Atleast you have a properly implemented legal system, however bad it maybe.
In most Asian countries, the laws are what the politicians and the police define. If you have money, power and status, there's nothing that you cannot do. Your complaints fall on deaf ears, even the simplest of ones.
Just as an example, there is an anti-smoking law in India which prohibits smoking in public places, when a friend of mine questioned a cop for smoking in a public place, the cop said that my friend was the one smoking and dragged him off.
I've lodged complaints against people who've mugged me, with details of their appearance and vehicle reg. numbers. So far, I've not even had a single response.
Cops and government officials ask for bribes at every stage, even if you are law abiding. The politicians set the rules. My father had to quit his job because he wanted to name some corrupt people in his organization.
Almost every politician is either from the Entertainment industry or has a criminal record, or both. What does the judiciary do? Absolutely nothing. Cases are lodged, and dropped with no charges and an apology.
We fail to understand how govt. employees with meagre salaries buy cars and properties that even the richest cannot afford.
I do not know abt UK, but I've been in the US, and have heard abt UK. Yes, to the dot perhaps it's a little bad, but not until you've lived the way we have. This is HELL.
This letter was submitted by an analogue of a LUG; although it would be nice were it otherwise, a LUG has hardly the influence of a Peruvian Senator.
I'm actually pretty surprised at that statement. Yes, a Peruvian senator might have sweeping powers to do a whole lot of things, but do not underestimate the power of LUGs, especially in a country like India.
I was a very active member of ILUGC - Indian LUG Chennai Chapter. We did a lot of good work, conducted expos and had excellent response. We've convinced a *LOT* of schools, colleges and small businesses to use Linux.
In fact, during the last expo, we had so many people from small companies come and ask us Opensource alternatives for a lot of simple things like word processing, accounting etc.
Not just that, we have had corporates looking at us, that brought in a symbiotic relation where companies used the group to employ people to switch over to Opensource, and that way both benefited (Yes, in India there are still companies which are in need of manpower in the IT industry).
Besides, it's an excellent resource for people who want to learn and do not have the means. We have had some really excellent talks, and we have had people from corporations offering us support in exchange for some technical expertise.
Companies based on the LUG have even done projects for government agencies like the Electricity Board and significant contribution to the Opensource.
Show me a senator who can convince all the educational institutions to use what he thinks is right, to convince govt. organizations and please lots of companies at the same time, purely out of goodwill? In a democracy, the people decide who the senator is.
But, hey, that explanation just isn't as sexy as something involving fractals, now is it?
Actually it is, because ultimately it boils down to the fact that introns are not *junk* but act as something analogous to white noise, and we should be looking at how the appropriate length is determined.
It could be possible that the amount of junk is guided by some mathematical expression, right? I'm *NOT* supporting the claims made by Pellionisz, he has given almost no information on this for me to make a statement eitherway.
But I do believe that it is possible that the termination could be determined by some pattern, that can be arrived at in more than one way.
Having junk of the appropriate length in a gene is one way of slowing down the production of a transcript that the cell may not need a lot of.
Exactly! If you assume that the junk is a function of the gene, you could say that the junk production is recursive dependent on the gene. It is possible that Pellionisz found that this is someway fractal in nature.
From the article -
Rather than being useless evolutionary debris, he says, the mysteriously repetitive but not identical strands of genetic material are in reality building instructions organized in a special type of pattern known as a fractal.
That would be an, errr.., incredible claim to make, but perhaps, it is possible that the junk acts as a fill, whose quantity is determined by certain parameters. The fact that this guy has not provided his work for peer review should say that he's gotten something that's kinda basic...and probably something that's already known (maybe not entirely, but deductively).
On an entirely different note, you have said in your research (on your site) that -
Given two sequences it is possible to estimate a distance between them that not only takes into account point mutations (as do traditional distance measures such as the Jukes-Cantor distance), but also rearrangements.
Forgive me if I sound incredibly naive and stupid, but couldn't we analyze the mutual algorithmic information of the junk with tons of other genes and find patterns? It could be possible that the junk causes mutations in some genes which in turn affects the junk's length correct? If so, then you would have a set of responses guided by mutual interaction, and this might be a factor involved in determining the junk quanta.
IANABI - I'm not into bio-informatics, although I have worked extensively with a lot of people who are in it, and offlate I've taken a liking to it. Personally, I have worked a lot with fractals and AI.
They worked really well, so they left the university (who paid for the research) and started a company, without giving the university a dime.
I could be wrong, but didn't Cisco and SUN do the same thing to Stanford? As in, everything they did was in Stanford, and owed a lot to the University, but did they do anything in return? I think not.
Of course, that's why I said _my_ career. I don't do graphics code:) :-)
A fair point, but his statement applied to the whole universe of developers (EVERYONE will need to use asm) vs mine which applied to me only (I won't). Still a chance it would be wrong, but a much smaller chance
Well, all I meant is that it doesn't really depend what you do, right? You could still encounter a situation where you might need asm.:-)
I say this because today, given the market situation and economic recession, you really can't be sure what you'd be asked to do as a developer. That increases the chances of developers being asked to code something as basic as asm at some point of time or other in their career, and refusing to might be a fine line between having a job or losing one.
Ofcourse, you could be absolutely right in your statement that you might _never_ have to write a line of asm in _your_ career.:-)
The thing is, we never know! I'm working on technologies which I never ever thought I'd work on, not that I'm complaining, but a few years ago I'd not have believed anybody tell me that I'd be doing what I'm today.
I think that parent meant that in _HIS_ line of work, you'd need an assembler at some point of time or the other.
Do you REALLY believe that? Are you mad? I can be pretty sure that in my career I will never be required to develop in assembler.
That would depend on what is it that you code, wouldn't it? I mean, when you're into graphics, you almost always have to cut corners, optimize math routines and use features particular to a card/processor and will end up using assembly.
And inevitably, at some point in a programmer's career, they'll come across a system in which the only available development tool is an assembler
That is a very bold statement to make, but then again it is true that many a time, even in places where there is absolutely no need for assembly, I've looked at asm to optimize some of my code. Perhaps you would encounter some situations where your solution would best be coded in assembly.
But just as how the parent made a pretty bold statement that you WILL need to use asm, your statement that you'd never have to code a line of assembly sounds equally ridiculous.
I'd however, like to add a few points which I consider relevant:
I absolutely agree that a lot of Indian languages have little or no relation to each other, but the truth is that a significant percentage of these languages can be traced back to a common root. For example, certain Brahmi-derived languages and Prakrit have very common grammatical rules, but are also very different in other ways.
As long as we can find a set of common languages which would serve the majority of the populace, it'd be great. Reaching that in itself would be significant achievement.
Regarding the differences in grammar, yes, you're correct. But look at it from the point of voice recognition. Malayalam and Tamil sound very much alike, and a person with the knowledge of one with absolutely no knowledge of the other can actually understand the other one. But the alphabets of Tamil and Malayalam are phonetically miles away, Malayalam has a alphabets that spell like Brahmi, look like Tamil ones and the lexicon has a lot of Sanskrit. Likewise for Telugu and Kannada. In fact, Kannada has grammatical rules that are pretty much like that of Sanskrit (there is a book called NLP - A Panian Perspective that discusses exactly these issues).
Well, as for what you said,
Let's admit it; computerisation of *all* Indian languages won't happen in our lifetimes. Denying that would be to deny India's mind-boggling linguistic diversity.
Perhaps not all of it, but once you have a large chunk of it, you'll realise that a lot of them are evolved dialects and can be traced to a series of common roots. Look at Urdu, Arabic script with Hindi, Persian and Arabic words in the North, while down south you have a mix of Marathi and Telugu words. So it may not be all that impossible.
Let me rephrase your statement - *Complete* computerization of all the languages will not happen, but basic computerization might just happen, however mind boggling that task may seem.
If you want to increase literacy in India, get your basics right:- increase the number of schools and increase their quality. Don't search for magic bullets. They won't deliver, even if they're tech-y stuff.
Hmmm.. I think the Simputer was originally intended more as a tool to help the farmers and the rural people, not to educate people. In fact, I fully agree with you that technology will not be the only saviour. But then again, tools equip people better. Don't look at the Simputer as the end result, look at it as a tool that'll ease your way into achieving it:-)
IAAI - I Am An Indian IAANLPR - I Am An Natural Language Processing Researcher
Ok, although India does have so many different languages, the majority of the people speak a countable few, maybe with subtle differences in dialects. In fact, only about 14 languages are recognized as official languages of India, and almost everybody can speak two or more Indian languages.
So, although the total figure may seem big, using just one language like Hindi would cover significant percent of the populace.
Also, there _is_ a lot of similarity between a lot of the languages, both in the written and the spoken forms. So developing a general prototype system and then expanding on it regionwise would not be as mammoth a task as it may seem.
For example, a lot of the South Indian languages sound similar, have similar sounding alphabets, with a few differences in grammar. The basic difference would come in smaller parts of the language set and may need certain prefixed lexicon modifications.
If these things are going to be custom built for each of these states, then I'm guessing that you'd have a system that is custom-built to the languages of that region.
It may take a while longer and maybe a little tedious, but I suppose that would be just worth the trouble, especially after having come this far.
Well, I guess it's my mistake, I was unaware that there was indeed a difference (I was however unable to verify what you said, but I'll take that at face value since it does sound plausible).
So, yes, this story IS science fiction. NOT sci-fi. It may or may not be great science fiction, but it is certainly above the level of sci-fi.
My reference was regarding the fact that this author had not bothered to call it Science Fiction, and someone else had to point it out to him. It wasn't an attempt at categorization, it was merely a pointer on what I felt was his attitude.
And, lest you come back with a boatload of (flaming) gibberish about Mr. Bova, I'll just mention a few of his credits
If I did come across as someone who'd be carping and flaming everybody, I'm sorry, you're mistaken. I was just speaking my mind about what I felt about this piece of work.
All that being said, this wasn't the greatest science fiction story ever told, but it was certainly thought-provoking and seemed a hell of a lot more insightful than what the average hack would turn out, in hopes of pimping the work out to Hollywood.
This is again a matter of perspective. Have you read Arthur C Clarke's The Star? It's a short story, but immensely thought provoking. Or for that matter, any one of Asimov's many short stories.
Maybe that accounts for it being so "boring" to so many of the posters (those who actually read it and those who merely claimed to).
Well, I did read the whole story and came away disappointed, probably because I expected more. It's the first time that Salon had posted something like this, and I guess I was hoping for a lot more.
Maybe if he'd jumped through all the right "literary" hoops (read as: sensationalized it all to pieces merely for the sake of sensationalizing it all to pieces) it would have gotten a better reception.
I beg to differ. A good short story, like I said earlier, does not have to try too hard or go onto explaining into great depths aspects of technology or give hi-tech sounding names to make an impression. For example, the short preface in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is written in such a way that it prompts the reader to read the whole way, without having to resort to any jargon speak (ofcourse, that Adams does resort to this later in the book is irrelevant in this context). Or for that matter Philip K Dick. If you must use jargon, do your homework and use styles like Baxter or even Tolkien.
Maybe people have simply become disinterested in story-telling in the traditional sense (ie, this piece being a classic cautionary tale).
If you must resort to story telling, you could try Tolkien's or even CS Lewis' style of writing. Is that not story telling that people still enjoy? Significant parts of Herbert's and Zindell's works are indeed story telling.
If he'd put in a bit more sex, a few more explosions, and plenty of things that would look great with the help of a few million in digital effects but add basically nothing to the story itself... who knows...
Sensational-ism might work with a few, but for the serious reader, it will not. I do not know, this seems to be a growing trend. A lot of writers these days seem to be relying on this to sell their ideas, which could be seen as emulation the movies.
I felt that a lot more could be done, this was just something you'd come up with on a bored saturday evening than serious writing. My point again is that do not try to sound cool by adding wierd terms and analogies. Instead just write good content.
And Brian Herbert wrote the add-ons for the Dune series like House Atreides, Corrino, Harkonnen and I think is presently writing the Butlerian Jihad.
I wonder if the parent poster has really read Herbert's Dune, or just looked up on the web after hearing about it here on Slashdot. It's kinda hard to forget that name you know:-)
Ofcourse, comparison with Dune and Foundation is not quite right because they are the wrong category - they're full fledged novels running into series of (uncompleted?) books, while this is just a short story.
But yes, it could have been thought provoking, like the way The Star or Nightfall One were, even though they were just short stories.
Re:Poor writing.
on
0wnz0red
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree. This seems more to be an attempt at "acting cool" than any serious science fiction writing.
He's taken standard ideas from the geek community and has jumbled them up in a story. Disney's in league with the **AAs, let them be one of the evil badasses. Sun One + Java gives us JavaOne. And ofcourse, the Big Brother is a badass, so there you go. Plus some 3l337 h4x0r speak, cryptographic terms and ideas of an Orvellian nightmare thrown in. Everything you'd think the average cs-geek would like?
Wrong!
Some aspects of the story are nice, like trust (not only in computing, in life too) and the way companies of tomorrow may try to control the way media dissemination AND their employees work, the burnout of coders and how the safest havens of tomorrow might be the living hells of today. But otherwise, it mostly sounded like lame speak to me.
Good science fiction (the guy can't even say it's sci-fi, he calls it just fiction at b0ing-b0ing) would just inherently impress the readers without trying to go on great lengths to explain some lame ass terms or go into longwinded exaggeration of how somethings are today (whether vapourware will work out?).
Take Arthur C Clarke's The Star or EM Forsters The machine stops, or David Zindell's Shanidar. You don't need to put in any effort for it to strike you as good work. You can just feel it.
This is poor writing, bad content and an attempt at/l4m3r h4x0r attitude - LART!/ If this guy is one of the best of tomorrow's sci-fi, God save sci-fi.
It swings both ways - by monitoring the contents of everyone to see if there is one potential threat, you are compromising the privacy of the mass to nab the few.
I'm not saying that what you're saying is wrong, or that complete freedom should be the way. But the truth is, it's debatable both ways.
Agreed it's worked out for you this time, but what about if some other guy who'd watched pr0n, for the heck of it? Not everybody who does that is a sex-offender or a serial rapist. What about his appraisal, what would you do if the guy evaluating the person felt that pr0n/is forbidden by religious law and is hence incorrect/ and had a grudge on him? And you go on as far as to post this information on a public forum like Slashdot.
If I were to spite you, I could make you visit my site and secretly store images, cookies and what not. Duh, I could right now put up 100s of pics of size 1x1 from bianca's smut shack in my site and could report you watching pr0n.
Aren't you compromising the privacy and freedom of people by doing this? Any sufficiently motivated person could and would misuse such information.
One of my seniors at college had done something similar for his final year undergrad project, a short description of which could be found here.
He'd connected a PIC to one of the ethernet cards (the system had two Eth0 and Eth1) and had implemented a simple HTTP into the ROM.
Only Eth0 could access Eth1, so you could access Eth0 through a webserver and send/receive requests, which would be translated into queries for Eth1. Eth1 would selectively process these queries by just looking into the request string, and trigger responses in the micro-controller.
The micro-controller could in turn use these requests to perform pre-determined operations, like switch operations, or even analog operations.
This way, he could use a web based interface to control external devices. You could put up the server on the web, and you can access the lava lamp in your room from the net:-)
It's old, but this is the only implementation that I know which can perform analog operations too (like he make it do/non-pre-determined/ stuff and perform things like tuning of a radio).
More often than not, blind simulations could lead you just about anywhere, and end up giving you results that you may already be aware of, or are of little significance.
And implementing criteria to help your purpose tends to get overly complex. Although some kind of "intelligence" of the kind your described in your second example is nice, it gets in the way of your actual research. Patterns in randomness is in itself a weakness, and you cannot afford absolute randomness as your organisms would otherwise just cease to exist.
I do have some white papers and notes that I'd prepared on this, but nothing very comprehensive. I had in fact written to organizations asking for DNA mappings of simple organisms so that I could work on them, but I did not have much of a response.
Besides, I realised that I would need a biologist to help me translate the mappings into understandable code. Since I did not receieve much of help, I just left it.
I did try doing something in Perl by creating predator-prey relations with simple environmental criteria hoping to mimic amoeba using little knowledge that I had, but dropped the project after it got too complex, and I realised that I needed more "professional" help from biologists.
I would still love to work on this area, if somebody could get me DNA mappings of simple (single celled) organisms with translations.
I'd written an essay on something similar to this, of using DNA Mapping long ago when I'd just started doing AI. You can find the essay here.
Ofcourse, once you start working on it, you just realise how damn tough it is, and although it sounds easy on paper, it's just not that simple. Simulated environments are just too complex.
And it's also interesting that David Zindell has written some interesting stuff on this in his series Requiem for Homo Sapiens, on simulated/virtual humans/ and so on.
I think you're mistaken about what I said, I meant that I felt that the rates are costly for me, and not that it's high price for an artist.
As a student, yes, $25 is significantly high for me, and I really do feel that he could be charging much higher for his talent.
And yes, I do concur with you that artists are being underpaid, but unfortunately a large chunk of the ones who are paid so much do not deserve, esp. not in areas like fashion (la FTV stuff), while there are others in other segments like painting and sculpting who are underpaid. Please note that not once did I mention anything that artists must not make anything, or anything along those lines.
Well, on most weekends, you can find this _amazing_ guy in downtown San Francisco, who paints sci-fi sceneries.
He uses a few innovative techniques to create awesome astronomical scenes using spray paint, in under just about 3-5 minutes. It's really great to watch, but the paintings are a little costly, about $25-$35.
The thing is, you can watch him paint it for you, and go on and buy it. If anybody's from in and around SFO, you can find him at Fisherman's Wharf, usually on Fri and Sat evenings. Neat stuff!
Ok, I don't usually answer ACs, but what the hell, I'll bite. It's anyway a spineless coward.
Right, because all of these colonies were really advanced before the white man got there. I'm all for the end of imperialsim and all, but come on.
Huh? So that gives you the right to plunder? Loot? Kill? Divide? Duh! Most of the problems today are due to the divide & rule policies of the so called imperialistic nations.
Does that count Kashmir?
According to the UN resolution in 1948, Kashmir is an integral part of India. At that point, there were more than a million Hindus and Buddhists, and Muslims were less than 1/5th of that amount. Now, there are hardly a few thousand of them, while there are nearly a million Muslims. Thousands of Hindus have been killed, or have fled while the Muslim population has grown. Go figure.
pi=Egyptians. Pre-dated you there a bit. Dude, Aryabhatta has the world's first record of ever have found that the ratio of the circumference to the radius is a constant. Abt 3000 years before the Egyptians.
Number system=from arabia. That's why they're called arabic numerals. LOL! Biggest crap of bullshit I've ever heard. It's Indo-Arabic numerals you dudhead. Go refer any history textbook. Invented in India, during trade with the Arabs, they took the system with them, and hence the name.
I mean seriously, do they actually teach you this stuff in school?
Fortunately, I don't live in the US or in the Russia, they have better things to teach us in school.
How's that Muslim minority doing in India right now? I seem to recall a few meeting their untimely demise...
Well, one of them has just become the president, shows true democratic values. Now why do I not recall US being shit scared of Muslims fundamentalists? Heard of some very nice anti-terrorism bills being drafted? Would I ever see a Muslim become the US president? I recall all of them being Christians. Hmmm..
Democracy, eh? I'm very sure that your Dubya came in a very democratic way indeed. Vote counting in Florida for months? Sheesh. Corporate Democracy, that's what the US is now. Don't kid yourself, we have much more rights here that you do out there.
What's this "give" stuff? On one hand you want to be respected, and on the other hand you want a free handout?
Nope, none of that is free handout, it's trade and technology. We pay and buy. Guess where Pakistan gets their awesome weapon power from? US & China. US is simply scared of India becoming something more. Period.
Second, as for free tech, who capped us? We had to invent it.
Nobody builds things from scratch. Get that first. Europe invented stuff. You had to invent stuff? Where did you get your basic stuff from? Europe. You're denying us the very access to such technology. You'd not know unless you're here. And don't get me started on the way you acquired some of your "technology".
Stop looking for international welfare and "do it yourself".
Who is looking for welfare? It's trade, and you have a problem with that? Apparently you do. Probably because US does not know what to do with a nation that does not do it's bidding, and cannot be bombed to kingdom come citing "terrorist reasons".
Third, you allied yourselves with the Soviets in the cold war.
This does it, you really are nada when it comes to history. India helped start the NAM, or the Non-Aligned Movement. We said we'd not side with neither US nor USSR during the cold war. We had diplomatic relations with the USSR only because US allied with Pakistan and established bases. Go get your history straight.
Then you want US help in the cold war after you allied yourself with the US's enemy, like that's going to happen. Looks like you need some lessons in basic diplomacy.
What crap. You are sounding like Bush senior. Trying to blame countries for things which their rulers committed 50 years ago, which was started by them in the first place. Guess who trained your OBLaden? Your eminent CIA. Guess who forced India to seek the help of USSR? US.
And where were they trained? It's amazing how the US is fine when you want something...
India. CV Raman was born, brought up and died in India. Rabindranath Tagore, freedom fighter born, brought up and died in India. Economics Amartya Sen born, brought up and alive and kicking in India. I can cite more. And yes, Chandrasekhar was born, brought up and trained here, and how come he does not win an award for his work here, but the moment he lands in the US his "brilliance" is recognised? And this is not counting the people who left our country.
Every unindustrialized (or semi-industrialized) nation wants to blame the US for all their problems, because we're the big target, and because they want the prosperity we have.
What nonsense! Do they teach you this crap at school or what? US is responsible for the troubles in Afghanistan. The trouble in the middle east. The trouble in North Korea. The trouble in Vietnam.
Did you ever stop to think the consequences of your actions? Agreed that the US has done some good things, but you've also done baser things which make those good deeds look like drops of water in the ocean. Vietnam war? An Atom Bomb? There is nothing that can justify deed such as that one.
They don't want us to get involved internationally, until someone comes after them. Then we're your best friend all of a sudden. The international community needs to decide - do you want US aid, US defense, and US tech, and all the problems that go with them, or not?
There is no question of the "white man" seeing what the native is doing, to quote the CEC of India. I think nations can figure out things on their own, in fact better, without the interference of the US.
US aid and tech? You sell colas and guns and want Indians and Chinese to write code for you. US defense? I think it's done more harm than good for a lot of nations. Learn from Europe what is diplomacy. I think the world was a much better place back then.
Another thing is that you're also paying for the expertise, something that id has gathered over the years.
A good 3d game engine which can make use of the latest technology, one that makes hardware designers consider your game as a test subject is something that does not happen everyday.
The primary reason id is where it is because of that expertise, which is what keeps them coming up with better technology & products everytime.
Although an el33t Jack h4x0r kid might be able to get the code and do something worthwhile, just how long would it last?
Forget the legal ramifications, there is a high probability that even before somebody does something worthwhile with it, id would have come up with something much better, guess which would sell better?
Besides, it's not just the 3d engines that count, gameplay does count too. id has a double shot advantage in that area, I feel.
Slashdot Mirror
Atleast you have a properly implemented legal system, however bad it maybe.
In most Asian countries, the laws are what the politicians and the police define. If you have money, power and status, there's nothing that you cannot do. Your complaints fall on deaf ears, even the simplest of ones.
Just as an example, there is an anti-smoking law in India which prohibits smoking in public places, when a friend of mine questioned a cop for smoking in a public place, the cop said that my friend was the one smoking and dragged him off.
I've lodged complaints against people who've mugged me, with details of their appearance and vehicle reg. numbers. So far, I've not even had a single response.
Cops and government officials ask for bribes at every stage, even if you are law abiding. The politicians set the rules. My father had to quit his job because he wanted to name some corrupt people in his organization.
Almost every politician is either from the Entertainment industry or has a criminal record, or both. What does the judiciary do? Absolutely nothing. Cases are lodged, and dropped with no charges and an apology.
We fail to understand how govt. employees with meagre salaries buy cars and properties that even the richest cannot afford.
I do not know abt UK, but I've been in the US, and have heard abt UK. Yes, to the dot perhaps it's a little bad, but not until you've lived the way we have. This is HELL.
This letter was submitted by an analogue of a LUG; although it would be nice were it otherwise, a LUG has hardly the influence of a Peruvian Senator.
I'm actually pretty surprised at that statement. Yes, a Peruvian senator might have sweeping powers to do a whole lot of things, but do not underestimate the power of LUGs, especially in a country like India.
I was a very active member of ILUGC - Indian LUG Chennai Chapter. We did a lot of good work, conducted expos and had excellent response. We've convinced a *LOT* of schools, colleges and small businesses to use Linux.
In fact, during the last expo, we had so many people from small companies come and ask us Opensource alternatives for a lot of simple things like word processing, accounting etc.
Not just that, we have had corporates looking at us, that brought in a symbiotic relation where companies used the group to employ people to switch over to Opensource, and that way both benefited (Yes, in India there are still companies which are in need of manpower in the IT industry).
Besides, it's an excellent resource for people who want to learn and do not have the means. We have had some really excellent talks, and we have had people from corporations offering us support in exchange for some technical expertise.
Companies based on the LUG have even done projects for government agencies like the Electricity Board and significant contribution to the Opensource.
Show me a senator who can convince all the educational institutions to use what he thinks is right, to convince govt. organizations and please lots of companies at the same time, purely out of goodwill? In a democracy, the people decide who the senator is.
That's the power of Opensource.
But, hey, that explanation just isn't as sexy as something involving fractals, now is it?
Actually it is, because ultimately it boils down to the fact that introns are not *junk* but act as something analogous to white noise, and we should be looking at how the appropriate length is determined.
It could be possible that the amount of junk is guided by some mathematical expression, right? I'm *NOT* supporting the claims made by Pellionisz, he has given almost no information on this for me to make a statement eitherway.
But I do believe that it is possible that the termination could be determined by some pattern, that can be arrived at in more than one way.
Having junk of the appropriate length in a gene is one way of slowing down the production of a transcript that the cell may not need a lot of.
Exactly! If you assume that the junk is a function of the gene, you could say that the junk production is recursive dependent on the gene. It is possible that Pellionisz found that this is someway fractal in nature.
From the article -
Rather than being useless evolutionary debris, he says, the mysteriously repetitive but not identical strands of genetic material are in reality building instructions organized in a special type of pattern known as a fractal.
That would be an, errr.., incredible claim to make, but perhaps, it is possible that the junk acts as a fill, whose quantity is determined by certain parameters. The fact that this guy has not provided his work for peer review should say that he's gotten something that's kinda basic...and probably something that's already known (maybe not entirely, but deductively).
On an entirely different note, you have said in your research (on your site) that -
Given two sequences it is possible to estimate a distance between them that not only takes into account point mutations (as do traditional distance measures such as the Jukes-Cantor distance), but also rearrangements.
Forgive me if I sound incredibly naive and stupid, but couldn't we analyze the mutual algorithmic information of the junk with tons of other genes and find patterns? It could be possible that the junk causes mutations in some genes which in turn affects the junk's length correct? If so, then you would have a set of responses guided by mutual interaction, and this might be a factor involved in determining the junk quanta.
IANABI - I'm not into bio-informatics, although I have worked extensively with a lot of people who are in it, and offlate I've taken a liking to it. Personally, I have worked a lot with fractals and AI.
To quote David Zindell - "I'm the programmer, the program and that which is programmed" ;-)
They worked really well, so they left the university (who paid for the research) and started a company, without giving the university a dime.
I could be wrong, but didn't Cisco and SUN do the same thing to Stanford? As in, everything they did was in Stanford, and owed a lot to the University, but did they do anything in return? I think not.
Of course, that's why I said _my_ career. I don't do graphics code :)
:-)
:-)
:-)
:-) My 0.02!
A fair point, but his statement applied to the whole universe of developers (EVERYONE will need to use asm) vs mine which applied to me only (I won't). Still a chance it would be wrong, but a much smaller chance
Well, all I meant is that it doesn't really depend what you do, right? You could still encounter a situation where you might need asm.
I say this because today, given the market situation and economic recession, you really can't be sure what you'd be asked to do as a developer. That increases the chances of developers being asked to code something as basic as asm at some point of time or other in their career, and refusing to might be a fine line between having a job or losing one.
Ofcourse, you could be absolutely right in your statement that you might _never_ have to write a line of asm in _your_ career.
The thing is, we never know! I'm working on technologies which I never ever thought I'd work on, not that I'm complaining, but a few years ago I'd not have believed anybody tell me that I'd be doing what I'm today.
Anyway, done enough ranting
I think that parent meant that in _HIS_ line of work, you'd need an assembler at some point of time or the other.
Do you REALLY believe that? Are you mad? I can be pretty sure that in my career I will never be required to develop in assembler.
That would depend on what is it that you code, wouldn't it? I mean, when you're into graphics, you almost always have to cut corners, optimize math routines and use features particular to a card/processor and will end up using assembly.
And inevitably, at some point in a programmer's career, they'll come across a system in which the only available development tool is an assembler
That is a very bold statement to make, but then again it is true that many a time, even in places where there is absolutely no need for assembly, I've looked at asm to optimize some of my code. Perhaps you would encounter some situations where your solution would best be coded in assembly.
But just as how the parent made a pretty bold statement that you WILL need to use asm, your statement that you'd never have to code a line of assembly sounds equally ridiculous.
You never know.
I'd however, like to add a few points which I consider relevant
I absolutely agree that a lot of Indian languages have little or no relation to each other, but the truth is that a significant percentage of these languages can be traced back to a common root. For example, certain Brahmi-derived languages and Prakrit have very common grammatical rules, but are also very different in other ways.
As long as we can find a set of common languages which would serve the majority of the populace, it'd be great. Reaching that in itself would be significant achievement.
Regarding the differences in grammar, yes, you're correct. But look at it from the point of voice recognition. Malayalam and Tamil sound very much alike, and a person with the knowledge of one with absolutely no knowledge of the other can actually understand the other one. But the alphabets of Tamil and Malayalam are phonetically miles away, Malayalam has a alphabets that spell like Brahmi, look like Tamil ones and the lexicon has a lot of Sanskrit. Likewise for Telugu and Kannada. In fact, Kannada has grammatical rules that are pretty much like that of Sanskrit (there is a book called NLP - A Panian Perspective that discusses exactly these issues).
:-)
Well, as for what you said,
Let's admit it; computerisation of *all* Indian languages won't happen in our lifetimes. Denying that would be to deny India's mind-boggling linguistic diversity.
Perhaps not all of it, but once you have a large chunk of it, you'll realise that a lot of them are evolved dialects and can be traced to a series of common roots. Look at Urdu, Arabic script with Hindi, Persian and Arabic words in the North, while down south you have a mix of Marathi and Telugu words. So it may not be all that impossible.
Let me rephrase your statement - *Complete* computerization of all the languages will not happen, but basic computerization might just happen, however mind boggling that task may seem.
If you want to increase literacy in India, get your basics right:- increase the number of schools and increase their quality. Don't search for magic bullets. They won't deliver, even if they're tech-y stuff.
Hmmm.. I think the Simputer was originally intended more as a tool to help the farmers and the rural people, not to educate people. In fact, I fully agree with you that technology will not be the only saviour. But then again, tools equip people better. Don't look at the Simputer as the end result, look at it as a tool that'll ease your way into achieving it
IAAI - I Am An Indian
IAANLPR - I Am An Natural Language Processing Researcher
Ok, although India does have so many different languages, the majority of the people speak a countable few, maybe with subtle differences in dialects. In fact, only about 14 languages are recognized as official languages of India, and almost everybody can speak two or more Indian languages.
So, although the total figure may seem big, using just one language like Hindi would cover significant percent of the populace.
Also, there _is_ a lot of similarity between a lot of the languages, both in the written and the spoken forms. So developing a general prototype system and then expanding on it regionwise would not be as mammoth a task as it may seem.
For example, a lot of the South Indian languages sound similar, have similar sounding alphabets, with a few differences in grammar. The basic difference would come in smaller parts of the language set and may need certain prefixed lexicon modifications.
If these things are going to be custom built for each of these states, then I'm guessing that you'd have a system that is custom-built to the languages of that region.
It may take a while longer and maybe a little tedious, but I suppose that would be just worth the trouble, especially after having come this far.
Well said, reminds me of this quote -
:-)
All science is either physics or stamp collecting." -- E. Rutherford
Well, I guess it's my mistake, I was unaware that there was indeed a difference (I was however unable to verify what you said, but I'll take that at face value since it does sound plausible).
... who knows ...
So, yes, this story IS science fiction. NOT sci-fi. It may or may not be great science fiction, but it is certainly above the level of sci-fi.
My reference was regarding the fact that this author had not bothered to call it Science Fiction, and someone else had to point it out to him. It wasn't an attempt at categorization, it was merely a pointer on what I felt was his attitude.
And, lest you come back with a boatload of (flaming) gibberish about Mr. Bova, I'll just mention a few of his credits
If I did come across as someone who'd be carping and flaming everybody, I'm sorry, you're mistaken. I was just speaking my mind about what I felt about this piece of work.
All that being said, this wasn't the greatest science fiction story ever told, but it was certainly thought-provoking and seemed a hell of a lot more insightful than what the average hack would turn out, in hopes of pimping the work out to Hollywood.
This is again a matter of perspective. Have you read Arthur C Clarke's The Star? It's a short story, but immensely thought provoking. Or for that matter, any one of Asimov's many short stories.
Maybe that accounts for it being so "boring" to so many of the posters (those who actually read it and those who merely claimed to).
Well, I did read the whole story and came away disappointed, probably because I expected more. It's the first time that Salon had posted something like this, and I guess I was hoping for a lot more.
Maybe if he'd jumped through all the right "literary" hoops (read as: sensationalized it all to pieces merely for the sake of sensationalizing it all to pieces) it would have gotten a better reception.
I beg to differ. A good short story, like I said earlier, does not have to try too hard or go onto explaining into great depths aspects of technology or give hi-tech sounding names to make an impression. For example, the short preface in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is written in such a way that it prompts the reader to read the whole way, without having to resort to any jargon speak (ofcourse, that Adams does resort to this later in the book is irrelevant in this context). Or for that matter Philip K Dick. If you must use jargon, do your homework and use styles like Baxter or even Tolkien.
Maybe people have simply become disinterested in story-telling in the traditional sense (ie, this piece being a classic cautionary tale).
If you must resort to story telling, you could try Tolkien's or even CS Lewis' style of writing. Is that not story telling that people still enjoy? Significant parts of Herbert's and Zindell's works are indeed story telling.
If he'd put in a bit more sex, a few more explosions, and plenty of things that would look great with the help of a few million in digital effects but add basically nothing to the story itself
Sensational-ism might work with a few, but for the serious reader, it will not. I do not know, this seems to be a growing trend. A lot of writers these days seem to be relying on this to sell their ideas, which could be seen as emulation the movies.
I felt that a lot more could be done, this was just something you'd come up with on a bored saturday evening than serious writing. My point again is that do not try to sound cool by adding wierd terms and analogies. Instead just write good content.
Frank Herbert authored the actual Dune series.
:-)
And Brian Herbert wrote the add-ons for the Dune series like House Atreides, Corrino, Harkonnen and I think is presently writing the Butlerian Jihad.
I wonder if the parent poster has really read Herbert's Dune, or just looked up on the web after hearing about it here on Slashdot. It's kinda hard to forget that name you know
Ofcourse, comparison with Dune and Foundation is not quite right because they are the wrong category - they're full fledged novels running into series of (uncompleted?) books, while this is just a short story.
But yes, it could have been thought provoking, like the way The Star or Nightfall One were, even though they were just short stories.
I agree. This seems more to be an attempt at "acting cool" than any serious science fiction writing.
/l4m3r h4x0r attitude - LART!/ If this guy is one of the best of tomorrow's sci-fi, God save sci-fi.
He's taken standard ideas from the geek community and has jumbled them up in a story. Disney's in league with the **AAs, let them be one of the evil badasses. Sun One + Java gives us JavaOne. And ofcourse, the Big Brother is a badass, so there you go. Plus some 3l337 h4x0r speak, cryptographic terms and ideas of an Orvellian nightmare thrown in. Everything you'd think the average cs-geek would like?
Wrong!
Some aspects of the story are nice, like trust (not only in computing, in life too) and the way companies of tomorrow may try to control the way media dissemination AND their employees work, the burnout of coders and how the safest havens of tomorrow might be the living hells of today. But otherwise, it mostly sounded like lame speak to me.
Good science fiction (the guy can't even say it's sci-fi, he calls it just fiction at b0ing-b0ing) would just inherently impress the readers without trying to go on great lengths to explain some lame ass terms or go into longwinded exaggeration of how somethings are today (whether vapourware will work out?).
Take Arthur C Clarke's The Star or EM Forsters The machine stops , or David Zindell's Shanidar. You don't need to put in any effort for it to strike you as good work. You can just feel it.
This is poor writing, bad content and an attempt at
He does not even come close.
Exceptions don't make rules.
/is forbidden by religious law and is hence incorrect/ and had a grudge on him? And you go on as far as to post this information on a public forum like Slashdot.
It swings both ways - by monitoring the contents of everyone to see if there is one potential threat, you are compromising the privacy of the mass to nab the few.
I'm not saying that what you're saying is wrong, or that complete freedom should be the way. But the truth is, it's debatable both ways.
Agreed it's worked out for you this time, but what about if some other guy who'd watched pr0n, for the heck of it? Not everybody who does that is a sex-offender or a serial rapist. What about his appraisal, what would you do if the guy evaluating the person felt that pr0n
If I were to spite you, I could make you visit my site and secretly store images, cookies and what not. Duh, I could right now put up 100s of pics of size 1x1 from bianca's smut shack in my site and could report you watching pr0n.
Aren't you compromising the privacy and freedom of people by doing this? Any sufficiently motivated person could and would misuse such information.
One of my seniors at college had done something similar for his final year undergrad project, a short description of which could be found here.
:-)
/non-pre-determined/ stuff and perform things like tuning of a radio).
He'd connected a PIC to one of the ethernet cards (the system had two Eth0 and Eth1) and had implemented a simple HTTP into the ROM.
Only Eth0 could access Eth1, so you could access Eth0 through a webserver and send/receive requests, which would be translated into queries for Eth1. Eth1 would selectively process these queries by just looking into the request string, and trigger responses in the micro-controller.
The micro-controller could in turn use these requests to perform pre-determined operations, like switch operations, or even analog operations.
This way, he could use a web based interface to control external devices. You could put up the server on the web, and you can access the lava lamp in your room from the net
It's old, but this is the only implementation that I know which can perform analog operations too (like he make it do
Very interesting stuff.
Very true.
More often than not, blind simulations could lead you just about anywhere, and end up giving you results that you may already be aware of, or are of little significance.
And implementing criteria to help your purpose tends to get overly complex. Although some kind of "intelligence" of the kind your described in your second example is nice, it gets in the way of your actual research. Patterns in randomness is in itself a weakness, and you cannot afford absolute randomness as your organisms would otherwise just cease to exist.
Interesting paradoxes, indeed.
Well, yes and no.
I do have some white papers and notes that I'd prepared on this, but nothing very comprehensive. I had in fact written to organizations asking for DNA mappings of simple organisms so that I could work on them, but I did not have much of a response.
Besides, I realised that I would need a biologist to help me translate the mappings into understandable code. Since I did not receieve much of help, I just left it.
I did try doing something in Perl by creating predator-prey relations with simple environmental criteria hoping to mimic amoeba using little knowledge that I had, but dropped the project after it got too complex, and I realised that I needed more "professional" help from biologists.
I would still love to work on this area, if somebody could get me DNA mappings of simple (single celled) organisms with translations.
Duh. My cat does this already, all I need to do is look for it when I'm shaving and can't find a towel ;-)
I'd written an essay on something similar to this, of using DNA Mapping long ago when I'd just started doing AI. You can find the essay here.
/virtual humans/ and so on.
Ofcourse, once you start working on it, you just realise how damn tough it is, and although it sounds easy on paper, it's just not that simple. Simulated environments are just too complex.
And it's also interesting that David Zindell has written some interesting stuff on this in his series Requiem for Homo Sapiens, on simulated
Yeah, same here. They've got very neat boards indeed, and reasonable too.
:-)
Thanks dude/ette(?)
Yeah.. and it kinda reminds me of this Doctor Fun comic strip :-D
I think you're mistaken about what I said, I meant that I felt that the rates are costly for me, and not that it's high price for an artist.
As a student, yes, $25 is significantly high for me, and I really do feel that he could be charging much higher for his talent.
And yes, I do concur with you that artists are being underpaid, but unfortunately a large chunk of the ones who are paid so much do not deserve, esp. not in areas like fashion (la FTV stuff), while there are others in other segments like painting and sculpting who are underpaid. Please note that not once did I mention anything that artists must not make anything, or anything along those lines.
Well, on most weekends, you can find this _amazing_ guy in downtown San Francisco, who paints sci-fi sceneries.
He uses a few innovative techniques to create awesome astronomical scenes using spray paint, in under just about 3-5 minutes. It's really great to watch, but the paintings are a little costly, about $25-$35.
The thing is, you can watch him paint it for you, and go on and buy it. If anybody's from in and around SFO, you can find him at Fisherman's Wharf, usually on Fri and Sat evenings. Neat stuff!
Ok, I don't usually answer ACs, but what the hell, I'll bite. It's anyway a spineless coward.
Right, because all of these colonies were really advanced before the white man got there. I'm all for the end of imperialsim and all, but come on.
Huh? So that gives you the right to plunder? Loot? Kill? Divide? Duh! Most of the problems today are due to the divide & rule policies of the so called imperialistic nations.
Does that count Kashmir?
According to the UN resolution in 1948, Kashmir is an integral part of India. At that point, there were more than a million Hindus and Buddhists, and Muslims were less than 1/5th of that amount. Now, there are hardly a few thousand of them, while there are nearly a million Muslims. Thousands of Hindus have been killed, or have fled while the Muslim population has grown. Go figure.
pi=Egyptians. Pre-dated you there a bit. Dude, Aryabhatta has the world's first record of ever have found that the ratio of the circumference to the radius is a constant. Abt 3000 years before the Egyptians.
Number system=from arabia. That's why they're called arabic numerals.
LOL! Biggest crap of bullshit I've ever heard. It's Indo-Arabic numerals you dudhead. Go refer any history textbook. Invented in India, during trade with the Arabs, they took the system with them, and hence the name.
I mean seriously, do they actually teach you this stuff in school?
Fortunately, I don't live in the US or in the Russia, they have better things to teach us in school.
How's that Muslim minority doing in India right now? I seem to recall a few meeting their untimely demise...
Well, one of them has just become the president, shows true democratic values. Now why do I not recall US being shit scared of Muslims fundamentalists? Heard of some very nice anti-terrorism bills being drafted? Would I ever see a Muslim become the US president? I recall all of them being Christians. Hmmm..
Democracy, eh? I'm very sure that your Dubya came in a very democratic way indeed. Vote counting in Florida for months? Sheesh. Corporate Democracy, that's what the US is now. Don't kid yourself, we have much more rights here that you do out there.
What's this "give" stuff? On one hand you want to be respected, and on the other hand you want a free handout?
Nope, none of that is free handout, it's trade and technology. We pay and buy. Guess where Pakistan gets their awesome weapon power from? US & China. US is simply scared of India becoming something more. Period.
Second, as for free tech, who capped us? We had to invent it.
Nobody builds things from scratch. Get that first. Europe invented stuff. You had to invent stuff? Where did you get your basic stuff from? Europe. You're denying us the very access to such technology. You'd not know unless you're here. And don't get me started on the way you acquired some of your "technology".
Stop looking for international welfare and "do it yourself".
Who is looking for welfare? It's trade, and you have a problem with that? Apparently you do. Probably because US does not know what to do with a nation that does not do it's bidding, and cannot be bombed to kingdom come citing "terrorist reasons".
Third, you allied yourselves with the Soviets in the cold war.
This does it, you really are nada when it comes to history. India helped start the NAM, or the Non-Aligned Movement. We said we'd not side with neither US nor USSR during the cold war. We had diplomatic relations with the USSR only because US allied with Pakistan and established bases. Go get your history straight.
Then you want US help in the cold war after you allied yourself with the US's enemy, like that's going to happen. Looks like you need some lessons in basic diplomacy.
What crap. You are sounding like Bush senior. Trying to blame countries for things which their rulers committed 50 years ago, which was started by them in the first place. Guess who trained your OBLaden? Your eminent CIA. Guess who forced India to seek the help of USSR? US.
And where were they trained? It's amazing how the US is fine when you want something...
India. CV Raman was born, brought up and died in India. Rabindranath Tagore, freedom fighter born, brought up and died in India. Economics Amartya Sen born, brought up and alive and kicking in India. I can cite more. And yes, Chandrasekhar was born, brought up and trained here, and how come he does not win an award for his work here, but the moment he lands in the US his "brilliance" is recognised? And this is not counting the people who left our country.
Every unindustrialized (or semi-industrialized) nation wants to blame the US for all their problems, because we're the big target, and because they want the prosperity we have.
What nonsense! Do they teach you this crap at school or what? US is responsible for the troubles in Afghanistan. The trouble in the middle east. The trouble in North Korea. The trouble in Vietnam.
Did you ever stop to think the consequences of your actions? Agreed that the US has done some good things, but you've also done baser things which make those good deeds look like drops of water in the ocean. Vietnam war? An Atom Bomb? There is nothing that can justify deed such as that one.
They don't want us to get involved internationally, until someone comes after them. Then we're your best friend all of a sudden.
The international community needs to decide - do you want US aid, US defense, and US tech, and all the problems that go with them, or not?
There is no question of the "white man" seeing what the native is doing, to quote the CEC of India. I think nations can figure out things on their own, in fact better, without the interference of the US.
US aid and tech? You sell colas and guns and want Indians and Chinese to write code for you. US defense? I think it's done more harm than good for a lot of nations. Learn from Europe what is diplomacy. I think the world was a much better place back then.
Good point.
Another thing is that you're also paying for the expertise, something that id has gathered over the years.
A good 3d game engine which can make use of the latest technology, one that makes hardware designers consider your game as a test subject is something that does not happen everyday.
The primary reason id is where it is because of that expertise, which is what keeps them coming up with better technology & products everytime.
Although an el33t Jack h4x0r kid might be able to get the code and do something worthwhile, just how long would it last?
Forget the legal ramifications, there is a high probability that even before somebody does something worthwhile with it, id would have come up with something much better, guess which would sell better?
Besides, it's not just the 3d engines that count, gameplay does count too. id has a double shot advantage in that area, I feel.