Am I to blame for misunderstanding rhetoric such as:
Researchers provide concrete evidence about how the human eye evolved (so the human eye has evolved, and these guys showed how)
So how did EMBL researchers finally trace the evolution of the eye? ("finally" implies that it is obvious that the eye has evolved, just nobody could show how)
I'm sorry if I used sloppy terminology. I was using the term evolution to mean the emergence of the species that currently inhabit the earth. That certainly is an event. On the other hand, we are in the domain of history, so strictly speaking the scientific method can only be used to point whether a certain scenario could have occured. It's quite impossible to perform repeated experiments of an event.
On the other hand the process of evolution can be studied empirically. If it can be shown that complex species cannot arise through an evolutionary process, then also the event of evolutionary emergence of species cannot have occured.
I thought that microevolution refered to variation within a group of similar species (dog, wolf), and macroevolution to a fish evolving into a frog. Why is the distinction nonexistant? I'm sincerely curious.
My original point was that the article mentioned that there are similar cells in the human eye and a living fossil. How does that show how the human eye could have evolved in small steps and not in a giant leap? If evolution happens in huge leaps, what is the mechanism for that?
Yes both definitely require some faith to believe. This does not mean that both are empirically as likely to have occured. The issue is not one of "pure faith", but a complex scientific question with religious implications.
Common ancestry might not disprove God, but disproving common ancestry disproves darwinism (or at least the currently prevalent darwinistic theories of a single first organism and an evolutionary tree as opposed to many first organisms and an evolutionary graph).
I agree that stating that God couldn't is utterly stupid, however the question is on whether evolution occured or not. That question is definitely within the domain of science and not religion.
These discussions reach absurd proportions, someone finds that the cells in a living fossil are very similar to those in a part of the human eye and suddenly it is possible to somehow evolve a complete human eye, lenses and all, just like that.
Yes, this is a valuable contribution, but claiming it shows how human vision evolved is about as absurd as claiming that tea cups show how beer containers evolved because they are similar in some ways.
It could also be pointed out that most parts of the really interesting parts of human vision aren't in the eyes themselves but in the brain.
When I did the service we were told to protect against "the Enemy".
When asked to elaborate the officer said something like: "Well, we are not allowed to say who the enemy is, but we can say this much: It's not the Swedes"
I guess it's between Norway and Russia then, even though I find the two scenarios you presented more likely to occur:)
Yes it's a case of "quick hacks". But the point Shirky was making was that it's not just any "quick hack", but a socially adapted "quick hack", AKA the right tool for the (one) right job.
A very interesting question. However if these people are to ever convince us that they possess abstract thought they will have to communicate that somehow. The least linguistic way of communicating would probably be through acting intelligently in some kind of test setting. No simple experiments:)
As a result of practice, yes it might. How your brain actually represents the concept of time is probably quite unknown.
However, representing a numerical concept as something visual has never been any challenge for human mental abilities.
For instance, one could say that "Joe was at the peek of his career", even though a career and a mountain have very few similarities, except perhaps the "shape".
Not using as much energy when asleep and rebuilding muscle and other tissue are probably also a factors, but perhaps orthogonal ones. It is imaginable that there could exist a lifeform which would rest (and thus save energy, rebuild) without putting its mind in a sleeping state.
Saving energy cannot possibly be the whole reason, because in that case you could compensate for lack of sleep by eating more, and you can to a point but after 48 hours or so of waking time you usually notice that it's not so much the lack of energy but the lack of ability to concentrate. So intuitively it would seem that the mind needs to do something that demands it to be in "sleep-mode".
The JVM might be written in C and be a native program, but it's still running the Java bytecode in a virtual machine. If the virtual machine does not have the math functions you mentioned as primitives their performance depends on the JVM/JIT-engine.
So in a benchmark comparing compiler performance I can't see how that is "moot".
what I see as the big imediment towards adoption of open source Yes, yes, or then it's one of the reasons open source manages to produce loads of useful software at a fraction of the cost of commercial development. Don't reinvent the wheel and don't solve everyone elses problems. MDI works great on windows where the culture encourages running many programs in full screen mode. I was also initially annoyed by the GIMP interface and all its windows, but there's a very simple solution to that: Put GIMP on its own virtual desktop.
Another take on this would be to analyze the RIAA "business model". Since they are suing end-users, and legal business is quite expensive, how big a fraction of the cases must they win to be "profitable". The reparations cannot possibly be huge for most people, on the scale of large organisation budgets. If the legal actions become too expensive to maintain, then the RIAA will be forced to change its strategy. It will also mean that their grip on the markets and labels will have to loosen.
In a well-designed OS, the kernel should be almost totally independent of the GUI and vice versa.
Why? You are assuming some kind of general multi-use operating system then. If the device is used for heavily graphical tasks and hardly any number crunching, then it pays to design the kernel for use with the graphical environment. A server on the other hand might benefit from throughput enhancing features that might impair interactive graphical performance. Either way the kernel is hardly independent from the GUI.
I would argue that social skills are a much better yardstick I realize that you got attecked and are responding to that, but I would like to point out that you're making a very "evil" argument because:
Social skills are even more difficult to evaluate than general mathematical skills most intelligence tests try to measure
Computer skills and social skills seem to be negatively correlated
Everyone knows socially capable people whom they still consider "stupid"
I think that using social skills as a metric for intelligence is at least as confusing as using mathematical (or computer or whatever) skills. Intelligence is too wide a concept to evaluate. Let's just settle for the fact that people have different needs when it comes to computer interfaces.
To get back on topic I would think that the whole question is not so much about "freedom" or "ease of use" as it is of software engineering. Whether we have a generic X layer with toolkits on top or whether we include both the low level graphics and the toolkit same layer (as in Y) should be considered on technical grounds rather than based on user interface grounds since both layerings allow similar user interfaces on top of them.
One toolkit equals "one look and feel", but does not equal "one desktop". You could have both "KDE" and "Gnome" on top of Y, no problem (except for lots of code). If Y is really better than X then let's hope something will come of it, it's not like X couldn't use some competitors.
Well yes and no. If you consider that both ends would be doing something similar to gzipping everything they sent and then gunzipping it back again. It becomes faster if the channel between the two is the bottleneck, if it isn't you just waste more CPU cycles so actually the system becomes slower.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this the kind of activity we should really be promoting?
Don't you just hate it when competitions are similar to real life, instead of promoting some "pure" academic ideal?
I guess I would approve any of those. Which can be shown to have occured?
Am I to blame for misunderstanding rhetoric such as:
Researchers provide concrete evidence about how the human eye evolved (so the human eye has evolved, and these guys showed how)
So how did EMBL researchers finally trace the evolution of the eye? ("finally" implies that it is obvious that the eye has evolved, just nobody could show how)
:) My my :)
I'm sorry if I used sloppy terminology. I was using the term evolution to mean the emergence of the species that currently inhabit the earth. That certainly is an event. On the other hand, we are in the domain of history, so strictly speaking the scientific method can only be used to point whether a certain scenario could have occured. It's quite impossible to perform repeated experiments of an event.
On the other hand the process of evolution can be studied empirically. If it can be shown that complex species cannot arise through an evolutionary process, then also the event of evolutionary emergence of species cannot have occured.
I thought that microevolution refered to variation within a group of similar species (dog, wolf), and macroevolution to a fish evolving into a frog. Why is the distinction nonexistant? I'm sincerely curious.
My original point was that the article mentioned that there are similar cells in the human eye and a living fossil. How does that show how the human eye could have evolved in small steps and not in a giant leap? If evolution happens in huge leaps, what is the mechanism for that?
Yes both definitely require some faith to believe. This does not mean that both are empirically as likely to have occured. The issue is not one of "pure faith", but a complex scientific question with religious implications.
Common ancestry might not disprove God, but disproving common ancestry disproves darwinism (or at least the currently prevalent darwinistic theories of a single first organism and an evolutionary tree as opposed to many first organisms and an evolutionary graph).
I agree that stating that God couldn't is utterly stupid, however the question is on whether evolution occured or not. That question is definitely within the domain of science and not religion.
These discussions reach absurd proportions, someone finds that the cells in a living fossil are very similar to those in a part of the human eye and suddenly it is possible to somehow evolve a complete human eye, lenses and all, just like that.
Yes, this is a valuable contribution, but claiming it shows how human vision evolved is about as absurd as claiming that tea cups show how beer containers evolved because they are similar in some ways.
It could also be pointed out that most parts of the really interesting parts of human vision aren't in the eyes themselves but in the brain.
Yes, there's a finnish movie about Finland attacking Luxemburg...
Or more likely, terrorism
When I did the service we were told to protect against "the Enemy".
:)
When asked to elaborate the officer said something like: "Well, we are not allowed to say who the enemy is, but we can say this much: It's not the Swedes"
I guess it's between Norway and Russia then, even though I find the two scenarios you presented more likely to occur
Why would anyone dial a number on a cellular!?
Yes it's a case of "quick hacks". But the point Shirky was making was that it's not just any "quick hack", but a socially adapted "quick hack", AKA the right tool for the (one) right job.
A very interesting question. However if these people are to ever convince us that they possess abstract thought they will have to communicate that somehow. The least linguistic way of communicating would probably be through acting intelligently in some kind of test setting. No simple experiments :)
:)
I think he got caught, since his career development quite obviously diminished after its peak.
In my mind, time exists as numbers
As a result of practice, yes it might. How your brain actually represents the concept of time is probably quite unknown.
However, representing a numerical concept as something visual has never been any challenge for human mental abilities.
For instance, one could say that "Joe was at the peek of his career", even though a career and a mountain have very few similarities, except perhaps the "shape".
Not using as much energy when asleep and rebuilding muscle and other tissue are probably also a factors, but perhaps orthogonal ones. It is imaginable that there could exist a lifeform which would rest (and thus save energy, rebuild) without putting its mind in a sleeping state.
Saving energy cannot possibly be the whole reason, because in that case you could compensate for lack of sleep by eating more, and you can to a point but after 48 hours or so of waking time you usually notice that it's not so much the lack of energy but the lack of ability to concentrate. So intuitively it would seem that the mind needs to do something that demands it to be in "sleep-mode".
The JVM might be written in C and be a native program, but it's still running the Java bytecode in a virtual machine. If the virtual machine does not have the math functions you mentioned as primitives their performance depends on the JVM/JIT-engine.
So in a benchmark comparing compiler performance I can't see how that is "moot".
what I see as the big imediment towards adoption of open source
Yes, yes, or then it's one of the reasons open source manages to produce loads of useful software at a fraction of the cost of commercial development. Don't reinvent the wheel and don't solve everyone elses problems. MDI works great on windows where the culture encourages running many programs in full screen mode. I was also initially annoyed by the GIMP interface and all its windows, but there's a very simple solution to that: Put GIMP on its own virtual desktop.
So many girls like LOTR because Legolas and Aragorn are hot.
Is it really that simple? And I was annoyed because they've put too much Arwen in the story. I guess I'm just plain strange.
I think you just explained the thing I've been wondering: Why so many girls like it :)
Money = sqrt(All_evil)
Woman = Time * Money
Time = Money
<=> Woman = Money ^ 2
=> Money ^ 2 = All_evil
<=> Woman = All_evil
Another take on this would be to analyze the RIAA "business model". Since they are suing end-users, and legal business is quite expensive, how big a fraction of the cases must they win to be "profitable". The reparations cannot possibly be huge for most people, on the scale of large organisation budgets. If the legal actions become too expensive to maintain, then the RIAA will be forced to change its strategy. It will also mean that their grip on the markets and labels will have to loosen.
In a well-designed OS, the kernel should be almost totally independent of the GUI and vice versa.
Why? You are assuming some kind of general multi-use operating system then. If the device is used for heavily graphical tasks and hardly any number crunching, then it pays to design the kernel for use with the graphical environment. A server on the other hand might benefit from throughput enhancing features that might impair interactive graphical performance. Either way the kernel is hardly independent from the GUI.
Remember this is open source. Nobody will force it down your throat. If it's any good people will use it, otherwise it will just die silently.
Even if it becomes popular, I'm sure there will be distros using traditional init.
I realize that you got attecked and are responding to that, but I would like to point out that you're making a very "evil" argument because:
I think that using social skills as a metric for intelligence is at least as confusing as using mathematical (or computer or whatever) skills. Intelligence is too wide a concept to evaluate. Let's just settle for the fact that people have different needs when it comes to computer interfaces.
To get back on topic I would think that the whole question is not so much about "freedom" or "ease of use" as it is of software engineering. Whether we have a generic X layer with toolkits on top or whether we include both the low level graphics and the toolkit same layer (as in Y) should be considered on technical grounds rather than based on user interface grounds since both layerings allow similar user interfaces on top of them.
One toolkit equals "one look and feel", but does not equal "one desktop". You could have both "KDE" and "Gnome" on top of Y, no problem (except for lots of code). If Y is really better than X then let's hope something will come of it, it's not like X couldn't use some competitors.
Well yes and no. If you consider that both ends would be doing something similar to gzipping everything they sent and then gunzipping it back again. It becomes faster if the channel between the two is the bottleneck, if it isn't you just waste more CPU cycles so actually the system becomes slower.