Coward, you're the one who looks foolish when you're certain that today's physical limits will absolutely constrain us for the next 3 trillion years. Like I said, only a hundred years ago, you'd have been certain that our universe was limited by whatever appeared in your optical telescope.
You're right about the interaction between "humans" and the universe, even fundamentally for both, in that timeframe.
But it it takes you 3Ty to get to bed, I'll have to see if I change enough in that time to bed with you. But I guess that's the way to bet, in such a timescale.
There's no way for them to know what will be "undiscernable" to instruments and intelligence in 3 trillion years. Scientists a century and a half ago would have limited our universe to detection by optical telescopes. In just a decade from now, "dark matter detectors" (for example) could push that "horizon" beyond today's wildest imaginings. "Only" a trillion years from now, if we could possibly keep a consistent identity with whatever intelligence descends from us to then, "we" will likely have intelligence of even subtler, more distant phenomena.
Or we'll have returned to optical telescopes, or much more likely, won't exist to know anything at all. At which point the "discernable" universe will be more or less infinitessimal, or zero.
Does it really count as "25 years of Tron" when you forget about Tron entirely for 5, 10 years at a time, then think of Tron for about 5-7 minutes, then forget for another 5, 10 years or so, until the next 90 seconds, and so on, over 25 years? Kinda like spending months rendering 30 seconds of CGI.
I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.
So I'm in exactly the same boat as you.
Looks like we could use a Firefox "watchdog" extension that tracks memory usage to catch the memory leak, then offers to cycle the app and recover the session.
But I've noticed that cycling just Evolution gets me out of the jam just as well.
I hope it makes a small leap backwards. Ever since a couple of weeks before fully upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04, when I run Evolution 2.10.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.3, after a few hours (or maybe a lot of GUI and HTTP events), some combo memory leak fills my 512MB RAM and starts crazily swapping. I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.
Even if they just had watchdogs that could restart and recover session state, they'd be more useable.
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The acts of altruism humans demonstrate are more complex than bees' honeycombs. Those behaviors also vary between individuals, and among groups, so it's not "hardwired" - at most, it's one of many congenital options from which humans can select.
Your last comment about my "reflexive cries of immorality and blasphemy" shows that you didn't understand anything about what I said about morality. In fact, it's clear that you just reflexively blurted some baseless gibberish when you saw me talk about morality, because I didn't even mention anything about "blasphemy". And what I said about morality was that it's not exclusive of neural neurology. I hope no one is led astray by your rhetoric, because it has nothing to do with mine.
I wanna see someone port MythTV's codecs to the PS3's Cell DSPs so I can use it as my PVR direct to my HDMI TV and 7.1 surround.
I didn't say that either sex or eating is doing wrong. What I pointed out was that Vedantam reported that altruism seems a "mere" nervous system function, and "therefore" not higher morality suppressing selfishness:
And that Vedantam's exclusion of moral faculties from "basic brain function" is stupid, and not supported by either the research or any sensible model of either morality or neurology. Nevermind that the research doesn't distinguish at "basic" brain function from learned behavior incarnated in synapses, which I also pointed out.
If you want to turn that into a rant against puritans, I'm glad to help. But if you want to rant against some strawman that isn't even me, you're all alone out there.
Running OO.o on OSX "just as well" as running OO.o on Linux could also be written "just as poorly". I use OO.o just fine on Linux, so I therefore could use it just as well on OS X. I might have problems switching to another OSX app with its different GUI paradigm, or installing X11, but that's not what I was asking about.
If I'm right about the OO.o cross-platform equality, thanks for clarifying. Otherwise, please help me get it.
For one, the research doesn't show that altruism is "hardwired", despite what Shankar Vedantam writes in the Washington Post. The brain has very little "hardwired" responses, especially for such complex and abstract behavior as "altruism". There are organs, nerve bundles, and the like, and surely some consequential neural connects at all scales of influence are determined by human genetics in a very consistent behavior (eg, the 12 cranial nerves). But even those "hardwired" connections aren't well understood, nor are the possibilities that environment after conception can make them very different.
For another, just because altruism stimulates (some of) the same brain parts that sex and good food stimulate, doesn't mean that altruism is not "higher moral behavior". If higher moral behavior didn't stimulate neurons that we feel as pleasure, then higher moral behavior wouldn't feel good. Why not? Does god hate pleasure? Must all pleasure come from doing wrong? What kind of sick, immoral person thinks like that?
This is just another journalist copout: we're not really good, or even responsible for what we do, because "we're wired that way". It's stupid, immoral, and should feel awful. But journalists like Vedantam and their editors seem to like it.
I know how the Internet works: I was an ISP while local loop speeds jumped from 1200bps through 1.5Mbps.
The Internet is multiply interconnected. Its total capacity, across multiple routes between points, is plenty high, while faster routers and more optical backhauls keep latency low. But backbone consolidation trends by the increasingly monopoly telcos/cablecos are reducing the interconnects, making bottlenecks. That's the main upgrade they're trying to avoid, or get even more heavily subsidized, by whining that it's "impossible".
Or maybe you can explain to me why Japan, S Korea and others who are serious about a broadband economy don't have the upstream problems you say.
So the original OO.o Mac port ran just as well on Mac as the Linux version ran on Linux, but it required (extra to MacOX) X11, and its GUI didn't match the rest of the Mac - but the GUI was the same as the Linux version. The NeoOffice fork looks like a Mac (and doesn't require X11), but it's not as fast or stable as OO.o itself running on Mac. Right?
Does OpenOffice run on Mac/OSX as well as it runs on Linux? Why split the "free office" market with NeoOffice, especially when both packages need more critical mass to fix bugs (apparently, NeoOffice even more)?
I'd like to see high-end, or any-end cars that won't start unless their driver's cellphone Bluetooths the car with positive breathalyzer results. Maybe after even one conviction for DWI/DUI.
Even if they get someone else to pass the test, that person might take the wheel instead of the drunk, especially motivated by knowing they put the drunk behind the wheel.
That is exactly the same BS ruling that killed MP3.com back in 1999 when the original Diamond Rio Flash/MP3 mobile player changed the world. What gives the government the right to tell you what you can do with the data you bought for the express purpose of playing it yourself?
Hell, in the US, even CDs have been allowed to be loaned to friends, played at parties, like analog records always were. These copyright exceptions to outlawed monopolies and free speech are only rationalized by protecting some return on investment, not making a crazy fortune on a 3.5 minute fad.
My "digital cable" TV coax has at least enough bandwidth to push at least 2 or 3 MPEG-2 movies to my TVs at 4Mbps each, plus 8Mbps download on the segregated Internet bandwidth. I'd gladly take the total 20Mbps as download, especially when the TV is off (which would be most of the time with that bandwidth available).
DSL and telco fiber has to compete with that, or install their own coax (plus fiber, probably). Verizon has FiOS for 20-30-50Mbps, but Optimum cablemodems deliver 30Mbps (plus the 4Mbps TV channels).
In other words, ISPs have the bandwidth (or their bizmodels and net infrastructure is too 1990s to survive to satisfy modern consumers). They're just screaming as usual to get exceptions to market demand, while they build cartels and monopolies on government subsidized infrastructure. It was all BS when 9600bps, then 19.2Kbps, then 33.6Kbps, then 56Kbps, then the jump to 1.5Mbps they said was impossible, now the 3-6-8-20-30Mbps. The fact is that these bandwidth investments not only get cheaper every time the market demands it, at higher prices, to many more customers. The bigger bandwidth makes more apps possible, apps closer to the ease and appeal of watching movies, without even the infrastructure and licensing investments to produce/buy more TV channels to sell people. Plus it gives the ISP the infrastructure to deliver on-demand movies and live events that are wildly profitable, and sell even more subscriptions, plus the "triple play" including telephone.
ISPs want all that, plus exceptions to further subsidize them when they do provide the bandwidth. Every time, it's the same. But this time, we can google for their whining the last time it was "impossible".
Bah, everyone knows shoggoths don't even see euclidean geometric structures, let alone get bound by them.
The shoggoth's Antarctic iceblock is in the Disney Concert Hall in LA, keeping Walt's head frozen.
The devil made me do it. And he works for god. Take it up with them.
That's a pretty good cover story. Really they had to radiation-shield the pentagram that locks down the devil at its center, with lots of authoritarian human bodies to absorb the extremely high frequencies that scorch souls.
Bush will fund it if it can report to him "weather" a given American is voting Republican properly or not.
These scenarios are nonsensical because we don't understand them. The Universe, though, is not nonsensical. So it's most probable that we don't understand the universe.
Yet. What you have not come to grips with is the idea that this science that limits humans, limits the Universe, is wrong. Or, less flame-filled, incomplete. Which is what science is about: continuing to test drive the real Universe to update our roadmap, until they correspond precisely and accurately.
We've already got a few hundred years perspective on science to know that the "state of the art" is both freedom from past ignorance, and today's chains. And we're talking about 3 trillion years in which to improve it.
Now, if you've got science which proves that c will always be the limit on how fast we can get between points in space, I'd like to see it. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. Even that informed belief, I suppose, could be wrong. But there you've got to prove it to get me to believe it is true. While all I'm saying is that FTL etc could be true in the future.
Anonymous conceited Coward, you're the one who looks foolish when you're certain that today's physical limits will absolutely constrain us for the next 3 trillion years. Like I said, only a hundred years ago, you'd have been certain that our universe was limited by whatever appeared in your optical telescope.
As far as you know. If you were an expert from 3Ty in the future, you'd be lying.
You're right about the interaction between "humans" and the universe, even fundamentally for both, in that timeframe.
But it it takes you 3Ty to get to bed, I'll have to see if I change enough in that time to bed with you. But I guess that's the way to bet, in such a timescale.
There's no way for them to know what will be "undiscernable" to instruments and intelligence in 3 trillion years. Scientists a century and a half ago would have limited our universe to detection by optical telescopes. In just a decade from now, "dark matter detectors" (for example) could push that "horizon" beyond today's wildest imaginings. "Only" a trillion years from now, if we could possibly keep a consistent identity with whatever intelligence descends from us to then, "we" will likely have intelligence of even subtler, more distant phenomena.
Or we'll have returned to optical telescopes, or much more likely, won't exist to know anything at all. At which point the "discernable" universe will be more or less infinitessimal, or zero.
Does it really count as "25 years of Tron" when you forget about Tron entirely for 5, 10 years at a time, then think of Tron for about 5-7 minutes, then forget for another 5, 10 years or so, until the next 90 seconds, and so on, over 25 years? Kinda like spending months rendering 30 seconds of CGI.
So I'm in exactly the same boat as you.
Looks like we could use a Firefox "watchdog" extension that tracks memory usage to catch the memory leak, then offers to cycle the app and recover the session.
But I've noticed that cycling just Evolution gets me out of the jam just as well.
Anonymous dude Coward, don't you think the FF 2.0.0.3 code in my Ubuntu 7.04 install is different from the code in your Windows 2000 install?
No. Isn't Don Knuth dead? He doesn't reply to emails...
I hope it makes a small leap backwards. Ever since a couple of weeks before fully upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04, when I run Evolution 2.10.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.3, after a few hours (or maybe a lot of GUI and HTTP events), some combo memory leak fills my 512MB RAM and starts crazily swapping. I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.
Even if they just had watchdogs that could restart and recover session state, they'd be more useable.