It's not Americans' fault that power makes you stupid. I mean, how would these mouth-breathing jingoists live with themselves if they didn't maintain a profoundly unjust, parochial worldview?
These days, if you wanna go evil, you gotta take a couple guys and put them in a shipping container strapped with $WEAPON.
Nonsense! You just start with a commercial interest being threatened, and fire up a propaganda campaign painting those standing in the way as authoritarian nutbags who pose a threat to the free world. Mouth a few platitudes about "human rights" to the left, so they'll fall in line, and poof, you have a mandate for an invasion. Send in the troops, pick a viceroy, and accept a pleasant sinecure at some pseudo-academic "Institute" once you retire.
I mean, if you consider that kind of thing "evil". Maybe it's not evil when Americans do it; I'm not that familiar with the sliding scale we judge them on.
Most people want us to wait until attacked before doing anthing to protect ourselves.
Where "doing anthing to protect ourselves" means lighting a whole bunch of civilians on fire by "mistake", right? (Hey, it's not like those terrorists place the same value on life as we do!)
Of course, you might mean things like boring investigative work to monitor potential threats and bring them through the justice system in the full light of day, or not blowing up civilians as "collateral damage" and then being so darned surprised when survivors and their relatives are unhappy with us. But somehow, I doubt it.
We need whoever attacks us to know that their country may no longer exist after they attack.
Because the only way to relate to a world full of strange and alien people is to terrify them into submission, and crush any hint of dissent within your own ranks, lest it betray weakness to the enemy.
I think you're confusing Warhammer 40K with reality.
I believe the US gives a great deal of foreign aid through the IMF and such--aid programs where we lend money to developing nations so that they can buy our DRM'd agricultural seeds or patented anti-retroviral drugs, in part.
Also, much of this "aid" comes in the form of loans with strings attached saying "get rid of any governmental function that helps poor people" and "sell your natural resources to corporations based in our country for a pittance".
There's a reason violence is still so commonly used after so many thousands of years of human existence; it works every single time if used in sufficient quantity.
For a certain version of "works". You cannot murder people into loving you, for example. You can bomb people into true submission, but that requires blazing a path of epic destruction through their homes like Hitler through Poland, only more thorough. To consider yourself one of "the good guys" when you're openly advocating that sort of thing requires the sort of masturbatory self-delusion endemic to cokeheads and Americans.
Like Hilzoy said, "Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to."
It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Well, what do you expect? You're not using these systems in the way they were designed to be used, and so they're a huge pain in the ass. If you're ABC, this is a feature, not a bug.
(Presumably you should be using IE. Or just watching it over the air, with commercials, like ABC would prefer that you do.)
Rowling, like any other wealthy person, benefited from society. Clearly, there's the infrastructure to produce and distribute the books, and a literate population capable of reading them... but I can't believe that you're forgetting that the wealth of the Harry Potter empire is founded entirely on the government-supported and -enforced convenient fiction of intellectual property.
In any case, the argument isn't that wealthy people shouldn't be wealthy; the argument is that they shouldn't be insanely, ludicrously, "nobody even bothers to understand numbers that big" wealthy. People haven't gotten three orders of magnitude smarter, more productive, or better in the last twenty years, but they've certainly managed to accrete wealth that seems to say that they have.
If wealth continues to rise upwards, your society ends up looking like a small group of "gated communities", containing the prisoners of addiction, surrounded by teeming shanty-town hordes of the prisoners of envy. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, as a member of either group.
So, that is why it's bad that a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth goes to a tiny slice of the very privileged. It sucks for most people, and in the end, it sucks for everyone.
I'm reminded of people kvetching that they'll never get the money they paid into Social Security back. The point is, of course, that they'll only get it back if they're horribly unfortunate. Social Security isn't a pension program, it's more like insurance against being disabled, widowed, or left poor and old. (Those Lucky Duckies!)
Similarly, members of the upper classes here must believe that taxes are, as you say, "fees for services rendered", that the only reason you're not barely scraping by is because you're a better person, and you deserve what you have. It's a comforting myth, even though it's based on ideas which range from flawed to laughably false.
Didn't we learn in the 1920s that the wealthy aren't superhuman masters of the universe? Aren't we learning that again now? To read a paean to the ridiculous idea that if I'm worth x on some measure of human quality, then Bill Gates must be worth 1000000x, to read yet another bit of gilded-age sophistry... well, it's kind of breathtaking.
Damn, that comes off cheesy. But really, you're still alive. You survived all that, and you still have most of your life ahead of you. Don't spend it mourning what's lost.
That can't possibly be expected behavior. File a bug with your distribution if it's not already known (see the following; I don't know what distro you're using).
The developers can't possibly have all of the relevant hardware; they need users who run into problems to help them out. Please try to help if you can; it might help the bug get fixed quicker.
(Not only is the user the enemy, the POV is that any configurable screensaver is by definition broken.)
Not exactly. The idea is that screensavers which require configuration are broken, which doesn't really relate to the problem in question.
gnome-screensaver doesn't operate on hacks like xscreensaver does; it operates on "themes", which are a hack combined with a set of configuration options. Why there's no options to duplicate a theme and edit its options, now that is confusing. I think that's what the developer wanted someone to write for him.
He sucked at explaining this, and succeeded only in pissing off the users. That part is the developer's fault.
you put stem cells in your brain, and you've just given yourself brain cancer
Not unless something goes extraordinarily wrong.
I see what you're saying about how it's the organization of brain cells that make them interesting--a bit of liver with circulation through it works fine, while a bit of brain with circulation through it may not be neurologically linked to anything in a way that makes sense.
But that's not "cancer". As far as I know, stem cells are generally coaxed into turning into healthy body cell types, none of which fir the definition of "cancer". I think what you mean to say is that you'd have a useless lump of healthy brain tissue in your head.
I've been having moments like that since I was a teenager. I used to think they meant I was going downhill already, but really, I think it's just indicative of the fact that we have good days and bad days; on the latter, it's easy to be surprised by your eloquence on the former.
Now, when I stop being impressed by anything I wrote less than n years ago, that's an important sign. I keep thinking it's happened already, but then I manage to impress myself one more time.
1. Open the file. 2. Delete the file (O_TRUNC). 3. Write data to the file.
Writing steps two and three to the disk is not generally bunched. It's certainly not an atomic operation. The fact that this ever worked is nigh miraculous.
I'm reminded of the transition from bash to dash for the default/bin/sh in Ubuntu; people relied on nonstandard behavior for convenience, and when that was taken away, dash was blamed, people were going to Leave! Linux! Forever!, and so on.
(This example was extraordinarily poorly handled; it should have been done like Debian Lenny did it, with a lot of lead time and making sure that everything worked as it should.)
Of course ext4 shouldn't be released without the workaround, but applications need to actually handle their I/O, not chuck a bunch of stuff at the disk and act surprised when it's not guaranteed to be properly transaction-y. If this is "fixed" in the filesystem (as the current patches do), they do so by making the entire filesystem be careful about what gets written to disk immediately. The filesystem can't know what's vital to write atomically; the app must tell it.
You know, for all the kvetching about Slashdot groupthink, the only consistent observation I've noticed is that talking about being modded down for your daring, iconoclastic views is the surest way to get modded up.
How lonely the life of a brave critic of the leftist dictatorship must be, eh?
We really need a "-1, Whining about the Cabal" mod.
I had to check to make sure you weren't my old boss! A place I worked about a year ago did that. Our systems automatically registered hosted domain names and dropped the list of subdomains into our database. A cron job pulled records from there, generated the data file, compiled it and told tinydns to reload it.
I really appreciated djbdns's data format after having dealt with BIND at my last job. I remember it being disturbingly finicky about its input--there are plenty of ways to kill your DNS server if, for instance, you didn't increment the serial (why on earth doesn't it just use the timestamp in seconds?) or left out a period somewhere.
Image if they got rid of all the SLOOOOW python in ubuntu would run considerably faster.
You don't actually know that. If you optimize without profiling things, you make a mess for yourself and don't actually improve anything.
Consider login time in GNOME. Your method would demand that gnome-settings-daemon be rewritten in assembler. Instead, consider that the login time was halved through careful profiling and algorithmic optimization--which is to say, nothing was rewritten in C.
As for slow performance of Python-based tools in general, note that the performance-critical libraries--cairo, GTK+, your video drivers--are all written in C. Rewriting the frontends isn't going to gain you much. If you disagree, go profile, and come back when you have more than simple kneejerking.
Heck, I just wrote a batch conversion process to move thousands of small XML files into one big XML file in another format. Time to execute xsltproc (in super-duper C!) a few hundred times for a test run? About a minute. Time to use a Perl interface to libxslt, along with parser hooks written as Perl subroutines? About four seconds, since I wasn't invoking xsltproc once for each input file.
Rewriting that project in C would have been time-consuming, error-prone, and utterly pointless.
PDF form support isn't a particularly new feature; it goes back to at least PDF 1.3 (section 7.6 of the standard), published in 2000.
The feature which you describe--saving filled-in forms rather than detached form data--is supported as of evince 2.24.1 and poppler 0.8.7. It's quite standardized; you just fill in the 'V' key in the field dictionary, which is empty in a blank form. (See table 7.44 in the PDF 1.3 standard.)
More accurately, he claims that IC systems derived from evolutionary process is statistically unlikely. And while that simulation can make an IC system, it has a few biases.
I don't think you were watching it properly.
The most successful algorithm doesn't seem to die.
A high-scoring algorithm continues to contribute to the gene pool until more effective algorithms displace it. Humans, in contrast, can only contribute for three generations (or four, in the case of virile males.), assuming 1 generation is 20 years. Other animals have a higher generations-to-lifespan ratio, but it isn't infinite.
From the linked page: "Reproduction. Those individuals remaining after selection become the parents of the next generation. The individuals wiped out by selection are replaced by mutated copies of the remaining individuals, or by crossover of two of the remaining individuals." A combination of sexual and asexual reproduction is used; if you think that restricting the system to put a maximum lifespan on individuals would make a difference, feel free to tweak the code and try it. But don't make the assertion unless you can back it up; it's just hand-waving.
The generations don't age
Similar to the issue about not dieing, humans and animals get old. They slow down. They don't heal as fast as they once did. They acquire life-long injuries and afflictions (polio, damaged limbs...). In this simulation, there is no such thing as a virile young adult with a hereditary predisposition towards sterility in middle age (or an accident arising from being an idiot), which would limit them to a single reproductive generation.
Why is this relevant? It's a bit of complexity papered over in the simulation because it's not directly relevant to the question of whether or not genetic algorithms can generate irreducibly complex systems.
Replication/Reproduction cycle facilitated by system and was not produced in an evolutionary manner.
Without the Java app to interpret, those codes would be meaningless; and the Java app was not a product of darwinian evolution. Biological evolution is similarly implausible. DNA goes through a fantastically complex process to duplicate a thread, and that process had to be in place alongside a DNA strand that could code a duplicate DNA interpreter as well as duplicate itself. Writing quines is complicated enough. But a quine that is self-compiling and self-executing? Generated at random in a system that is passively hostile? Please.
Again, how does this relate to the proposition in question--whether or not a genetic algorithm can produce an irreducibly-complex system as Behe defined it? The system is far, far simpler than an actual organism, but the properties it's designed to study are emulated faithfully--non-random selection on a set of randomly-varying replicators.
You might as well claim that because a human wrote the program, it was intelligently designed and is therefore not capable of showing anything at all about evolution. (Hey, it's been claimed.)
One of your criticisms is unsupported, and the other two are irrelevant. Would you like to try again?
I know next to nothing about Feyerabend, but I do know that he advocated the teaching of creationism--not, it seems, because he was keen on Jesus, but because he was just that postmodern.
Behe's thesis in Darwin's Black Box was that systems which would fall apart if one component were removed could not have been produced by evolutionary processes. This is not true. (One might think Behe would have done a bit more testing before staking his claim.)
X is supposed to be bulletproof--it's supposed to at least get you to a working login screen no matter what. File a bug; the developers may not be aware of the situation. They'll likely ask for some more information and testing on your part, so please keep an eye on the report after you file it.
I know I'm asking you to do some work, but good bug reports are the primary means by which problems get fixed. The developers probably don't know that the system is broken on your hardware, because they don't have a copy of your hardware on which to test it. You're not just helping yourself out; you're helping everyone else who might run into the same problem in the future.
I'm sorry to say that this is not a satisfactory answer. Look around the net - hey, just stay on this site and click on a random link - and you'll see that various Desktop versions of Linux are portrayed as nothing less than perfection. Me and the people around me who have tried the same software (I'm talking 13 years in my case) must be subjected to some strange phenomenon where the most simple tasks seem to require RSI-inducing terminal typing. Fix one thing, something else breaks. Update and things go bonkers. Disable update and... it updates. Reboot to get sound. Recompile to get wifi. Repeat.
You may not believe this, but few things piss me off more than mindless fanboyism, and I say this as a Linux diehard. It leads to terrible disappointment for users who find out that, yes, it's still got a ton of problems.
It's 2009, people. Multimedia is ubiquitous, no matter how complex these peripherals are, each and every common-sensed consumer expects them to work without a problem and does not wish to lose time on it. Truth is that the best Ubuntu experience is the one where you have a Windows box running a foot further on the desk, so you can scroll through an avalanche of third-rate forums and half-arsed wikis to find some obscure sequence of terminal commands. In most cases you're trying to find out how to run a windows look-a-like tool or package in your newly found time consumer. Consumers want this and that. Don't discuss with them whether or not they need it. I'm hinting at a very wide range of issues here, going from drawing squares in Gimp to having flash whilst browsing.
I know I may seem like a broken record here, but the developers can't fix the problem if they're unaware of it. Developers get into habits of using a program a particular way, and without users providing feedback in the form of bug reports with explicit instructions on reproducing the bug, they won't become aware of it.
I know, I know, most people have better things to do with their time than file bugs, and this is why I don't recommend the OS to people who don't fiddle with computers as their primary occupation.
As for Flash... well, that's the problem when you try and mix proprietary and free software. X.org/PulseAudio/Firefox developers point the finger at Flash as the source of the suckiness, while Flash developers (presumably) point at X.org/PulseAudio/Firefox. The best free solution is reportedly swfdec, but it's not going to be as good as proprietary Flash, at least not for a while. (Reportedly, it plays YouTube, at least.)
Most of the energy isn't put into bug resolving, btw. The average Ubuntu dev works on polish and gloss, like this incredible progress in boot time.
I don't think that's quite fair--it's a false dichotomy. The major change in boot time comes from enabling the new ext4 filesystem; it's not plausible to assume that Ted Ts'o and everyone else who's been working on the kernel would be making your Flash work properly if they hadn't been doing that.
If there's one thing that's possible to learn in the history of operating systems: apps kill competition, not OSs. No applications ? No carrot!
We don't have a working browser in Ubuntu because everyone warped the system enough to get Internet Explorer working via IEs4Linux; we have a working browser because of Firefox. Similarly, the Flash problem won't be solved by any amount of fiddling on Adobe's part, or by any amount of work from the PulseAudio crew. It'll be solved when swfdec (or maybe Gnash) can finally step in as replacements.
Excuses are the trademark of FOSS, not freedom, not liberty, not whatever third-world slogan they can come up with. Excuses are what you normally get for complaining about FOSS. They vary from "your fault", "worksforme", "their fa
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It's not Americans' fault that power makes you stupid. I mean, how would these mouth-breathing jingoists live with themselves if they didn't maintain a profoundly unjust, parochial worldview?
Nonsense! You just start with a commercial interest being threatened, and fire up a propaganda campaign painting those standing in the way as authoritarian nutbags who pose a threat to the free world. Mouth a few platitudes about "human rights" to the left, so they'll fall in line, and poof, you have a mandate for an invasion. Send in the troops, pick a viceroy, and accept a pleasant sinecure at some pseudo-academic "Institute" once you retire.
I mean, if you consider that kind of thing "evil". Maybe it's not evil when Americans do it; I'm not that familiar with the sliding scale we judge them on.
Where "doing anthing to protect ourselves" means lighting a whole bunch of civilians on fire by "mistake", right? (Hey, it's not like those terrorists place the same value on life as we do!)
Of course, you might mean things like boring investigative work to monitor potential threats and bring them through the justice system in the full light of day, or not blowing up civilians as "collateral damage" and then being so darned surprised when survivors and their relatives are unhappy with us. But somehow, I doubt it.
Because the only way to relate to a world full of strange and alien people is to terrify them into submission, and crush any hint of dissent within your own ranks, lest it betray weakness to the enemy.
I think you're confusing Warhammer 40K with reality.
Also, much of this "aid" comes in the form of loans with strings attached saying "get rid of any governmental function that helps poor people" and "sell your natural resources to corporations based in our country for a pittance".
Mmm, freedom. Can you taste it?
For a certain version of "works". You cannot murder people into loving you, for example. You can bomb people into true submission, but that requires blazing a path of epic destruction through their homes like Hitler through Poland, only more thorough. To consider yourself one of "the good guys" when you're openly advocating that sort of thing requires the sort of masturbatory self-delusion endemic to cokeheads and Americans.
Like Hilzoy said, "Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to."
It's the 21st century version of fiddling with the rabbit ears, adjusting the fine-tuning knob and pounding on the TV set.
Well, what do you expect? You're not using these systems in the way they were designed to be used, and so they're a huge pain in the ass. If you're ABC, this is a feature, not a bug.
(Presumably you should be using IE. Or just watching it over the air, with commercials, like ABC would prefer that you do.)
Rowling, like any other wealthy person, benefited from society. Clearly, there's the infrastructure to produce and distribute the books, and a literate population capable of reading them... but I can't believe that you're forgetting that the wealth of the Harry Potter empire is founded entirely on the government-supported and -enforced convenient fiction of intellectual property.
In any case, the argument isn't that wealthy people shouldn't be wealthy; the argument is that they shouldn't be insanely, ludicrously, "nobody even bothers to understand numbers that big" wealthy. People haven't gotten three orders of magnitude smarter, more productive, or better in the last twenty years, but they've certainly managed to accrete wealth that seems to say that they have.
If wealth continues to rise upwards, your society ends up looking like a small group of "gated communities", containing the prisoners of addiction, surrounded by teeming shanty-town hordes of the prisoners of envy. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, as a member of either group.
So, that is why it's bad that a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth goes to a tiny slice of the very privileged. It sucks for most people, and in the end, it sucks for everyone.
I'm reminded of people kvetching that they'll never get the money they paid into Social Security back. The point is, of course, that they'll only get it back if they're horribly unfortunate. Social Security isn't a pension program, it's more like insurance against being disabled, widowed, or left poor and old. (Those Lucky Duckies!)
Similarly, members of the upper classes here must believe that taxes are, as you say, "fees for services rendered", that the only reason you're not barely scraping by is because you're a better person, and you deserve what you have. It's a comforting myth, even though it's based on ideas which range from flawed to laughably false.
Didn't we learn in the 1920s that the wealthy aren't superhuman masters of the universe? Aren't we learning that again now? To read a paean to the ridiculous idea that if I'm worth x on some measure of human quality, then Bill Gates must be worth 1000000x, to read yet another bit of gilded-age sophistry... well, it's kind of breathtaking.
I wish I could give you a hug.
Damn, that comes off cheesy. But really, you're still alive. You survived all that, and you still have most of your life ahead of you. Don't spend it mourning what's lost.
That can't possibly be expected behavior. File a bug with your distribution if it's not already known (see the following; I don't know what distro you're using).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/207135
http://bugs.debian.org/505097
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/474745
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/BrokenSoundDrivers
The developers can't possibly have all of the relevant hardware; they need users who run into problems to help them out. Please try to help if you can; it might help the bug get fixed quicker.
(Not only is the user the enemy, the POV is that any configurable screensaver is by definition broken.)
Not exactly. The idea is that screensavers which require configuration are broken, which doesn't really relate to the problem in question.
gnome-screensaver doesn't operate on hacks like xscreensaver does; it operates on "themes", which are a hack combined with a set of configuration options. Why there's no options to duplicate a theme and edit its options, now that is confusing. I think that's what the developer wanted someone to write for him.
He sucked at explaining this, and succeeded only in pissing off the users. That part is the developer's fault.
Not unless something goes extraordinarily wrong.
I see what you're saying about how it's the organization of brain cells that make them interesting--a bit of liver with circulation through it works fine, while a bit of brain with circulation through it may not be neurologically linked to anything in a way that makes sense.
But that's not "cancer". As far as I know, stem cells are generally coaxed into turning into healthy body cell types, none of which fir the definition of "cancer". I think what you mean to say is that you'd have a useless lump of healthy brain tissue in your head.
I've been having moments like that since I was a teenager. I used to think they meant I was going downhill already, but really, I think it's just indicative of the fact that we have good days and bad days; on the latter, it's easy to be surprised by your eloquence on the former.
Now, when I stop being impressed by anything I wrote less than n years ago, that's an important sign. I keep thinking it's happened already, but then I manage to impress myself one more time.
Oh, indeed.
The apps are doing this:
1. Open the file.
2. Delete the file (O_TRUNC).
3. Write data to the file.
Writing steps two and three to the disk is not generally bunched. It's certainly not an atomic operation. The fact that this ever worked is nigh miraculous.
I'm reminded of the transition from bash to dash for the default /bin/sh in Ubuntu; people relied on nonstandard behavior for convenience, and when that was taken away, dash was blamed, people were going to Leave! Linux! Forever!, and so on.
(This example was extraordinarily poorly handled; it should have been done like Debian Lenny did it, with a lot of lead time and making sure that everything worked as it should.)
Of course ext4 shouldn't be released without the workaround, but applications need to actually handle their I/O, not chuck a bunch of stuff at the disk and act surprised when it's not guaranteed to be properly transaction-y. If this is "fixed" in the filesystem (as the current patches do), they do so by making the entire filesystem be careful about what gets written to disk immediately. The filesystem can't know what's vital to write atomically; the app must tell it.
You know, for all the kvetching about Slashdot groupthink, the only consistent observation I've noticed is that talking about being modded down for your daring, iconoclastic views is the surest way to get modded up.
How lonely the life of a brave critic of the leftist dictatorship must be, eh?
We really need a "-1, Whining about the Cabal" mod.
I had to check to make sure you weren't my old boss! A place I worked about a year ago did that. Our systems automatically registered hosted domain names and dropped the list of subdomains into our database. A cron job pulled records from there, generated the data file, compiled it and told tinydns to reload it.
I really appreciated djbdns's data format after having dealt with BIND at my last job. I remember it being disturbingly finicky about its input--there are plenty of ways to kill your DNS server if, for instance, you didn't increment the serial (why on earth doesn't it just use the timestamp in seconds?) or left out a period somewhere.
Image if they got rid of all the SLOOOOW python in ubuntu would run considerably faster.
You don't actually know that. If you optimize without profiling things, you make a mess for yourself and don't actually improve anything.
Consider login time in GNOME. Your method would demand that gnome-settings-daemon be rewritten in assembler. Instead, consider that the login time was halved through careful profiling and algorithmic optimization--which is to say, nothing was rewritten in C.
As for slow performance of Python-based tools in general, note that the performance-critical libraries--cairo, GTK+, your video drivers--are all written in C. Rewriting the frontends isn't going to gain you much. If you disagree, go profile, and come back when you have more than simple kneejerking.
Heck, I just wrote a batch conversion process to move thousands of small XML files into one big XML file in another format. Time to execute xsltproc (in super-duper C!) a few hundred times for a test run? About a minute. Time to use a Perl interface to libxslt, along with parser hooks written as Perl subroutines? About four seconds, since I wasn't invoking xsltproc once for each input file.
Rewriting that project in C would have been time-consuming, error-prone, and utterly pointless.
PDF form support isn't a particularly new feature; it goes back to at least PDF 1.3 (section 7.6 of the standard), published in 2000.
The feature which you describe--saving filled-in forms rather than detached form data--is supported as of evince 2.24.1 and poppler 0.8.7. It's quite standardized; you just fill in the 'V' key in the field dictionary, which is empty in a blank form. (See table 7.44 in the PDF 1.3 standard.)
Was that what you meant?
Alternatively, license out your DRM tech so Sony can build a reader compatible with your service.
I think you may be completely missing the point of their business model. One of the benefits of DRM is that everyone has to repurchase things.
I have MP3s that are nearly a decade old. Are there any DRM systems still extant from that long ago?
DRM media expires. That's the point. Removing the single point of failure contradicts the whole model.
More accurately, he claims that IC systems derived from evolutionary process is statistically unlikely. And while that simulation can make an IC system, it has a few biases.
I don't think you were watching it properly.
The most successful algorithm doesn't seem to die.
A high-scoring algorithm continues to contribute to the gene pool until more effective algorithms displace it. Humans, in contrast, can only contribute for three generations (or four, in the case of virile males.), assuming 1 generation is 20 years. Other animals have a higher generations-to-lifespan ratio, but it isn't infinite.
From the linked page: "Reproduction. Those individuals remaining after selection become the parents of the next generation. The individuals wiped out by selection are replaced by mutated copies of the remaining individuals, or by crossover of two of the remaining individuals." A combination of sexual and asexual reproduction is used; if you think that restricting the system to put a maximum lifespan on individuals would make a difference, feel free to tweak the code and try it. But don't make the assertion unless you can back it up; it's just hand-waving.
The generations don't age
Similar to the issue about not dieing, humans and animals get old. They slow down. They don't heal as fast as they once did. They acquire life-long injuries and afflictions (polio, damaged limbs...). In this simulation, there is no such thing as a virile young adult with a hereditary predisposition towards sterility in middle age (or an accident arising from being an idiot), which would limit them to a single reproductive generation.
Why is this relevant? It's a bit of complexity papered over in the simulation because it's not directly relevant to the question of whether or not genetic algorithms can generate irreducibly complex systems.
Replication/Reproduction cycle facilitated by system and was not produced in an evolutionary manner.
Without the Java app to interpret, those codes would be meaningless; and the Java app was not a product of darwinian evolution. Biological evolution is similarly implausible. DNA goes through a fantastically complex process to duplicate a thread, and that process had to be in place alongside a DNA strand that could code a duplicate DNA interpreter as well as duplicate itself. Writing quines is complicated enough. But a quine that is self-compiling and self-executing? Generated at random in a system that is passively hostile? Please.
Again, how does this relate to the proposition in question--whether or not a genetic algorithm can produce an irreducibly-complex system as Behe defined it? The system is far, far simpler than an actual organism, but the properties it's designed to study are emulated faithfully--non-random selection on a set of randomly-varying replicators.
You might as well claim that because a human wrote the program, it was intelligently designed and is therefore not capable of showing anything at all about evolution. (Hey, it's been claimed.)
One of your criticisms is unsupported, and the other two are irrelevant. Would you like to try again?
I know next to nothing about Feyerabend, but I do know that he advocated the teaching of creationism--not, it seems, because he was keen on Jesus, but because he was just that postmodern.
Behe's thesis in Darwin's Black Box was that systems which would fall apart if one component were removed could not have been produced by evolutionary processes. This is not true. (One might think Behe would have done a bit more testing before staking his claim.)
X is supposed to be bulletproof--it's supposed to at least get you to a working login screen no matter what. File a bug; the developers may not be aware of the situation. They'll likely ask for some more information and testing on your part, so please keep an eye on the report after you file it.
I know I'm asking you to do some work, but good bug reports are the primary means by which problems get fixed. The developers probably don't know that the system is broken on your hardware, because they don't have a copy of your hardware on which to test it. You're not just helping yourself out; you're helping everyone else who might run into the same problem in the future.
I'm sorry to say that this is not a satisfactory answer. Look around the net - hey, just stay on this site and click on a random link - and you'll see that various Desktop versions of Linux are portrayed as nothing less than perfection. Me and the people around me who have tried the same software (I'm talking 13 years in my case) must be subjected to some strange phenomenon where the most simple tasks seem to require RSI-inducing terminal typing. Fix one thing, something else breaks. Update and things go bonkers. Disable update and ... it updates. Reboot to get sound. Recompile to get wifi. Repeat.
You may not believe this, but few things piss me off more than mindless fanboyism, and I say this as a Linux diehard. It leads to terrible disappointment for users who find out that, yes, it's still got a ton of problems.
It's 2009, people. Multimedia is ubiquitous, no matter how complex these peripherals are, each and every common-sensed consumer expects them to work without a problem and does not wish to lose time on it. Truth is that the best Ubuntu experience is the one where you have a Windows box running a foot further on the desk, so you can scroll through an avalanche of third-rate forums and half-arsed wikis to find some obscure sequence of terminal commands. In most cases you're trying to find out how to run a windows look-a-like tool or package in your newly found time consumer. Consumers want this and that. Don't discuss with them whether or not they need it. I'm hinting at a very wide range of issues here, going from drawing squares in Gimp to having flash whilst browsing.
I know I may seem like a broken record here, but the developers can't fix the problem if they're unaware of it. Developers get into habits of using a program a particular way, and without users providing feedback in the form of bug reports with explicit instructions on reproducing the bug, they won't become aware of it.
I know, I know, most people have better things to do with their time than file bugs, and this is why I don't recommend the OS to people who don't fiddle with computers as their primary occupation.
As for Flash... well, that's the problem when you try and mix proprietary and free software. X.org/PulseAudio/Firefox developers point the finger at Flash as the source of the suckiness, while Flash developers (presumably) point at X.org/PulseAudio/Firefox. The best free solution is reportedly swfdec, but it's not going to be as good as proprietary Flash, at least not for a while. (Reportedly, it plays YouTube, at least.)
Most of the energy isn't put into bug resolving, btw. The average Ubuntu dev works on polish and gloss, like this incredible progress in boot time.
I don't think that's quite fair--it's a false dichotomy. The major change in boot time comes from enabling the new ext4 filesystem; it's not plausible to assume that Ted Ts'o and everyone else who's been working on the kernel would be making your Flash work properly if they hadn't been doing that.
If there's one thing that's possible to learn in the history of operating systems: apps kill competition, not OSs. No applications ? No carrot!
We don't have a working browser in Ubuntu because everyone warped the system enough to get Internet Explorer working via IEs4Linux; we have a working browser because of Firefox. Similarly, the Flash problem won't be solved by any amount of fiddling on Adobe's part, or by any amount of work from the PulseAudio crew. It'll be solved when swfdec (or maybe Gnash) can finally step in as replacements.
Excuses are the trademark of FOSS, not freedom, not liberty, not whatever third-world slogan they can come up with. Excuses are what you normally get for complaining about FOSS. They vary from "your fault", "worksforme", "their fa