Evolution is the aggrigate[sic] of mutations that manage to survive through generations.
Actually, you're "confusing the journey with the destination". The proper name for what you described is "species". Evolution is the process that produces them.
Of course, such terms are used so loosely by the media and the general population that confusion is inevitable.
If it doesn't fit in my pocket ...
on
The Future of the PDA
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I remember reading that back when the first Palm Pilot was being developed, there was a mantra among the developers to the effect that "If it doesn't fit in my pocket, it won't be in my pocket."
This is why I'd predict that the "smartphone" will win over the "PDA". The gadgets that are being marketed as PDAs now mostly are physically too large for the typical shirt pocket.
My wife even has a Treo, but she mostly leaves it home on the desk, because it's "too big", and carries a tiny cell phone that's just a phone. The Treo doesn't get used much, except for the few games she has loaded. (She loves the Sudoku puzzles.;-)
For several years, I had a Kyocera smartphone, which I used a lot as both phone and PDA. At least I did, until it lost its calendar, and when I tried to reload from backup, it "backed up" its (empty) calendar, wiping out the backup. So I went back to a paper pocket calendar, which is more powerful anyway.
When it started dying, due to a company subsidy I got a CrackBerry. It also fits in my pocket, and is a fairly good phone, but otherwise not too useful. Now that I don't work there any more, and pay for it myself, I find that it's not worth the money. If you're not on an Outlook email system, its email is fairly cruddy and difficult to use. Its browsers are all cruddy, not much better than the initial Mosaic release. And our attempts to use it as a modem all came to naught. (Yeah, the salesmen said it would work, but after the company signed the deal and gave us developers the BBs, we found that RIM's CS people couldn't be bothered to answer our question.) So much for the idea that it would get our laptops connected where there was no wifi.
Frankly, the things are mostly a waste of money, unless you have one with software tailored for the one job you need it for.
I keep hoping the handhelds.org people will come up with a way to do a pocket-size gadget that does GSM/GPRS/wifi and can also talk IP across a USB and/or Bluetooth link. With linux on board, including ssh, I could program the rest of the stuff myself, and we won't have to deal with the obtruction from the phone companies who insist on locking us out of the most useful stuff.
Yeah, I know; I'm dreaming. There's no way the US phone companies will allow a pipsqueak like me to use "their" infrastructure for my own development purposes.
That's right, simply burn 17MB CDLinux ISO (with Chinese language support) to a CD and "install" the disc into the CD-ROM drive. When the computer boots up, it will have a properly licensed operating system running.
Exactly. And now that we know how to do "live" CD OSs, this could easily become the norm in some parts of the world. The PC vendor has a rack of such CDs, asks you which OS you want, and slips the appropriate CD into the drive. You take the PC home, fire it up, and that OS boots with a screen asking if you'd like to install on the disk (so you can pull the CD out and insert a pirated music CD;-).
This does bring up an interesting question, though. That CD is in fact an add-on, which is a small but nonzero extra price. It's more subtle than the blatant "Microsoft tax" of the pre-installed Windows forced on customers that want linux or FreeBSD or whatever.
The general question is: Suppose I'm a poor person in some poor, remote place, and I'm looking for a cheap but usable computer. What are my options? How exactly can I minimize the price? How can I avoid these extra charges for little things that I don't want?
The question might be simple, but the answer is probably a large FAQ or maybe even a major web site, because of all the forces (like this MS-friendly "anti-piracy" decree) that want to add their favorite thing to my computer and collect their couple of yuan from me. Why should I pay the hidden tax of this "free" OS CD when I have one sitting on my desk at home?
One source of this question is the growing population of people running local "internet cafe" sites. It's not just hardware; there's also the question of dealing with internet providers, and cutting through their attempts to maximise income by imposing lots of mandatory "options".
Suppose I'm a small-time internet site in some remote location. What leverage do I have to persuade the local internet suppliers to just give me a connection with a specific bandwidth, and nothing else? Yes, I intend to run my own email server; I don't want to pay for your "smart server" service. Yes, I intend to register my own domain and run my own DNS server; I don't want to pay for yours. No, I don't need a web host; I know how to run my own. I just want IP connectivity with N bits/sec, thank you very much. And so on.
Is this info collected somewhere? Should I set up a site to collect it? (If so, I can see it taking a lot of disk space, so despite the fact that I live in a suburb of Boston, I just might be interested in the answers myself.;-)
If DRM becomes as oppressive as the big media players seem to want it to be, then it will drive people away from platforms requiring it and towards platforms that circumvent it.
Back in the late 80's and early 90's, I was involved in a case that got a lot less publicity, but is perhaps an instructive parallel.
At that time, AT&T's Sys/V unix was a market leader, and most vendors sold it with a curious restriction: The low-end systems had a limit of two simultaneous logins. For a price (on the order of $100), you could get an "upgrade" that relaxed this restriction. All it did was overwrite one or two bytes in one of the system files somewhere, but it would cost you.
There were the usual problems with the/bin/login program, however. The frustrating part was that when something didn't work, all you got was a cryptic message that didn't tell you what the problem was. So I wrote another login program that pretty much did what/bin/login did, but it had a -d option to specify a debug level, so you could get a detailed log of a login exchange, complete with lots of information about anything that failed.
It didn't enforce the login limit, because I didn't know how to determine the limit. There were discussions of this on mailing lists and newsgroups, where some people mentioned that they used my login mostly because it didn't enforce the login limit.
I publicly offered to implement the limit (as a command-line option;-), if only someone at AT&T would tell me where to find it. I never heard from them, though we knew that a lot of AT&T techies were reading the lists. Our theory was that if they told us where the limit was, we could simply erase it.
We certainly could, of course, but this was silly on its face. We didn't need to erase it; we had my login program, duh. There were a few questions as to whether my program was legal. But we decided that was also silly; it was just a program that opened a port, did a bit of I/O, and then exec'd another program. If that's illegal, it would shoot down lots of important commercial apps that used the serial ports to talk to lots of useful gadgetry. Requiring that a plugged-in gadget go through/bin/login's checks is nonsensical on its face.
Anyway you don't see any such discussion any more. To my knowledge, there are no longer any unix-like systems that have such a limit. At least I haven't encountered one for the last 8 or 10 years. Not even OS X has a login limit. (Anyone know of a system that does?)
These days, we're seeing the same fuss over DRM limits. These limits are just as arbitrary and artificial as AT&T's login limit was. The purpose is to prevent users from using their computers' capabilities without paying extra for an "upgrade" that amounts to overwriting a few bytes in some hidden config file. Such an upgrade must be possible, because if the DRM is enforced everywhere, everywhere includes recording studios and production facilities, and nobody can produce commercial recordings. So there has to be a way to allow DRM violations for "professional" customers who pay enough to get those few bytes changed.
I'm betting that DRM will fall to the same quandary that killed off the AT&T login limit.
Of course, if they give me specs for their DRM, I'll be happy to add it (as a command-line option;-) to my software. To make it easy, they should post the code (in C, perl, tcl and python, please) where we can all download it and use it.
Maybe we can add a +DRM option to the cp, scp and rsync commands. I wouldn't object to the inclusion of such an option.
I think there's a definite market for a Linux-based small office server, something that's easy to set up, deploy and maintain, and which doesn't require a lot of knowledge of Linux as an OS to keep running. I.e., everything should be accessible through GUI tools, lots of hand-holding through setup, use of Windows terminology,...
In a sense, you've just summarized why it probably won't ever happen.
What is needed can be summarized as a drop-in replacement for whatever MS-Windows system is currently in use.
This means that the linux system must not only mimic identically the latest MS system; it must also mimic every MS system ever sold. And it must do so without knowing what system the user has been using.
Microsoft isn't expected to do this. It's OK for them to radically change the GUI with every release. Users accept that, grumble, and learn to use it.
But if a non-MS system doesn't respond exactly as a user's old system did, it is immediately rejected, and the user goes back to the old MS system "until the linux system works like I expect".
No company could ever satisfy such a requirement. So it will never happen.
This technical term for this situation is "drop-dead requirement". It is used routinely by managers everywhere who know what they want, and aren't about to consider an alternative.
Linux systems can only be sold to customers who are as willing to devote as much time to learning linux as they are to learning the next Windows release. Evidence is that, at least in the US, this is somewhere between 5% and 10% of the potential "business" market. The rest will spent whatever time is required for Microsoft software but will reject any other system if the time is nonzero.
In other fields, this percentage tends to be a lot higher, so that's where most of the sales have been.
The potential for chilling effects in areas such as discussing whether the Hamas victory in the PA elections is a good thing is pretty high, what the real meaning of "Jihad" is, etc.
Actually, that's a pretty silly thing to try chilling, since you can find Arabic dictionaries quite easily. We have one, on a shelf next to our Hebrew, Greek and Latin dictionaries. (Anyone with a serious interest in European history should have these.) If you loook up "jihad" you'll see that it just means "struggle". Granted, you often hear other bogus translations, but those are just propaganda of the most transparent variety.
I heard a cute illustration a few months ago in a radio interview with somewho who mentioned a friend who had commented that her jihad was with weight loss.
I have this image of an NSA analyst who gets the recording of that phone conversation, translates it, and tries to make sense of that comment based on the media's mistranslation of "jihad".
Lessee; I claim that I'm "typing" without a typewriter, and that it's "wiretapping" to intercept a wireless communication, and that a set of pixels on the screen is a "button".
And you accuse me of talking about reality? You have a bizarre concept of reality. Maybe you are in need of therapy.;-)
If cows pollute more than cars, it's because we breed them in huge numbers. This is not "natural".
Perhaps, but the evidence is that before our agriculture, the grassland habitats that are best for grazing animals were populated with lots of large grazers. We may not have changed the total number by much; we just replaced the wild grazers with domesticated grazers. We really don't know which direction we changed the numbers.
But the really fun part of the methane story is the recent discovery of the "missing methane source". We'd had good estimates that roughly 1/3 of the methane came from our industrial pollution and 1/3 from ungulates (wild and domestic). But the remaining 1/3 was long a mystery. No more. We now know that most of the rest comes from termites.
This sounds like a joke, of course, and some of the science news stories were pretty funny in a geek-humor fashion. But it turns out that the total biomass of termites is greater than that of the grazing animals. Termites digest plant matter in much the same way as the large grazers, and they even use symbiotic bacteria that are close relatives of those inside cattle.
So imagine every second there are billions of tiny termite farts, each releasing a microlitre or so of CH4. There are trillions and trillions of termites in the world, each constantly letting go with tiny bursts of methane.
The world is more complex (and sometimes funnier) than we imagined.
BTW, geese and kangaroos are also grazers, and they add a tiny amount to the world's methane supply. But there aren't really enough of them to make a difference.
Actually, the story with clouds turns out to be a bit more complicated. Some studies of the subject have been published. The conclusions are that some kinds of clouds produce a net cooling; other kinds of clouds produce a net warming.
The weather satellites do give us pretty good information on the cloud cover, and the subject is known well enough to give good estimates of the total effect. Unfortunately, whether the total effect is "cooling" or "warming" varies on a daily (or hourly) time scale.
With a bit of googling, you can find a number of discussions of the topic. I just asked google about "cloud cover warming cooling effect", and got over 1.6 million hits. A casual glance shows that you have quite a lot of reading ahead if you want to understand the topic. Words like "variable", "depends" and "mixed" are common in these articles.
I would think a mirror surface that is completely reflective would be most effective, but light colored surfaces would have some effect as well.
So what we should do is have a law that all new roofs shall be white, or a very light color.
I wonder what the total area of the world's roofs is?
There has been a related suggestion, that in urban areas, most roofs should be converted to greenhouses, to be used to grow perishables like vegetables. This would intercept a lot of incoming sunlight and convert it to hydrocarbons (thus taking CO2 out of the air), and would cut down on transportation costs for the crops.
This has actually been done on a small scale in some parts of the world, and seems to work pretty well. Whether it could be scaled up to significantly effect global warming isn't obvious.
In any case, it could involve some serious construction costs on old buildings, whose roofs are generally not suitable to handle the load. With new buildings, it could be done without much added cost.
Anyway, it's fun to read about such ideas. But orbiting a large sunshade is an even more fun idea.
[T]he government would have to out google Google...
Nah; they'd just have to pay google to install the software. Google makes quite a lot of money leasing their software to organizations with private networks. Why wouldn't you expect them to also lease it to the US government? I'd be astounded if this wasn't being done.
Despite all of NSA's expertise, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did at least part of their analysis and indexing with google software. If there's a good commercial product for a job, why not use it?
AT&T is a company, it's not a government. They can do what they want with their customers data...
Actually, they're more a shell corporation that exists partly so that this sort of logic can be used to exempt them from legal restrictions (such as the Bill of Rights) than would apply to a government agency. They have always been a government agency in all but the legal niceties.
Their basic business involves selling something that pretty much has to be done by a government agency. Otherwise, we'd have the scenario of hundreds or thousands of companies running wires down our streets. At any given time, half those wires would be down, the streets would be impassible by vehicles, and our kids and pets would be in danger of electrocution if they wandered outside. So the government outlaw such wiring, except to strictly regulated corporations.
(This isn't hypothetical. Here in Boston, we've had several large dogs electrocuted by contact with a manhole cover, and in New York, at least one human has died this way. The pseudo-private electric companies haven't been punished in any meaningful way for these deaths.)
The problem is that in the US and many other countries, there are legal restrictions on how a government agency can (mis)use this wiring. The Bill of Rights guarantees us freedom of speech, assembly, and so on. A government agency couldn't enforce a "no servers" rule, for instance; we'd just say "First Ammendment", and the courts would rule in our favor. A government agency couldn't legally restrict our use of the wires, just as they can't restrict our use of the roads, unless they could show that we're engaged in illegal activities. A government agency couldn't intercept and record our traffic without a court order.
But AT&T can legally do all these things, because legally they're "not government". They are created by the government, their monopoly is enforced by the government, and they are at the mercy of the government for their regulated profits. So they act like a government agency, but one without the need to abide by such silly restrictions as the Bill of Rights.
We're just seeing one of the more blatant violations of the Bill of Rights that this legal arrangement makes possible.
Is it still technically 'wiretapping' if there is no wire,...?
Sure, just as what I'm doing now is "typing" although there's not a typewriter in the house.
It's still "wiretapping" when it's wireless, as this message will be when I hit the "Submit" button.
For that matter, that thingie is still a "button" although it's just made of pixels on the screen, and will cease to "exist" milliseconds after I "hit" it.
If we're not careful, this could lead to a deep discussion on the nature of reality. Or at least the nature of linguistic referents.
Start using it, get everyone you know to use it. Encrypt everything.
Exactly. Those of us who are Internet old-timers have long understood that the online world is in fact totally open. There is no privacy online. Never has been, and never will be.
You should always assume that everything here is visible to everyone, and may be archived at lots of places you don't know about. The NSA's archives are just one of many places where our words and pictures are being enshrined for posterity. Consider, for example, that every email you've ever sent is potentially available to every prospective employer, and to all your relatives and friends.
There is nothing much any of us can do about this. If you don't like this, don't put things online. This includes email. As soon as it goes out of your machine, you have no way of knowing who has a copy.
Encryption is partly successful at fighting this. If you've used a good encryption scheme, reading your words will be very expensive for a bystander, so they won't do it without good reason. But with enough computing power, most encryption other than a truly random one-time pad can be broken. And computing power is getting cheaper, so with time, the cost of decrypting your stuff will drop. So it will mostly buy you time before your stuff can be read by everyone.
The real problem now is that, while everything on the Internet is potentially visible to those with political and economic power, the opposite isn't true. Imagine the effects if everything in every government and corporate office (and neighborhood bar;-) were visible to the public.
OK; what would mostly happen is that in most cases the onlookers would fall asleep. But it's interesting to think of a world in which we could access all of our own governments' and employers' information. This could go a long way toward loosening their power over us.
There have been a few sci-fi novels written that deal with such a scenario. Anyone want to mention their favorite?
Oh, I dunno; a quick glance over the messages here show that the overwhelming majority express some sort of disagreement with their parent. I'd conclude that at least the/. readers who deign to post messages are highly unlikely to take what they read at face value.
You may also notice a certain amount of self-reference in this message...
Well, I was thinking of asking an even closer question: In a discussion of George Bush, which name is more likely to pop up first, Orwell or Mussolini? Or Stalin, for that matter.
I wonder if we could get reliable statistics?... wanders off to google window...
Imagine that you can't view web pages anymore, because of some change made to the HTML standard. Who is to blame for this? Is it the standards body's fault? Or is it exclusively the responsibility of the people who make your browser?
In my experience, this has amost always been Microsoft's fault. They made and sold the software that generated the standards-volating (-redefining?;-) web page. When I investigate a page that doesn't work in some browser, I almost always find evidence in the HTML header that it was produced by MS software.
I don't blame the users of this software, who are generally not techies, but rather "users" who just want to create web pages, and they've been convinced by others that you need fancy-schmancy complicated GUI tools to do this. They were suckered by MS; they're not the ones to blame.
Of course, MS isn't the only culprit here; they're just the biggest, baddest of a bad lot. Thus, I've been in a few discussions about the problems with commedycentral.com, especially the Daily Show's videos. Web geeks that first look at the html behind this site are usually shocked that something can be so incredibly poorly done. They usually express aesthetic offense at what they see. Then they notice that it's only the video clips that have problems; the ads work just fine. So it's not an accident.
But examining their html doesn't seem to turn up any evidence that MS was involved. They run on Sun servers, and there is enough variety in the html to infer that a number of different packages are involved. None of them seem to identify the producing software at all. This in itself says that it's probably not from MS software, because they usually include boilerplate ads for the software.
In any case, there is plenty of blame to pass around for web pages that "extend" the standards. Microsoft isn't the only one trying to make life difficult for users of competitors' equipment. But they are easily the biggest and worst violator.
It's proof beyond a reasonable doubt for the existence of the creature and clear and convincing evidence of the predictive power of evolution theory. Some countries put people on electric chairs based on less 'proof' than that.;)
Heh. You're right there. And I guess it just shows that the religious and right-wing political folks hold science to a much higher standard of proof than scientists (or lawyers) do.
It doesn't sound like there's any denying going on, but rather a question regarding the impact?
Actually, the Bush gang does seem to have wised up that the denial isn't really going over all that well. So they've switched to the traditional "Further research is needed" approach.
"Yes, some scientists say there's warming, but they don't agree on exactly how much or exactly what the causes are. We should wait until the scientists can reduce their error estimates to zero and prove exactly what's happening. Until then, we should all just go about our business as usual."
And since science hardly ever actually proves anything, this amounts to an indefinite delay to taking any action that might interfere with business and industry.
One of the interesting codes is the recent use of the phrase "sound science" by the Republicans (and a few others). If you look for the definition, you'll find that it means science that can absolutely prove its results, with no error bars or conjectures remaining. This sounds good to most non-scientists. But hardly anything in science has ever been proved to this degree. Scientists are still testing the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Relativity, and even the Law of Gravity. (They're all hoping to become famous for finding a loophole.;-) We'll all be dead for centuries before they even get close with something as complex and chaotic as weather and climate.
So basically Bush & Co are insisting that we wait until scientists have done something that science doesn't do. It may be a long wait.
[I]f you're going to compare our pollution with Mt. Tamboras then shouldn't we have global cooling?
No, because the pollution is different.
Actually, we used to produce a lot more cooling pollution. It was mostly in the form of smoke from incomplete burning of wood and fossil fuels. Smoke and other particulates tend to intercept incoming sunlight and reflect it back out, decreasing the solar power flux at ground level and cooling things down.
But our industry learned how to burn those things much more "cleanly", getting more energy out of them, and releasing mostly CO2. That's a "greenhouse" gas that tends to absorb sunlight and warm the surrounding air molecules.
Actually, of course, both volcanoes and human industry have always produced both effects. With volcanoes, the cooling effects usually dominate. With our industry, we've slowly moved to mostly heating effects.
There's lots of literature that talks about the details of all this. In recent decades, a lot of major volcanoes and other volcanic spots (such as Mount Saint Helens, Mount Etna, Yellowstone and Iceland) have been heavily instrumented, and the data is mostly available online. It was physicists who invented the Web, after all, so they could share their research data. We also have a lot of worldwide atmospheric data online, thanks to NOAA and similar research orgs in other countries.
Digging through all that dry data can take time, and we can hardly expect the typical citizen to do it. This is part of why there's a fuss at NASA and NOAA. People there have been digging through the data, or more accurately, writing software to do it.
The Bush administration doesn't like their conclusions, for mostly business reasons, and has tried to block the release of the scientific results. They're not the only politicians doing this of course; they're just the most powerful at the moment. And they're not subtle about it. Ordering a top NASA administrator not to talk to an NPR interviewer is about as in-your-face as you can get, and that's not an isolated incident.
But the planet doesn't care. It will react as it reacts, and we'll have to live with the consequences. Or not, as the case may be.
Yes, this is bad news for regular users, but its also bad for the big telcos.... The reason is that telcos think only in terms of their own networks, not in terms of the internet as a whole.
Yup. And this is yet another example of a universal problem that the DoD's ARPAnet project was originally funded to solve.
The basic problem back in the 60's was that the government was findingg itself with more and more comm equipment, but most gadgets would only communicate with other gadgets from the same vendor. The vendors were unwilling and/or unable to make their gadgets talk to ther vendors' gadgets. The ARPAnet project, which eventually evolved into the Internet, had the explicit goal of making everything talk to everything else. This was done by adding software (initially in separate computers called IMPs) that implemented a higher-level comm protocol, with routines to translate to/from all the "local" protocols that various gadgetry used.
As we know, this was rather successful. But vendors have never stopped fighting the basic idea. They repeatedly try to sell equipment that won't play nice with competitors' equipment. These days the usual scheme is to imlement the IP protocols, but to do it in ways that make the competition look bad.
And now that the telcos are involved in supplying Internet infrastructure, they are playing the same game. Like any corporation, they really want monopoly control, so they can charge "monopoly rents" without the need to bother with good service. And they're trying to implement all the traditional tools that big corporations have to prevent a free market from arising.
Primary of these, of course, is to bribe the government. That's why most of us have no more than one legal supplier of high-speed access. Access to the wires is a legal monopoly, enforced by your friendly local government. In the few areas where they can't get away with this, they try all the other anti-market techniques that have worked in the past. That's really what we're discussing now.
If they can legally discriminate for/against packets based on source/dest address, then they can make sure that you can't get good access to sites that they don't approve of. Being corporations, such disapproval comes mostly from those sites not paying them enough to get in their high-speed address list.
It's all about imposing a monopoly "market" and charging monopoly rents.
History depends on retrodiction to prove the validity of theories, and retrodiction always uses this teleological perspective.
One picky point: The terms "retrodiction" and "postdiction" seem to be in competition. The paired prefixes "pre-" and "post-" would say that "prediction" and "postdiction" are the better pair. And "postdiction" is one char shorter, which will probably save you several seconds of typing over your lifetime.;-)
Anyway, whichever you call it, this is a good example. One of the creationists bogus claims is that paleontology can't make predictions, because they can't find fossils from the future. This is a parody, of course, but it's the essence of the logical fallacy.
The answer to this, as with other non-experimental sciences such as astronomy, is that evolutionary biology can't make predictions per se, but it can make postdictions. And in this case, that's what the scientists did.
They had a pretty good estimate of when the first vertebrates moved onto land, roughly between 350 and 400 million years. They made the "prediction" that if we could find strata that date to the middle of that period, where the original terrain was shallow water along shorelines, we should find fossils of the intermediate forms. The fossils should look like lobe-finned fish, but the lobes should be extended into limbs that could function somewhat poorly on land. This would allow the critters to crawl out of the water to escape predators, at a time when there weren't any large predators on land.
Consulting with geologists turned up just such strata, unfortunately on Ellesmere Island. The biologists went there during the brief only-slightly-horrible summer, and found just the sort of transitional fossils that they expected, before the weather returned to its normal deep freeze.
This is a classical "postdiction", i.e., a prediction of what you'll find if you dig in such-and-such a place. As such, it's goood support for the biologists' understanding of how vertebrates colonized the land. It's not proof, of course, because scientists generally don't do proof. Rather, it's a demo of the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
And there's really no teleology here. Tiktaalik wasn't trying to evolve into us. It was probably just trying to get out of the reach of large predators. The ones that did this the best survived to leave offspring. Maybe they were our ancestors, though these particular individuals probably weren't.
Also, media hype aside, it's not any sort of startling discovery. We already had other fossils of fragments of transitional forms. But these are some of the best such fossils that we have. Some of them are nearly complete. And they're pretty much what we expected, based on the earlier partial fossils of similar critters.
These fossils are destined to be textbook illustrations for the next couple decades. And some paleontologists are destined to spend many of their future Junes on Ellesmere Island. They'll probably be making jokes about how global warming isn't happening fast enough for them.
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Evolution is the aggrigate[sic] of mutations that manage to survive through generations.
Actually, you're "confusing the journey with the destination". The proper name for what you described is "species". Evolution is the process that produces them.
Of course, such terms are used so loosely by the media and the general population that confusion is inevitable.
I remember reading that back when the first Palm Pilot was being developed, there was a mantra among the developers to the effect that "If it doesn't fit in my pocket, it won't be in my pocket."
;-)
This is why I'd predict that the "smartphone" will win over the "PDA". The gadgets that are being marketed as PDAs now mostly are physically too large for the typical shirt pocket.
My wife even has a Treo, but she mostly leaves it home on the desk, because it's "too big", and carries a tiny cell phone that's just a phone. The Treo doesn't get used much, except for the few games she has loaded. (She loves the Sudoku puzzles.
For several years, I had a Kyocera smartphone, which I used a lot as both phone and PDA. At least I did, until it lost its calendar, and when I tried to reload from backup, it "backed up" its (empty) calendar, wiping out the backup. So I went back to a paper pocket calendar, which is more powerful anyway.
When it started dying, due to a company subsidy I got a CrackBerry. It also fits in my pocket, and is a fairly good phone, but otherwise not too useful. Now that I don't work there any more, and pay for it myself, I find that it's not worth the money. If you're not on an Outlook email system, its email is fairly cruddy and difficult to use. Its browsers are all cruddy, not much better than the initial Mosaic release. And our attempts to use it as a modem all came to naught. (Yeah, the salesmen said it would work, but after the company signed the deal and gave us developers the BBs, we found that RIM's CS people couldn't be bothered to answer our question.) So much for the idea that it would get our laptops connected where there was no wifi.
Frankly, the things are mostly a waste of money, unless you have one with software tailored for the one job you need it for.
I keep hoping the handhelds.org people will come up with a way to do a pocket-size gadget that does GSM/GPRS/wifi and can also talk IP across a USB and/or Bluetooth link. With linux on board, including ssh, I could program the rest of the stuff myself, and we won't have to deal with the obtruction from the phone companies who insist on locking us out of the most useful stuff.
Yeah, I know; I'm dreaming. There's no way the US phone companies will allow a pipsqueak like me to use "their" infrastructure for my own development purposes.
That's right, simply burn 17MB CDLinux ISO (with Chinese language support) to a CD and "install" the disc into the CD-ROM drive. When the computer boots up, it will have a properly licensed operating system running.
;-).
;-)
Exactly. And now that we know how to do "live" CD OSs, this could easily become the norm in some parts of the world. The PC vendor has a rack of such CDs, asks you which OS you want, and slips the appropriate CD into the drive. You take the PC home, fire it up, and that OS boots with a screen asking if you'd like to install on the disk (so you can pull the CD out and insert a pirated music CD
This does bring up an interesting question, though. That CD is in fact an add-on, which is a small but nonzero extra price. It's more subtle than the blatant "Microsoft tax" of the pre-installed Windows forced on customers that want linux or FreeBSD or whatever.
The general question is: Suppose I'm a poor person in some poor, remote place, and I'm looking for a cheap but usable computer. What are my options? How exactly can I minimize the price? How can I avoid these extra charges for little things that I don't want?
The question might be simple, but the answer is probably a large FAQ or maybe even a major web site, because of all the forces (like this MS-friendly "anti-piracy" decree) that want to add their favorite thing to my computer and collect their couple of yuan from me. Why should I pay the hidden tax of this "free" OS CD when I have one sitting on my desk at home?
One source of this question is the growing population of people running local "internet cafe" sites. It's not just hardware; there's also the question of dealing with internet providers, and cutting through their attempts to maximise income by imposing lots of mandatory "options".
Suppose I'm a small-time internet site in some remote location. What leverage do I have to persuade the local internet suppliers to just give me a connection with a specific bandwidth, and nothing else? Yes, I intend to run my own email server; I don't want to pay for your "smart server" service. Yes, I intend to register my own domain and run my own DNS server; I don't want to pay for yours. No, I don't need a web host; I know how to run my own. I just want IP connectivity with N bits/sec, thank you very much. And so on.
Is this info collected somewhere? Should I set up a site to collect it?
(If so, I can see it taking a lot of disk space, so despite the fact that I live in a suburb of Boston, I just might be interested in the answers myself.
Yeah, I thought I'd read somewhere that some Windows releases did this. But I thought I'd avoid the MS-bashing (for once), and let others do it.
Hey, Windows does have a POSIX library.
Though some have suggested that it be called a "wierdnix" library. Google for it if you don't recognize the term.
If DRM becomes as oppressive as the big media players seem to want it to be, then it will drive people away from platforms requiring it and towards platforms that circumvent it.
/bin/login program, however. The frustrating part was that when something didn't work, all you got was a cryptic message that didn't tell you what the problem was. So I wrote another login program that pretty much did what /bin/login did, but it had a -d option to specify a debug level, so you could get a detailed log of a login exchange, complete with lots of information about anything that failed.
;-), if only someone at AT&T would tell me where to find it. I never heard from them, though we knew that a lot of AT&T techies were reading the lists. Our theory was that if they told us where the limit was, we could simply erase it.
/bin/login's checks is nonsensical on its face.
;-) to my software. To make it easy, they should post the code (in C, perl, tcl and python, please) where we can all download it and use it.
Back in the late 80's and early 90's, I was involved in a case that got a lot less publicity, but is perhaps an instructive parallel.
At that time, AT&T's Sys/V unix was a market leader, and most vendors sold it with a curious restriction: The low-end systems had a limit of two simultaneous logins. For a price (on the order of $100), you could get an "upgrade" that relaxed this restriction. All it did was overwrite one or two bytes in one of the system files somewhere, but it would cost you.
There were the usual problems with the
It didn't enforce the login limit, because I didn't know how to determine the limit. There were discussions of this on mailing lists and newsgroups, where some people mentioned that they used my login mostly because it didn't enforce the login limit.
I publicly offered to implement the limit (as a command-line option
We certainly could, of course, but this was silly on its face. We didn't need to erase it; we had my login program, duh. There were a few questions as to whether my program was legal. But we decided that was also silly; it was just a program that opened a port, did a bit of I/O, and then exec'd another program. If that's illegal, it would shoot down lots of important commercial apps that used the serial ports to talk to lots of useful gadgetry. Requiring that a plugged-in gadget go through
Anyway you don't see any such discussion any more. To my knowledge, there are no longer any unix-like systems that have such a limit. At least I haven't encountered one for the last 8 or 10 years. Not even OS X has a login limit. (Anyone know of a system that does?)
These days, we're seeing the same fuss over DRM limits. These limits are just as arbitrary and artificial as AT&T's login limit was. The purpose is to prevent users from using their computers' capabilities without paying extra for an "upgrade" that amounts to overwriting a few bytes in some hidden config file. Such an upgrade must be possible, because if the DRM is enforced everywhere, everywhere includes recording studios and production facilities, and nobody can produce commercial recordings. So there has to be a way to allow DRM violations for "professional" customers who pay enough to get those few bytes changed.
I'm betting that DRM will fall to the same quandary that killed off the AT&T login limit.
Of course, if they give me specs for their DRM, I'll be happy to add it (as a command-line option
Maybe we can add a +DRM option to the cp, scp and rsync commands. I wouldn't object to the inclusion of such an option.
I think there's a definite market for a Linux-based small office server, something that's easy to set up, deploy and maintain, and which doesn't require a lot of knowledge of Linux as an OS to keep running. I.e., everything should be accessible through GUI tools, lots of hand-holding through setup, use of Windows terminology, ...
In a sense, you've just summarized why it probably won't ever happen.
What is needed can be summarized as a drop-in replacement for whatever MS-Windows system is currently in use.
This means that the linux system must not only mimic identically the latest MS system; it must also mimic every MS system ever sold. And it must do so without knowing what system the user has been using.
Microsoft isn't expected to do this. It's OK for them to radically change the GUI with every release. Users accept that, grumble, and learn to use it.
But if a non-MS system doesn't respond exactly as a user's old system did, it is immediately rejected, and the user goes back to the old MS system "until the linux system works like I expect".
No company could ever satisfy such a requirement. So it will never happen.
This technical term for this situation is "drop-dead requirement". It is used routinely by managers everywhere who know what they want, and aren't about to consider an alternative.
Linux systems can only be sold to customers who are as willing to devote as much time to learning linux as they are to learning the next Windows release. Evidence is that, at least in the US, this is somewhere between 5% and 10% of the potential "business" market. The rest will spent whatever time is required for Microsoft software but will reject any other system if the time is nonzero.
In other fields, this percentage tends to be a lot higher, so that's where most of the sales have been.
The potential for chilling effects in areas such as discussing whether the Hamas victory in the PA elections is a good thing is pretty high, what the real meaning of "Jihad" is, etc.
Actually, that's a pretty silly thing to try chilling, since you can find Arabic dictionaries quite easily. We have one, on a shelf next to our Hebrew, Greek and Latin dictionaries. (Anyone with a serious interest in European history should have these.) If you loook up "jihad" you'll see that it just means "struggle". Granted, you often hear other bogus translations, but those are just propaganda of the most transparent variety.
I heard a cute illustration a few months ago in a radio interview with somewho who mentioned a friend who had commented that her jihad was with weight loss.
I have this image of an NSA analyst who gets the recording of that phone conversation, translates it, and tries to make sense of that comment based on the media's mistranslation of "jihad".
But you are talking about reality.
;-)
Lessee; I claim that I'm "typing" without a typewriter, and that it's "wiretapping" to intercept a wireless communication, and that a set of pixels on the screen is a "button".
And you accuse me of talking about reality? You have a bizarre concept of reality. Maybe you are in need of therapy.
If cows pollute more than cars, it's because we breed them in huge numbers. This is not "natural".
Perhaps, but the evidence is that before our agriculture, the grassland habitats that are best for grazing animals were populated with lots of large grazers. We may not have changed the total number by much; we just replaced the wild grazers with domesticated grazers. We really don't know which direction we changed the numbers.
But the really fun part of the methane story is the recent discovery of the "missing methane source". We'd had good estimates that roughly 1/3 of the methane came from our industrial pollution and 1/3 from ungulates (wild and domestic). But the remaining 1/3 was long a mystery. No more. We now know that most of the rest comes from termites.
This sounds like a joke, of course, and some of the science news stories were pretty funny in a geek-humor fashion. But it turns out that the total biomass of termites is greater than that of the grazing animals. Termites digest plant matter in much the same way as the large grazers, and they even use symbiotic bacteria that are close relatives of those inside cattle.
So imagine every second there are billions of tiny termite farts, each releasing a microlitre or so of CH4. There are trillions and trillions of termites in the world, each constantly letting go with tiny bursts of methane.
The world is more complex (and sometimes funnier) than we imagined.
BTW, geese and kangaroos are also grazers, and they add a tiny amount to the world's methane supply. But there aren't really enough of them to make a difference.
Actually, the story with clouds turns out to be a bit more complicated. Some studies of the subject have been published. The conclusions are that some kinds of clouds produce a net cooling; other kinds of clouds produce a net warming.
The weather satellites do give us pretty good information on the cloud cover, and the subject is known well enough to give good estimates of the total effect. Unfortunately, whether the total effect is "cooling" or "warming" varies on a daily (or hourly) time scale.
With a bit of googling, you can find a number of discussions of the topic. I just asked google about "cloud cover warming cooling effect", and got over 1.6 million hits. A casual glance shows that you have quite a lot of reading ahead if you want to understand the topic. Words like "variable", "depends" and "mixed" are common in these articles.
I would think a mirror surface that is completely reflective would be most effective, but light colored surfaces would have some effect as well.
So what we should do is have a law that all new roofs shall be white, or a very light color.
I wonder what the total area of the world's roofs is?
There has been a related suggestion, that in urban areas, most roofs should be converted to greenhouses, to be used to grow perishables like vegetables. This would intercept a lot of incoming sunlight and convert it to hydrocarbons (thus taking CO2 out of the air), and would cut down on transportation costs for the crops.
This has actually been done on a small scale in some parts of the world, and seems to work pretty well. Whether it could be scaled up to significantly effect global warming isn't obvious.
In any case, it could involve some serious construction costs on old buildings, whose roofs are generally not suitable to handle the load. With new buildings, it could be done without much added cost.
Anyway, it's fun to read about such ideas. But orbiting a large sunshade is an even more fun idea.
[T]he government would have to out google Google ...
Nah; they'd just have to pay google to install the software. Google makes quite a lot of money leasing their software to organizations with private networks. Why wouldn't you expect them to also lease it to the US government? I'd be astounded if this wasn't being done.
Despite all of NSA's expertise, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did at least part of their analysis and indexing with google software. If there's a good commercial product for a job, why not use it?
AT&T is a company, it's not a government. They can do what they want with their customers data ...
Actually, they're more a shell corporation that exists partly so that this sort of logic can be used to exempt them from legal restrictions (such as the Bill of Rights) than would apply to a government agency. They have always been a government agency in all but the legal niceties.
Their basic business involves selling something that pretty much has to be done by a government agency. Otherwise, we'd have the scenario of hundreds or thousands of companies running wires down our streets. At any given time, half those wires would be down, the streets would be impassible by vehicles, and our kids and pets would be in danger of electrocution if they wandered outside. So the government outlaw such wiring, except to strictly regulated corporations.
(This isn't hypothetical. Here in Boston, we've had several large dogs electrocuted by contact with a manhole cover, and in New York, at least one human has died this way. The pseudo-private electric companies haven't been punished in any meaningful way for these deaths.)
The problem is that in the US and many other countries, there are legal restrictions on how a government agency can (mis)use this wiring. The Bill of Rights guarantees us freedom of speech, assembly, and so on. A government agency couldn't enforce a "no servers" rule, for instance; we'd just say "First Ammendment", and the courts would rule in our favor. A government agency couldn't legally restrict our use of the wires, just as they can't restrict our use of the roads, unless they could show that we're engaged in illegal activities. A government agency couldn't intercept and record our traffic without a court order.
But AT&T can legally do all these things, because legally they're "not government". They are created by the government, their monopoly is enforced by the government, and they are at the mercy of the government for their regulated profits. So they act like a government agency, but one without the need to abide by such silly restrictions as the Bill of Rights.
We're just seeing one of the more blatant violations of the Bill of Rights that this legal arrangement makes possible.
Is it still technically 'wiretapping' if there is no wire, ...?
...
Sure, just as what I'm doing now is "typing" although there's not a typewriter in the house.
It's still "wiretapping" when it's wireless, as this message will be when I hit the "Submit" button.
For that matter, that thingie is still a "button" although it's just made of pixels on the screen, and will cease to "exist" milliseconds after I "hit" it.
If we're not careful, this could lead to a deep discussion on the nature of reality. Or at least the nature of linguistic referents.
Here goes
One word: Encryption
;-) were visible to the public.
Start using it, get everyone you know to use it. Encrypt everything.
Exactly. Those of us who are Internet old-timers have long understood that the online world is in fact totally open. There is no privacy online. Never has been, and never will be.
You should always assume that everything here is visible to everyone, and may be archived at lots of places you don't know about. The NSA's archives are just one of many places where our words and pictures are being enshrined for posterity. Consider, for example, that every email you've ever sent is potentially available to every prospective employer, and to all your relatives and friends.
There is nothing much any of us can do about this. If you don't like this, don't put things online. This includes email. As soon as it goes out of your machine, you have no way of knowing who has a copy.
Encryption is partly successful at fighting this. If you've used a good encryption scheme, reading your words will be very expensive for a bystander, so they won't do it without good reason. But with enough computing power, most encryption other than a truly random one-time pad can be broken. And computing power is getting cheaper, so with time, the cost of decrypting your stuff will drop. So it will mostly buy you time before your stuff can be read by everyone.
The real problem now is that, while everything on the Internet is potentially visible to those with political and economic power, the opposite isn't true. Imagine the effects if everything in every government and corporate office (and neighborhood bar
OK; what would mostly happen is that in most cases the onlookers would fall asleep. But it's interesting to think of a world in which we could access all of our own governments' and employers' information. This could go a long way toward loosening their power over us.
There have been a few sci-fi novels written that deal with such a scenario. Anyone want to mention their favorite?
Oh, I dunno; a quick glance over the messages here show that the overwhelming majority express some sort of disagreement with their parent. I'd conclude that at least the /. readers who deign to post messages are highly unlikely to take what they read at face value.
...
You may also notice a certain amount of self-reference in this message
Wow, you missed Godwin's law for a millimeter!
... wanders off to google window ...
Well, I was thinking of asking an even closer question: In a discussion of George Bush, which name is more likely to pop up first, Orwell or Mussolini? Or Stalin, for that matter.
I wonder if we could get reliable statistics?
Imagine that you can't view web pages anymore, because of some change made to the HTML standard. Who is to blame for this? Is it the standards body's fault? Or is it exclusively the responsibility of the people who make your browser?
;-) web page. When I investigate a page that doesn't work in some browser, I almost always find evidence in the HTML header that it was produced by MS software.
;-)
In my experience, this has amost always been Microsoft's fault. They made and sold the software that generated the standards-volating (-redefining?
I don't blame the users of this software, who are generally not techies, but rather "users" who just want to create web pages, and they've been convinced by others that you need fancy-schmancy complicated GUI tools to do this. They were suckered by MS; they're not the ones to blame.
Of course, MS isn't the only culprit here; they're just the biggest, baddest of a bad lot. Thus, I've been in a few discussions about the problems with commedycentral.com, especially the Daily Show's videos. Web geeks that first look at the html behind this site are usually shocked that something can be so incredibly poorly done. They usually express aesthetic offense at what they see. Then they notice that it's only the video clips that have problems; the ads work just fine. So it's not an accident.
But examining their html doesn't seem to turn up any evidence that MS was involved. They run on Sun servers, and there is enough variety in the html to infer that a number of different packages are involved. None of them seem to identify the producing software at all. This in itself says that it's probably not from MS software, because they usually include boilerplate ads for the software.
In any case, there is plenty of blame to pass around for web pages that "extend" the standards. Microsoft isn't the only one trying to make life difficult for users of competitors' equipment. But they are easily the biggest and worst violator.
</rant value="Microsoft">
I finally upgraded my Mac Powerbook to Tiger last month, and I no longer have Internet Explorer to test it with.
...
Maybe I'll try it with Safari or Camino or Opera or Firefox or Seamonkey or iWeb or
It's proof beyond a reasonable doubt for the existence of the creature and clear and convincing evidence of the predictive power of evolution theory. Some countries put people on electric chairs based on less 'proof' than that. ;)
Heh. You're right there. And I guess it just shows that the religious and right-wing political folks hold science to a much higher standard of proof than scientists (or lawyers) do.
It doesn't sound like there's any denying going on, but rather a question regarding the impact?
;-) We'll all be dead for centuries before they even get close with something as complex and chaotic as weather and climate.
Actually, the Bush gang does seem to have wised up that the denial isn't really going over all that well. So they've switched to the traditional "Further research is needed" approach.
"Yes, some scientists say there's warming, but they don't agree on exactly how much or exactly what the causes are. We should wait until the scientists can reduce their error estimates to zero and prove exactly what's happening. Until then, we should all just go about our business as usual."
And since science hardly ever actually proves anything, this amounts to an indefinite delay to taking any action that might interfere with business and industry.
One of the interesting codes is the recent use of the phrase "sound science" by the Republicans (and a few others). If you look for the definition, you'll find that it means science that can absolutely prove its results, with no error bars or conjectures remaining. This sounds good to most non-scientists. But hardly anything in science has ever been proved to this degree. Scientists are still testing the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Theory of Relativity, and even the Law of Gravity. (They're all hoping to become famous for finding a loophole.
So basically Bush & Co are insisting that we wait until scientists have done something that science doesn't do. It may be a long wait.
[I]f you're going to compare our pollution with Mt. Tamboras then shouldn't we have global cooling?
No, because the pollution is different.
Actually, we used to produce a lot more cooling pollution. It was mostly in the form of smoke from incomplete burning of wood and fossil fuels. Smoke and other particulates tend to intercept incoming sunlight and reflect it back out, decreasing the solar power flux at ground level and cooling things down.
But our industry learned how to burn those things much more "cleanly", getting more energy out of them, and releasing mostly CO2. That's a "greenhouse" gas that tends to absorb sunlight and warm the surrounding air molecules.
Actually, of course, both volcanoes and human industry have always produced both effects. With volcanoes, the cooling effects usually dominate. With our industry, we've slowly moved to mostly heating effects.
There's lots of literature that talks about the details of all this. In recent decades, a lot of major volcanoes and other volcanic spots (such as Mount Saint Helens, Mount Etna, Yellowstone and Iceland) have been heavily instrumented, and the data is mostly available online. It was physicists who invented the Web, after all, so they could share their research data. We also have a lot of worldwide atmospheric data online, thanks to NOAA and similar research orgs in other countries.
Digging through all that dry data can take time, and we can hardly expect the typical citizen to do it. This is part of why there's a fuss at NASA and NOAA. People there have been digging through the data, or more accurately, writing software to do it.
The Bush administration doesn't like their conclusions, for mostly business reasons, and has tried to block the release of the scientific results. They're not the only politicians doing this of course; they're just the most powerful at the moment. And they're not subtle about it. Ordering a top NASA administrator not to talk to an NPR interviewer is about as in-your-face as you can get, and that's not an isolated incident.
But the planet doesn't care. It will react as it reacts, and we'll have to live with the consequences. Or not, as the case may be.
Yes, this is bad news for regular users, but its also bad for the big telcos. ... The reason is that telcos think only in terms of their own networks, not in terms of the internet as a whole.
Yup. And this is yet another example of a universal problem that the DoD's ARPAnet project was originally funded to solve.
The basic problem back in the 60's was that the government was findingg itself with more and more comm equipment, but most gadgets would only communicate with other gadgets from the same vendor. The vendors were unwilling and/or unable to make their gadgets talk to ther vendors' gadgets. The ARPAnet project, which eventually evolved into the Internet, had the explicit goal of making everything talk to everything else. This was done by adding software (initially in separate computers called IMPs) that implemented a higher-level comm protocol, with routines to translate to/from all the "local" protocols that various gadgetry used.
As we know, this was rather successful. But vendors have never stopped fighting the basic idea. They repeatedly try to sell equipment that won't play nice with competitors' equipment. These days the usual scheme is to imlement the IP protocols, but to do it in ways that make the competition look bad.
And now that the telcos are involved in supplying Internet infrastructure, they are playing the same game. Like any corporation, they really want monopoly control, so they can charge "monopoly rents" without the need to bother with good service. And they're trying to implement all the traditional tools that big corporations have to prevent a free market from arising.
Primary of these, of course, is to bribe the government. That's why most of us have no more than one legal supplier of high-speed access. Access to the wires is a legal monopoly, enforced by your friendly local government. In the few areas where they can't get away with this, they try all the other anti-market techniques that have worked in the past. That's really what we're discussing now.
If they can legally discriminate for/against packets based on source/dest address, then they can make sure that you can't get good access to sites that they don't approve of. Being corporations, such disapproval comes mostly from those sites not paying them enough to get in their high-speed address list.
It's all about imposing a monopoly "market" and charging monopoly rents.
History depends on retrodiction to prove the validity of theories, and retrodiction always uses this teleological perspective.
;-)
One picky point: The terms "retrodiction" and "postdiction" seem to be in competition. The paired prefixes "pre-" and "post-" would say that "prediction" and "postdiction" are the better pair. And "postdiction" is one char shorter, which will probably save you several seconds of typing over your lifetime.
Anyway, whichever you call it, this is a good example. One of the creationists bogus claims is that paleontology can't make predictions, because they can't find fossils from the future. This is a parody, of course, but it's the essence of the logical fallacy.
The answer to this, as with other non-experimental sciences such as astronomy, is that evolutionary biology can't make predictions per se, but it can make postdictions. And in this case, that's what the scientists did.
They had a pretty good estimate of when the first vertebrates moved onto land, roughly between 350 and 400 million years. They made the "prediction" that if we could find strata that date to the middle of that period, where the original terrain was shallow water along shorelines, we should find fossils of the intermediate forms. The fossils should look like lobe-finned fish, but the lobes should be extended into limbs that could function somewhat poorly on land. This would allow the critters to crawl out of the water to escape predators, at a time when there weren't any large predators on land.
Consulting with geologists turned up just such strata, unfortunately on Ellesmere Island. The biologists went there during the brief only-slightly-horrible summer, and found just the sort of transitional fossils that they expected, before the weather returned to its normal deep freeze.
This is a classical "postdiction", i.e., a prediction of what you'll find if you dig in such-and-such a place. As such, it's goood support for the biologists' understanding of how vertebrates colonized the land. It's not proof, of course, because scientists generally don't do proof. Rather, it's a demo of the predictive power of evolutionary theory.
And there's really no teleology here. Tiktaalik wasn't trying to evolve into us. It was probably just trying to get out of the reach of large predators. The ones that did this the best survived to leave offspring. Maybe they were our ancestors, though these particular individuals probably weren't.
Also, media hype aside, it's not any sort of startling discovery. We already had other fossils of fragments of transitional forms. But these are some of the best such fossils that we have. Some of them are nearly complete. And they're pretty much what we expected, based on the earlier partial fossils of similar critters.
These fossils are destined to be textbook illustrations for the next couple decades. And some paleontologists are destined to spend many of their future Junes on Ellesmere Island. They'll probably be making jokes about how global warming isn't happening fast enough for them.