Yeah, yeah, it's gotta be a troll, but I'm helpless to resist.
First, of course, as long as we're using troll logic, putting this radio data into sound form cost so little of "the taxpayers money" that I can't see why anyone would care. If you really do, fine, it was *my* money that went to pay for it, and I give them retroactive permission.
But you say you don't want any space exploration
until we've got our act together down here. Right. Uh-huh. Pop quiz: what technology lets us(a) measure atmospheric conditions, including temperature, ozone & pollution levels, humidity, wind patterns, etc. over the entire planet, (b) essay land usage over the entire planet, (c) keep track of arctic ice packs (d) measure water temperature & sea levels, and (e) communicate all this information around the world so we can act on it?
Gosh, maybe satellite technology? Sure, let's abandon that! It hasn't helped us at all!
Not to mention that space is such an unusual environment that simply developing the technology to explore it leads to new insights and discoveries. You have no idea how much modern medical technology (even the mass-produced stuff that's made it to third-world countries) owes to the space program and the utter necessity of having small, low-power, reliable medical sensors and other medical equipment. Not to mention computer technology, materials science, etc.
Could this stuff have been developed without going into space. Sure. Would it have? I doubt it. Necessity is really the mother of invention and without it, without being forced to find new ways to do things, engineers will use the tried-and-true ways.
Do you honestly think that studying the environments on other planets won't spark new insights about our own? Mars had water once, and doesn't now. Why? What might that imply for our Earth?
Then, of course, there are even more practical reasons for research into space technology. You are worried about global warming. Why not generate power with orbiting solar panels? Beam the power down to Earth in a form that makes it through the atmosphere efficiently (e.g. microwaves) and suddenly we don't need to burn so much fossil fuel. Or just put the nuclear plants in space the same way. If there's a meltdown, it's 100,000 miles away, and if we're really worried, we just send a robot over there with a rocket to accelerate it to escape velocity and drop it in the sun.
Do you think even poor people would benefit from the ultrapure chemicals that could be synthesized in space (e.g. pharmeceuticals)? What can we make in microgravity that we can't here? We hardly know, we've barely even tried!
Of course, Pluto has a moon, whereas from what I
gather few of the other KBO's do. (Of course, I
also gather that the resolution we have on most
of them doesn't preclude moons.)
For some purposes, it really makes sense. For example, X-MAME has pretty minimal hardware requirements. Almost any PC can handle the VGA X server, keyboard, and mouse. The joystick drivers are reasonably self-configuring, too.
Put together a CD with X-MAME, a bunch of ROMs, and a reasonably intelligent startup script. It would try to read config data from a floppy, and if not found, it would ask some config questions and save them to a floppy.
Now you can turn almost any 486+ with a VGA card into a couple hundred arcade machines.
Create a packager that can bundle up a game and hardware config and pipe the output into mkisofs and cdrecord, and you've really got something.
Sure, if you change hardware you need to burn another CD, but heck, if you buy in bulk you can even get the 700MB CDs for less than a dollar a pop. I can afford that, for as often as I change hardware.
Actually, the key item was a magic field that would "align the molecules" of the normally non-conducting substrate the fake circuits were built on. This created a conducting region in the substrate.
Thus, portions of the "fake" circuits were in fact used, but the actual connections between them were obscured because no one ever figured out that the insulator did in fact conduct in some places.
Until this one primitive human came along and figured this all out in (I think) a few pages. The book wasn't a lot better than the movie, but I was sick on my back for two days with nothing better to read.
Well, the cameras are kinda pricey, but Firewire/i-Link/IEEE1394 video is pretty cool.
The native DV standard is 720x480@29.97fps(NTSC) or 720x560@25fps (I think) (PAL).
I've got a Sony TRV-310 (~US$800 last Christmas) and and an ADS Pyro Firewire card (US$70 a couple months ago). The nice thing about the camera is it can play and digitize even old 8mm camcorder tapes.
See the DVgrab links page for info on exactly what software and hardware are needed/available.
There's one open-source video editing app (Broadcast2000) and one commercial (MainActor) for Linux that I know of.
Note that such camcorders store and transmit using the DV standard, which is compressed to ~3.7MB/sec. There are also raw video cameras available, though I don't know if they are supported yet. For scientific work you may need a raw camera, for personal or broadcast work DV is ample.
...but it can be. Honest. Do a search on "slow
RAM". Or take a look at this link.
Many many motherboards allow you to install more RAM than their L2 cache can handle. My Asus P5A can only handle 128MB, for example. Add more RAM and it's acessible, but not cached. So things get dramatically slower.
The slow ram can, however, be used as swap. Much faster than a swap partition on a hard disk, though obviously not as good as real cached RAM.
I've got an old VLB 486 motherboard. And I've got a cacheing VLB IDE controller which takes 30-pin SIMMS. I figure I'll keep the OS on a SCSI drive, and put in an old 40MB IDE disk with a 16MB swap partition and 16MB of cache RAM. Should be a pretty fast swap disk. I just need to find the time to set it up.:-)
Ah, but a person is a person, and an object is an object. A person is a sentient being and an object, by definition, is not.
I'm not a poet enough to put it into the perfect words, but in a fundamental sense the universe is divided into two classes of things, persons that
can own things, and objects that can be owned. Of course, this isn't the only difference between them, but it's an important one.
What makes slavery wrong is its fundamental denial of this difference, making a person something that can be owned.
Of course, this distinction is too simplistic to cover all the bases. Part of the reason for this debate is the controversial issue of whether "information" should be treated as a third class or not. That is, something that isn't a person but nevertheless cannot be owned.;-)
I and a friend here were under the impression that if one uses an IETF standard, e.g. RFC 1341 which defines Base64 encoding, one is obligated to allow others to use it freely. I can't find an explicit statement of that yet on the IETF pages, but if this is the case it would seem that Digital Convergence would be the ones in violation.
Can easily and completely remove packages and be sure you didn't miss anything
Can install and run multiple versions of a package
But how do you do this? It's easy if you leverage the power of...symbolic links.
First, you extract the package into, say,/opt/packagename-packageversion. Under that directory, there's a/bin, a/usr, a/lib, a/whatever, etc. You can even run it and test it
from there, without privileges, before moving on.
Next, when you're sure it was extracted correctly, and it's passed some basic functionality checks,
you create symbolic links from within, e.g.,/usr/bin/ to within/opt/packagename-packageversion/usr/bin, then chown to the user the package needs to be.
Note that most of these steps can be done without root privileges. You extract it as user "tool", who has basically the rights of a guest account. The function checks are done that way, too. Only once you're satisfied do you need root to set the symbolic links and do the chown to whatever user the files need to be.
You can easily figure out what belongs to what package. Just do a "find" for symbolic links that
link into that directory under/opt.
Completely and safely removing a package is easy too, just have that find command remove the symlinks too, then remove the directory.
Because the package's files are concentrated in one place, it's possible to have multiple versions installed on the same system without overwriting each other. The symlinks get a bit more complicated, but you can have, e.g., a Netscape-4.05 and a Netscape-4.07, and pick which one works best for which pages, just as an example.
It seems to me that the existing pakage systems were too inspired by Windows, scattering files willy-nilly. I've been told that in the 70's and 80's software was typically installed the encap way, though not always so automatically.
There's more to old media than just the information printed on them. Their condition can offer a lot of clues about the time they were made.
I just heard on NPR yesterday about researchers looking at old letters from the time of the American Revolution. The words on the paper are important, of course, but medical historians want the actual letters themselves. To smell them.
It seems that when cholera broke out in a town, the mail was sprinkled with vinegar to help sterilize it before it was carried away. Even two hundred years later one can detect the odor of vinegar on many of them, and this offers clues as to the spread of the disease in the colonies at the time.
Just naively archiving old documents onto CD-ROM or something can miss a great deal...
Why is breaking into and destroying systems so appealing to crackers and kiddies?
Destruction is easy. People do it all the time by accident. If you think you're so cool, try improving something.
You never see these twits producing anything useful. They don't make better applications. They don't come up with sophisticated new algorithms. They don't even figure out how to fix the bugs they find, they just work out how to trigger them, a far less complicated problem.
Firewire is attractive to sony because the PSX2 is a way to get digital sony-branded storage into the home...
But at least other companies can and do make Firewire/iLink/1394/whatever equipment. And the specs are available. Most of the 1394 interfaces even support the Open Host Controller Interface, which means the same driver binary works on nearly any 1394 card and peripheral!
...let's face it: morality is maintained by spirituality...
Man, this irks me when I see it. When I tell people that I'm an atheist, I sometimes get the reaction, "So, you could go on a killing spree anytime, right?"
It always makes me wonder about the people who ask such questions. Do they really wake up in the morning and think, "Gosh, what a beautiful day! I think I'll go out and fire a machine gun into a crowd! Oops... God says I can't do that. Darn. Oh, well, guess I'll go fishing instead."
I enjoy playing with this computer that I could never have produced from raw materials, and living in a house I could not have built by myself, listening to music I could not have performed myself, eating food I couldn't have gathered and prepared myself, etc.
Cooperation is in our best interest. I am ethical and moral, people are ethical and moral, because the alternative is running naked in the woods fighting over scraps of food.
Sure, there are people who cheat and lie and steal and kill. But the benefits of cooperation are so obvious that we've managed to hold it together and even improve our understanding of morality anyway.
Needless to say, I don't agree that society would never have progressed without "the morality imposed by Christianity."
Basically his conclusion is that many biochemical functions require a lot of unique biochemical parts (lets say more than ten different complex molecules). If one part is removed (which is done in lab rats by playing with their genes) the process stops working completely. This means that these functions cannot gradually evolve from a less functional form (as Darwin postulated but did not prove) but have to simply appear at much higher improbability.
Not terribly convincing. For example, the "original" metabolic pathway may have been more complicated. Different molecules that had other purposes eventually came together and accidentally produced something useful, that perhaps took the place of an existing process, perhaps even using some of the intermediate products. Later, the older process atrophied away, and stopped being produced. There's precedent for this - we've lost the ability to produce some amino acids because we get enough from our diet.
Anyway, take a look at Tierra, for example. Essentially, evolving computer programs, but the neat part is that they are open-ended - they can invent novel algorithms that the simulation's author never imagined. And they do invent novel algorithms.
They are written in a special assembly language, but not that special. The only major changes from typical assembly languages is that the opcodes have no operands and don't need to specify an exact address for some operations.
I wrote a version myself, and was amazed when the 'organisms' exploited flaws in my implementation that I didn't even know were there. They also evolved complicated algorithms (e.g. loop unrolling) that, at first blush, look like they need all the individual parts together to work correctly... like Behe asserts.
I'm not so convinced by arguments that state, "I can't imagine how this could have arisen without design, so it must have been design."
What's more, this was made retroactive to all current copyrights in October of 1998.
Which is unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 9. No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Well, it should be. The Supreme Court stupidly held that that only applied to criminal law, not civil law, back in 1789. Schmucks. The Sonny Bono act would have been unconstitutional. And, frankly, should still be. See here.
Also, remember the whole 5-7-5 thing comes from Japanese, a language very different from our own.
I remember an Isaac Asimov story (one of the "Tales of the Black Widowers") where it was argued that the limerick is to English what the haiku is to Japanese. Japanese is a tonal language, and fixed patterns of syllables stand out very well. It's also mildly difficult but not impossible to assemble coherent phrases with fixed syllable-patterns in Japanese.
English, on the other hand, is not a tonal language, and has a grammar that consists mostly of a collection of exceptions. Patterns of syllable-stress and rhymes stand out. And it is similarly mildly difficult but not impossible to form coherent phrases with fixed meter and rhyme.
Haikus don't stand out in English very well, and from what I gather it's (a) difficult to construct a limerick in Japanese and (b) doesn't sound terribly unsual when you do.
The only prayer you ever have of seeing them release their specs is if they realize that a large portion of their customer base uses alt. OSs...And how do we do that? By praising them, buying their cards...
But that's just it. We shouldn't buy their cards until they release specs. I bought my TNT on the understanding that full, DRI-based Linux support would be forthcoming. I now regret that decision.
I won't recommend Nvidia cards to my Linux-using friends until and unless they release specs. I will suggest alternatives that do give enough information to write an open-source driver, e.g. Matrox. This has already cost Nvidia two customers. (Yeah, I know, big whoop. But I hardly think I'm alone in this policy.)
What will convince Nvidia to release specs is (a) the growing number of people using Linux that (b) insist on specs. If Nvidia sees a significant market that their policies prevent them from effectively competing in, I believe they will change their policies.
So far as I can determine, the source files compile a loadable kernel module tailored to the specific kernel you're running. Then this tailored module talks to the more generic, binary-only module.
This should be interesting - it'll certainly take me at least a few days to get everything set up to try it out. Meanwhile I'll be looking for performance numbers.
Until it's fully open-source, though, I still won't recommend nVidia stuff to my friends.
I suggest y'all look up Larry Niven's "The Theory
and Practice of Teleportation", an essay from 1969. Anticipated most if not all of these points.
Darn funny read, too.
He also has a series of short stories set in a world where teleportation (based on an "amplified tunnel diode effect", i.e. quantum tunnelling, so no matter replicators) is widespread. He did assume you need both a transmitter and a receiver. (In TAPOT, he notes, "If you don't, you get a short war...")
"The Alibi Machine" notes that alibis - "I wasn't there, I was somewhere else" - are obsoleted by teleportation. You can pretend to leave a party to go to the bathroom, kill someone, and be back before the hors d'ouvres are finished.
Then there are "flash crowds" - a physical distributed denial-of-service attack, you might say. Something interesting comes up on the news, and maybe a tenth of a percent of the viewers think, "Hey, that's interesting, I'll 'port over there and see it in person." Suddenly you've got hundreds, thousands, or millions of people zipping in from everywhere...
In "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", some thieves have made a good living hopping into flash crowds, starting riots, and looting during the confusion.
Anyway, interesting to speculate upon. But I think practical teleportation is a long
way off, if it ever comes.
I noted something a bit inconsitent. First you say:
With Macintosh/Windows, they can go into a store, buy a game, take it home, put the CD in the drive, close the drive, click 'Next' a few times (as per the directions that magically pop up on the screen), click 'Finish' and have instant access to a new piece of software.
and then you state:
If your "grandpa" isn't downloading and installing a bunch of 3rd party crap and device drivers from the 'net (like most of the windows slashdot demographic), most of his crashes will be uptime-related
So the good thing is he'll be able to install third-party stuff, but if he does, it'll make the computer crash?
It's not just stuff off the net that can cause problems for Windows. Microsoft Flight Simulator 5 (the last Microsoft anything I purchased) was not compatible with Microsoft Smartdrive caching. (This was back in the 3.11 days.) I lost the contents of an entire hard drive to that little bug.
One final point:
Sit someone down in front of a PC that has had zero computer experience at all. There's NO way they are going to ever be as proficient under Linux as they could be under MacOS or Windows unless they have some Linuxhead do the installation of software and administration for them.
But, of course, that's precisely this situation; someone is going to be doing installation and administration.
You'd have other problems. First, as I understand it, it may not be possible at all to reconnect spinal nerves; I think several of them are quite long, on the order of inches. You'd have to vastly accelerate the growth of nerves to make it work. Nanotech would do it, but if you have nanotech, you'd have better options than transplants anyway.
Let's assume you have a drug that lets the new brain and the spine connect up. The problem is, the subject will need lots of therapy to essentially rewire things. One thing might actually help - many learned reflexes are actually stored in the spine.
A friend of mine suffered a back injury and lost the ability to run. He could stand, sit, walk, amble, mosey, shuffle, etc. But he couldn't run - the nerves that handled the "running algorithm" had been damaged. He had to relearn running from scratch, in his late teens.
If the nerves could be reattached, and the new brain and spine could learn to agree on signaling (a big if), then less therapy might be needed than one would expect. Still, the subject would probably walk, sit, run, etc. remarkably like the "old" person did.
It'd be interesting to see what other reflexes might transfer across; I have this image of Bill Gate's head on an "exotic dancer's" body. It's not a good image.
I can't for the life of me figure out why companies destroy old computer stuff instead of donating, selling, or recycling them. I can barely imagine a context in which it would make sense.
Well, okay, I can think of a couple, for sufficiently small values of "make sense":
They've been fully depreciated, and for tax reasons can't be allowed to have a value
The company is worried about "secret" data left on hard drives, and doesn't want to differentiate between "drives" and "other stuff"
The company is worried about employees prematurely "obsoleting" equipment so they or their friends can have it
The company is worried in some bizarre way about "liability"
Does anyone know why this is done? I asked our IS ("Incompetent Service") dept. here and was told they'd "rather not say".
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First, of course, as long as we're using troll logic, putting this radio data into sound form cost so little of "the taxpayers money" that I can't see why anyone would care. If you really do, fine, it was *my* money that went to pay for it, and I give them retroactive permission.
But you say you don't want any space exploration until we've got our act together down here. Right. Uh-huh. Pop quiz: what technology lets us(a) measure atmospheric conditions, including temperature, ozone & pollution levels, humidity, wind patterns, etc. over the entire planet, (b) essay land usage over the entire planet, (c) keep track of arctic ice packs (d) measure water temperature & sea levels, and (e) communicate all this information around the world so we can act on it?
Gosh, maybe satellite technology? Sure, let's abandon that! It hasn't helped us at all!
Not to mention that space is such an unusual environment that simply developing the technology to explore it leads to new insights and discoveries. You have no idea how much modern medical technology (even the mass-produced stuff that's made it to third-world countries) owes to the space program and the utter necessity of having small, low-power, reliable medical sensors and other medical equipment. Not to mention computer technology, materials science, etc.
Could this stuff have been developed without going into space. Sure. Would it have? I doubt it. Necessity is really the mother of invention and without it, without being forced to find new ways to do things, engineers will use the tried-and-true ways.
Do you honestly think that studying the environments on other planets won't spark new insights about our own? Mars had water once, and doesn't now. Why? What might that imply for our Earth?
Then, of course, there are even more practical reasons for research into space technology. You are worried about global warming. Why not generate power with orbiting solar panels? Beam the power down to Earth in a form that makes it through the atmosphere efficiently (e.g. microwaves) and suddenly we don't need to burn so much fossil fuel. Or just put the nuclear plants in space the same way. If there's a meltdown, it's 100,000 miles away, and if we're really worried, we just send a robot over there with a rocket to accelerate it to escape velocity and drop it in the sun.
Do you think even poor people would benefit from the ultrapure chemicals that could be synthesized in space (e.g. pharmeceuticals)? What can we make in microgravity that we can't here? We hardly know, we've barely even tried!
Ah, well, lunch is over, back to work.
"-DDECENT_PERFORMANCE_ON_CPUS_LESS_THAN_2GHZ" options?
I guess nobody thought of "-DWORK_ON_MORE_THAN_ONE_PLATFORM", either.
Of course, Pluto has a moon, whereas from what I
gather few of the other KBO's do. (Of course, I
also gather that the resolution we have on most
of them doesn't preclude moons.)
And it's "bugger all" not "all bugger". :->
Put together a CD with X-MAME, a bunch of ROMs, and a reasonably intelligent startup script. It would try to read config data from a floppy, and if not found, it would ask some config questions and save them to a floppy.
Now you can turn almost any 486+ with a VGA card into a couple hundred arcade machines.
Create a packager that can bundle up a game and hardware config and pipe the output into mkisofs and cdrecord, and you've really got something.
Sure, if you change hardware you need to burn another CD, but heck, if you buy in bulk you can even get the 700MB CDs for less than a dollar a pop. I can afford that, for as often as I change hardware.
Thus, portions of the "fake" circuits were in fact used, but the actual connections between them were obscured because no one ever figured out that the insulator did in fact conduct in some places.
Until this one primitive human came along and figured this all out in (I think) a few pages. The book wasn't a lot better than the movie, but I was sick on my back for two days with nothing better to read.
http://www.geocities.com/simesgreen/gllife/
I've got a Sony TRV-310 (~US$800 last Christmas) and and an ADS Pyro Firewire card (US$70 a couple months ago). The nice thing about the camera is it can play and digitize even old 8mm camcorder tapes.
See the DVgrab links page for info on exactly what software and hardware are needed/available.
There's one open-source video editing app (Broadcast2000) and one commercial (MainActor) for Linux that I know of.
Note that such camcorders store and transmit using the DV standard, which is compressed to ~3.7MB/sec. There are also raw video cameras available, though I don't know if they are supported yet. For scientific work you may need a raw camera, for personal or broadcast work DV is ample.
Many many motherboards allow you to install more RAM than their L2 cache can handle. My Asus P5A can only handle 128MB, for example. Add more RAM and it's acessible, but not cached. So things get dramatically slower.
The slow ram can, however, be used as swap. Much faster than a swap partition on a hard disk, though obviously not as good as real cached RAM.
I've got an old VLB 486 motherboard. And I've got a cacheing VLB IDE controller which takes 30-pin SIMMS. I figure I'll keep the OS on a SCSI drive, and put in an old 40MB IDE disk with a 16MB swap partition and 16MB of cache RAM. Should be a pretty fast swap disk. I just need to find the time to set it up. :-)
I'm not a poet enough to put it into the perfect words, but in a fundamental sense the universe is divided into two classes of things, persons that can own things, and objects that can be owned. Of course, this isn't the only difference between them, but it's an important one.
What makes slavery wrong is its fundamental denial of this difference, making a person something that can be owned.
Of course, this distinction is too simplistic to cover all the bases. Part of the reason for this debate is the controversial issue of whether "information" should be treated as a third class or not. That is, something that isn't a person but nevertheless cannot be owned. ;-)
I and a friend here were under the impression that if one uses an IETF standard, e.g. RFC 1341 which defines Base64 encoding, one is obligated to allow others to use it freely. I can't find an explicit statement of that yet on the IETF pages, but if this is the case it would seem that Digital Convergence would be the ones in violation.
What do we want in a package format?
But how do you do this? It's easy if you leverage the power of...symbolic links.
First, you extract the package into, say, /opt/packagename-packageversion. Under that directory, there's a /bin, a /usr, a /lib, a /whatever, etc. You can even run it and test it
from there, without privileges, before moving on.
Next, when you're sure it was extracted correctly, and it's passed some basic functionality checks, you create symbolic links from within, e.g., /usr/bin/ to within /opt/packagename-packageversion/usr/bin, then chown to the user the package needs to be.
Note that most of these steps can be done without root privileges. You extract it as user "tool", who has basically the rights of a guest account. The function checks are done that way, too. Only once you're satisfied do you need root to set the symbolic links and do the chown to whatever user the files need to be.
You can easily figure out what belongs to what package. Just do a "find" for symbolic links that link into that directory under /opt.
Completely and safely removing a package is easy too, just have that find command remove the symlinks too, then remove the directory.
Because the package's files are concentrated in one place, it's possible to have multiple versions installed on the same system without overwriting each other. The symlinks get a bit more complicated, but you can have, e.g., a Netscape-4.05 and a Netscape-4.07, and pick which one works best for which pages, just as an example.
It seems to me that the existing pakage systems were too inspired by Windows, scattering files willy-nilly. I've been told that in the 70's and 80's software was typically installed the encap way, though not always so automatically.
I just heard on NPR yesterday about researchers looking at old letters from the time of the American Revolution. The words on the paper are important, of course, but medical historians want the actual letters themselves. To smell them.
It seems that when cholera broke out in a town, the mail was sprinkled with vinegar to help sterilize it before it was carried away. Even two hundred years later one can detect the odor of vinegar on many of them, and this offers clues as to the spread of the disease in the colonies at the time.
Just naively archiving old documents onto CD-ROM or something can miss a great deal...
Destruction is easy. People do it all the time by accident. If you think you're so cool, try improving something.
You never see these twits producing anything useful. They don't make better applications. They don't come up with sophisticated new algorithms. They don't even figure out how to fix the bugs they find, they just work out how to trigger them, a far less complicated problem.
How can that make them feel powerful?
But at least other companies can and do make Firewire/iLink/1394/whatever equipment. And the specs are available. Most of the 1394 interfaces even support the Open Host Controller Interface, which means the same driver binary works on nearly any 1394 card and peripheral!
Take a look at:
Man, this irks me when I see it. When I tell people that I'm an atheist, I sometimes get the reaction, "So, you could go on a killing spree anytime, right?"
It always makes me wonder about the people who ask such questions. Do they really wake up in the morning and think, "Gosh, what a beautiful day! I think I'll go out and fire a machine gun into a crowd! Oops... God says I can't do that. Darn. Oh, well, guess I'll go fishing instead."
I enjoy playing with this computer that I could never have produced from raw materials, and living in a house I could not have built by myself, listening to music I could not have performed myself, eating food I couldn't have gathered and prepared myself, etc.
Cooperation is in our best interest. I am ethical and moral, people are ethical and moral, because the alternative is running naked in the woods fighting over scraps of food.
Sure, there are people who cheat and lie and steal and kill. But the benefits of cooperation are so obvious that we've managed to hold it together and even improve our understanding of morality anyway.
Needless to say, I don't agree that society would never have progressed without "the morality imposed by Christianity."
Not terribly convincing. For example, the "original" metabolic pathway may have been more complicated. Different molecules that had other purposes eventually came together and accidentally produced something useful, that perhaps took the place of an existing process, perhaps even using some of the intermediate products. Later, the older process atrophied away, and stopped being produced. There's precedent for this - we've lost the ability to produce some amino acids because we get enough from our diet.
Anyway, take a look at Tierra, for example. Essentially, evolving computer programs, but the neat part is that they are open-ended - they can invent novel algorithms that the simulation's author never imagined. And they do invent novel algorithms.
They are written in a special assembly language, but not that special. The only major changes from typical assembly languages is that the opcodes have no operands and don't need to specify an exact address for some operations.
I wrote a version myself, and was amazed when the 'organisms' exploited flaws in my implementation that I didn't even know were there. They also evolved complicated algorithms (e.g. loop unrolling) that, at first blush, look like they need all the individual parts together to work correctly... like Behe asserts.
I'm not so convinced by arguments that state, "I can't imagine how this could have arisen without design, so it must have been design."
Which is unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 9. No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Well, it should be. The Supreme Court stupidly held that that only applied to criminal law, not civil law, back in 1789. Schmucks. The Sonny Bono act would have been unconstitutional. And, frankly, should still be. See here.
I remember an Isaac Asimov story (one of the "Tales of the Black Widowers") where it was argued that the limerick is to English what the haiku is to Japanese. Japanese is a tonal language, and fixed patterns of syllables stand out very well. It's also mildly difficult but not impossible to assemble coherent phrases with fixed syllable-patterns in Japanese.
English, on the other hand, is not a tonal language, and has a grammar that consists mostly of a collection of exceptions. Patterns of syllable-stress and rhymes stand out. And it is similarly mildly difficult but not impossible to form coherent phrases with fixed meter and rhyme.
Haikus don't stand out in English very well, and from what I gather it's (a) difficult to construct a limerick in Japanese and (b) doesn't sound terribly unsual when you do.
The only prayer you ever have of seeing them release their specs is if they realize that a large portion of their customer base uses alt. OSs...And how do we do that? By praising them, buying their cards...
But that's just it. We shouldn't buy their cards until they release specs. I bought my TNT on the understanding that full, DRI-based Linux support would be forthcoming. I now regret that decision.
I won't recommend Nvidia cards to my Linux-using friends until and unless they release specs. I will suggest alternatives that do give enough information to write an open-source driver, e.g. Matrox. This has already cost Nvidia two customers. (Yeah, I know, big whoop. But I hardly think I'm alone in this policy.)
What will convince Nvidia to release specs is (a) the growing number of people using Linux that (b) insist on specs. If Nvidia sees a significant market that their policies prevent them from effectively competing in, I believe they will change their policies.
So far as I can determine, the source files compile a loadable kernel module tailored to the specific kernel you're running. Then this tailored module talks to the more generic, binary-only module.
This should be interesting - it'll certainly take me at least a few days to get everything set up to try it out. Meanwhile I'll be looking for performance numbers.
Until it's fully open-source, though, I still won't recommend nVidia stuff to my friends.
He also has a series of short stories set in a world where teleportation (based on an "amplified tunnel diode effect", i.e. quantum tunnelling, so no matter replicators) is widespread. He did assume you need both a transmitter and a receiver. (In TAPOT, he notes, "If you don't, you get a short war...")
"The Alibi Machine" notes that alibis - "I wasn't there, I was somewhere else" - are obsoleted by teleportation. You can pretend to leave a party to go to the bathroom, kill someone, and be back before the hors d'ouvres are finished.
Then there are "flash crowds" - a physical distributed denial-of-service attack, you might say. Something interesting comes up on the news, and maybe a tenth of a percent of the viewers think, "Hey, that's interesting, I'll 'port over there and see it in person." Suddenly you've got hundreds, thousands, or millions of people zipping in from everywhere...
In "The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", some thieves have made a good living hopping into flash crowds, starting riots, and looting during the confusion.
Anyway, interesting to speculate upon. But I think practical teleportation is a long way off, if it ever comes.
With Macintosh/Windows, they can go into a store, buy a game, take it home, put the CD in the drive, close the drive, click 'Next' a few times (as per the directions that magically pop up on the screen), click 'Finish' and have instant access to a new piece of software.
and then you state:
If your "grandpa" isn't downloading and installing a bunch of 3rd party crap and device drivers from the 'net (like most of the windows slashdot demographic), most of his crashes will be uptime-related
So the good thing is he'll be able to install third-party stuff, but if he does, it'll make the computer crash?
It's not just stuff off the net that can cause problems for Windows. Microsoft Flight Simulator 5 (the last Microsoft anything I purchased) was not compatible with Microsoft Smartdrive caching. (This was back in the 3.11 days.) I lost the contents of an entire hard drive to that little bug.
One final point:
Sit someone down in front of a PC that has had zero computer experience at all. There's NO way they are going to ever be as proficient under Linux as they could be under MacOS or Windows unless they have some Linuxhead do the installation of software and administration for them.
But, of course, that's precisely this situation; someone is going to be doing installation and administration.
Let's assume you have a drug that lets the new brain and the spine connect up. The problem is, the subject will need lots of therapy to essentially rewire things. One thing might actually help - many learned reflexes are actually stored in the spine.
A friend of mine suffered a back injury and lost the ability to run. He could stand, sit, walk, amble, mosey, shuffle, etc. But he couldn't run - the nerves that handled the "running algorithm" had been damaged. He had to relearn running from scratch, in his late teens.
If the nerves could be reattached, and the new brain and spine could learn to agree on signaling (a big if), then less therapy might be needed than one would expect. Still, the subject would probably walk, sit, run, etc. remarkably like the "old" person did.
It'd be interesting to see what other reflexes might transfer across; I have this image of Bill Gate's head on an "exotic dancer's" body. It's not a good image.
Well, okay, I can think of a couple, for sufficiently small values of "make sense":
Does anyone know why this is done? I asked our IS ("Incompetent Service") dept. here and was told they'd "rather not say".