Oh, and I also think it's pretty stupid to talk about how few lines it took to write the program when it's using a bunch of libraries.
You are so correct, my man. What is the point of a library if you didn't write it yourself? Why, it would be utterly useless!
I could just write a one-liner that calls this program, by that rationale.
Well it's not the same, because you'd just be doing what someone has already done, now wouldn't you? This guy did something original, and he did with economy.
No, the real heroes are the artists, scientists and adventurers who's willingness to push the boundaries of human experience will one day free us from the endless cycle of destroying and rebuilding.
Quantum computers would actually achieve a major goal for minesweeper development: the ability to dynamically change the mines to maximize frustration without invalidating previous moves and all in constant time.
How come major American News organizations didn't expose the clearly fraudulent evidence put forth in the days before the war?
From the moment of Powell's little show at the UN, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that these jerks had absolutely nothing. It became more clear as the UN inspections progressed.
Now that is a major story, one sure to garner lots big ratings: "Day 16 of the White House Under Siege as reporters and congressmen demand some form of evidence from the administration, any at all!"
Why didn't it happen that way? Why did they all tell the same story? Ritter is a child molester. Chirac is a surrender monkey. The protesters are all hippies. Bush is a steely eyed man of action and this all somehow fits into the war on terror. Does Saddam have remote controlled drones, ready to strike the Eastern Seaboard with small pox? Our crack reporter asks this and more to an anonymous senior official from the Department of Homeland Security after this short break for our sponsors.
The article says something about "baryonic matter" and "non-baryonic matter", implying that dark matter is not just hard to see, but also exotic in it's basic structure. I wonder if they have some reason to suspect that.
The problem with gaming addiction is that noone empathizes with the addicted, *even among themselves*.
Even those of us who've never smoked, for instance, can understand how hard it is for someone to stop smoking.
Mmorpgs addiction is not like caffein or tobacco or driving fast, after all, most people live a life while satisfying their need. It's more like sex and gambling: when you're addicted, it consumes your life and your money. You may hold down a job to keep yourself afloat, but that's it.
For some reason, these addicitons, which seem to me far worse, are treated with nothing but derision.
And the effect is this. I code for fun, but I mostly code for work. My software is proprietary and very valuable to the company. I simply cannot distribute the source code, or in any way make the workings of the software public.
What this means is that I can only use GPL software at work if I can distribute it separately from my software that interoperates with it. If I have to incorporate some third party software into my own, then it can't be GPL'd.
What kind of wingspan would you need to fly on mars?
Now, a Titan flyer could get by with little stubs, or maybe some kind of lighter-than-air flyer, that could easily land to do analysis of objects.
We really ought to send flyers into the gas giants, too.
It's the old perma-death question. It obviously would make for more interesting, gritty, and exciting game play (plus you'd get more out of your content, since difficult content would be dangerous to work through and thus take more time.)
The downside is that the it will piss off the newbs and once-a-monthers who make up the bulk of the revenue for any bigtime mmorpg, and it breaks the basic animalistic conditioning of simple tasks followed by predictable reward that keeps people hooked like a drug.
Look at World of Warcraft: It almost completely eliminated any death penalty and PvP is a joke. Among the vast hordes of people that just want to click the next mob and power up, it's one of the game's most attractive features.
The truth is, the majority of players want nothing negative to ever happen to their character , and believe nothing negative *should* ever happen.
As a Nethack player, that viewpoint is alien to me, but then most people can't stand Nethack.
Using cops to make traffic stops has made commonplace what should be a rare occurance in a free country: otherwise law-abiding citizens submitting to an interrogation from the police.
Automatic traffic enforcement can alleviate some of this.
Dude, that wave you're riding came all the way across the ocean. If some concrete barrel is sucking on it to power your xbox, it won't be as big when you catch it.
On the other hand, they would double as tsunami detectors.
Only if you're totally anal about it. Teach a dog not to bite as a puppy, and get one big enough that the kids can't torture it, and that's about it. Unless you're one of those wierdos that lets dogs into your house.
Dawkins is what I would call a zealot, but he is also one of the most careful separators of the facts and myths of evolution, and as a result, is (or was a few decades ago) one of the most insightful commenters on evolution. For example, he destroyed the understandable myth that organisms evolve for the good of the species, that those genes that benefit the species most are past on the most (in some cases, it turns out to be the exact opposite.)
To defend that particular quote, he's ruminating on the myth of *atheism*, which is bolstered by evolutionary ideas but is not part of them.
And the statement is factually correct. What Darwin lent to atheists is the realization that just because something appears to be incomprehensably rich and complex, it doesn't mean that it truly is incomprehensible, or that it required a higher being to become so. He demonstrated that failure of imagination is not proof of God.
I do believe that everyone gives in to some myth or another about the goings on in their lives, including biologists and Richard Dawkins, but I'd guess that whatever success they have as scientists rests in partly in their ability to see past the myths. I'd also guess that scientists like Dawkins spend a great deal of time going over their assumptions and searching for hidden ones they don't yet know they've made.
I wrote a program that knew it's own syntax in subset-of-C parse tree (basically it's genetic code).
What it would do was to create two mutants of it's parse tree, generate the c code from the mutants, compile them, then fork, execing both children executables. This had the benefit of every children always being compilable, and the "DNA" being somewhat less brittle. (Every child did *something*, even if it wasn't able to reproduce.)
It was pretty slow, but eventually crashed my system. In the process though, it *did* manage to complexify itself adding a few lines here and there, and cut out some code I thought was necessary but turned out wasn't, streamlining itself for it's competition for compiler time, I guess.
Anyway, I thought it wasn't too interesting because my little subset had no IO capabilities beyond being able to summon gcc onto the results of STDOUT, and it's sole selection criteria was speed through the compiler. I also just now realize that eventually one would mutate into a simple fork bomb and all evolution would stop.
With a better c-subset and a more interesting selection environment, it could possibly be cool.
I'm not sure that they meant "irreducibly complex" in the same way most creationists did.
The article only takes "irreducibly complex" to mean "fits the definition given by Behe for irreducibly complex", which is quite suffcient to disprove his theory. BTW, this is not the first time that something "Irreducibly Complex" according to Behe has been shown to be evolvable.
One pathway that Behe's defenders don't seem to comprehend is that "Irreducibly Complex" does not imply that the feature in question is the least complex structure capable of solving a problem (see human eye, for example), meaning that a true "IC" feature might have evolved from less efficient but MORE (or differently) complex structure that was reducible to a structure less complex than the final state.
In other words, Behe has an interesting, intellegent criticism, but it doesn't pan out, which BTW, is good for science. He proposed something falsifiable, and it's been falsified.
The big break throughs in Neural Networks etc. may come from neurology and not AI. How, exactly, does the brain form neural pathways? Once we answer that and can simulate it, what will our artificial networks be capable of?
This is the best evidence I've seen to refute the idea of God-as-Life-Giver. If we can spark evolution so easily in our own stupid little worlds, how could it take God 10 billion years to do it in his?
No, if there is a God he is a God-the-Prime-Mover, and we are one of those primordial soup runs where they just fill the world with random instructions to see what forms from it. Of course, they doesn't preclude him messing with us once we do form.
Darwinism is a scientific theory, but it addresses a question of great sigificance to how we view the world and live our lives - where we came from.
Human culture has gone through several such transitions as investigators grapple with knoweldge the refutes millenia old common sense.
We are due another such transition as advances in neurology reduce the idea of a soul to a metaphor. After we leap that hurdle, debates about evolution will seem quaint.
As a result, I suspect that even in the minds of most scientists, it's taken on the status of a myth.
Only to non-biologists. It's actually the exact opposite of a myth: a useful tool that works for you whether you believe it or not. As scary as it sounds, there are "Creationist on Sundays" doctors who quite contentedly use the tool of evoulutionary theory and it's spin offs such as genetc theory in their daily work.
So, with that in mind, what creationism threatens is not the scientific theory of Darwinism, but the myth of Darwinism.
Well, I don't care much about the fate of any myth, one way or another, but I'd be hesitant to suggest, that myths surrounding evolutions are threatened by those particular myths that were generated to fill a void that evolution has so aptly filled.
Be that as it may, I'm not a geologist, and I don't know any geologists personally. I'm betting that fewer than 1% of/.ers are geologists. Very few./ers rely on first-hand scientific knowledge to know that creationism is false.
Are you a scientist? If you are, you know that the evidence for lots of our recent advancements has been right under our nose all along, like the missing pieces in a puzzle, only most didn't even know there was a puzzle because we'd just made up stories to fill the gaps.
No, not everyone's a geologist, but anyone who went to a decent elementary school has met a geologist when they were a kid. They go out and they show you what they do. They answer the prodding, often insightful, often skeptical questions that innocent kids throw at them. Then they *show* you why they know what they know, don't know what they don't. That's not a myth, that's real. And whether you want to follow geology up to the limits of knowledge or not is your choice. It's not really that far of a journey, anyone with a brain in their head can take it.
What they do know is that they've thrown their hat in the ring with a certain myth, and that creationism is a competing myth.
The competition is between the myths of creationism and the real idea of evolution, and frankly, it's not much of a competition. The myths that surround evolution are totally irrelevent, even as they cause people to do stupid things. The reason they aren't important is that they aren't at the core of the idea, unlike the myths of creationism.
So I don't have to write my own data routines all the time.
So if I get hit by a truck, all accumulated data is right there, easily accessible even before my replacement has figured out my horrid code.
It scales. They've put a lot of working into making it easy to complexify your data structures as you need to. That's work I don't want to do, and especially don't want to wish I had done 3 years ago.
If I want to do some little thing, I can do it painlessly in any language I want, because someone else has already written the API.
And, sort of as a side benefit, it makes think of your data structure in a differently, which can occaisionally be enlightening.
Slashdot Mirror
Did he bring them a plastic turkey?
I'm just saying I'd be way more impressed if someone did the same thing in 200 lines of assembly.
That would be trivial given the right processor and instruction set.
Oh, and I also think it's pretty stupid to talk about how few lines it took to write the program when it's using a bunch of libraries.
You are so correct, my man. What is the point of a library if you didn't write it yourself? Why, it would be utterly useless!
I could just write a one-liner that calls this program, by that rationale.
Well it's not the same, because you'd just be doing what someone has already done, now wouldn't you? This guy did something original, and he did with economy.
No, the real heroes are the artists, scientists and adventurers who's willingness to push the boundaries of human experience will one day free us from the endless cycle of destroying and rebuilding.
Quantum computers would actually achieve a major goal for minesweeper development: the ability to dynamically change the mines to maximize frustration without invalidating previous moves and all in constant time.
How come major American News organizations didn't expose the clearly fraudulent evidence put forth in the days before the war?
From the moment of Powell's little show at the UN, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that these jerks had absolutely nothing. It became more clear as the UN inspections progressed.
Now that is a major story, one sure to garner lots big ratings: "Day 16 of the White House Under Siege as reporters and congressmen demand some form of evidence from the administration, any at all!"
Why didn't it happen that way? Why did they all tell the same story? Ritter is a child molester. Chirac is a surrender monkey. The protesters are all hippies. Bush is a steely eyed man of action and this all somehow fits into the war on terror. Does Saddam have remote controlled drones, ready to strike the Eastern Seaboard with small pox? Our crack reporter asks this and more to an anonymous senior official from the Department of Homeland Security after this short break for our sponsors.
The article says something about "baryonic matter" and "non-baryonic matter", implying that dark matter is not just hard to see, but also exotic in it's basic structure. I wonder if they have some reason to suspect that.
The problem with gaming addiction is that noone empathizes with the addicted, *even among themselves*.
Even those of us who've never smoked, for instance, can understand how hard it is for someone to stop smoking.
Mmorpgs addiction is not like caffein or tobacco or driving fast, after all, most people live a life while satisfying their need. It's more like sex and gambling: when you're addicted, it consumes your life and your money. You may hold down a job to keep yourself afloat, but that's it.
For some reason, these addicitons, which seem to me far worse, are treated with nothing but derision.
Are you saying antimatter weapons already exist?
And the effect is this. I code for fun, but I mostly code for work. My software is proprietary and very valuable to the company. I simply cannot distribute the source code, or in any way make the workings of the software public.
What this means is that I can only use GPL software at work if I can distribute it separately from my software that interoperates with it. If I have to incorporate some third party software into my own, then it can't be GPL'd.
What kind of wingspan would you need to fly on mars? Now, a Titan flyer could get by with little stubs, or maybe some kind of lighter-than-air flyer, that could easily land to do analysis of objects. We really ought to send flyers into the gas giants, too.
It's the old perma-death question. It obviously would make for more interesting, gritty, and exciting game play (plus you'd get more out of your content, since difficult content would be dangerous to work through and thus take more time.)
The downside is that the it will piss off the newbs and once-a-monthers who make up the bulk of the revenue for any bigtime mmorpg, and it breaks the basic animalistic conditioning of simple tasks followed by predictable reward that keeps people hooked like a drug.
Look at World of Warcraft: It almost completely eliminated any death penalty and PvP is a joke. Among the vast hordes of people that just want to click the next mob and power up, it's one of the game's most attractive features.
The truth is, the majority of players want nothing negative to ever happen to their character , and believe nothing negative *should* ever happen.
As a Nethack player, that viewpoint is alien to me, but then most people can't stand Nethack.
Automatic traffic enforcement can alleviate some of this.
Maybe the profile is different, the way they can tell a nuke from an earthquake.
On the other hand, they would double as tsunami detectors.
Only if you're totally anal about it. Teach a dog not to bite as a puppy, and get one big enough that the kids can't torture it, and that's about it. Unless you're one of those wierdos that lets dogs into your house.
Dawkins is what I would call a zealot, but he is also one of the most careful separators of the facts and myths of evolution, and as a result, is (or was a few decades ago) one of the most insightful commenters on evolution. For example, he destroyed the understandable myth that organisms evolve for the good of the species, that those genes that benefit the species most are past on the most (in some cases, it turns out to be the exact opposite.)
To defend that particular quote, he's ruminating on the myth of *atheism*, which is bolstered by evolutionary ideas but is not part of them.
And the statement is factually correct. What Darwin lent to atheists is the realization that just because something appears to be incomprehensably rich and complex, it doesn't mean that it truly is incomprehensible, or that it required a higher being to become so. He demonstrated that failure of imagination is not proof of God.
I do believe that everyone gives in to some myth or another about the goings on in their lives, including biologists and Richard Dawkins, but I'd guess that whatever success they have as scientists rests in partly in their ability to see past the myths. I'd also guess that scientists like Dawkins spend a great deal of time going over their assumptions and searching for hidden ones they don't yet know they've made.
I wrote a program that knew it's own syntax in subset-of-C parse tree (basically it's genetic code).
What it would do was to create two mutants of it's parse tree, generate the c code from the mutants, compile them, then fork, execing both children executables. This had the benefit of every children always being compilable, and the "DNA" being somewhat less brittle. (Every child did *something*, even if it wasn't able to reproduce.)
It was pretty slow, but eventually crashed my system. In the process though, it *did* manage to complexify itself adding a few lines here and there, and cut out some code I thought was necessary but turned out wasn't, streamlining itself for it's competition for compiler time, I guess.
Anyway, I thought it wasn't too interesting because my little subset had no IO capabilities beyond being able to summon gcc onto the results of STDOUT, and it's sole selection criteria was speed through the compiler. I also just now realize that eventually one would mutate into a simple fork bomb and all evolution would stop.
With a better c-subset and a more interesting selection environment, it could possibly be cool.
The article only takes "irreducibly complex" to mean "fits the definition given by Behe for irreducibly complex", which is quite suffcient to disprove his theory. BTW, this is not the first time that something "Irreducibly Complex" according to Behe has been shown to be evolvable.
One pathway that Behe's defenders don't seem to comprehend is that "Irreducibly Complex" does not imply that the feature in question is the least complex structure capable of solving a problem (see human eye, for example), meaning that a true "IC" feature might have evolved from less efficient but MORE (or differently) complex structure that was reducible to a structure less complex than the final state.
In other words, Behe has an interesting, intellegent criticism, but it doesn't pan out, which BTW, is good for science. He proposed something falsifiable, and it's been falsified.
The big break throughs in Neural Networks etc. may come from neurology and not AI. How, exactly, does the brain form neural pathways? Once we answer that and can simulate it, what will our artificial networks be capable of?
Every phone in the world will ring at the same time.
No, if there is a God he is a God-the-Prime-Mover, and we are one of those primordial soup runs where they just fill the world with random instructions to see what forms from it. Of course, they doesn't preclude him messing with us once we do form.
Human culture has gone through several such transitions as investigators grapple with knoweldge the refutes millenia old common sense.
We are due another such transition as advances in neurology reduce the idea of a soul to a metaphor. After we leap that hurdle, debates about evolution will seem quaint.
As a result, I suspect that even in the minds of most scientists, it's taken on the status of a myth.
Only to non-biologists. It's actually the exact opposite of a myth: a useful tool that works for you whether you believe it or not. As scary as it sounds, there are "Creationist on Sundays" doctors who quite contentedly use the tool of evoulutionary theory and it's spin offs such as genetc theory in their daily work.
So, with that in mind, what creationism threatens is not the scientific theory of Darwinism, but the myth of Darwinism.
Well, I don't care much about the fate of any myth, one way or another, but I'd be hesitant to suggest, that myths surrounding evolutions are threatened by those particular myths that were generated to fill a void that evolution has so aptly filled.
Be that as it may, I'm not a geologist, and I don't know any geologists personally. I'm betting that fewer than 1% of /.ers are geologists. Very few ./ers rely on first-hand scientific knowledge to know that creationism is false.
Are you a scientist? If you are, you know that the evidence for lots of our recent advancements has been right under our nose all along, like the missing pieces in a puzzle, only most didn't even know there was a puzzle because we'd just made up stories to fill the gaps.
No, not everyone's a geologist, but anyone who went to a decent elementary school has met a geologist when they were a kid. They go out and they show you what they do. They answer the prodding, often insightful, often skeptical questions that innocent kids throw at them. Then they *show* you why they know what they know, don't know what they don't. That's not a myth, that's real. And whether you want to follow geology up to the limits of knowledge or not is your choice. It's not really that far of a journey, anyone with a brain in their head can take it.
What they do know is that they've thrown their hat in the ring with a certain myth, and that creationism is a competing myth.
The competition is between the myths of creationism and the real idea of evolution, and frankly, it's not much of a competition. The myths that surround evolution are totally irrelevent, even as they cause people to do stupid things. The reason they aren't important is that they aren't at the core of the idea, unlike the myths of creationism.
Are you just going to leave us hanging, as it were?
So if I get hit by a truck, all accumulated data is right there, easily accessible even before my replacement has figured out my horrid code.
It scales. They've put a lot of working into making it easy to complexify your data structures as you need to. That's work I don't want to do, and especially don't want to wish I had done 3 years ago.
If I want to do some little thing, I can do it painlessly in any language I want, because someone else has already written the API.
And, sort of as a side benefit, it makes think of your data structure in a differently, which can occaisionally be enlightening.