This is silly. Do you think that Windows and Macintosh don't have protection boundaries between the graphics rendering layer and the applications (client)? X has used shared memory and event coalescing forever. The only possibly defensible issue regarding X's C-S architecture is the context switch/scheduling delay, and that's on the order of a hundredth of a second delay. Even those delays can be ameliorated with one of the low-latency/interruptible syscall patches for Linux.
People calling for the rip-and-replace of X windows are simply not being realistic, either on a technical assessment level, or on a welcome to the real-world level.
I'm happy to spread the word about it. I read that article many years ago, and felt the same way. Interesting to read it again now and to see that he specifically discussed the vancomycin-resistant staph concern.
Well, that's the hope, that somehow the antibiotic-resistant genes will prove detrimental to the bacteria in the absence of the specific antibiotic. If a vancomycin-resistant staph bug is 10% less efficient at metabolism or replication, then there might be a degree to which the problem becomes self-limiting. This is also the idea behind letting older antibiotics 'rest' for awhile, in the hope that, in the absence of the antibiotics, the wild population will mutate back to the more efficient non-resistant configuration.
I suspect that's not a terribly sturdy reed to pin one's hopes on, though. I'd again recommend Bruce Sterling's Bitter Resistance column for more on this.
Bacteria are very unlike higher animals. Bacteria aren't restricted to darwinian evolution. They sometimes just grab genes from things they eat and incorporate them into their structure. Some bacteria even take the presence of antibiotics as a sign to spew out copies of their drug-resistant genes.. such bacteria 'remember' that those genes helped them out, and share the wealth when they are attacked. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are an obscenely dangerous threat.
See Bruce Sterling's excellent article, Bitter Resistance for far more information than you wanted to know about drug resistance in bacteria.
I sent my old Palm IIIe to pasture, and stepped up to a hot young Sony Clié SJ30. 8 times the memory, quadruple the resolution, 65,000 available colors, MemoryStick slot, Jog Wheel.. $250 bucks without cradle.
But the authors use this statement to justify scoring human influence as "moderate" (4) up to 15 km from settlements on this basis. (They estimated 15 km to be a day's travel.)
Well, it depends on what they are really trying to show in their map, doesn't it? There is comparatively little space on the planet that looks anything like pre-human wilderness anymore, which is worthwhile to note, whether one's politics involves hugging pandas or eliminating all species that do not, in fact, taste like chicken.
Programming in threads is fine, so long as you have some ability to encapsulate your memory reliably. Doing multithreaded programming in Java is the default, and Java's strong object encapsulation and memory protection makes it quite reasonable to program with threads.
You absolutely have to be aware of concurrency issue.. deadlock, livelock, and all that, but it's not a terribly bad burden given that you gain so much in simplicity of memory management, integrated exceptions on null pointers, etc., etc.
The point of the proximity sensing, zero-force capability is that you don't HAVE to tap hard on the surface. You just let gravity drop your fingers on the surface. Imagine drumming your fingers on a tabletop VERY LIGHTLY, so they barely touch. That's all it takes.
Maybe. I used the DataHand and the Kinesis, and both claimed all kind of benefits due to lower force requirements, but the actual movements they required were more difficult to make.
It's difficult to just hold one's fingers without motion.. having to make very delicate motions, or having to hold one's fingers above the sensitive zone rather than resting on keys, would both require significant effort.
The POSIX subsystem was put there so that Microsoft could compete for government contracts that specified POSIX compatibility in the RFP's.
I could be wrong, but I doubt that Microsoft's POSIX subsystem gets much use. First, there are many POSIX standards, which were designed as a base reference for UNIX-like compatibility. Microsoft only implemented support for POSIX 1. If you try and imagine how loose these standards must be in order for Windows NT 3.51 to meet them, you'll be understanding how meaningless this level of compatibility is. The base level POSIX standards say nothing about the X Window system, for instance.
In practice, Microsoft got NT in to the bidding process for those contracts, and won some of them. Once Windows is selected, the (extremely limited) NT POSIX interfaces are generally ignored in favor of building more robust Win32 code.
Are you sure your PC has enough cooling? I had severe stability problems with my Athlon Linux system whenever I ran 3d games on my GeForce4MX, but finally I saw an error message that google indicated was linked to hardware problems, and the light went on.
One can of compressed air and some moist paper towels later, I had cleaned a bunch of dust out of the CPU's heat sink and had improved airflow through the case tremendously, and boom, all my stability problems went away.
Of course, using the latest NVidia drivers and specifying mem=nopentium in my/etc/grub.conf (or/etc/lilo.conf) file to work around the Linux kernel's problem with AGP on Athlon helped too, but the big thing was cleaning my case.
That study is based on how many copies of linux overall were sold and not how many users use it. For example I have purchased about 4 or 5 different linux distro's and have bought 3 or 4 different versions of redhat, 2 suse, and 2 caldera before sco fucked it up. In the IDC study that would equal 12 different linux users or installations. Very inaccurate.
You're joking, right? Don't forget, plenty of people run Linux who didn't buy a distro.. it's easy (and perfectly legal) to buy one copy of Linux and install it on dozens of systems, or to make copies of someone else's CD's, or to download ISO's. The IDC study would have had to take that into account if they were to seriously tackle the question.
Mac user sdo upgrade but not as often and only once avery couple of years. Last I heard from the gartner group about a year ago was that linux owned %.5 of the dekstop market while Apple owned %4. Linux however does make up %3 or %4 used as servers but thats it.
Again, you don't seriously you believe that Linux makes up only 3 or 4 percent of the installed server base, do you?.
Gartner/Dataquest is citing Linux as earning 6% of server revenues in 2002, which amounts to a far higher unit share than that. Remember, one of the reason Epic committed to porting to Linux is from their experience that 50% of the high speed servers deployed for Unreal Tournament were running on Linux.
Linux, not Macintosh, is the second choice platform overall, based on the economics.
Big difference not to mention people who use linux are not teenage gamers but mostly hackers or administrators. People who use macs are ordinary people who might have a stronger appeal to games.
Yes, there are surely more commercial game sales on Macintosh than Linux, but that's not to say there aren't enough Linux users out there to make it worthwhile to do a port. Particularly when there are cross platform API's like OpenGL, Ogg Vorbis, and SDL that reduce the effort required.
For what it's worth, IDC is claiming that Linux is outpacing Macintosh on the desktop these days.
I would imagine that's dominated by technical/business desktops, but Linux is at least competitive with the Macintosh overall in magnitude, and perhaps greater than OS X in particular?
And keep in mind that the work to produce a Linux port is largely work to produce an OpenGL renderer, and all that work goes directly towards supporting the MacOS X version.
That's what public key cryptography is for. The only way this system could work is if each consumer has a private key attached to his PC, and if all mp3 software available was PKI aware.
If the record companies were a bit less finicky, and were content to know who originally downloaded a song from an RIAA-approved online music service, that part could be got round.
In general, I really, really like the idea of putting identifying markers into media files rather than programming computers to preemptively constrict the user's freedom of action, but in the end it sort of comes down to putting technical and legal restrictions in place. Identifying markers could simply be less onerous.
I don't understand your worldview in two areas. Will you please help me better understand it?
1. Order as a property? As defined by what? Couldn't it merely *appear* to be order - in the same way that something which on the surface seems chaotic may actually be complex and ordered? How can you say that order is a property of the universe?
I'm sorry, but your question doesn't make any sense to me. It seems like you're talking about order as some sort of metaphysical issue. I'm simply talking about order as the presence of physical regularities, of consistent physical laws, if you will. What's the difference between F 'appearing' to equal MA and F=MA? If the appearance is so close that we can never find any exception to the correlation, and if all of observable nature behaves in accordance with that correlation, then I'd say that's real enough to work with, and real enough for nature to evolve accordingly, as that law plays out over time.
2. A naturalistic worldview leaves little place for morality, right? I mean, if there's no transcendant meaning - then why does the whole of humanity (or at least the extreme majority) clamor for love, duty, honor, courage? Why are we as animals different in that respect from the others? Does this question make sense? After all, if there's no objective standard to measure right and wrong, why shouldn't I just kill people who disagree with me or get in my way?
There are a number of answers to that question:
Because you'll go to jail.
Because people won't like you.
Because someone might shoot you.
Because you may feel guilty in violating the mores that were taught you when you were a young child, and which are reinforced by the society in which you live and by your very human instinct to live in a social context.
Simple, good, practical reasons, all.
Many of these reasons also apply to wolf packs and other social animal societies.. if you break the rules of the society, you will suffer for it, your pack will suffer for it, and you may have less chance to reproduce, which may tend to extinguish that behavior.
Love, duty, honor, and courage are part of the human psyche, and we all benefit tremendously from those aspects of our nature. Not all animals have the instincts to live in societies. Ever seen a wolverine? Pure viciousness on four legs. If humans acted like that, we could not survive in our present numbers. Wolverines, though, have the physical attributes to survive on a solitary basis. Ever seen a dolphin? Dolphins don't have the physical attributes to survive on their own in the great ocean, generally. What dolphins do have are the social instincts required to survive in groups.
We're more like the dolphins than the wolverines. For long, long history we have depended on our social instincts and our ability to cooperate to make up for our lack of muscles, fangs, and claws.
I concur that we're not all the same, but *if* there's an objective judge of morality, wouldn't it be wise to understand what the judge's perspective on morality is?
There is an objective judge of morality over the long term, it's called natural selection, and it is constantly in play, and it shapes life all over the planet. Natural selection is the morality that applies to the wolf, and the dolphin, and the wolverine, and the dung beetle, and the lion, and the elm tree.
There are also subjective judges of morality over the shorter term.. they are the other creatures who live in society with you. Dolphins and wolves have to worry about this sort of morality, and so do we. Elm trees don't, so far as we know.
Is it easily possible to run PHP on Apache2 if one sticks to the non-threaded process model?
One thing that is very nice about Apache 2 is that it is so much easier to get Apache+SSL built and working. Building Apache 1.3 plus SSL plus PHP is still a bit of a chore, though I'm sure the PHP developers wouldn't consider it so.
Evolution doesn't violate causality. The cause of a larger brain is that the dna strands in the germ line were imperfectly copied during meiosis. The resulting DNA code is a little bit different, usually to a neutral or negative result, but occasionally, over the enormous lengths of time and the enormous reproducing population size, a mutation occurs which gives the newly born critter an advantage.
A smart brain is not caused by the usefulness of that smart brain, it is caused by the usefulness of the slighty-less smart brain that last year's model had, in combination with a lucky change in the DNA.
At least, that's the simplified model. There are all kinds of secondary dynamics going on, like cultural and social evolution, changes in the environment from one season, year, or generation t to the next, smarter predators, new diseases, etc., etc., etc.
It's all Very complex, but evolution does not require and does not postulate any kind of time travel or reverse causality.
I promise that I'll not engage in a long religious discussion here, but there seems to be a cognitive dissonance in your reasoning -
What *is* order if there's no absolute truth?
Order is a property of the universe. The universe is completely able to match consequence with cause, and to do so in a consistent fashion. Science is based on the observation and analysis of this fact, and only extends to that point which can be observed or reliably inferred.
When christians speak of absolute truth, they tend to mean 'absolute judgement', or 'absolute morality', or 'absolute meaning', none of which I believe has any universal grounding to be found in the natural world. Morality and ethics and meaning do arise from the order of the universe by way of both biological and social evolution, and so can be said to connect back to the universe's wellsprings of order.
That's not enough meaning for a lot of people, surely, but that too is okay. We're not all the same.
If we take at face value your assertion that we're a lot "of...complexity arising out of a bunch of...unordered bits" how can we who have arisen from randomness have any hope that the logic, reason, and thought processes we have exist with any semblance of order at all?
Are we not then randomly "reasoning" our way through the randomness of the universe? If that's the case, how can we have any faith in the conclusions we draw from that kind of reasoning?
I think it were better not to engage in a long religious discussion here. I'd just say that evolution is not a purely random process.. selection is a tremendous force for order in biological evolution, and has built great structure and order in us, even as our existence dances on the edge of chaos. That's what makes life magical.
If you want or need greater certainty than that affords, then by all means you should seek such out. I don't feel a need for absolute standards of truth, because I don't believe I can ever have omniscience, and I'm basically ok with that.
And why not? Faith is meant to transcend the scientifically knowable. As long as one doesn't cling to one's faith to the extent of shutting out scientifically demonstrable and materially important facts, what's the harm in feeling positive, or even joyful, about the universe?
I'm glad that Larry is loved by the universe, even though I myself tend to believe we're all just a fascinating lot of wondrous complexity arising out of a bunch of initially unordered bits. Sort of like Perl.;-)
It sounds like there's a lot of details left to be worked out, but if something like this could serve as a continuous blood glucose diagnostic, I'm so there. Having been an insulin dependent diabetic for the last 13 years or so, a continuous blood glucose monitor has really been the most important missing piece to the whole puzzle.
Sampling my blood sugar once or twice a day is far too infrequent to get a sense of how my blood sugar rises and falls over time. Having a monitor that could record my blood sugar levels even every five minutes would be fantastic. Make it able to sample every five seconds and hook it up to an insulin pump, and you've got as close to a cybernetic cure as one could hope for.
Being an insulin-dependent diabetic is like driving a manual transmission car.. very workable, but you have to do a lot more work, and you have to know what the engine and gears are doing. If it's still too early for a cure, having a really good tachometer would be the next best thing.
And having an intelligent cyber-tattoo would be just too cyber-punky for words. Sign me up.
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This is silly. Do you think that Windows and Macintosh don't have protection boundaries between the graphics rendering layer and the applications (client)? X has used shared memory and event coalescing forever. The only possibly defensible issue regarding X's C-S architecture is the context switch/scheduling delay, and that's on the order of a hundredth of a second delay. Even those delays can be ameliorated with one of the low-latency/interruptible syscall patches for Linux.
People calling for the rip-and-replace of X windows are simply not being realistic, either on a technical assessment level, or on a welcome to the real-world level.
And for god's sake, keep your private signing key encrypted in your gpg keyring, or offline.
I'm happy to spread the word about it. I read that article many years ago, and felt the same way. Interesting to read it again now and to see that he specifically discussed the vancomycin-resistant staph concern.
That is reassuring to hear. Let's hope it's a relatively quick process.
Well, that's the hope, that somehow the antibiotic-resistant genes will prove detrimental to the bacteria in the absence of the specific antibiotic. If a vancomycin-resistant staph bug is 10% less efficient at metabolism or replication, then there might be a degree to which the problem becomes self-limiting. This is also the idea behind letting older antibiotics 'rest' for awhile, in the hope that, in the absence of the antibiotics, the wild population will mutate back to the more efficient non-resistant configuration.
I suspect that's not a terribly sturdy reed to pin one's hopes on, though. I'd again recommend Bruce Sterling's Bitter Resistance column for more on this.
Bacteria are very unlike higher animals. Bacteria aren't restricted to darwinian evolution. They sometimes just grab genes from things they eat and incorporate them into their structure. Some bacteria even take the presence of antibiotics as a sign to spew out copies of their drug-resistant genes.. such bacteria 'remember' that those genes helped them out, and share the wealth when they are attacked. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are an obscenely dangerous threat.
See Bruce Sterling's excellent article, Bitter Resistance for far more information than you wanted to know about drug resistance in bacteria.
I sent my old Palm IIIe to pasture, and stepped up to a hot young Sony Clié SJ30. 8 times the memory, quadruple the resolution, 65,000 available colors, MemoryStick slot, Jog Wheel.. $250 bucks without cradle.
And I don't feel one bit guilty about it.
But the authors use this statement to justify scoring human influence as "moderate" (4) up to 15 km from settlements on this basis. (They estimated 15 km to be a day's travel.)
Well, it depends on what they are really trying to show in their map, doesn't it? There is comparatively little space on the planet that looks anything like pre-human wilderness anymore, which is worthwhile to note, whether one's politics involves hugging pandas or eliminating all species that do not, in fact, taste like chicken.
Nah.
Programming in threads is fine, so long as you have some ability to encapsulate your memory reliably. Doing multithreaded programming in Java is the default, and Java's strong object encapsulation and memory protection makes it quite reasonable to program with threads.
You absolutely have to be aware of concurrency issue.. deadlock, livelock, and all that, but it's not a terribly bad burden given that you gain so much in simplicity of memory management, integrated exceptions on null pointers, etc., etc.
The point of the proximity sensing, zero-force capability is that you don't HAVE to tap hard on the surface. You just let gravity drop your fingers on the surface. Imagine drumming your fingers on a tabletop VERY LIGHTLY, so they barely touch. That's all it takes.
Maybe. I used the DataHand and the Kinesis, and both claimed all kind of benefits due to lower force requirements, but the actual movements they required were more difficult to make.
It's difficult to just hold one's fingers without motion.. having to make very delicate motions, or having to hold one's fingers above the sensitive zone rather than resting on keys, would both require significant effort.
Give it up, nobody gives a shit. If all that stuff wasn't under the GNU license it would be available some other way.
This is hard to believe, given that no one had made such tools available before GNU, and no one has really created such tools since.
GNU/Linux is pretty silly, but GNU's contributions to Linux are not.
The POSIX subsystem was put there so that Microsoft could compete for government contracts that specified POSIX compatibility in the RFP's.
I could be wrong, but I doubt that Microsoft's POSIX subsystem gets much use. First, there are many POSIX standards, which were designed as a base reference for UNIX-like compatibility. Microsoft only implemented support for POSIX 1. If you try and imagine how loose these standards must be in order for Windows NT 3.51 to meet them, you'll be understanding how meaningless this level of compatibility is. The base level POSIX standards say nothing about the X Window system, for instance.
In practice, Microsoft got NT in to the bidding process for those contracts, and won some of them. Once Windows is selected, the (extremely limited) NT POSIX interfaces are generally ignored in favor of building more robust Win32 code.
Are you sure your PC has enough cooling? I had severe stability problems with my Athlon Linux system whenever I ran 3d games on my GeForce4MX, but finally I saw an error message that google indicated was linked to hardware problems, and the light went on.
One can of compressed air and some moist paper towels later, I had cleaned a bunch of dust out of the CPU's heat sink and had improved airflow through the case tremendously, and boom, all my stability problems went away.
Of course, using the latest NVidia drivers and specifying mem=nopentium in my /etc/grub.conf (or /etc/lilo.conf) file to work around the Linux kernel's problem with AGP on Athlon helped too, but the big thing was cleaning my case.
That study is based on how many copies of linux overall were sold and not how many users use it. For example I have purchased about 4 or 5 different linux distro's and have bought 3 or 4 different versions of redhat, 2 suse, and 2 caldera before sco fucked it up. In the IDC study that would equal 12 different linux users or installations. Very inaccurate.
You're joking, right? Don't forget, plenty of people run Linux who didn't buy a distro.. it's easy (and perfectly legal) to buy one copy of Linux and install it on dozens of systems, or to make copies of someone else's CD's, or to download ISO's. The IDC study would have had to take that into account if they were to seriously tackle the question.
Mac user sdo upgrade but not as often and only once avery couple of years. Last I heard from the gartner group about a year ago was that linux owned %.5 of the dekstop market while Apple owned %4. Linux however does make up %3 or %4 used as servers but thats it.
Again, you don't seriously you believe that Linux makes up only 3 or 4 percent of the installed server base, do you?. Gartner/Dataquest is citing Linux as earning 6% of server revenues in 2002, which amounts to a far higher unit share than that. Remember, one of the reason Epic committed to porting to Linux is from their experience that 50% of the high speed servers deployed for Unreal Tournament were running on Linux.
Linux, not Macintosh, is the second choice platform overall, based on the economics.
Big difference not to mention people who use linux are not teenage gamers but mostly hackers or administrators. People who use macs are ordinary people who might have a stronger appeal to games.
Yes, there are surely more commercial game sales on Macintosh than Linux, but that's not to say there aren't enough Linux users out there to make it worthwhile to do a port. Particularly when there are cross platform API's like OpenGL, Ogg Vorbis, and SDL that reduce the effort required.
For what it's worth, IDC is claiming that Linux is outpacing Macintosh on the desktop these days.
I would imagine that's dominated by technical/business desktops, but Linux is at least competitive with the Macintosh overall in magnitude, and perhaps greater than OS X in particular?
And keep in mind that the work to produce a Linux port is largely work to produce an OpenGL renderer, and all that work goes directly towards supporting the MacOS X version.
That's what public key cryptography is for. The only way this system could work is if each consumer has a private key attached to his PC, and if all mp3 software available was PKI aware.
If the record companies were a bit less finicky, and were content to know who originally downloaded a song from an RIAA-approved online music service, that part could be got round.
In general, I really, really like the idea of putting identifying markers into media files rather than programming computers to preemptively constrict the user's freedom of action, but in the end it sort of comes down to putting technical and legal restrictions in place. Identifying markers could simply be less onerous.
I don't understand your worldview in two areas. Will you please help me better understand it?
1. Order as a property? As defined by what? Couldn't it merely *appear* to be order - in the same way that something which on the surface seems chaotic may actually be complex and ordered? How can you say that order is a property of the universe?
I'm sorry, but your question doesn't make any sense to me. It seems like you're talking about order as some sort of metaphysical issue. I'm simply talking about order as the presence of physical regularities, of consistent physical laws, if you will. What's the difference between F 'appearing' to equal MA and F=MA? If the appearance is so close that we can never find any exception to the correlation, and if all of observable nature behaves in accordance with that correlation, then I'd say that's real enough to work with, and real enough for nature to evolve accordingly, as that law plays out over time.
2. A naturalistic worldview leaves little place for morality, right? I mean, if there's no transcendant meaning - then why does the whole of humanity (or at least the extreme majority) clamor for love, duty, honor, courage? Why are we as animals different in that respect from the others? Does this question make sense? After all, if there's no objective standard to measure right and wrong, why shouldn't I just kill people who disagree with me or get in my way?
There are a number of answers to that question:
Simple, good, practical reasons, all.
Many of these reasons also apply to wolf packs and other social animal societies.. if you break the rules of the society, you will suffer for it, your pack will suffer for it, and you may have less chance to reproduce, which may tend to extinguish that behavior.
Love, duty, honor, and courage are part of the human psyche, and we all benefit tremendously from those aspects of our nature. Not all animals have the instincts to live in societies. Ever seen a wolverine? Pure viciousness on four legs. If humans acted like that, we could not survive in our present numbers. Wolverines, though, have the physical attributes to survive on a solitary basis. Ever seen a dolphin? Dolphins don't have the physical attributes to survive on their own in the great ocean, generally. What dolphins do have are the social instincts required to survive in groups.
We're more like the dolphins than the wolverines. For long, long history we have depended on our social instincts and our ability to cooperate to make up for our lack of muscles, fangs, and claws.
I concur that we're not all the same, but *if* there's an objective judge of morality, wouldn't it be wise to understand what the judge's perspective on morality is?
There is an objective judge of morality over the long term, it's called natural selection, and it is constantly in play, and it shapes life all over the planet. Natural selection is the morality that applies to the wolf, and the dolphin, and the wolverine, and the dung beetle, and the lion, and the elm tree.
There are also subjective judges of morality over the shorter term.. they are the other creatures who live in society with you. Dolphins and wolves have to worry about this sort of morality, and so do we. Elm trees don't, so far as we know.
Is it easily possible to run PHP on Apache2 if one sticks to the non-threaded process model?
One thing that is very nice about Apache 2 is that it is so much easier to get Apache+SSL built and working. Building Apache 1.3 plus SSL plus PHP is still a bit of a chore, though I'm sure the PHP developers wouldn't consider it so.
Evolution doesn't violate causality. The cause of a larger brain is that the dna strands in the germ line were imperfectly copied during meiosis. The resulting DNA code is a little bit different, usually to a neutral or negative result, but occasionally, over the enormous lengths of time and the enormous reproducing population size, a mutation occurs which gives the newly born critter an advantage.
A smart brain is not caused by the usefulness of that smart brain, it is caused by the usefulness of the slighty-less smart brain that last year's model had, in combination with a lucky change in the DNA.
At least, that's the simplified model. There are all kinds of secondary dynamics going on, like cultural and social evolution, changes in the environment from one season, year, or generation t to the next, smarter predators, new diseases, etc., etc., etc.
It's all Very complex, but evolution does not require and does not postulate any kind of time travel or reverse causality.
I promise that I'll not engage in a long religious discussion here, but there seems to be a cognitive dissonance in your reasoning - What *is* order if there's no absolute truth?
Order is a property of the universe. The universe is completely able to match consequence with cause, and to do so in a consistent fashion. Science is based on the observation and analysis of this fact, and only extends to that point which can be observed or reliably inferred.
When christians speak of absolute truth, they tend to mean 'absolute judgement', or 'absolute morality', or 'absolute meaning', none of which I believe has any universal grounding to be found in the natural world. Morality and ethics and meaning do arise from the order of the universe by way of both biological and social evolution, and so can be said to connect back to the universe's wellsprings of order.
That's not enough meaning for a lot of people, surely, but that too is okay. We're not all the same.
If we take at face value your assertion that we're a lot "of...complexity arising out of a bunch of...unordered bits" how can we who have arisen from randomness have any hope that the logic, reason, and thought processes we have exist with any semblance of order at all?
Are we not then randomly "reasoning" our way through the randomness of the universe? If that's the case, how can we have any faith in the conclusions we draw from that kind of reasoning?
I think it were better not to engage in a long religious discussion here. I'd just say that evolution is not a purely random process.. selection is a tremendous force for order in biological evolution, and has built great structure and order in us, even as our existence dances on the edge of chaos. That's what makes life magical.
If you want or need greater certainty than that affords, then by all means you should seek such out. I don't feel a need for absolute standards of truth, because I don't believe I can ever have omniscience, and I'm basically ok with that.
And why not? Faith is meant to transcend the scientifically knowable. As long as one doesn't cling to one's faith to the extent of shutting out scientifically demonstrable and materially important facts, what's the harm in feeling positive, or even joyful, about the universe?
I'm glad that Larry is loved by the universe, even though I myself tend to believe we're all just a fascinating lot of wondrous complexity arising out of a bunch of initially unordered bits. Sort of like Perl. ;-)
Okay, well, imagine a manual transmission car that you are only able to shift four times a day. ;-)
The biggest thing is not being able to have a continuous readout, but the pain and hassle is not to be ignored, either.
And you'd be amazed at how many test strips an insulin dependent diabetic can go through..
It sounds like there's a lot of details left to be worked out, but if something like this could serve as a continuous blood glucose diagnostic, I'm so there. Having been an insulin dependent diabetic for the last 13 years or so, a continuous blood glucose monitor has really been the most important missing piece to the whole puzzle.
Sampling my blood sugar once or twice a day is far too infrequent to get a sense of how my blood sugar rises and falls over time. Having a monitor that could record my blood sugar levels even every five minutes would be fantastic. Make it able to sample every five seconds and hook it up to an insulin pump, and you've got as close to a cybernetic cure as one could hope for.
Being an insulin-dependent diabetic is like driving a manual transmission car.. very workable, but you have to do a lot more work, and you have to know what the engine and gears are doing. If it's still too early for a cure, having a really good tachometer would be the next best thing.
And having an intelligent cyber-tattoo would be just too cyber-punky for words. Sign me up.