The last five items you list are from the "wildcard" section and the dates given are the earliest possible date the author believes the given event could occur, not a date he believes it is likely to occur.
Quoting from the introduction:
We have also modified and extended the 'wildcard' section, based on John Petersen's excellent work in his book Out of the Blue'. Although wildcards are defined as events that can happen at almost any time, for most there is a date before which they couldn't happen, since their mechanisms do not yet exist. We have estimated the dates at which each wildcard becomes feasible.
I think you may be confusing Scheme and Common Lisp. Scheme was designed to have a minimal syntax and semantics (for example mandating optimized tail recursion and providing little syntactic sugar for expressing iterative processes, or using continuations in preference to exceptions) while Common Lisp is a huge language with plenty of sugar
You seem to be trying to make some syllagism here but I don't follow it at all.
I read that we lose 6 species each day from the face of the earth
6 species a day may be the correct figure for animals or plants during the last few thousand years- you should be able to find a better estimate in an ecology textbook. I don't know is there is an estimate of species lost and creation in bacteria, archaebacteria, or protists, especially since the notion of species in bacteria is somewhat tricky because of the magnitude of lateral gene transfer.
The rate of speciation and extinction varies over geological time though. Sometimes the net change will be (roughly) zero, sometimes there will be mass extinctions, and sometimes there will be rapid and speciation and creation of new taxa.
we don't see new species being created
Yes we do, its all over the fossil record. Bacteria and plants can undergo rapid speciation because of the flexibility of their genomes, animals generally less so, so the documentation of speciation is better for bacteria and plants. We'll understand speciation much better when we have a better understanding of how organisms develop- how the interactions between genes and environment bring about a complete organism which is less or more simaler to its ancestors.
we see statistical laws in action everywhere we look, with increaing entropy being of great interest.
I don't see what this has to do with the rest of your post. Events which are more probable than the alternatives will on average occur more than the alternatives. Entropy will increase over time in closed systems but entropy can be shifted or exported from closed systems
What makes evolution feasible?
heredity, mutation, and varying reproductive success between organisms.
Conversely, many "complex" species that thrive today would have a difficult or impossible existing at prior points in earth's history because they've adapted to be reproductively successful in the environment that they live in in the present day. If you transported them to a different time with a different climate, soil conditions, or competing or predatory species, they'd go extinct- "complexity" isn't always optimal.
I don't understand what you are saying. Crystals don't have food, at least not in the sense that organisms do, so talking about crystals acquiring food is meaningless.
Secondly, there are ways of quantifying genetic and genomic "complexity", but comparing the "complexity" of something abiotic to something living is inherently nonsensical.
Thirdly, an order of magnitude difference in genome size (measured in number if genes, one way of giving a number to "complexity") between prokarotes is possible. The prokaryote with the smallest genome has roughly 400 genes, though I don't know the size of the largest prokaryotic genome off hand, I know it is a few thousand genes. So ten times "simpler" than a prokaryote isn't dead.
The phylogenetic algorithms may be of interest- though I haven't read the paper yet and I'm not very knowledgeable about molecular systematics anyhow, but any results on the origin of a major taxa (and land plants certainly qualify) are inherently interesting, even if as you noted, they aren't surprising or arrived at by novel techniques.
If you attend a major university, you may be able access Science magazine electronically free of charge (minus tuition of course) from any computer with an IP address on your university's network. Try going to Science's homepage. If under the advertisments at the top of the page, there is some text that says "Institution: University of foo", then you have electronic access to all the articles that have appeared in print (Sadly institutional subscriptions don't include access to papers on ScienceExpress that have been published electronically but not yet on paper)
If you do the math you'll see that searching entire 128bit keyspace in a decades time would require the capability to test almost 22^100 keys per second, or roughly 10 million tillion times the computing power of the EFF's DES Cracker
It's not clear what form proposed legislation will take- key escrow or backdoors (by which the government could decrypt files and network traffic having a private key provided by the user or manufacturer). If users themselves are required to register private and symmetric keys then it would still seem to be legal to possess and use crypto, Open{BSD,SSH, SSL}, GNUpg, included- so long as you register keys (Would you have to register your key for every SSH session?) but if the onus is on developers to provide keys/backdoors, then it seems like any crypto source code would be illegal to distribute or possibly even possess in the United States. Would printed source (as in Applied Cryptography) be illegal? Pseudocode? Natural language explanations of algorithms?
To study the effectiveness of an HIV/AIDS vaccine in humans, researchers recruit HIV-free volunteers and give half the vaccine and half a placebo and test them all for HIV at regular intervals. If a statistically significant number of those given the vaccine instead of a placebo are free of HIV at the end of the study then you can conclude that the vaccine is effective at reducing your chances of contracting HIV.
It would be unethical to lead people to believe that they are now immune to HIV (at least half of them, the placebo group, are not) and so encourage risky behavior, so all volenteers are taught about safe sex and given condoms.
The parent post wasn't talking about computer systems, it was talking about crypto systems. And there are well known perfect algorithms -- like one-time pads -- and well known exponentially difficult algorigthms -- the proven public-key algorithms. (e.g. DES, AES)
1. DES and AES are symmetric key systems, not public key.
2. When people say that breaking cipher X is exponentially difficult, its really shorthand for "there is no known algorithmic attack against the cipher that is significantly faster than checking all the permutations of keys by brute force". It may be that brute force is optimal but unless you've actually done a proof, this is only a conjecture. Look at the improvements to DES that the NSA suggested to IBM- these changes fortified DES against cryptoanalysis that wouldn't be public knowledge for almost another 2 decades- yet most people had no basis for making this judgement- just as we can only guess that AES is secure against all possible future attacks. This doesn't mean that the algorithm doesn't matter- clearly DES is stronger than rot-13, but you shouldn't assume that an algorithm alone brings security
I guess I just I come across more persistant people than you- and I think the day I started this I was solicted 5 or 6 times with various leaflets while waking from my apartment to the lab I work in across campus- this day was particularly bad because voting for student government elections was going on so all the candidates had their people out handing out leaflets, various other campus orgazations were out distributing stuff, there were a few religious groups, people handing out ads for clubs, etc. Some people are nice about it and will simply move on to the next person if you say you're not interested, but many will try to jam a flyer in my hands any way even after I say I'm not interested. I'm already over run with pieces of paper so I try not to accumulate any more. Religious groups are particularly bad about this- they'll step in front of me and jam a card in my hands, ask if I would like to learn about the Bible, and continue talking to me even after I've declined both of these, I've had creepy people try to follow me along, trying to get me to stop and listen to them. I've had people ask me why I won't stop a minute and listen about Jesus. If I say that I'm an agnostic atheist whose has already thought long and hard about this, this only makes them more determined.
I understand that many people handing out flyers and trying to get people to talk to them are very passionate about whatever they're out and about about, and I might even be one of them on Monday, protesting the DMCA, and I hate to not give them a minute, but I've found that a minute ends up turning into 5 minutes and so on (I'm not good at extricating myself from conversation), so I've found that its easier to just give the impression that I'm a bit insane.
Just to clarify, I think he/she is thinking of the license for Guile, the GNU extension interpreter/library based on the Scheme language. The FSF added an exception to the GPL in this case, hoping that it would promote the use and development of guile by allowing proprietary software developers to link guile into their apps without requiring the software to be put under a GPL-compatible license. Guile may one day replace Emacs Lisp as the standard extensibility language for GNU Emacs.
We also have one blooming in the greenhouse at the University of Washington as well. I believe that the two Universities are planning on mating the two plants together.
1. Someone, please someone, make an installer that works? I've tried all of them for PPC; there was a LinuxPPC installer (IIRC) that was broken, the FORTH code for the 'blessed' system partition was just wrong. SuSE is on my PPC machines right now because it needed the least work (for me, anyway) to get it running fast.
Have you tried Debian GNU/Linux? Potato was released for PPC and despite all the complaints I've head about installing Debian, it was the easiest install I have ever done.
2. Let's also see some "no MacOS, no way" things happening. I don't want MOL, I don't want to keep System around. I've never had much luck with the "official" method (the 800k Apple_Bootstrap parition trick) for having a MacOS-less PPC box. I have always used Mandrake on x86, and I hope they'll get this one right.
Is your firmware Old World or New World? If it's New World You shouldn't have too many problems if you've set your boot arguments correctly in lilo.conf (for SUSE) or yaboot.conf (Debian). ybin/yaboot work fine for me on a MacOSless rev-A iMac running Debian Woody.
3. Voodoo 3! I have a Mac-ized Voodoo3 gathering dust because none of the kernels seem to work, even the latest 2.4.x. Please, there are people with PPC boxes that aren't running ATI. Let's see some cool stuff happen!
I don't have a Voodoo 3, so I don't know if any of your problems are caused by it. In general, kernel.org kernels won't compile or boot on PPC because Linus' tree doesn't incorporate the latest PPC changes. For PPC specific kernel source and binaries, check here. Right now I'm running 2.4.3 from the bitkeeper tree plus the ReiserFS Endian-safe patch and there haven't been any problems.
Bad me. "their" should be "they're". I never made this mistake when I was a little kid. I must be losing my neurons too fast. Usually I preview obsessive-compulsively before I post too.
This is a common misconception- as far as I know, there is no purely functional Lisp. Common Lisp allows to write programs in any style. So if you want functional, write functional. If you prefer procedural, you can use setf. If you want OO, then use CLOS. Scheme is closer to a true functional language and many users tend to write scheme in a functional style, but it does have set! and its simple to hack your own object system if the implementation you are using doesn't come with one. (One if the weaknesses of Scheme, is that it doesn't have a standardized object or module system).
It definitely would. Publishing interesting results brings visibility and prestige to your lab thus raising the chances that your grant proposals will get funded and increasing the number of people interested in collaborating with you, post-docs who want to work in your lab, etc. If a person had a major personal stake in a particular theory because they were the originator of it, then their ego might get in the way, but if its an interesting problem, then some one else will do a similar experiment and publish their results.
Slashdot Mirror
"(2) Any software portion of such standards is based on open source code"
--PhillipThe last five items you list are from the "wildcard" section and the dates given are the earliest possible date the author believes the given event could occur, not a date he believes it is likely to occur.
Quoting from the introduction:
We have also modified and extended the 'wildcard' section, based on John Petersen's excellent work in his book Out of the Blue'. Although wildcards are defined as events that can happen at almost any time, for most there is a date before which they couldn't happen, since their mechanisms do not yet exist. We have estimated the dates at which each wildcard becomes feasible.
I think you may be confusing Scheme and Common Lisp. Scheme was designed to have a minimal syntax and semantics (for example mandating optimized tail recursion and providing little syntactic sugar for expressing iterative processes, or using continuations in preference to exceptions) while Common Lisp is a huge language with plenty of sugar
You seem to be trying to make some syllagism here but I don't follow it at all.
I read that we lose 6 species each day from the face of the earth6 species a day may be the correct figure for animals or plants during the last few thousand years- you should be able to find a better estimate in an ecology textbook. I don't know is there is an estimate of species lost and creation in bacteria, archaebacteria, or protists, especially since the notion of species in bacteria is somewhat tricky because of the magnitude of lateral gene transfer.
The rate of speciation and extinction varies over geological time though. Sometimes the net change will be (roughly) zero, sometimes there will be mass extinctions, and sometimes there will be rapid and speciation and creation of new taxa.
we don't see new species being createdYes we do, its all over the fossil record. Bacteria and plants can undergo rapid speciation because of the flexibility of their genomes, animals generally less so, so the documentation of speciation is better for bacteria and plants. We'll understand speciation much better when we have a better understanding of how organisms develop- how the interactions between genes and environment bring about a complete organism which is less or more simaler to its ancestors.
we see statistical laws in action everywhere we look, with increaing entropy being of great interest.I don't see what this has to do with the rest of your post. Events which are more probable than the alternatives will on average occur more than the alternatives. Entropy will increase over time in closed systems but entropy can be shifted or exported from closed systems
What makes evolution feasible?heredity, mutation, and varying reproductive success between organisms.
Conversely, many "complex" species that thrive today would have a difficult or impossible existing at prior points in earth's history because they've adapted to be reproductively successful in the environment that they live in in the present day. If you transported them to a different time with a different climate, soil conditions, or competing or predatory species, they'd go extinct- "complexity" isn't always optimal.
Yes, with heredity being what it is, that approach is is more or less valid.
I don't understand what you are saying. Crystals don't have food, at least not in the sense that organisms do, so talking about crystals acquiring food is meaningless.
Secondly, there are ways of quantifying genetic and genomic "complexity", but comparing the "complexity" of something abiotic to something living is inherently nonsensical.
Thirdly, an order of magnitude difference in genome size (measured in number if genes, one way of giving a number to "complexity") between prokarotes is possible. The prokaryote with the smallest genome has roughly 400 genes, though I don't know the size of the largest prokaryotic genome off hand, I know it is a few thousand genes. So ten times "simpler" than a prokaryote isn't dead.
The phylogenetic algorithms may be of interest- though I haven't read the paper yet and I'm not very knowledgeable about molecular systematics anyhow, but any results on the origin of a major taxa (and land plants certainly qualify) are inherently interesting, even if as you noted, they aren't surprising or arrived at by novel techniques.
If you attend a major university, you may be able access Science magazine electronically free of charge (minus tuition of course) from any computer with an IP address on your university's network. Try going to Science's homepage. If under the advertisments at the top of the page, there is some text that says "Institution: University of foo", then you have electronic access to all the articles that have appeared in print (Sadly institutional subscriptions don't include access to papers on ScienceExpress that have been published electronically but not yet on paper)
--Phillipthat should read "2^100" and "10 million trillion", in any case, much more processing power than is concievable in the near future
If you do the math you'll see that searching entire 128bit keyspace in a decades time would require the capability to test almost 22^100 keys per second, or roughly 10 million tillion times the computing power of the EFF's DES Cracker
But will it still be legal under US law to import strong crypto into the US- either by downloading it, or by mail ordering a CD from openbsd.org?
It's not clear what form proposed legislation will take- key escrow or backdoors (by which the government could decrypt files and network traffic having a private key provided by the user or manufacturer). If users themselves are required to register private and symmetric keys then it would still seem to be legal to possess and use crypto, Open{BSD,SSH, SSL}, GNUpg, included- so long as you register keys (Would you have to register your key for every SSH session?) but if the onus is on developers to provide keys/backdoors, then it seems like any crypto source code would be illegal to distribute or possibly even possess in the United States. Would printed source (as in Applied Cryptography) be illegal? Pseudocode? Natural language explanations of algorithms?
To study the effectiveness of an HIV/AIDS vaccine in humans, researchers recruit HIV-free volunteers and give half the vaccine and half a placebo and test them all for HIV at regular intervals. If a statistically significant number of those given the vaccine instead of a placebo are free of HIV at the end of the study then you can conclude that the vaccine is effective at reducing your chances of contracting HIV.
It would be unethical to lead people to believe that they are now immune to HIV (at least half of them, the placebo group, are not) and so encourage risky behavior, so all volenteers are taught about safe sex and given condoms.
1. DES and AES are symmetric key systems, not public key.
2. When people say that breaking cipher X is exponentially difficult, its really shorthand for "there is no known algorithmic attack against the cipher that is significantly faster than checking all the permutations of keys by brute force". It may be that brute force is optimal but unless you've actually done a proof, this is only a conjecture. Look at the improvements to DES that the NSA suggested to IBM- these changes fortified DES against cryptoanalysis that wouldn't be public knowledge for almost another 2 decades- yet most people had no basis for making this judgement- just as we can only guess that AES is secure against all possible future attacks. This doesn't mean that the algorithm doesn't matter- clearly DES is stronger than rot-13, but you shouldn't assume that an algorithm alone brings security
I guess I just I come across more persistant people than you- and I think the day I started this I was solicted 5 or 6 times with various leaflets while waking from my apartment to the lab I work in across campus- this day was particularly bad because voting for student government elections was going on so all the candidates had their people out handing out leaflets, various other campus orgazations were out distributing stuff, there were a few religious groups, people handing out ads for clubs, etc. Some people are nice about it and will simply move on to the next person if you say you're not interested, but many will try to jam a flyer in my hands any way even after I say I'm not interested. I'm already over run with pieces of paper so I try not to accumulate any more. Religious groups are particularly bad about this- they'll step in front of me and jam a card in my hands, ask if I would like to learn about the Bible, and continue talking to me even after I've declined both of these, I've had creepy people try to follow me along, trying to get me to stop and listen to them. I've had people ask me why I won't stop a minute and listen about Jesus. If I say that I'm an agnostic atheist whose has already thought long and hard about this, this only makes them more determined.
I understand that many people handing out flyers and trying to get people to talk to them are very passionate about whatever they're out and about about, and I might even be one of them on Monday, protesting the DMCA, and I hate to not give them a minute, but I've found that a minute ends up turning into 5 minutes and so on (I'm not good at extricating myself from conversation), so I've found that its easier to just give the impression that I'm a bit insane.
As for me, I'm a Super-Duper-anarchist!
Just to clarify, I think he/she is thinking of the license for Guile, the GNU extension interpreter/library based on the Scheme language. The FSF added an exception to the GPL in this case, hoping that it would promote the use and development of guile by allowing proprietary software developers to link guile into their apps without requiring the software to be put under a GPL-compatible license. Guile may one day replace Emacs Lisp as the standard extensibility language for GNU Emacs.
We also have one blooming in the greenhouse at the University of Washington as well. I believe that the two Universities are planning on mating the two plants together.
Have you tried Debian GNU/Linux? Potato was released for PPC and despite all the complaints I've head about installing Debian, it was the easiest install I have ever done.
2. Let's also see some "no MacOS, no way" things happening. I don't want MOL, I don't want to keep System around. I've never had much luck with the "official" method (the 800k Apple_Bootstrap parition trick) for having a MacOS-less PPC box. I have always used Mandrake on x86, and I hope they'll get this one right.Is your firmware Old World or New World? If it's New World You shouldn't have too many problems if you've set your boot arguments correctly in lilo.conf (for SUSE) or yaboot.conf (Debian). ybin/yaboot work fine for me on a MacOSless rev-A iMac running Debian Woody.
3. Voodoo 3! I have a Mac-ized Voodoo3 gathering dust because none of the kernels seem to work, even the latest 2.4.x. Please, there are people with PPC boxes that aren't running ATI. Let's see some cool stuff happen!I don't have a Voodoo 3, so I don't know if any of your problems are caused by it. In general, kernel.org kernels won't compile or boot on PPC because Linus' tree doesn't incorporate the latest PPC changes. For PPC specific kernel source and binaries, check here. Right now I'm running 2.4.3 from the bitkeeper tree plus the ReiserFS Endian-safe patch and there haven't been any problems.
Previous /. Discussion here
I think this is an obvious case of "It takes one to know one".
We really don't need Yet Another GPL vs. BSD Flamewar.
Bad me. "their" should be "they're". I never made this mistake when I was a little kid. I must be losing my neurons too fast. Usually I preview obsessive-compulsively before I post too.
This is a common misconception- as far as I know, there is no purely functional Lisp. Common Lisp allows to write programs in any style. So if you want functional, write functional. If you prefer procedural, you can use setf. If you want OO, then use CLOS. Scheme is closer to a true functional language and many users tend to write scheme in a functional style, but it does have set! and its simple to hack your own object system if the implementation you are using doesn't come with one. (One if the weaknesses of Scheme, is that it doesn't have a standardized object or module system).
It definitely would. Publishing interesting results brings visibility and prestige to your lab thus raising the chances that your grant proposals will get funded and increasing the number of people interested in collaborating with you, post-docs who want to work in your lab, etc. If a person had a major personal stake in a particular theory because they were the originator of it, then their ego might get in the way, but if its an interesting problem, then some one else will do a similar experiment and publish their results.