The pulling out of the standards process is an expression of the true beliefs of Sun Microsystems. I don't think that anyone who cares about Free Software is going to be suckered by this one.
However, there are plenty of companies that are going to go for the Free Beer aspect of this and that is going to hurt Linux.
The article has a little dig at the end about Sun sucking up to the Open Source community by funding the next Apache conference. I can imagine that they're keen to get their co-operation and stimulate the Jakarta side of things there, but once again, if they had any intention of it taking off then they'd make it standard.
Here are some other well-known plurals of latinate words so that/. readers can make an empirical judgement of the correct usage for themselves, unswayed by authoritarian word-usage totalitarians:
was that an attempt to start a flame war, or merely the confidence of ignorance? There are lots of different endings for latin -us words. Read Tom Christiansen's page. I can't believe this debate comes up again and again. I agree about the OED though - but obviously they are anticipating usage fees.
I totally concur with you on this - it's an appalling piece of "journalism",but sadly anecdotal evidence used this way is not an uncommon flaw. I wonder if the author includes it because he is clueless himself.
It seems that we're nearly living in a new Dark Age. There are hordes of the uneducate who see the miracles of technology dangled before their eyes: daily transubstantiations, revelations and manifestations. These things all obviously happen, yet there is no understanding of how, so belief is compelled and rationality suppressed. So quiet possibly the journalist is happy with just lumping the problem of the moment into the category of "AOL caused" without trying to elucidate how or why - unlike your attempt to speculate on the causes.
Think of things this way. Suppose I never have a selfish thought for myself. I spend every waking hour trying to help others all of the time. Now I cannot help myself. However if I help myself and then decide to help others I can help more and more people and maybe have a real collective presence and impact.
Sure, that's the stated rationale that most people use, but I don't think it's very carefully thought out. Assuming that helping oneself and helping others are in direct conflict with each other bears careful examination for a start. There are many things that one does that have in effect no cost to oneself yet help others (fill examples of opening doors, being polite etc.). Many of these are examples where helping others incurs a small immediate cost yet result in an equal, or greater, delayed payback. We're not very good at seeing how these work because of the lack of a simply detectable cause-and-effect. My forbearance in not pushing old-ladies out of the way to get onto crowded buses will indirectly benefit me because my old mom will not be hurt if we all behave in this way. My paying taxes to the government, which will hopefully go towards health-care and education for the underpriveleged instead of export subsidies to arms manufacturers, will indirectly benefit me because I am less likely to be mugged by an alienated, dis-enfranchised underclass.
These examples sound boring compared to the dream of becoming the richest man on earth. But they are far more likely to happen! The "everyone can be a millionaire so everyone's gotta try (The The)" attitude is just another manifestation of the tendency to gamble - it's a sort of work-ethic version of participating in state-lotteries. The odds are probably pretty similar (in terms of becoming the one winner), the rules are the same (there can be only one winner), the only difference is that there is a better distribution of small prizes to keep the suckers alive so that they will play for more generations.
It's a crap shoot - it's organized that way. If it's not a gamble - then doesn't that mean that Bill is the winner by virtue of the superiority of his work ethic and intellect? Yes?-You mean that all the other superb hackers, rat-racing businessmen are his inferiors? No?-Then it is a gamble.
I think it is a good idea because my life is short. I want to enjoy my life
Well, it could still be an enjoyable life under different conditions. I guess it depends whether you look forward to old age hated and despised? Maybe it would make someone like Gates feel important, even if in a negative way. Personally I'd rather be Stallman;-)
you go downhill rapidly but stay in a rut and loose your humanity.
Well, I can't deny that happens for some people, but with my 2 grand-fathers they were active (sailing in competitions and hiking) until their late 80's. One had a heart attack on the boat and died, the other got lung-cancer which finished him off in a year because he wouldn't accept treatment.
Actually, the lack of genetic variability in cheetahs isn't so much because they're "perfectly designed" as because they are on the verge of extinction-
I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't think that they're perfectly designed. I do think however that they are evolved. I was replying to a poster that seemed to feel that anything that had "evolved" was superior to that which had been designed. In fact, this is a premise of the Genetic Programming/Genetic Algorithm people - that an "evolutionary" process will necessarily be an optimizing process.
I'm very aware of the population bottleneck in cheetahs - a result of their evolution which is merely a contigent, stochastic process which responds to local environmental conditions.
I agree with most of what you've said but I think that you are a little confused with the following quote though:
-basically, as long as you have that much genetic variability you have "hybrid vigour".
Hybrid vigour is actually a term applied to the apparent increase in fitness of the offspring of a cross that involves two highly inbred parental lines. The extra variation resulting from this creates unpredictably (on the basis of extrapolating from h^2 calculations in the parental lines) fit phenotypes in the offspring.
The heart of the matter is that we have a system now. Just because it came about through a highly contigent, stochastic process called evolution doesn't mean that it is the best possible system or a better system than could be denied. Also the idea that altering existing social structures would be "against" evolution is hard to support without a huge amount of hand waving.
The idea that the problem can be separated into two components, "do the ads cater to a pre-exisiting audience or do they create their audience?" is weak. This would have been a valid question for how did it start to be this way. But at this late stage of our culture the two are probably inextricably entangled.
The real question is do game players care that there are sexist ads (and I would distinguish these from ads that merely use sexual imagery - this distinction is admitted in the original article)?
It seems foolish to me for game companies to be alienating a huge market. The female market is a pretty under-developed one at the moment.
Do we really want to play around with our lives any longer? I mean, we've completely ruined our natural environment and wiped out countless species of animals. Do we want to wipe out ourselves as well?
I don't want to play around with our lives any longer. We've done that for too long, trusting to nature or to god. We have to understand how and why things happen. Then we can control them. You talk about an overpopulated earth stuffed with old people - well, letting nature take it's course is resulting in an overpopulated earth now. As for the old people, wouldn't it be possible to plan for a spectrum of people of different ages? With regard to people looking alike, aside from general tendencies to prefer certain proportions in the face and in waist-to-hip ratios (not overall fatness) there are diverse culturally determnined preferences.
The only thing you should be scared about is not understanding the technology and taking part in democratic decisions about it. Needless to say the former is a pre-requisite for the former.
Really now, tampering with biological genes which have withstood thousands of years of evolution may destroy large sections of our world
Really now, I suspect that you are aware that not tampering with them might also be a problem.
I can only assume that you are trying to be provocative when you say :
make everybody intelligent. That's not such a bright idea either. With intelligence comes and increased desire to alter existing social structures. Get enough entropy stirred into the pool and the whole thing collapses into anarchy.
Why wouldn't altering existing social structures be a good thing? Are you happy with the present? If you really are serious about this then you should consider that while this attitude makes you merely smug and complacent it also makes a lot of people hungry, cold, nauseous, bitter, tortured and sad.
Really now, your facile discussion is at best irritating and at worst disgusting.
We simply are not at the point socially or otherwise to start tinkering with human genetics.
We already do quite a lot of tinkering: chorionic villi sampling and amniocentesis provide information on common genetic diseases to allow for the selective termination of foetuses at the choice of the parents. Also quite a lot of people are doing "selective breeding experiments" with human subjects! Yes, it's a procedure called sex!
This would only be a concern if they were introducing these promotors and repressors into the genes of germline cells,
No, if the phenotype of the population is altered uniformly through somatic DNA by this technology then there may be too little variation left to cope with novel environmental threats. What if it turns out that we all need appendices to cope with a (presently) rarely occuring bacteria and we've eliminated it from all of the F0 generation?
We get eliminated, we leave no offspring.
On the other hand, if we changed the germ-line then it would only(!) affect the next generation - of course this would ultimately mean extinction for the race - but what the hell! If we were that stupid we deserved it.
The strength of evolved systems (mainly biological, but you can see it most easily in genetic programming) is that the huge mess of largely unreadable information is far more robust and flexible than a straightforward human-coded version.
Like Cheetahs for example? A highly evolved species, so evolved in fact that they have one of the lowest known genetic variations. I think that you are assuming that evolution is synonymous with best, which in your mind is synonymous with varied and able to respond to a variety of situations.
I really don't buy the genetic programming argument at all. It might work well for problems that have not been studied well and hence the problems and parameters are unknown, but given a clearly defined problem I'll go for human design any time.
introoduce an evolved system to a slightly different problem or environment, even one it's never seen before, and it is far more likely to deal gracefully than a "programmed" system.
I know this is reductio ad absurdum but here goes for some examples to disprove this statement:
putting humans or mars=landers on mars
putting a trained human and an un-trained human in charge of open-heart-surgery
getting a human or a computer to run Linux on it's hardware
I think GP is interesting, potentially useful for suggesting strategies when we don't have a clue, or when we are optimizing in parameter spaces with unfeasibly large dimensionalities for standard statistical approaches to apply, but that's all. Engineered design rules!
My intent is to provoke thought about the potential dangers that come with scientific advances, rather than to try to prevent the coming of those advances.
I guess we're pretty much in agreement about what needs to be done then. However, with anything related to genetics and humans the response is usually so strong and emotional that we are not really in that much danger of focusing only on the good.
I understand and appreciate this visceral reaction, and I think that "the public" is right to be skeptical. But, they/we have to take it a step further and not merely worry about whether this sort of thing is "against Nature" or "against God's will" - we/they have to determine what it is that we like about our society (or what it is that we would achieve ideally) and then set about controlling any new technologies. For some things that means don't use them at all (Biowarfare) and for others they should probably be used (giving people the option to do pre-pregnancy genetic testing). But, we've really got to increase public understanding of science. Otherwise people won't be informed, will know that their not informed and will thus be resentful, suspicious and unable to make logical choices.
The alternative? A mostly educated population choosing on the basis of informed rationality what they feel to be best. I look forward to it *g*.
Disclaimer: I have not read the original article, merely the crappy MSNBC piece stuffed with "factoids". how thoroughly was this tested and how good is the understanding we have of the systems involved I would imagine that one of the benefits of this work is that it will allow investigation of complex phenotypes. Many phenotypes are controlled by several genes operating in weird regulatory networks. The ability to switch on and off bits of this network merely by dumping in chemicals would be great. A different specific switch for each gene in the network. What happens when gene 1 is on and 2,3,4 are off etc. So, this could allow us to understand better what is happening with developmental defects, homeostatic defects etc What will it end up costing? If we live in an unethical , immoral society which prizes other goals than human dignity and freedom, well then, probably those two latter will go by the board when a technology that can affect them that also happens to be profitable turns up.Change the system, don't kill the science!
Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI is pretty committed and there are links available through the Scientific Applications on Linux site. Perhaps it's such a large area that it would be a good thing to have an independent/.-like site that provided forums for these discussions - taking sci.molbio etc to a nicer medium, it could allow for sharing of graphics which would help some awkward discussions.
Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI is pretty committed and there are links available through
It could be argued that it is the construction of a particular type of machine - a biological machine. Just because the parts are made of cells doesn't mean that this is no less a mechanism. They've shown a way to take bits of things found in nature and use them to create other things. Would we argue against nano-tech because it used atoms? - merely a process that puts molecules together in different ways?
What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
Restricting access to things that are necessary for life and health go on all the time under our current system. Hence the high price of drugs for the third world etc. It's capitalism.
this means even cheaper, tastier lamb chops - now with foetal brain flavour!
Definitely innovative and non-obvious, until this was done there was repeated insistence that animal, unlike plant, cells would never be able to be used for cloning as they were not totipotent.
W.r.t. the mad scientist, well - mad scientists are good for driving technology and thus the best thing to do is to clone the mad scientist thousands of times. Thus, even for heinous crimes the guilt is distributed over many bodies and the individual punishment is thus negligible as the moral quota tends to 1/infinity.
So, if what's going on is that instructions for an x86 are being translated on the fly into instructions for Crusoe and this is done so well that there is a marginal difference between using the actual Crusoe instruction set what does this bode for independent byte-code implementations of Java etc? Doesn't it open up the possibility of keeping libraries of pre-compiled, pre-interpreted , ANSI C, on the hand-held, then a nice little dynamically compiled x86 gets sent over the net, looks up it's stubs locally and away it goes? Am I being really naive here? (Actually, I don't want an answer to exactly that, I want to know what my naivete is !. I suppose there would be security issues.
It's the code-morphing that makes it compatible right? Or is there some deeper compatibility at the hardware level? Is there any reason to believe that applications written natively for this would be able to avoid the code-morphing layer and run even faster?
Slashdot Mirror
However, there are plenty of companies that are going to go for the Free Beer aspect of this and that is going to hurt Linux.
The article has a little dig at the end about Sun sucking up to the Open Source community by funding the next Apache conference. I can imagine that they're keen to get their co-operation and stimulate the Jakarta side of things there, but once again, if they had any intention of it taking off then they'd make it standard.
I didn't realize until the above commented got moderated as such - oh well, here goes!
correction gratefully received. I just checked my source and found that the phrase I remembered was "enculer les mouches".
not what would be called an honculeur de mouche?
doofus doofii
ignoramus ignoramii
corpus corpii
calculus calculii
detritus detritii
Hope that helps.
was that an attempt to start a flame war, or merely the confidence of ignorance? There are lots of different endings for latin -us words. Read Tom Christiansen's page. I can't believe this debate comes up again and again. I agree about the OED though - but obviously they are anticipating usage fees.
It seems that we're nearly living in a new Dark Age. There are hordes of the uneducate who see the miracles of technology dangled before their eyes: daily transubstantiations, revelations and manifestations. These things all obviously happen, yet there is no understanding of how, so belief is compelled and rationality suppressed. So quiet possibly the journalist is happy with just lumping the problem of the moment into the category of "AOL caused" without trying to elucidate how or why - unlike your attempt to speculate on the causes.
Think of things this way. Suppose I never have a selfish thought for myself. I spend every waking hour trying to help others all of the time. Now I cannot help myself. However if I help myself and then decide to help others I can help more and more people and maybe have a real collective presence and impact.
Sure, that's the stated rationale that most people use, but I don't think it's very carefully thought out. Assuming that helping oneself and helping others are in direct conflict with each other bears careful examination for a start. There are many things that one does that have in effect no cost to oneself yet help others (fill examples of opening doors, being polite etc.). Many of these are examples where helping others incurs a small immediate cost yet result in an equal, or greater, delayed payback. We're not very good at seeing how these work because of the lack of a simply detectable cause-and-effect. My forbearance in not pushing old-ladies out of the way to get onto crowded buses will indirectly benefit me because my old mom will not be hurt if we all behave in this way. My paying taxes to the government, which will hopefully go towards health-care and education for the underpriveleged instead of export subsidies to arms manufacturers, will indirectly benefit me because I am less likely to be mugged by an alienated, dis-enfranchised underclass.
These examples sound boring compared to the dream of becoming the richest man on earth. But they are far more likely to happen! The "everyone can be a millionaire so everyone's gotta try (The The)" attitude is just another manifestation of the tendency to gamble - it's a sort of work-ethic version of participating in state-lotteries. The odds are probably pretty similar (in terms of becoming the one winner), the rules are the same (there can be only one winner), the only difference is that there is a better distribution of small prizes to keep the suckers alive so that they will play for more generations.
It's a crap shoot - it's organized that way. If it's not a gamble - then doesn't that mean that Bill is the winner by virtue of the superiority of his work ethic and intellect? Yes?-You mean that all the other superb hackers, rat-racing businessmen are his inferiors? No?-Then it is a gamble.
I think it is a good idea because my life is short. I want to enjoy my life
Well, it could still be an enjoyable life under different conditions. I guess it depends whether you look forward to old age hated and despised? Maybe it would make someone like Gates feel important, even if in a negative way. Personally I'd rather be Stallman ;-)
you go downhill rapidly but stay in a rut and loose your humanity.
Well, I can't deny that happens for some people, but with my 2 grand-fathers they were active (sailing in competitions and hiking) until their late 80's. One had a heart attack on the boat and died, the other got lung-cancer which finished him off in a year because he wouldn't accept treatment.
Actually, the lack of genetic variability in cheetahs isn't so much because they're "perfectly designed" as because they are on the verge of extinction-
I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't think that they're perfectly designed. I do think however that they are evolved. I was replying to a poster that seemed to feel that anything that had "evolved" was superior to that which had been designed. In fact, this is a premise of the Genetic Programming/Genetic Algorithm people - that an "evolutionary" process will necessarily be an optimizing process.
I'm very aware of the population bottleneck in cheetahs - a result of their evolution which is merely a contigent, stochastic process which responds to local environmental conditions.
I agree with most of what you've said but I think that you are a little confused with the following quote though:
-basically, as long as you have that much genetic variability you have "hybrid vigour".
Hybrid vigour is actually a term applied to the apparent increase in fitness of the offspring of a cross that involves two highly inbred parental lines. The extra variation resulting from this creates unpredictably (on the basis of extrapolating from h^2 calculations in the parental lines) fit phenotypes in the offspring.
The heart of the matter is that we have a system now. Just because it came about through a highly contigent, stochastic process called evolution doesn't mean that it is the best possible system or a better system than could be denied. Also the idea that altering existing social structures would be "against" evolution is hard to support without a huge amount of hand waving.
I guess one or both of us should have put: ;-) on our post. ;-) Thanks for the explanation though.
I don't understand. What else could it be?
The real question is do game players care that there are sexist ads (and I would distinguish these from ads that merely use sexual imagery - this distinction is admitted in the original article)?
It seems foolish to me for game companies to be alienating a huge market. The female market is a pretty under-developed one at the moment.
Do we really want to play around with our lives any longer? I mean, we've completely ruined our natural environment and wiped out countless species of animals. Do we want to wipe out ourselves as well?
I don't want to play around with our lives any longer. We've done that for too long, trusting to nature or to god. We have to understand how and why things happen. Then we can control them. You talk about an overpopulated earth stuffed with old people - well, letting nature take it's course is resulting in an overpopulated earth now. As for the old people, wouldn't it be possible to plan for a spectrum of people of different ages? With regard to people looking alike, aside from general tendencies to prefer certain proportions in the face and in waist-to-hip ratios (not overall fatness) there are diverse culturally determnined preferences.
The only thing you should be scared about is not understanding the technology and taking part in democratic decisions about it. Needless to say the former is a pre-requisite for the former.
Really now, tampering with biological genes which have withstood thousands of years of evolution may destroy large sections of our world
Really now, I suspect that you are aware that not tampering with them might also be a problem.
I can only assume that you are trying to be provocative when you say :
make everybody intelligent. That's not such a bright idea either. With intelligence comes and increased desire to alter existing social structures. Get enough entropy stirred into the pool and the whole thing collapses into anarchy.
Why wouldn't altering existing social structures be a good thing? Are you happy with the present? If you really are serious about this then you should consider that while this attitude makes you merely smug and complacent it also makes a lot of people hungry, cold, nauseous, bitter, tortured and sad.
Really now, your facile discussion is at best irritating and at worst disgusting.
We simply are not at the point socially or otherwise to start tinkering with human genetics.
We already do quite a lot of tinkering: chorionic villi sampling and amniocentesis provide information on common genetic diseases to allow for the selective termination of foetuses at the choice of the parents. Also quite a lot of people are doing "selective breeding experiments" with human subjects! Yes, it's a procedure called sex!
This would only be a concern if they were introducing these promotors and repressors into the genes of germline cells,
No, if the phenotype of the population is altered uniformly through somatic DNA by this technology then there may be too little variation left to cope with novel environmental threats. What if it turns out that we all need appendices to cope with a (presently) rarely occuring bacteria and we've eliminated it from all of the F0 generation?
We get eliminated, we leave no offspring.
On the other hand, if we changed the germ-line then it would only(!) affect the next generation - of course this would ultimately mean extinction for the race - but what the hell! If we were that stupid we deserved it.
The strength of evolved systems (mainly biological, but you can see it most easily in genetic programming) is that the huge mess of largely unreadable information is far more robust and flexible than a straightforward human-coded version.
Like Cheetahs for example? A highly evolved species, so evolved in fact that they have one of the lowest known genetic variations. I think that you are assuming that evolution is synonymous with best, which in your mind is synonymous with varied and able to respond to a variety of situations.
I really don't buy the genetic programming argument at all. It might work well for problems that have not been studied well and hence the problems and parameters are unknown, but given a clearly defined problem I'll go for human design any time.
introoduce an evolved system to a slightly different problem or environment, even one it's never seen before, and it is far more likely to deal gracefully than a "programmed" system.
I know this is reductio ad absurdum but here goes for some examples to disprove this statement:
I think GP is interesting, potentially useful for suggesting strategies when we don't have a clue, or when we are optimizing in parameter spaces with unfeasibly large dimensionalities for standard statistical approaches to apply, but that's all. Engineered design rules!
My intent is to provoke thought about the potential dangers that come with scientific advances, rather than to try to prevent the coming of those advances.
I guess we're pretty much in agreement about what needs to be done then. However, with anything related to genetics and humans the response is usually so strong and emotional that we are not really in that much danger of focusing only on the good.
I understand and appreciate this visceral reaction, and I think that "the public" is right to be skeptical. But, they/we have to take it a step further and not merely worry about whether this sort of thing is "against Nature" or "against God's will" - we/they have to determine what it is that we like about our society (or what it is that we would achieve ideally) and then set about controlling any new technologies. For some things that means don't use them at all (Biowarfare) and for others they should probably be used (giving people the option to do pre-pregnancy genetic testing). But, we've really got to increase public understanding of science. Otherwise people won't be informed, will know that their not informed and will thus be resentful, suspicious and unable to make logical choices.
The alternative? A mostly educated population choosing on the basis of informed rationality what they feel to be best. I look forward to it *g*.
Disclaimer: I have not read the original article, merely the crappy MSNBC piece stuffed with "factoids". how thoroughly was this tested and how good is the understanding we have of the systems involved I would imagine that one of the benefits of this work is that it will allow investigation of complex phenotypes. Many phenotypes are controlled by several genes operating in weird regulatory networks. The ability to switch on and off bits of this network merely by dumping in chemicals would be great. A different specific switch for each gene in the network. What happens when gene 1 is on and 2,3,4 are off etc. So, this could allow us to understand better what is happening with developmental defects, homeostatic defects etc What will it end up costing? If we live in an unethical , immoral society which prizes other goals than human dignity and freedom, well then, probably those two latter will go by the board when a technology that can affect them that also happens to be profitable turns up.Change the system, don't kill the science!
Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI is pretty committed and there are links available through the Scientific Applications on Linux site. Perhaps it's such a large area that it would be a good thing to have an independent /.-like site that provided forums for these discussions - taking sci.molbio etc to a nicer medium, it could allow for sharing of graphics which would help some awkward discussions.
Thanks for posting this. I agree that the biological side of things could be improved. There are quite a lot of important Open/Free bio-informatics sites and projects. I know that the EBI is pretty committed and there are links available through
After all, this is not a machine or mechanism
It could be argued that it is the construction of a particular type of machine - a biological machine. Just because the parts are made of cells doesn't mean that this is no less a mechanism. They've shown a way to take bits of things found in nature and use them to create other things. Would we argue against nano-tech because it used atoms? - merely a process that puts molecules together in different ways?
What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
Restricting access to things that are necessary for life and health go on all the time under our current system. Hence the high price of drugs for the third world etc. It's capitalism.
Definitely innovative and non-obvious, until this was done there was repeated insistence that animal, unlike plant, cells would never be able to be used for cloning as they were not totipotent.
W.r.t. the mad scientist, well - mad scientists are good for driving technology and thus the best thing to do is to clone the mad scientist thousands of times. Thus, even for heinous crimes the guilt is distributed over many bodies and the individual punishment is thus negligible as the moral quota tends to 1/infinity.
So, if what's going on is that instructions for an x86 are being translated on the fly into instructions for Crusoe and this is done so well that there is a marginal difference between using the actual Crusoe instruction set what does this bode for independent byte-code implementations of Java etc? Doesn't it open up the possibility of keeping libraries of pre-compiled, pre-interpreted , ANSI C, on the hand-held, then a nice little dynamically compiled x86 gets sent over the net, looks up it's stubs locally and away it goes? Am I being really naive here? (Actually, I don't want an answer to exactly that, I want to know what my naivete is !. I suppose there would be security issues.
It's the code-morphing that makes it compatible right? Or is there some deeper compatibility at the hardware level? Is there any reason to believe that applications written natively for this would be able to avoid the code-morphing layer and run even faster?