If we are going to support fair use, and if we don't hold a great deal of truck with the idea that a copyright holder has eternal and arbitrary rights, then we can't really get on this side of this issue. Good on Lucas for his fair use. It's just a shame that his films started sucking.
Nonetheless, all you needed to do is read Godel, Eshcher, Bach and you would come up with the same result. If this is a problem with mechanical logic, it is also a problem with organic logic. After all, as a human being, I can't tell you whether a procedure like P (or whatever) is going to loop infinitely either, if that procedure is allowed to read my outputs.
The fact that I (as a human) am allowed to respond "duh, um, I just don't know" is not some super-power. I can write a computer program that just doesn't know the answer to a question as well. There; we just mimicked human intuition.
Yeah, FTL communication is cool, and I would agree that it is vital if it were at all possible, and I mean at all. It's not. The truth is that this type of laser teleportation is pretty arcane stuff, and doesn't move faster than the speed of light.
The question is begged, "what is the point of making a a laser go the speed of light? Isn't that like making a german sheppard go the speed of dog?" and the answer is um, sort of. Because the laser is reconstructed at the other location sort of faster than the speed of light, in that half of it arrives instantly (FTL) and the other half arrives at the speed of light.
This doesn't make any sense, but that's cool, so we'll keep going. The important thing to note is that the two halves of the laser beam (not really half, in the terms of 1/2 intensity or anything like that, it's more about the polarization, but we'll gloss over that) are needed to transmit any information. That's any information at all, including if the laser is even turned on or not.
That means that half of the laser can arrive from Jupiter, and the other half is en route for however long it takes for light to get here from Jupiter and you pretty much have to wait around.
(Actually, you can do a whole bunch of nifty calculations while you're waiting, and this is usually a good idea, but I've already dreadfully confused myself so let's skip that part.)
Then your speed-of-light transmission arrives with the other half of the data and you can reconstruct the original. Which is fabulous, and actually quite exciting, but importantly not faster than the speed of light.
Information turns out to be limited just like everything else is by the universal speed limit of 3X10^8m/s. So, if you want to go past, say, Mars, you're going to have to be ready for some lag on your phone call home. It's sad, but it's true.
Environmental activism is supposed to be all about preserving "Earth's delicate balance," of which extinction is a natural, and vital process.
Some environmentalists would agree with the 'delicate balance' thing, but that's the source of the problem. There is no balance, balance implies that something is pretty static, don't you think? Since there are important natural events like extinction, we know that the environment is constantly changing.
There is no balance, balance is bullshit. Extinction can't be part of a balance anyway, because it's a highly disruptive force. A balance in which extinction was natural and vital would be shifting so constantly and drastically that we wouldn't even know what we were trying to preserve.
The environmentalists that you describe exist, but are crazy. They would have campaigned against the pre-cambrian explosion that brought most of the species currently alive into existence. The only 'delicately balanced' earth would be one with no life on it at all.
In short, please stop defining things as 'good' because they're 'natural' there is not necessary implication of the first when one has proved the second (which one can't do anyway).
if there were none at all, why would TV make good shows?
Three of the biggest hyped shows of the past few seasons have been Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos, Sex in the City. Now, this is just my opinion, but these have also been a lot closer to "good" shows then Everyone wants to brutally murder Raymond.
Don't you get it? The advertising model is not working any more. Nobody watches them so it doesn't pay to buy them, commercial TV is crap, so they don't support anything good.
Of course, I download all the above HBO shows off of KaZaA, so the caTV model isn't really that much better.
These are the hardware issues, but do you know how complicated and cool the software issues are?
To start with, soccer is a team game -- one of the most interesting features of this type of work is figuring out how to make these robots work together, and independently. This is where you get your 'selfish / communal' (sometimes referred to as 'capitalist / communist') programming models.
Right now (if I remember correctly) the idea of rewarding the whole team for a goal -- the communal model -- is dominant, if individual players were all trying independantly for a goal-reward, then no one would pass, and the goalie would run across the field leaving the net open.
But, if you're going to have star players, or different roles for different identical team members, then you are going to have to incorporate the selfish model to a certain degree inside the communal model. This type of programming is interesting even without the hardware issues.
Reading the other posts, I have to say that this is the proper direction to be arguing. If you look at the political action groups that stricke the most fear in political chest cavities (hearts being absent), it's groups with religious or near-religious fervour.
The NRA, the Anti-abortion lobby, these people are fanatics. Political fanatics who are willing to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on nothing but a particular looney belief.
As much as I am devoted to liberties of information and so on, it's not the sort of thing that makes me want to scream, weep, and get into a club devoted to. As much as I'd love to spend a few bucks, this isn't the actual right route.
No one is ever going to be intimidated by a group of geeks because (and I know none of us get to hear this often, so relish it) we have a life. Compared to members of the Christian right or other highly-motivated looneys, we have a life.
Note, for example, that the feminst lobby doesn't exactly have politicians shaking in their boots. There are more women then there are geeks. Instead of trying to beat entertainment concerns dollar for dollar, it would make more sense to spend your time and energy on campaign-finance reform. That's the whole problem here. That's the battle that needs fighting.
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Good old dot-net. I know it's not supposed to be out yet, but.net, which is getting better at using internet technologies to keep the user updated with regards to unfamiliar file extensions (I tested it out with.ace, and it gave me a link to download the winace file archiver) should have been updated by now. Like the man says, it's two years late already.
Even better, since this is such a lie, what would it be like to grow up and find out that you're vapourware?
It will take a lot of experimentation and research before this is a reliable and feasible strategy; this article had no photos. I am pretty sure we're looking at a lie, here. Remember that the shameless self-promoters at ACT (and they have a huge research budget) didn't even get to blastocyst stage.
Still, the moral implications of human vapourware are something that we may want to discuss.
What about the story? Lots and lots of games have complex narratives. Although Q3 and other FPS games are basically graphics + code, even in these games, someone has to come up with what kind of bad guys would make sense.
I just want to point out that fictional elements don't exist outside of art. They are one of the cornerstones of art. Fundamentally, it tends to be useful to locate the artistic elements in certain portions of a medium instead of deciding whether the whole medium is artistic.
Things are a little different here. In the article, they say that the keylogger was just used to find the key for the encryption that the gangster was using. The actual key isn't really evidence -- whatever they decrypted is. Now; if the FBI can go into my house, and they have a search warrant, then they can open my safe. The method they use to find the combination of my safe isn't very important. Just as long as the decryption was legally done, and the data wasn't modified in order to incriminate the suspect, I don't see a problem here.
C, H, O and N are not as limited as they seem. What's more, bio systems are more than happy to branch into more exotic chemicals when needed, after all, Hemoglobin uses four Fe atoms to do the voodoo that it does so well.
One of the most interesting things that we are beginning to learn about bio nanomachines is that they tend to rely on their shape more than their bonding properties (except for stuff like hemoglobin, where the bonding properties are necessary, and then they tend to use just about anything). Shape is totatlly doable with a small set of building blocks. So far, we really don't need to second-guess the old pro. If we can do what bio does, then we're already there. Think about the fact that biology has covered the earth in solar panels. If we could find a way of using ATP to power our tools, then we could just pave the streets with chlorophyll and we wouldn't need power plants.
Wasn't looking to go with that 'plant' pun there.
The reason that embryonic stem cells seem like the best way to go at the moment is that absolutely no adult stem cell has been shown to produce *every* cell type on demand apart from embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells have proven to be multipotent -- they can produce several different types of cells. This is great, but embryonic stem cells are pluripotent -- they can produce every type of cell. (A full embryo -- in case someone is a big hound for completeness -- is totipotent and can not only produce any cell, but can produce a full, functioning human as well. This is not, however, useful to anyone but Dr. Moreau.)
The most important economic point is that in Everquest, there are things of value. If things exist, and these things have value, then the economic system is reasonable. As things stand, perhaps the people who play most have the most money, but in future the people who are richest in the real world will have the most money, because that's the way the modern economic system works.
Suppose we had a GNU project to do something similar; and published each and every solution which resulted - distributing this effort among thousands of GNU advocates.
That would be lovely. All that you would need to do is sort through the trillions of outputs to see if any of them were valuable.
This is a field test of an AI trial solution. The entirety of the attempt is to learn whether the GA is capable of coming up with inventions that are as sophisticated as those designed manually. If you stop using existing patents as the fitness function, you now need to have a method of learning which among the generated solutions is superior.
In the case of software patents, that means you need to be able to tell the computer what the ideal piece of software will do and how. That means, finally, that you have to detail every single part of the program before you can start evolving it. So, you might as well just write the code. You need to do this for every single piece of software you are trying to evolve.
Otherwise this would have already been done. What's more, if you want a complicated program, you'll probably need a lot more than a 1000-node cluster. Think about this, an evolutionary approach to Apache means that you would need to store in hard drive a large number of Apache prototypes which are in the process of evolving, then you would need to stress test these Apache prototypes one by one, and decide which one worked best. You would need to run a few hundreds of thousands of generations, minimum. That's a damn hell of a lot of processor usage.
Okay, listen. The Genetic Algorythm is NOT merely the act of analysing absolutely everything that is possible. That is not feasable. It is not iteration, either. The GA is a process that sets very specific 'fitness' functions and models a limited set of variables that can be changed randomly in order to work towards the highest fitness possible. Each genetic (should be called evolutionary, but it seems that I have already lost that battle) program is usually tailored for a specific problem.
If you think that you can write a program that models absolutely every possible invention, then go ahead and try. I have been working on a limited algorythm as a hobby project, and a decent fitness function is a very difficult creature to track down.
Antibiotic resistance is not a 'downside' or 'harmful side effect' of antibiotic technology.
Antibiotics have saved thousands of lives in the past half-century by killing bacteria. If anti-biotics are now less good at killing bacteria, this does not in any way negate the past successes. "Superbugs" as some irritating media technology writers and broadcasters have called them are simply exactly as dangerous as bacteria in the pre-anti-biotic world were. Going back to where we started is not a 'hazard', and what's more that's not where we're going. New antibiotics seem (at least so far) to be keeping up with resistance.
Sufficient testing means that accountable testing by a responsible third party. If you look around, there actually are some well-reasoned articles, and opinions out there describing the fact that the studies done by the biotech firms on their own product, not publicly available or accountable, are not spectacularly reliable.
Also, please note that the third link opens with an example of how traditional breeding *have*, in at least one case, produced dangerous alergens. They should probably be tested too. This is food, and it is commercially produced by giant corporations and distributed widely. An accountability structure needs to be developed beyond what exists today, because companies have no financial motive to make things safe, if they can make them cheap instead.
The non-seed producing crops are a short-term market owner. At the moment, you buy cheap gengeneered corn because you have to buy it every year. But in the short-term future (probably w/i the next few years, even) home-built hacks are going to appear. Selling genes is like selling code; it's basically just information.
This will be a huge party for the clever types who are willing to break laws to work around biotech-giant companies. If you think this is unlikely, look at this article from Utne Reader. Home biolabs are just around the corner. If someone wanted to tinker with a GM corn variety, all they would need to do is get one kernel of that corn, and they could pretty easily convince a crop to produce viable seeds.
The Utne article points out that animal biotech is virtually impossible at home, but that plant biotech is comparatively simple. Soon enough, we'll be seeing a host of patent violation lawsuits attacking websites that give step-by-step instructions on how to re-engineer your GM crops. The patented genes in those crops will soon enough look just a silly as the DMCA copyright stuff that we whine about so much.
Indeed, someone should get on producing a Slashdot icon for GM-hacking. Just to stay ahead of the curve
When I learned to read, I didn't start by memorizing oral poetry, and get to actual books after three years.
When I learned chemistry, I didn't start with colossal proteins, and wait for the third year before I found out about the periodic table.
When I learned about literature, I didn't start with 20th century authors and work backwards to Virgil and then Homer.
Why is CS being taught backwards? CS is taught in universities, to a group of students with sufficient background to understand Gödel and set theory. Why don't we start CS with Turing, and get to OO programming at the end?
It is valuable for programmers to understand the basic logical structures upon which the computer operates. These are interesting and would succesfully weed out the tourists. The truth is that most of the people who are entering CS programs these days are doing so because they think that "computers are full of lots of wires and stuff; and oh, yeah, a future" (quotation from an actual public transit ad that I saw a while ago).
Coding has become something like medicine and law: a career worth entering into just for the money. I am not profesionally connected with computer programming, so I can afford to be a bit of a purist on this issue. To tell you the truth, though, this is not a job market that will remain staggeringly profitable for any particularly long amount of time. Um, I have to admit that I find that kind of funny.
Just want to address the readability issue. This is not important as a learning language, indeed it is counter-productive. I went into first-year CS, and failed because I couldn't stand to attend the classes. Then I advanced to second-year CS (don't ask me how I did this after failing first-year) and again couldn't stand attending the classes. Java is DULL. Java is not the sort of stuff that interests people who are even remotely capable of being truly excited by coding.
This is especially true in terms of readablility. One of the most important skills that a programmer can learn is decent god damn commenting. If you are in CS, and are being taught in a language that is so self-explanatory that you need to write five lines of code to do what you should be doing in one (regardless of how fast it is at run-time, how user-friendly it is and all of that, the lack of pointer manipulation slows you down at coding time), then there is no need for proper commenting. It would be like commenting an english sentence.
This, of course, when one is in a CS program, leads to massive mark deductions. I happen to hate my university's CS program, and I am now the hell out of it, but a great part of the reason is the loathsomeness of Java. Sorry. Java(tm). Java(R)(corp)(tm)*.
This type of thing really frightens me. I wish it hadn't been modded so far down, because this is a valid opinion; we're talking about the books and this person has voiced an opinion on the subject of the books. It's not fair to mod it so far down, but it frightens the hell out of me.
Gentleman: I respect your opinion -- that witchcraft and magic are the sorts of ideas that are dangerous to children. I do on aggree with you, but I respect the opinion. I suggest that your religion is not everyone's and at a certain point even the most fundamental of Christians need to accept the fact that some people choose not to be 'saved' as you say. This choice does exist to us, even in your rather literal interpretation (this is a supposition) of the four gospels.
Seriously, I don't like hearing about burning books. One of the things about computers is that we have become too used to the concept of "rm". Literature, art of any kind in fact, is not transitory. It should not be deletable. It is, from a social perspective, read-only. Remember when the Taliban were trashing those statues, and the world was up in arms? Repeat after me: WE DO NOT DELETE OUR ARTISTIC WORKS, REGARDLESS OF HOW WE DISAGREE WITH THEM.
I really, really think that this is a fundamental feature of democracy. Bigger than the daft little ritual with the slips of paper that we slip into the box.
All this talk about mobile devices.
I would be nervous shaking even a "sturdy" hard drive while it was spinning. These things aren't gyro-stabilised or anything like that. From the article:
"The 531DX uses a technology called ramp loading that locks the head in a plastic latch above the drive surface when you power it down."
This means that when it's still powered up, the heads can still hit the platter, if (say) you brought your MP3 player to aerobics class. Still, it's a step in the right direction. If someone sold a hard drive that they were willing to guarantee to be shock-resistant *while in use*, I would snap it up for my laptop. No more sleep mode! Hell, I could use it as an MP3 player... um, for two hours. A giant, heavy, short-lived MP3 player.
I'd probably still stick it in my backpack and walk around wired to any anyway. Heh.
"an easy-to-understand slogan... important at the level of politics in getting people to understand what is at stake in a issue,"
How about "two legs bad, four legs good?" Oh wait, that's Orwellian again. I keep screwing this up.
Here's a novel idea -- how about we drop the slogans and the desperate scramble to make sure the 'people' understand. They will never understand. There will always be some people who just follow along with what's going on.
Issues like this should be dealt with by people that *understand* them. If we need to go scrambling around to find the best metaphor, then something is awry.
One thing you forgot to mention: the IBM 1GB Microdrive. Basically a 1 Gig hard drive, fits into a PCMCIA card. I know this makes me a laptop loser(tm), I run my life of an i Series thinkpad, but it's a pretty damn good storage method (if you can shell out the dough).
I can't afford one yet, but is HIGH on my wish list.
The main point is that floppy is dead. Everyone with a desktop is in a parrallel world -- laptops more and more these days don't bother with internal floppy drives, and that means that when push comes to shove, we can't boot of them once everything goes all flaky.
Bring on bootable CD BIOS and understand that the 3 1/4 floppy is as dead as 5 1/2 floppy. Even better, bring on bootable PCMCIA BIOS and bootable network drive BIOS. The only reason that you non-laptop people have floppy drives (and this comes from my experience working in a retailer) is that floppy drives are as cheap as dirt.
Not that fancy store bought dirt -- I can't compete with that stuff.
Floppy must die. Read my lips, no new floppies.
Okay, now I'm rambling. So I'm drunk, sue me. Nonetheless, the floppy is long obsolete, people have already mentioned that the stability of the medium is questionable (can anyone say corrupted FAT? I don't believe that anyone on/. hasn't seen a dead floppy more frequently than a scratched CD).
USB fancyness like the USB key mentioned recently or CD/DVD, or PCMCIA are the only things that make sense universally. This is a notepad-centric view, admittedly, but the fact that I have a hell of a time booting a distro so that I can get M$ Windoze off my ThinkPad(tm: big blue) means that everone needs to lose the floppy addiction, especially the open-source community.
Wow, that was vitriolic. I need to drink less.
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If we are going to support fair use, and if we don't hold a great deal of truck with the idea that a copyright holder has eternal and arbitrary rights, then we can't really get on this side of this issue. Good on Lucas for his fair use. It's just a shame that his films started sucking.
Nice poem.
Nonetheless, all you needed to do is read Godel, Eshcher, Bach and you would come up with the same result. If this is a problem with mechanical logic, it is also a problem with organic logic. After all, as a human being, I can't tell you whether a procedure like P (or whatever) is going to loop infinitely either, if that procedure is allowed to read my outputs.
The fact that I (as a human) am allowed to respond "duh, um, I just don't know" is not some super-power. I can write a computer program that just doesn't know the answer to a question as well. There; we just mimicked human intuition.
The question is begged, "what is the point of making a a laser go the speed of light? Isn't that like making a german sheppard go the speed of dog?" and the answer is um, sort of. Because the laser is reconstructed at the other location sort of faster than the speed of light, in that half of it arrives instantly (FTL) and the other half arrives at the speed of light.
This doesn't make any sense, but that's cool, so we'll keep going. The important thing to note is that the two halves of the laser beam (not really half, in the terms of 1/2 intensity or anything like that, it's more about the polarization, but we'll gloss over that) are needed to transmit any information. That's any information at all, including if the laser is even turned on or not.
That means that half of the laser can arrive from Jupiter, and the other half is en route for however long it takes for light to get here from Jupiter and you pretty much have to wait around.
(Actually, you can do a whole bunch of nifty calculations while you're waiting, and this is usually a good idea, but I've already dreadfully confused myself so let's skip that part.)
Then your speed-of-light transmission arrives with the other half of the data and you can reconstruct the original. Which is fabulous, and actually quite exciting, but importantly not faster than the speed of light.
Information turns out to be limited just like everything else is by the universal speed limit of 3X10^8m/s. So, if you want to go past, say, Mars, you're going to have to be ready for some lag on your phone call home. It's sad, but it's true.
Some environmentalists would agree with the 'delicate balance' thing, but that's the source of the problem. There is no balance, balance implies that something is pretty static, don't you think? Since there are important natural events like extinction, we know that the environment is constantly changing.
There is no balance, balance is bullshit. Extinction can't be part of a balance anyway, because it's a highly disruptive force. A balance in which extinction was natural and vital would be shifting so constantly and drastically that we wouldn't even know what we were trying to preserve.
The environmentalists that you describe exist, but are crazy. They would have campaigned against the pre-cambrian explosion that brought most of the species currently alive into existence. The only 'delicately balanced' earth would be one with no life on it at all.
In short, please stop defining things as 'good' because they're 'natural' there is not necessary implication of the first when one has proved the second (which one can't do anyway).
Three of the biggest hyped shows of the past few seasons have been Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos, Sex in the City. Now, this is just my opinion, but these have also been a lot closer to "good" shows then Everyone wants to brutally murder Raymond.
Don't you get it? The advertising model is not working any more. Nobody watches them so it doesn't pay to buy them, commercial TV is crap, so they don't support anything good.
Of course, I download all the above HBO shows off of KaZaA, so the caTV model isn't really that much better.
To start with, soccer is a team game -- one of the most interesting features of this type of work is figuring out how to make these robots work together, and independently. This is where you get your 'selfish / communal' (sometimes referred to as 'capitalist / communist') programming models.
Right now (if I remember correctly) the idea of rewarding the whole team for a goal -- the communal model -- is dominant, if individual players were all trying independantly for a goal-reward, then no one would pass, and the goalie would run across the field leaving the net open.
But, if you're going to have star players, or different roles for different identical team members, then you are going to have to incorporate the selfish model to a certain degree inside the communal model. This type of programming is interesting even without the hardware issues.
The NRA, the Anti-abortion lobby, these people are fanatics. Political fanatics who are willing to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on nothing but a particular looney belief.
As much as I am devoted to liberties of information and so on, it's not the sort of thing that makes me want to scream, weep, and get into a club devoted to. As much as I'd love to spend a few bucks, this isn't the actual right route.
No one is ever going to be intimidated by a group of geeks because (and I know none of us get to hear this often, so relish it) we have a life. Compared to members of the Christian right or other highly-motivated looneys, we have a life.
Note, for example, that the feminst lobby doesn't exactly have politicians shaking in their boots. There are more women then there are geeks. Instead of trying to beat entertainment concerns dollar for dollar, it would make more sense to spend your time and energy on campaign-finance reform. That's the whole problem here. That's the battle that needs fighting.
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Good old dot-net. I know it's not supposed to be out yet, but .net, which is getting better at using internet technologies to keep the user updated with regards to unfamiliar file extensions (I tested it out with .ace, and it gave me a link to download the winace file archiver) should have been updated by now. Like the man says, it's two years late already.
It will take a lot of experimentation and research before this is a reliable and feasible strategy; this article had no photos. I am pretty sure we're looking at a lie, here. Remember that the shameless self-promoters at ACT (and they have a huge research budget) didn't even get to blastocyst stage.
Still, the moral implications of human vapourware are something that we may want to discuss.
I just want to point out that fictional elements don't exist outside of art. They are one of the cornerstones of art. Fundamentally, it tends to be useful to locate the artistic elements in certain portions of a medium instead of deciding whether the whole medium is artistic.
Things are a little different here. In the article, they say that the keylogger was just used to find the key for the encryption that the gangster was using. The actual key isn't really evidence -- whatever they decrypted is. Now; if the FBI can go into my house, and they have a search warrant, then they can open my safe. The method they use to find the combination of my safe isn't very important. Just as long as the decryption was legally done, and the data wasn't modified in order to incriminate the suspect, I don't see a problem here.
C, H, O and N are not as limited as they seem. What's more, bio systems are more than happy to branch into more exotic chemicals when needed, after all, Hemoglobin uses four Fe atoms to do the voodoo that it does so well.
One of the most interesting things that we are beginning to learn about bio nanomachines is that they tend to rely on their shape more than their bonding properties (except for stuff like hemoglobin, where the bonding properties are necessary, and then they tend to use just about anything). Shape is totatlly doable with a small set of building blocks. So far, we really don't need to second-guess the old pro. If we can do what bio does, then we're already there. Think about the fact that biology has covered the earth in solar panels. If we could find a way of using ATP to power our tools, then we could just pave the streets with chlorophyll and we wouldn't need power plants.
Wasn't looking to go with that 'plant' pun there.
The reason that embryonic stem cells seem like the best way to go at the moment is that absolutely no adult stem cell has been shown to produce *every* cell type on demand apart from embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells have proven to be multipotent -- they can produce several different types of cells. This is great, but embryonic stem cells are pluripotent -- they can produce every type of cell. (A full embryo -- in case someone is a big hound for completeness -- is totipotent and can not only produce any cell, but can produce a full, functioning human as well. This is not, however, useful to anyone but Dr. Moreau.)
The most important economic point is that in Everquest, there are things of value. If things exist, and these things have value, then the economic system is reasonable. As things stand, perhaps the people who play most have the most money, but in future the people who are richest in the real world will have the most money, because that's the way the modern economic system works.
Suppose we had a GNU project to do something similar; and published each and every solution which resulted - distributing this effort among thousands of GNU advocates.
That would be lovely. All that you would need to do is sort through the trillions of outputs to see if any of them were valuable.
This is a field test of an AI trial solution. The entirety of the attempt is to learn whether the GA is capable of coming up with inventions that are as sophisticated as those designed manually. If you stop using existing patents as the fitness function, you now need to have a method of learning which among the generated solutions is superior.
In the case of software patents, that means you need to be able to tell the computer what the ideal piece of software will do and how. That means, finally, that you have to detail every single part of the program before you can start evolving it. So, you might as well just write the code. You need to do this for every single piece of software you are trying to evolve.
Otherwise this would have already been done. What's more, if you want a complicated program, you'll probably need a lot more than a 1000-node cluster. Think about this, an evolutionary approach to Apache means that you would need to store in hard drive a large number of Apache prototypes which are in the process of evolving, then you would need to stress test these Apache prototypes one by one, and decide which one worked best. You would need to run a few hundreds of thousands of generations, minimum. That's a damn hell of a lot of processor usage.
Okay, listen. The Genetic Algorythm is NOT merely the act of analysing absolutely everything that is possible. That is not feasable. It is not iteration, either. The GA is a process that sets very specific 'fitness' functions and models a limited set of variables that can be changed randomly in order to work towards the highest fitness possible. Each genetic (should be called evolutionary, but it seems that I have already lost that battle) program is usually tailored for a specific problem. If you think that you can write a program that models absolutely every possible invention, then go ahead and try. I have been working on a limited algorythm as a hobby project, and a decent fitness function is a very difficult creature to track down.
Antibiotic resistance is not a 'downside' or 'harmful side effect' of antibiotic technology.
Antibiotics have saved thousands of lives in the past half-century by killing bacteria. If anti-biotics are now less good at killing bacteria, this does not in any way negate the past successes. "Superbugs" as some irritating media technology writers and broadcasters have called them are simply exactly as dangerous as bacteria in the pre-anti-biotic world were. Going back to where we started is not a 'hazard', and what's more that's not where we're going. New antibiotics seem (at least so far) to be keeping up with resistance.
Sufficient testing means that accountable testing by a responsible third party. If you look around, there actually are some well-reasoned articles, and opinions out there describing the fact that the studies done by the biotech firms on their own product, not publicly available or accountable, are not spectacularly reliable.
Also, please note that the third link opens with an example of how traditional breeding *have*, in at least one case, produced dangerous alergens. They should probably be tested too. This is food, and it is commercially produced by giant corporations and distributed widely. An accountability structure needs to be developed beyond what exists today, because companies have no financial motive to make things safe, if they can make them cheap instead.
The non-seed producing crops are a short-term market owner. At the moment, you buy cheap gengeneered corn because you have to buy it every year. But in the short-term future (probably w/i the next few years, even) home-built hacks are going to appear. Selling genes is like selling code; it's basically just information.
This will be a huge party for the clever types who are willing to break laws to work around biotech-giant companies. If you think this is unlikely, look at this article from Utne Reader. Home biolabs are just around the corner. If someone wanted to tinker with a GM corn variety, all they would need to do is get one kernel of that corn, and they could pretty easily convince a crop to produce viable seeds.
The Utne article points out that animal biotech is virtually impossible at home, but that plant biotech is comparatively simple. Soon enough, we'll be seeing a host of patent violation lawsuits attacking websites that give step-by-step instructions on how to re-engineer your GM crops. The patented genes in those crops will soon enough look just a silly as the DMCA copyright stuff that we whine about so much.
Indeed, someone should get on producing a Slashdot icon for GM-hacking. Just to stay ahead of the curve
When I learned chemistry, I didn't start with colossal proteins, and wait for the third year before I found out about the periodic table.
When I learned about literature, I didn't start with 20th century authors and work backwards to Virgil and then Homer.
Why is CS being taught backwards? CS is taught in universities, to a group of students with sufficient background to understand Gödel and set theory. Why don't we start CS with Turing, and get to OO programming at the end?
It is valuable for programmers to understand the basic logical structures upon which the computer operates. These are interesting and would succesfully weed out the tourists. The truth is that most of the people who are entering CS programs these days are doing so because they think that "computers are full of lots of wires and stuff; and oh, yeah, a future" (quotation from an actual public transit ad that I saw a while ago).
Coding has become something like medicine and law: a career worth entering into just for the money. I am not profesionally connected with computer programming, so I can afford to be a bit of a purist on this issue. To tell you the truth, though, this is not a job market that will remain staggeringly profitable for any particularly long amount of time. Um, I have to admit that I find that kind of funny.
This is especially true in terms of readablility. One of the most important skills that a programmer can learn is decent god damn commenting. If you are in CS, and are being taught in a language that is so self-explanatory that you need to write five lines of code to do what you should be doing in one (regardless of how fast it is at run-time, how user-friendly it is and all of that, the lack of pointer manipulation slows you down at coding time), then there is no need for proper commenting. It would be like commenting an english sentence.
This, of course, when one is in a CS program, leads to massive mark deductions. I happen to hate my university's CS program, and I am now the hell out of it, but a great part of the reason is the loathsomeness of Java. Sorry. Java(tm). Java(R)(corp)(tm)*.
Hmm. Too drunk to be posting.
This type of thing really frightens me. I wish it hadn't been modded so far down, because this is a valid opinion; we're talking about the books and this person has voiced an opinion on the subject of the books. It's not fair to mod it so far down, but it frightens the hell out of me.
Gentleman: I respect your opinion -- that witchcraft and magic are the sorts of ideas that are dangerous to children. I do on aggree with you, but I respect the opinion. I suggest that your religion is not everyone's and at a certain point even the most fundamental of Christians need to accept the fact that some people choose not to be 'saved' as you say. This choice does exist to us, even in your rather literal interpretation (this is a supposition) of the four gospels.
Seriously, I don't like hearing about burning books. One of the things about computers is that we have become too used to the concept of "rm". Literature, art of any kind in fact, is not transitory. It should not be deletable. It is, from a social perspective, read-only. Remember when the Taliban were trashing those statues, and the world was up in arms? Repeat after me: WE DO NOT DELETE OUR ARTISTIC WORKS, REGARDLESS OF HOW WE DISAGREE WITH THEM.
I really, really think that this is a fundamental feature of democracy. Bigger than the daft little ritual with the slips of paper that we slip into the box.
All this talk about mobile devices.
I would be nervous shaking even a "sturdy" hard drive while it was spinning. These things aren't gyro-stabilised or anything like that. From the article:
"The 531DX uses a technology called ramp loading that locks the head in a plastic latch above the drive surface when you power it down."
This means that when it's still powered up, the heads can still hit the platter, if (say) you brought your MP3 player to aerobics class. Still, it's a step in the right direction. If someone sold a hard drive that they were willing to guarantee to be shock-resistant *while in use*, I would snap it up for my laptop. No more sleep mode! Hell, I could use it as an MP3 player... um, for two hours. A giant, heavy, short-lived MP3 player.
I'd probably still stick it in my backpack and walk around wired to any anyway. Heh.
How about "two legs bad, four legs good?" Oh wait, that's Orwellian again. I keep screwing this up.
Here's a novel idea -- how about we drop the slogans and the desperate scramble to make sure the 'people' understand. They will never understand. There will always be some people who just follow along with what's going on.
Issues like this should be dealt with by people that *understand* them. If we need to go scrambling around to find the best metaphor, then something is awry.
One thing you forgot to mention: the IBM 1GB Microdrive. Basically a 1 Gig hard drive, fits into a PCMCIA card. I know this makes me a laptop loser(tm), I run my life of an i Series thinkpad, but it's a pretty damn good storage method (if you can shell out the dough). /. hasn't seen a dead floppy more frequently than a scratched CD).
I can't afford one yet, but is HIGH on my wish list.
The main point is that floppy is dead. Everyone with a desktop is in a parrallel world -- laptops more and more these days don't bother with internal floppy drives, and that means that when push comes to shove, we can't boot of them once everything goes all flaky.
Bring on bootable CD BIOS and understand that the 3 1/4 floppy is as dead as 5 1/2 floppy. Even better, bring on bootable PCMCIA BIOS and bootable network drive BIOS. The only reason that you non-laptop people have floppy drives (and this comes from my experience working in a retailer) is that floppy drives are as cheap as dirt.
Not that fancy store bought dirt -- I can't compete with that stuff.
Floppy must die. Read my lips, no new floppies.
Okay, now I'm rambling. So I'm drunk, sue me. Nonetheless, the floppy is long obsolete, people have already mentioned that the stability of the medium is questionable (can anyone say corrupted FAT? I don't believe that anyone on
USB fancyness like the USB key mentioned recently or CD/DVD, or PCMCIA are the only things that make sense universally. This is a notepad-centric view, admittedly, but the fact that I have a hell of a time booting a distro so that I can get M$ Windoze off my ThinkPad(tm: big blue) means that everone needs to lose the floppy addiction, especially the open-source community.
Wow, that was vitriolic. I need to drink less.