I wrote a publication (16 pages, IEEE format) for Word and it was a REAL pain. Word stored the whole document in memory, which actually meant that part of it was cached to hard drive. I work in the Field of Computer Vision, so I necessarily had about 10 megs of images in there. Occasionally, that would be too much for the operating system, and I'd have to wait 15 minutes or so for the memory manager to catch and resolve some thrashing issues.
Also, every time I changed anything at all, Word would move around the pictures and mess everything up - even though I had all the pictures positioned as "absolute." At the end of the publication, any 3 minute change at the beginning of the document took half an hour to fix.
For the next publication, I did everything in Latex. The added bonus there was that format is separate from content, and the format descriptors where already written by IEEE (and by my school for my thesis).
Seriously...its been done. And Slashdot covered it.
What was the first macrovirus called? The Concept virus. I imagine thats not really a coincidence. It was proof that you can implement a fairly complex algorithm on a fairly simple system.
If viruses weren't so destructive, it'd be pretty darn impressive - and it probably is for the sociopaths who design viruses. Its like putting a 3-d rendering engine on a TI-85 calculator. As it is, I wish they'd just make the viruses and keep them to themselves as theoretical ideas except when they can serve some useful purpose.
So...how about some useful flash stuff? I'd like to see some of these fairly difficult ideas implemented in flash:
A 3-d polygon based fighting game
A C compiler (or some other high-level language compiler)
A database
An emulator of some old, archaic system
Those would be way more newsworthy than a virus, IMHO. Anybody heard of any of those in Flash?
...same as Japan validating American cars
on
Samba Turns 10
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Samba works faster than Microsoft networking (there are tests showing this). I'll admit, Microsoft keeps pushing the envelope - releasing new stuff that barely works, and giving great new ideas to Samba's developers.
And as far as making standards, a lot of the new ideas for a browser come from MS. Are they bad ideas? I think not. MS does a lot of things very badly, but their internet browser is top notch - it works better, and encorporates a lot of interesting features not found in other browsers. If they'd release it under Linux, I'd have no good reason to dual boot.
The first project that I can think that did this was turbovision, the environment used for Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc, and which is now used in exactly such an environment.
In fact, most of the modern professional GUIs are used for multiple languages. I have a theory as to why: the constructs of a language are basically the same, meaning that if a company wishes to create IDEs for multiple languages, then the best way would simply be to make a parser front-end that converts everything to data structures. It is therefore in their best interest to make IDEs modular.
But...I can think of a very good reason for keeping a GUIs language-independant. For languages that have it, introspection has allowed IDEs to detect structures far better than the traditional IDE - case in point is Borland's JBuilder, which can be used to modify a user interface using RAD which was hand-created (most IDEs can't do that). However, this requires that the RAD be written in the language - making it NOT language-independant.
My conclusion is that having an all-in-one IDE is kind of like having an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. Sure, all of the features work, but none of them work really well.
Of course, I suppose we could have a GUI for C/C++, Fortran, Cobol, and Assembly, since all of those are strictly compiled (I know there are other compiled languages, but those are the ones that lots of people use).
It is quite arguable that current hardware implementations aren't the fastest way to solve most problems (we currently eliminate complex behaviours and only using predictable gate structures), since routing is known to be an NPC problem alone, making the problem of routing and calculating other variables at least NPC. Eliminating variables makes it easy to pick a solution that is known to work, but it will not necessarily determine the optimum design.
It is, in fact "some bizarre magic," so to speak, not because we do not understand it, but because it requires considerable algorithmic search to find such an efficient (quick, small and effective) state through which the machine can produce its effect - its magic in the same sense that a chess playing program is magic.
The insight that you fail to grasp is that with this technique, we can take advantage of those variables that you say we should eliminate, making designs better. This allows for the possibility of a much wider range of functionality for chips than we currently have for them.
As far as complexity, what kind of bacteria are you thinking of that its so far from? The techniques used in neural networks are almost all taken straight from biology. The major simplification is a lack of frequency encoding. That's pretty much it; everything else works pretty much the same. Perhaps you're under the impression that the "evolution" of bacteria changes their basic behavior. This is extremely seldom - usually changes in bacteria are no more drastic that the cosmetic changes that occur in a "mutating" FPGA design.
So...at least we can have the complexity of bacteria to do the work of genius hardware designers using search techniques to produce better designs.
One thing further, though: if nature is any indication, it is extremely different to increase the level of complexity of an organism (or in this case, of a network). I would agree that "intelligent" machines that make you into toast are a long way off because we can't make evolving machines - only learning ones, even if they do use genetic algorithms to do it (which is essentially what viruses and bacteria do regularly, I might add).
I believe pretty much all long range naval missiles (airborne) are radar guided. No...not anymore.
There are now boats/subs capable of launching intelligent missles with absolute navigation the same way sailors used to do it (using the sky), and with sophisticated vision systems that use cameras to identify targets. The technology is also applied to bombs and ICBMs. I guess they figured that stealth exists but invisible doesn't.
We don't need to bring all of our defenses to bear on a pesky ship. An approximate location and one of our latest navigating missles is enough to destroy most classes of targets (it might not be able to differentiate between two different boats though)...
If we know we need to use our expensive missles, we can.
Learn to read. I've said it twice now. You even quoted me. I WAS REFERRING TO THE PROOF WHEN I SAID "MERELY NP-HARD." Does this make sense yet? Let me try again to be more clear. The proof for NP-Hardness is much easier than the proof for NPC because all you have to prove is a reduction to NPC, and not a polynomial verification of the solution. Hopefully you understand now.
Nowhere did I say that NP-Hard was easier to solve than NP. You inferred that this is what I was saying.
Why didn't I come right out and say that NP-Hard is at least as hard as NPC? Well, I would assume that if you were actually reading the constraints it would be obvious.
The cases to which you are referring are already solvable in practice so are not a concern for this discussion. What is of interest here is problems that couldn't be solved previously, such as, for instance, optimization problems. To find the optimal solution to most problems, even a normal case often involves a significant amount of search.
That's exactly what I'm saying - we could find the absolute best.
By "solve" I meant, given that two computerized players both played a perfect game, who would win, the first player, the second player, or would it be a draw? This is the kind of question we could answer.
It seems impossible, but if you study AI a bit, you'll see that this is what NP=P implies, despite the seemingly enormous search space required by BFS, since chess is NPC. Obviously the solution wouldn't be using the BFS.
I'm not sure you quite understand the difference enough to understand my comments. Let me formalize the definitions for you of NPC and NP-Hard. This is taken straight from my textbook (I'm a grad student at Purdue University).
The simplest, and main way that NP completness is proven is by showing
1) A decision problem may be transformed in polynomial time into another NP complete problem
2) The solution to the problem may be verified as correct or incorrect in polynomial time
If only condition 1 may be met, then the problem is considered NP-Hard. This is what I meant when I said, "merely NP-Hard" - they haven't the ability to go the full distance towards a proof of NPC.
The decision problem in this case is "Does this key decrypt this data?" The answer is undecidable. Hence, most decryption is NP Hard.
Now lets look at your case. Almost all problems can be trivally converted into decision problems (and back, but I'll leave the inverse conversion to you as exercise) in polynomial time, given the proper context, including the ones you presented. The decision in the first case is "Is there a clique of size k within Graph G?" while the second (transformed into a decision problem) is "Is the maximum clique of size K in Graph G?"
As you see from the criteria you have presented, both would be considered NPC. However, given my criteria, the first would be NPC if condition #2 is satisfied (it is), while the second would NP-hard, because you cannot prove in polynomial time that any solution is optimal.
We can make polynomial improvements by getting better hardware for most problems. What we can't do is make exponential improvements. This is why it is trivial to solve most kinds of polynomial problems.
All NP-complete problems can be considered search problems. All search problems can be parallelized.
Not all encryption schemes are NP-Complete! Most are actually just NP-Hard because you can't tell whether or not you've found the correct decryption. So, decryption schemes will not be solved even if you can convert into NP complete problems into NP problems. It will be a lot easier though.
That polynomial can still be huge, say N^1000. Except for really large N, current exponential-time algorithms could be superior to polynomial-time ones.
This lacks some of the insight into NP and NPC problems. We only care about the large cases for the most part. On the small scale (small being relative to the problem), exponential solutions are always easy to solve.
There are some amazing implications of this anyway. For instance, we can solve chess (find the best possible game), and all other decidable search problems.
Keep in mind that our computer improvements allow us to make polynomial time reductions in the amount of time that the problem takes.
Something that has never been observed in a domain that has never had more than casual observation.
The probability of life existing on Europa is necessarily less than the probability of the formation of life in general, of which biologists have been doing quite a bit more than a casual study. As I said, we have REALLY tried to make it happen.
You gave the example of nuclear fusion. In this case, you are referring to a phenomenon that we don't have the capability to create. This is something quite different; if we could bring a large enough mass to a high enough temperature and pressure, it would fuse on its own. Finding out how to create life is more like solving an NP hard problem - we have all of the necessary components, since we know the exact chemical makeup of life and under what conditions it is capabile of subsisting. All that is required is that we try all of the finitely many (though extremely large) combinations of reactions that would be necessary to produce life. We have tried a small but significant subset of these combinations - it is significant because we have eliminated classes of solutions through our efforts, not merely single solutions. From this, we can say that the probability of spontaneous creation is low, though we may not agree as to how low.
Just because *we* cannot do something doesn not mean it is not dirt common as far as the greater universe is concerned.
Let me extend my point to be more inclusive: if we can find the probability of an event in a domain, and have no evidence to the contrary for other domains, Occam's Razor would dictate that this probability also holds for other domains.
In other words, if the simplest solution to any problem is most likely the correct one, then what we observe about things on earth also holds for outer space unless we get other data, as is the case for the existance of stars.
Life could be dirt common, but it would not be wise to assume that this is the case unless you believe that Occam's Razor is a fallacy.
And yet we cannot create a mixure of salts to match this signature - the only thing that does exist that matches are bacteria. I would say that you are arguing for the opposition.
That's not necessarily true. We HAVE NOT created a mixture of salts that match this signature. This does not mean that doing so is impossible or even improbable for us. We've only had the data a short time, and there are more than a few combinations to try to figure out what a correct salt would be to produce such a spectral signature. There may have been no reason to create such salts in the past.
Despite all of our informed attempts to throw what we think are the right chemicals (i.e. all of the ones that make up life), we have not succeeded in creating it. What can we conclude from our search? Considering the sheer amount of searching we have done in order to attempt the creation of life, we can assume that it requires extremely delicate (i.e. extremely improbable conditions). Were this not the case, we would have found the right combination to create life already.
This is not unlike a lot of the things that we don't know how to do. We can say something about the difficulty of solving any problem (modeling any phenomenon) by examining and dismissing the most likely possible solutions/theories. This is the basis of a lot of the field of statistics, and part of the basis of Occams Razor: the past knowledge should be considered when evaluating the future (in this case, our past experience shows that it is easier for to generate salts that have unique properties than it is to create life).
You disagree? I should never consider that the probability of something that has never been observed should be considered astronomically low? Then I better start wearing a helmet to be ready for when the sky falls.
As an aside, I think that the probability of life occuring spontaneously is too high for it to exist at all in a universe this small or this young. Given our current estimate of the probability of the formation of life, and our guess of the age and size of the universe, the odds that life would already exist are incalculably high. I believe we must have been created.
We know how something about how improbable it is that life exists, at least as far as we can tell. As intelligent organisms, we cannot accurately calculate the probability of life being spontaneously created because we have never done it ourselves, EVER.
Conversely, we know how to make many different kinds of salts. Even though we don't know the precise chemical composition that could create this spectrum, we are much closer to causing that by randomly combining chemicals.
Occam's Razor therefore dictates that the most probable event is NOT life. Here's a similar hypothesis (another piece of data with a theory that has an incalculably low probability of occurance):
I don't know where my parents are, but I saw some strange, oddly organized patterns in the aurora borealis today. My parents must be on the sun, sending me a message.
I think that rather bringing home entertainment into the computers (i.e. turning a computer into a home entertainment system), the future is giving home entertainment systems computerized components.
How about using smaller computerized components for the system? For instance, using a biscuit-PC as a controller for a surround sound system, and another as a controller for all the lights...etc. No one would think twice about leaving those on. They could connect to each other via ethernet to be able do simple detection tasks. Why waste power, money, and all the extra features that come with a full size PC when you can get it all in a small one?
The parallelism is also much more suited to solving tasks that have to do with a house.
Next: Portable System Utility Belt
on
SNES Portable
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If he's going to have all of these systems, he needs some kind of a belt that he can use to carry all of his portable systems on. That, and portable controllers, batarangs, and webshooters.
I think we should call him "PVGSman" (portable video game systems).
You're right about the publisher. I always confuse Ballantine and Bantam. Sorry, it was Ballantine who did it. And yes, it did take a while for the popularity to grow to such a level that they asked him for more (it was a request, not an order - he didn't have to do anything). As to the source, I'm not sure if its on the net. I read it in a biography on him offline in the back of his unpublished works.
I'm not trying to be dark or pessimistic - rather, the opposite. We all have to work. Its part of life - I don't think it takes away from art or literature; I'd say its a part of it. I was defending the beauty of selling hamburgers with the help of Tolkien's story. I didn't consider that some would think that I was criticizing Tolkien.
I'm not sure that making commercials is not an art - or that making commemorative merchandise isn't. I think they both probably are, despite the fact that they make money.
After the success of the hobbit, Bantam books sent a letter to Mr. Tolkien saying, "we want more hobbits" because of the popularity.
Despite its greatness, LOTR was made to meet the demand. It was written FOR THE MONEY!
It sucks that J.R.R. Tolkien stooped to the level of making money? Okay. Then I guess you better not read anything he ever wrote published by Bantam books given his consent. That means it was for the money, otherwise he would have just given it away for free.
I suppose all that leaves is his unfinished works, which he only showed to his friends and family and which was published after his death.
Art and literature are seldom for their own sake, for we are all forced to work until we eat dust.
You might say that marketing dilutes creativity. Who are you to say what is creative? Most of the marketing people I know put a lot of creative thinking into their work - commercials are no exception; a lot of creative effort has been put into using the characters in a way to sell the product. Perhaps if you looked for the "art and literature" within the commercials, you wouldn't get sick looking at them.
I don't like flash because, specifically, the tools cost an arm and a leg, and are completely owned by one company.
Javascript, on the other hand, is a publically available language that can potentially do everything that flash can.
However, javascript on Netscape is like Javascript on IE's retarded parapalegic brother. By comparison, it is capable of doing about half as many things. Plus, the language is far more strict and has undocumented problems. I sincerely wish that Microsoft would port IE to Linux. Of course, if they did, I'd have no real reason to use Windows.
Information obtained from the internet is deemed public information, so people are allowed to collect it in the US. However, you can sue for illegal solicitation if someone e-mails you without consent or a business relationship in the US - the greater of $5000 or the product or service advertised is the standard penalty.
Its just really difficult to enforce.
And you saying we're too permissive? What, do you kill spammers in Italy?
You know, the last planet of the Apes movie that Charlton Heston made included blowing up the planet at the end. Some interviews said that this was so that it would be THE END of the saga. And then they made another.
They sort of tied up ALL the loose ends in the previous movie as well...it will sort of make the plot not as good to make another.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of Conan books, and lots of plots to choose from. Sword & Sorcery is a classic genre. I wouldn't mind if he (or someone else) made a few more of those. Heck, they could make twenty or thirty of them. I'd watch them when I wanted to see an action movie.
While I'm at it, I might as well mention a few other good movies that could easily have more sequels that I would like to see.
Ghostbusters (probably need different guys)
Tron (same idea, but with modern computer systems)
They Live!(I wanna see more of that fight scene - MUCH better than matrix)
HHGTG (except for make it a REAL movie this time)
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a publication (16 pages, IEEE format) for Word and it was a REAL pain. Word stored the whole document in memory, which actually meant that part of it was cached to hard drive. I work in the Field of Computer Vision, so I necessarily had about 10 megs of images in there. Occasionally, that would be too much for the operating system, and I'd have to wait 15 minutes or so for the memory manager to catch and resolve some thrashing issues.
Also, every time I changed anything at all, Word would move around the pictures and mess everything up - even though I had all the pictures positioned as "absolute." At the end of the publication, any 3 minute change at the beginning of the document took half an hour to fix.
For the next publication, I did everything in Latex. The added bonus there was that format is separate from content, and the format descriptors where already written by IEEE (and by my school for my thesis).
Seriously...its been done. And Slashdot covered it.
What was the first macrovirus called? The Concept virus. I imagine thats not really a coincidence. It was proof that you can implement a fairly complex algorithm on a fairly simple system.
If viruses weren't so destructive, it'd be pretty darn impressive - and it probably is for the sociopaths who design viruses. Its like putting a 3-d rendering engine on a TI-85 calculator. As it is, I wish they'd just make the viruses and keep them to themselves as theoretical ideas except when they can serve some useful purpose.
So...how about some useful flash stuff? I'd like to see some of these fairly difficult ideas implemented in flash:
A 3-d polygon based fighting game
A C compiler (or some other high-level language compiler)
A database
An emulator of some old, archaic system
Those would be way more newsworthy than a virus, IMHO. Anybody heard of any of those in Flash?
Samba works faster than Microsoft networking (there are tests showing this). I'll admit, Microsoft keeps pushing the envelope - releasing new stuff that barely works, and giving great new ideas to Samba's developers.
And as far as making standards, a lot of the new ideas for a browser come from MS. Are they bad ideas? I think not. MS does a lot of things very badly, but their internet browser is top notch - it works better, and encorporates a lot of interesting features not found in other browsers. If they'd release it under Linux, I'd have no good reason to dual boot.
The first project that I can think that did this was turbovision, the environment used for Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, etc, and which is now used in exactly such an environment.
In fact, most of the modern professional GUIs are used for multiple languages. I have a theory as to why: the constructs of a language are basically the same, meaning that if a company wishes to create IDEs for multiple languages, then the best way would simply be to make a parser front-end that converts everything to data structures. It is therefore in their best interest to make IDEs modular.
But...I can think of a very good reason for keeping a GUIs language-independant. For languages that have it, introspection has allowed IDEs to detect structures far better than the traditional IDE - case in point is Borland's JBuilder, which can be used to modify a user interface using RAD which was hand-created (most IDEs can't do that). However, this requires that the RAD be written in the language - making it NOT language-independant.
My conclusion is that having an all-in-one IDE is kind of like having an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. Sure, all of the features work, but none of them work really well.
Of course, I suppose we could have a GUI for C/C++, Fortran, Cobol, and Assembly, since all of those are strictly compiled (I know there are other compiled languages, but those are the ones that lots of people use).
It is quite arguable that current hardware implementations aren't the fastest way to solve most problems (we currently eliminate complex behaviours and only using predictable gate structures), since routing is known to be an NPC problem alone, making the problem of routing and calculating other variables at least NPC. Eliminating variables makes it easy to pick a solution that is known to work, but it will not necessarily determine the optimum design.
It is, in fact "some bizarre magic," so to speak, not because we do not understand it, but because it requires considerable algorithmic search to find such an efficient (quick, small and effective) state through which the machine can produce its effect - its magic in the same sense that a chess playing program is magic.
The insight that you fail to grasp is that with this technique, we can take advantage of those variables that you say we should eliminate, making designs better. This allows for the possibility of a much wider range of functionality for chips than we currently have for them.
As far as complexity, what kind of bacteria are you thinking of that its so far from? The techniques used in neural networks are almost all taken straight from biology. The major simplification is a lack of frequency encoding. That's pretty much it; everything else works pretty much the same. Perhaps you're under the impression that the "evolution" of bacteria changes their basic behavior. This is extremely seldom - usually changes in bacteria are no more drastic that the cosmetic changes that occur in a "mutating" FPGA design.
So...at least we can have the complexity of bacteria to do the work of genius hardware designers using search techniques to produce better designs.
One thing further, though: if nature is any indication, it is extremely different to increase the level of complexity of an organism (or in this case, of a network). I would agree that "intelligent" machines that make you into toast are a long way off because we can't make evolving machines - only learning ones, even if they do use genetic algorithms to do it (which is essentially what viruses and bacteria do regularly, I might add).
I believe pretty much all long range naval missiles (airborne) are radar guided.
No...not anymore.
There are now boats/subs capable of launching intelligent missles with absolute navigation the same way sailors used to do it (using the sky), and with sophisticated vision systems that use cameras to identify targets. The technology is also applied to bombs and ICBMs. I guess they figured that stealth exists but invisible doesn't.
We don't need to bring all of our defenses to bear on a pesky ship. An approximate location and one of our latest navigating missles is enough to destroy most classes of targets (it might not be able to differentiate between two different boats though)...
If we know we need to use our expensive missles, we can.
You're right. I never remember which to convert to which.
Learn to read. I've said it twice now. You even quoted me. I WAS REFERRING TO THE PROOF WHEN I SAID "MERELY NP-HARD." Does this make sense yet? Let me try again to be more clear. The proof for NP-Hardness is much easier than the proof for NPC because all you have to prove is a reduction to NPC, and not a polynomial verification of the solution. Hopefully you understand now.
Nowhere did I say that NP-Hard was easier to solve than NP. You inferred that this is what I was saying.
Why didn't I come right out and say that NP-Hard is at least as hard as NPC? Well, I would assume that if you were actually reading the constraints it would be obvious.
You know what? You're right. It is PSPACE. I'm totally wrong. Thanks for the correction.
The cases to which you are referring are already solvable in practice so are not a concern for this discussion. What is of interest here is problems that couldn't be solved previously, such as, for instance, optimization problems. To find the optimal solution to most problems, even a normal case often involves a significant amount of search.
Everyones a critic.
That's exactly what I'm saying - we could find the absolute best.
By "solve" I meant, given that two computerized players both played a perfect game, who would win, the first player, the second player, or would it be a draw? This is the kind of question we could answer.
It seems impossible, but if you study AI a bit, you'll see that this is what NP=P implies, despite the seemingly enormous search space required by BFS, since chess is NPC. Obviously the solution wouldn't be using the BFS.
I'm not sure you quite understand the difference enough to understand my comments. Let me formalize the definitions for you of NPC and NP-Hard. This is taken straight from my textbook (I'm a grad student at Purdue University).
The simplest, and main way that NP completness is proven is by showing
1) A decision problem may be transformed in polynomial time into another NP complete problem
2) The solution to the problem may be verified as correct or incorrect in polynomial time
If only condition 1 may be met, then the problem is considered NP-Hard. This is what I meant when I said, "merely NP-Hard" - they haven't the ability to go the full distance towards a proof of NPC.
The decision problem in this case is "Does this key decrypt this data?" The answer is undecidable. Hence, most decryption is NP Hard.
Now lets look at your case. Almost all problems can be trivally converted into decision problems (and back, but I'll leave the inverse conversion to you as exercise) in polynomial time, given the proper context, including the ones you presented. The decision in the first case is "Is there a clique of size k within Graph G?" while the second (transformed into a decision problem) is "Is the maximum clique of size K in Graph G?"
As you see from the criteria you have presented, both would be considered NPC. However, given my criteria, the first would be NPC if condition #2 is satisfied (it is), while the second would NP-hard, because you cannot prove in polynomial time that any solution is optimal.
We can make polynomial improvements by getting better hardware for most problems. What we can't do is make exponential improvements. This is why it is trivial to solve most kinds of polynomial problems.
All NP-complete problems can be considered search problems. All search problems can be parallelized.
Not all encryption schemes are NP-Complete! Most are actually just NP-Hard because you can't tell whether or not you've found the correct decryption. So, decryption schemes will not be solved even if you can convert into NP complete problems into NP problems. It will be a lot easier though.
That polynomial can still be huge, say N^1000. Except for really large N, current exponential-time algorithms could be superior to polynomial-time ones.
This lacks some of the insight into NP and NPC problems. We only care about the large cases for the most part. On the small scale (small being relative to the problem), exponential solutions are always easy to solve.
There are some amazing implications of this anyway. For instance, we can solve chess (find the best possible game), and all other decidable search problems.
Keep in mind that our computer improvements allow us to make polynomial time reductions in the amount of time that the problem takes.
Are you a proponent of porting Microsoft's tools to other environments? For example, would you be in favor of MSVS for Linux, or IE for Linux?
Something that has never been observed in a domain that has never had more than casual observation.
The probability of life existing on Europa is necessarily less than the probability of the formation of life in general, of which biologists have been doing quite a bit more than a casual study. As I said, we have REALLY tried to make it happen.
You gave the example of nuclear fusion. In this case, you are referring to a phenomenon that we don't have the capability to create. This is something quite different; if we could bring a large enough mass to a high enough temperature and pressure, it would fuse on its own. Finding out how to create life is more like solving an NP hard problem - we have all of the necessary components, since we know the exact chemical makeup of life and under what conditions it is capabile of subsisting. All that is required is that we try all of the finitely many (though extremely large) combinations of reactions that would be necessary to produce life. We have tried a small but significant subset of these combinations - it is significant because we have eliminated classes of solutions through our efforts, not merely single solutions. From this, we can say that the probability of spontaneous creation is low, though we may not agree as to how low.
Just because *we* cannot do something doesn not mean it is not dirt common as far as the greater universe is concerned.
Let me extend my point to be more inclusive: if we can find the probability of an event in a domain, and have no evidence to the contrary for other domains, Occam's Razor would dictate that this probability also holds for other domains.
In other words, if the simplest solution to any problem is most likely the correct one, then what we observe about things on earth also holds for outer space unless we get other data, as is the case for the existance of stars.
Life could be dirt common, but it would not be wise to assume that this is the case unless you believe that Occam's Razor is a fallacy.
And yet we cannot create a mixure of salts to match this signature - the only thing that does exist that matches are bacteria. I would say that you are arguing for the opposition.
That's not necessarily true. We HAVE NOT created a mixture of salts that match this signature. This does not mean that doing so is impossible or even improbable for us. We've only had the data a short time, and there are more than a few combinations to try to figure out what a correct salt would be to produce such a spectral signature. There may have been no reason to create such salts in the past.
Despite all of our informed attempts to throw what we think are the right chemicals (i.e. all of the ones that make up life), we have not succeeded in creating it. What can we conclude from our search? Considering the sheer amount of searching we have done in order to attempt the creation of life, we can assume that it requires extremely delicate (i.e. extremely improbable conditions). Were this not the case, we would have found the right combination to create life already.
This is not unlike a lot of the things that we don't know how to do. We can say something about the difficulty of solving any problem (modeling any phenomenon) by examining and dismissing the most likely possible solutions/theories. This is the basis of a lot of the field of statistics, and part of the basis of Occams Razor: the past knowledge should be considered when evaluating the future (in this case, our past experience shows that it is easier for to generate salts that have unique properties than it is to create life).
You disagree? I should never consider that the probability of something that has never been observed should be considered astronomically low? Then I better start wearing a helmet to be ready for when the sky falls.
As an aside, I think that the probability of life occuring spontaneously is too high for it to exist at all in a universe this small or this young. Given our current estimate of the probability of the formation of life, and our guess of the age and size of the universe, the odds that life would already exist are incalculably high. I believe we must have been created.
We know how something about how improbable it is that life exists, at least as far as we can tell. As intelligent organisms, we cannot accurately calculate the probability of life being spontaneously created because we have never done it ourselves, EVER.
Conversely, we know how to make many different kinds of salts. Even though we don't know the precise chemical composition that could create this spectrum, we are much closer to causing that by randomly combining chemicals.
Occam's Razor therefore dictates that the most probable event is NOT life. Here's a similar hypothesis (another piece of data with a theory that has an incalculably low probability of occurance):
I don't know where my parents are, but I saw some strange, oddly organized patterns in the aurora borealis today. My parents must be on the sun, sending me a message.
I think that rather bringing home entertainment into the computers (i.e. turning a computer into a home entertainment system), the future is giving home entertainment systems computerized components.
How about using smaller computerized components for the system? For instance, using a biscuit-PC as a controller for a surround sound system, and another as a controller for all the lights...etc. No one would think twice about leaving those on. They could connect to each other via ethernet to be able do simple detection tasks. Why waste power, money, and all the extra features that come with a full size PC when you can get it all in a small one?
The parallelism is also much more suited to solving tasks that have to do with a house.
If he's going to have all of these systems, he needs some kind of a belt that he can use to carry all of his portable systems on. That, and portable controllers, batarangs, and webshooters.
I think we should call him "PVGSman" (portable video game systems).
You're right about the publisher. I always confuse Ballantine and Bantam. Sorry, it was Ballantine who did it. And yes, it did take a while for the popularity to grow to such a level that they asked him for more (it was a request, not an order - he didn't have to do anything). As to the source, I'm not sure if its on the net. I read it in a biography on him offline in the back of his unpublished works.
I'm not trying to be dark or pessimistic - rather, the opposite. We all have to work. Its part of life - I don't think it takes away from art or literature; I'd say its a part of it. I was defending the beauty of selling hamburgers with the help of Tolkien's story. I didn't consider that some would think that I was criticizing Tolkien.
I'm not sure that making commercials is not an art - or that making commemorative merchandise isn't. I think they both probably are, despite the fact that they make money.
After the success of the hobbit, Bantam books sent a letter to Mr. Tolkien saying, "we want more hobbits" because of the popularity.
Despite its greatness, LOTR was made to meet the demand. It was written FOR THE MONEY!
It sucks that J.R.R. Tolkien stooped to the level of making money? Okay. Then I guess you better not read anything he ever wrote published by Bantam books given his consent. That means it was for the money, otherwise he would have just given it away for free.
I suppose all that leaves is his unfinished works, which he only showed to his friends and family and which was published after his death.
Art and literature are seldom for their own sake, for we are all forced to work until we eat dust.
You might say that marketing dilutes creativity. Who are you to say what is creative? Most of the marketing people I know put a lot of creative thinking into their work - commercials are no exception; a lot of creative effort has been put into using the characters in a way to sell the product. Perhaps if you looked for the "art and literature" within the commercials, you wouldn't get sick looking at them.
I don't like flash because, specifically, the tools cost an arm and a leg, and are completely owned by one company.
Javascript, on the other hand, is a publically available language that can potentially do everything that flash can.
However, javascript on Netscape is like Javascript on IE's retarded parapalegic brother. By comparison, it is capable of doing about half as many things. Plus, the language is far more strict and has undocumented problems. I sincerely wish that Microsoft would port IE to Linux. Of course, if they did, I'd have no real reason to use Windows.
Information obtained from the internet is deemed public information, so people are allowed to collect it in the US. However, you can sue for illegal solicitation if someone e-mails you without consent or a business relationship in the US - the greater of $5000 or the product or service advertised is the standard penalty.
Its just really difficult to enforce.
And you saying we're too permissive? What, do you kill spammers in Italy?
You know, the last planet of the Apes movie that Charlton Heston made included blowing up the planet at the end. Some interviews said that this was so that it would be THE END of the saga. And then they made another.
They sort of tied up ALL the loose ends in the previous movie as well...it will sort of make the plot not as good to make another.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of Conan books, and lots of plots to choose from. Sword & Sorcery is a classic genre. I wouldn't mind if he (or someone else) made a few more of those. Heck, they could make twenty or thirty of them. I'd watch them when I wanted to see an action movie.
While I'm at it, I might as well mention a few other good movies that could easily have more sequels that I would like to see.
Ghostbusters (probably need different guys)
Tron (same idea, but with modern computer systems)
They Live!(I wanna see more of that fight scene - MUCH better than matrix)
HHGTG (except for make it a REAL movie this time)