they were discussing giving things away for free as a business model.
Well, given that just the other day I expressed my comparable views on the "business model" meme I can at least claim consistency. Trying to push it back into the "business model" frame completely misses my point because is exactly what I'm objecting to.
Not all organizations, or ventures, or whatever you want to call them are businesses, and not all of them need (or want) business models, profits, or whatever. Algebra has lasted for centuries without turning a dime (though early practitioners did consider it "intellectual property" and jealously guarded "their" methods). There are not-for-profit organizations that have lasted as long as any business (longer, I suspect).
Just to make it crystal clear: I'm not ignoring the question of how long can all this free content from businesses that need to have viable business models can continue, I'm objecting to the underlying assumption that that's where all the free content comes from in the first place.
--MarkusQ
P.S. You forgot to give me your credit card number, but you obviously read my content. Are you admitting to being leacher? And, for that matter, unless you're an astroturfer of some sort (and thus getting paid to entertain me) I suppose I owe you something as well.
Unless, of course, we are doing the unthinkable and entertaining each other without a viable business model!
I hate this question. You might as well ask "For how long can we afford to have sex without charging each other?" or "For how long can we make idle chit chat with random strangers without getting their billing information first?"
Or how about "How long can the sun shine without protection of its intellectual property?"
I'm as capitalistic as the next guy, but capitalism is a specific mechanism to resolve a certain specific class of problems in an efficient manner. It is not some universal mandate, and there's no reason to suspect that it imposes any sorts of limits on conduct that isn't covered by the model.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Please respond with your credit card numbers so I can bill you for spouting off. I've gotta eat, you know.
Oh great. As if the botnets and spam and phishing and all the other nonsense aren't enough to drive a simple sysadmin mad, now I'm going to have to wory about bird flu as well?
Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are abel and willing to do so.
As an administrator of a few reasonably small domains, my first thought was oh, the fools!
You don't want to read every piece of e-mail that comes into even one site, let alone the whole internet. You don't even want to try to write programs to do it.
/dev/null, I tell you,/dev/null! The only sane thing to do with 99% of the e-mail is route it to/dev/null in the most efficient way possible. All else is madness!
You would be better off trying to understand the inner thoughts of a lava lamp then trying to figure out why anyone thinks anyone would buy "farmasuiticals (the 1 U've been lOOking 4!)", let alone ingest them! Or invest in "s+0cks" that are about to "+ake 0ff" based on the say so of a stranger named "Brandice Hornyslut." Or the pointlessly malformed sludge, the server errors from misconfigured machines...if anyone really wanted to hide something they'd be about as well off e-mailing it as flushing it down the toilet--and trying to find it would be about as pleasant.
Sadly, no. I read the research as part of a marketing course I took ages ago (trying to understand the other side--I'm strictly a development guy); I've seen it alluded to here and there, but have long lost the original handouts. It's also come up occasionally in the context of people's reaction to technology (if you don't understand something, it's easy to make a quick judgment on an assumption that technology is either pure good or pure evil, and assume that it is very important that everyone agree with you; paradoxically, if you do understand it, you're likely to spend a lot of your time on "vi-vs.-emacs" fiddling--and still assume that it's very important that everyone agree with you).
This fits in nicely with another finding that seems amazing when you first hear about it, but is obviously true:
People spend more conscious thinking time on a choice when it doesn't really matter.
Hard to believe, right? You'd think we would think long and hard about things that matter (in the sense that one or the other of the choices will be far better or worse than the other) and not waste time on choices where the outcome is pretty much the same regardless of what we decided. But that's not, in fact, how we operate.
If you give people a choice between, say, being paid a dollar or getting hit with a stick, they make up their minds much quicker than if (to choose an example at the other end of the spectrum) you let them pick a candy out of a box of identical chocolates. You can even induce the effect; people will eat potato chips out of a bag one after another without even looking at them, but if you spread the same chips out on the table and ask "which chip do you want to eat next?" so that it becomes something they have to decide they will generally slow to a crawl.
For the most part, I agree with you. However <rant>
I think there's room for both business models.
Except, in this case, I don't have a business model. None, nada, ziltch.
And you know what? Not only do I produce software without a business model, I've been known to sing songs I just made up on the spur of the moment, without an agent or a recording contract. I say things to people without testing them on a focus group, and I don't care what my Q factor is. I got up this morning with a few interesting ideas
which I spent the morning working on, but I didn't update my vision statement because I don't have one.
Does anyone else remember the days when people just did things because they felt like it?
</rant>
Ah hem. Thank you.
My point being, of course, that the fundamental thing so many people seem to miss about OSS is that it isn't a business so it doesn't need a business model, anymore than algebra or sex do. Yes, you can build a business around any of them, and it may succeed or fail, but that's your problem. The algebra, the sex, and the open source software will still be there whether you make money off them or not.
This is a crock. As others have pointed out already, immature software is unlikely to be used in an enterprise environment (unless it was developed in house) regardless of the license. But wait, there's more. I happen to have a number of immature open source projects of my own at the moment, and I don't give a flying fig if they "make it" in an enterprise environment.
Why? Because unlike Microsoft, I don't expect any revenue from them and thus won't be disappointed if I don't get any. I wrote them because I needed them and open sourced them because I wanted a few more eyeballs on them. But even if no one else ever even downloads them, I'm not <voice='spooky'>Dooomed</voice> because I'm not selling them in the first place. For the vast majority of open source projects, saying that they won't make it in "the Enterprise" is about as relevant as saying that cows will never use the iPod.
The station yes, but the remaining tether, assuming it is trailing down into the atmosphere, would create drag,
How, if there's no relative motion? Remember, the tether is attached to the counterweight--it isn't as if there are two independent things here, one in an orbit and the other held up by magic. It's the entire thing that is in geostationary orbit, and that means that all of it is going to stay over one point on the Earth's surface. And with no relative motion, there's no drag; to use your car analogy, if you stick your hand out of the window of a car that is stationary with respect to the Earth's surface, do you create drag and slow it down? No.
The downside would be that the end of the tether attached to the orbital station would set up a drag in the Earth's atmosphere
No, it wouldn't. It's in a geostationary orbit, so it's moving at the same speed the earth's surface is. There wouldn't be any relative velocity, so no drag.
If we have purchased something we have looked forward to, we will disregard negative things about this and might even become angry if friends point out flaws in the product to us. This is because we all want to think that we are crafty consumers who have made the smart choice. Of course, WE would never fall for advertising, we think. So when evidence mounts that the purchase wasn't as good as we thought, we resist facing it until the evidence is overwhelming.
The heck with things we buy; you should see how irrational we get over things we vote for.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Although I structured this as a joke (did you notice?) the point is quite serious. There have even been studies (at least one of which made it to/.) where people were more adamant in insisting that they liked something after they had selected it (as a gift, IIRC) for someone else.
And (perhaps most interestingly) the harder we resist changing, the more extreme we are likely to be when we finally do admit--not that we made a mistake, mind you--but that we were fooled by the foul tricksters that we once supported.
No. Variation is necessary for diversity (since without it there would be nothing for natural selection to act on) but random variation on its own simply can not lead to adaptive diversity. The universe isn't nearly old enough for this to be even remotely plausible. Remember, that random walks are, at any given step, as likely to revert as advance; their mean net progress only scales with the square root of time.
But, if you add a bias (i.e. natural selection in this case) progress--however you define it--can be much faster.
Imagine a little solar powered toy that occasionally hops straight up a centimeter or so, standing on a level table top, and another identical toy standing on a slightly tilted table top. Which do you suppose will make it to the edge first? And, more importantly, in which case can we make meaningful explanatory/predictive statements about which edge of the table it will ultimately fall off of?
Specialtion of house mice on different Pacific islands is a common example - the environments and therefore selective pressures are presumably the same. Yet the mice have very different genetic content between populations.
Yes, this is a classic case of population geneticists missing the trees for the forests. Why? Because the environments are so glaringly different, yet the difference is so easy to miss if your mind is stuck on populations that it makes a wonderful ah-ha! teachable moment.
Spotted the difference yet?
I won't do the "scroll down...." trick you see in e-mail, and I suspect slashcode wouldn't let me get away with if I tried, so here goes. If you think about populations of mice instead of individual mice, you will miss the fact that one of the key factors in the environment of any individual mouse is other mice. The very fact that the populations differ in genetically significant ways means that mice in these populations are in significantly different environments, because they have to deal with different sorts of mice. That, and time, is all it takes to get a peacock's tail or a human brain.
As far as the definition of evolution, I give up. I've given you citations and sound fundamental philisophical resaoning as to why the correct view is that evolution is change in genetic population. I don't have anything else.
If you gave any sound fundamental philosophical reasons, I missed them. I will go back and read through your posts again. As I recall, the only arguments you gave favoring your definition were 1) argument by authority (which, in this case, is doubly suspect because so many "experts" on evolution these day are either closet ID proponents trying to discredit it from within, or honest but timid to the point where they will misstate their case to avoid confrontation with the former), and 2) because it is measurable.
Contrast that with the facts that 1) it isn't what people in general mean by evolution, or even what specialists mean, in my experience, and 2) it cuts out all the interesting questions, leaving only tautologies. I've explained the second point previously, but let's look at the first:
Suppose I have a puppy with short, straight brown hair, and one day I buy two poodles with long, curly black hair. Is that evolution? I suspect most people, even population geneticists, would say no. But, as you will note, it does meet your over broad definition, and, if you really pelived what you wrote, you would have to say that it was evolution.
Yes, but 1G is an enormously difficult acceleration to sustain for any length of time. Any technology capable of sustaining that for even a few days, let alone a few months, and still delivering a useful payload, would definitely be in the indistinguishable-from-magic regime.
Basically, controlled fusion and a whole lot of engineering should get you there (days, probably not months, unless you're talking some sort of tam jet). Certainly not doable today, but not that far past (say) a beanstalk or reasonable intellectual property laws.
At first I was astounded by your response; then, I realized, that you had systematically missed the point, by substituting the concept of variation (differences amongst individuals) for the concept of diversity (the range of different types of creatures in existence) that I explicitly used. Thus, you are (consistently, at least) talkinmg about why Spot has large brown spots and Rover has small black spots and ignoring the larger issue of why dogs exist in the first place.
So going back over it again, but keeping these two concepts straight:
Natural selection (as you state) does not, on its own, explain variation; it was never intended to. Instead, it simply assumed some supply of variation, and used it to explain diversity, which it does (and genetic drift, et al, can not, even in principle[1]).
The diversity (not the variation) is almost perfectly adaptive. We do not see whales-like creatures stubbornly living in caves. By the same token, variation is almost perfectly non-adaptive; if there were an even mildly significant advantage to one variety over another, we would see only the more adaptive variation in relatively few generations.
As an aside, your argument that "it MUST work that way because an organism cannot predict what kind of variation will turn out to be adaptive in advance" is flawed. Evolution is no guarantee that organisms will be adaptive in the future; it only appears that way when (as is often the case) the future turns out to be fairly similar to the past. And, in any case, you are confusing levels; even if organisms could predict what would be adaptive in the future, they have no way (short of genetic engineering on themselves) to act on the information.
As for the optimality point, a human (to choose your example) may well be loaded with design flaws. That doesn't matter in the slightest, so long as some other creature can't walk in and swipe his niche.
You write "My definition is superior in explanatory value because it is measurable."
That's just silly. Suppose that some manned mission to Mars were to find crates and crates of hand-copied volumes of Jane Eyre just sitting around on the sand. And suppose, after careful study by a team of experts, it was found that the books weren't all identical; that, in fact, there were minor differences between them and, so far as the experts could tell, no two copies were alike. Further, by doing some detailed statistical analysis, they were to determine that (to within some margin of error) all of the differences between the books could be explained by random processes, and anounced this as their explanation.
Suppose further (but just a little bit further) they were accused of missing the main question, and by defining the question to be "why do these books vary", producing a theory with no predictive or explanatory power. If they responded "my definition is superior in explanatory value because it is measurable," would you just accept it?
I have read On the Origin of Species cover to cover twice, and a few things are clear:
The theory was not intended to explain variation within a species (it was, rightly, taken as a given); a priori one would assume that different physical object will be different, and thus we only need seek explanation for differences that appear so well suited to some purpose that one might assume they were designed for that purpose, or otherwise display a highly non-random distribution.
The question of speciation was not "how do populations that are almost identical but don't or can't interbreed come about" but rather "how do wildly different types of of creatures, all reasonably well suited to their environment come about." What you are calling "speciation" was a minor detail and essentially assumed (mostly through geographic isolation, but he made it clear that there were other mechanisms that would serve as well).
I appologize for the probably higher level of typos in this post; I've had a sick one-year old sleeping on my lap through most of it.
--MarkusQ
[1] Unless you're going to drag in some sort of anthropic argument.
No, we have reduced to the problem of how to accelerate only part of the ship, while the other parts can hitch a ride on the first. I suspect the sweet spot would be the first part at 2/3 of the total mass.
If you're correct, then we're done:
To accelerate the ship to near light speed, we just need to figure out how to accelerate 2/3 of the ship to near light speed.
To accelerate 2/3 of the ship to near light speed, we just need to figure out how to accelerate 4/9 of the ship to near light speed, and use it to accelerate the 2/3 part.
To accelerate 4/9 of the ship to near light speed, we just need to figure out how to accelerate 8/27 of the ship to near light speed, and use it to accelerate the 4/9 part that we'll use to accelerate the 2/3 part we'll use to accelerate the whole ship.
...skipping a bunch of steps...
To accelerate an unimaginably teny tiny bit of the ship to near light speed, we just need to figure out how to accelerate an even smaller bit of the ship to near light speed; we'll use a flashlight.
And we're not just talking about any old object here. From the article:
In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star. In effect, the payload would be hitching a ride on a star.
So we've reduced the problem of how to accelerate a ship to near light speed to the problem of how to accelerate a star to near light speed.
evolution isn't just change, it's adaptive change.
Sorry, that is just not correct. Evolution is NOT defined in modern biology as adaptive change. Your basic premise is wrong, making your arguments specious.
Funny, I feel the same way about your argument. A quick google shows about a 50/50 split in the definitions which specify "adaptive change" (in some form or another) as opposed to the ones such as you site. To give just a few examples:
But, as I pointed out, this isn't a problem that can be solved with dueling citations; even starting down that path misses the fundamental point that genetic drift alone can't explain any of the key observations about life:
It is very diverse
The diversity is (to a good first approximation) perfectly adaptive
When you drill down to a more detailed accounting it is still adaptive, but at the level of genes, not individuals or populations (e.g. see Dawkins "Extended Phenotype")
It is optimal, in the sense that permuting the diversity in any way (e.g. hanging giraffes from cave roofs) would destroy one or more of the points above.
So if you define "evolution" as above, you wind up faced with the fact (from your source) that "Drift produces evolutionary change, but there is no guarantee that the new population will be more fit than the original one. Evolution by drift is aimless, not adaptive." and you have done nothing but muddy the waters. By calling every change "evolution" you admit more causes which can do nothing to explain anything that needed explaining.
For example, suppose a new school of "economic biologists" broadened the definition of evolution still further, to include (say) a change in the average market value of a member of the species or the number of books in which it is mentioned. What good would that do? Now there would be a whole bunch more things that could cause "evolution" but they would have done nothing to clarify the question--instead, they would have confused things horribly.
And that, pretty much, is what "population genetics" has done. The questions are murky enough at the level of the individual organisms, but by considering populations you effectively average out all the interesting questions and wind up making vacuous statements such as "genetic drift causes evolution" where "genetic drift" is defined (again from your source) as what happens when, by chance "the frequency of an allele may begin to drift toward higher or lower values."
Combining this with your definition of evolution, we have:
The frequency of an allele drifting toward higher or lower values causes changes in the statistics of the presence of genes in a population over time.
Which, as I hope you can see, has no explanatory value whatsoever and makes no testable predictions to speak of (though the converse would be world shaking news).
Changes in the statistics of the presence of genes in a population over time is evolution.
No, this is a meme of the anti-evolution crowd (part of the "scientists dispute evolution" nonsense) that is to often repeated by loose-thinking scientists and popularizations. You are confusing one of the intermediate effects of evolution (an effect which, as you note, could have multiple causes apart from evolution) with evolution itself. Lets see how that sort of fuzzy thinking looks like in another environment:
Changes in the statistics of the presence of the sun in a the sky over time is the heliocentric theory of the solar system.
To which, of course, you reply: No, no, no! The heliocentric theory of the solar system explains why we see the sort of pattern of sunlight that we do--it isn't just the change in sunlight, but a specific theory that predicts why we see the sort of patterns of change of sunlight that we do.
Same deal in evolution. Or to bring it on home: giraffes, bats and whales all had a reasonably recent common ancestor. There is no reason what so ever for genetic drift to have taken this common ancestor towards any of the three forms in particular. The amazing fact is, we do not find whales grazing the savanna, bats swimming in the open sea, and giraffes hanging upside down in caves. The odds against the situation we do see are already pretty steep, and when you throw in polar bears, monkeys, elephants, house cats, foxes, and so on it gets down right amazing that every population seems to have "drifted" from the common ancestor in a way that suited its environment.
Now, the genetic drift idea just leaves this hanging out there, and doesn't even attempt to offer an explanation (which is why the closet Intelligent Design people keep trying to keep it in play). But Darwin makes a bold prediction; this directed change is not the result of any magical force, but rather the effect of a simple, natural process; the change was random, but the maladapted variants died off at a faster rate than the rest. In the ocean, bat-like mutations just didn't do as well as the whale-like mutations.
There are many studies of such populations in absence of at least known natural selection factors that show evolution (changes in gene distribution statistics).
Same problem: evolution isn't just change, it's adaptive change.
While genetic drift is a stochastic process, an allele is truth state, and eventually it will propagate throughout the population, or disappear completely.
Granted. But it's a string of nonsequitors.
The power of genetic drift effects can be seen in a striking example in the human race - every living human has mitochondrial DNA originating from a single female. There are many other examples of human populations (where natural selection is generally not a factor) that for one reason or another are genetically isolated and are quite divergent in their genetic statistics.
This is another Intelligent Design meme: that some how, humans are magically out of reach of natural selection now. It is completely unfounded--unless you are claiming that something like "everyone has exactly the same number of children" or "people's inherited characteristics have no effect on their breeding success", you'll see it as soon as you stop to think about it.
But in any case, even if it wasn't begging the question, why should we be the least bit surprised about the mitochondrail DNA?
The evidence is pretty clear that genetic drift is an important cause of evolution. Some feel it is more important than natural selection.
The evidence is smoke and mirrors and the people who have been taken in by it either 1) have an agenda or 2) aren't thinking very clearly. You can trot out all the "experts" that you want, but if an idea doesn't hold water (or, as in this case, needs a supernatural entity to care the w
But (as I'm sure you'll admit) evolution isn't the same thing as speciation; you could, for example, have two different species (say, hares and foxes) engaged in an ongoing arms race, evolving quite rapidly, yet neither population splitting into two or more sub-species. Conversely, you could, at least in principle, have two populations of the same species that were separated in some way gradually "drift" into separate species. So the evolution of adaptive traits is not the same thing as speciation, and, as I said before, it is natural selection, not genetic drift, which drives evolution.
But even the case for genetic drift "causing" speciation is not as strong as you seem to think; for it to work the two populations would have to occupy very similar environments (to prevent differential natural selection from swamping out the effects of drift--remember, random walks scale with sqrt(t), while a typical bias tends to be liniar or better). When you consider that the "environment" consists of all the other species in the two environments, as well as the physical environment, and whatever is keeping them apart, and so forth...even the article you linked to doesn't make a very strong case (mostly argument from authority) for what is a rather implausible theory.
The second part, the proposal that natural selection is the mechanism has been understood to be not the best mechanism for the process of evolution has been understood for nearly 100 years.
Understood by whom? And, more to the point, what alternative do they supposedly posit as a replacement?
Darwin did not understand genes, genetics, nor the mechanisms of genetic drift that occur within populations. This knowedge postdates Darwin's original work.
He didn't need to. An understanding of genes and genetics is no more important to understanding natural selection than it is to understanding artificial selection (which, you may note, was successfully practiced for eons before Mendel or Watson and Crick).
And genetic drift, while it may or may not be a significant factor in the way species change over time, it is not (and demonstrably can not be) a significant factor in how they evolve. Remember, the power of evolution isn't that it explains change in general but that it explains apparently purposeful change without needing to use a ghost in the machine somewhere. If you plan to use random drift for that, you'll have a heck of a time explaining why things consistently "randomly drift" in the right direction. The correct explanation (and totally in keeping with Darwin's work) is that they don't consistently drift in the right direction, but that every branch who's genes drift in the wrong direction dies out (by the definition of "the wrong direction") and thus we don't see them and feel the need to explain them. This process is, of course, called "natural selection".
a gazillon lawyers are gettings paid a gazillon dollars per hour and they would have spotted this
I'm not so sure. My lawyer misses things that I think are obvious, but catches things that I never would have thought to look for. There may be a reason we spent years studying different subjects. I don't read whatever it is he reads, and I doubt he'd know what an RFC was or where to find it unless someone told him.
I agree the From: field is easy to spoof, but the To: / Cc: / Bcc: fields needs to be valid in order for the email to actually get somewhere...
No, not really. They may get caught in a spam filter or something, but a non-paranoid SMPT server just looks at the SMTP commands and ignores the headers in the DATA block. SMTP is a protocol born in a more trusting era, when people on the net more or less knew each other--and if you did something stupid, you were likely to get a call ("Hey Bob, did you read the RFC, or just print it out to look at later?") from your neighbors.
Slashdot Mirror
they were discussing giving things away for free as a business model.
Well, given that just the other day I expressed my comparable views on the "business model" meme I can at least claim consistency. Trying to push it back into the "business model" frame completely misses my point because is exactly what I'm objecting to.
Not all organizations, or ventures, or whatever you want to call them are businesses, and not all of them need (or want) business models, profits, or whatever. Algebra has lasted for centuries without turning a dime (though early practitioners did consider it "intellectual property" and jealously guarded "their" methods). There are not-for-profit organizations that have lasted as long as any business (longer, I suspect).
Just to make it crystal clear: I'm not ignoring the question of how long can all this free content from businesses that need to have viable business models can continue, I'm objecting to the underlying assumption that that's where all the free content comes from in the first place.
--MarkusQ
P.S. You forgot to give me your credit card number, but you obviously read my content. Are you admitting to being leacher? And, for that matter, unless you're an astroturfer of some sort (and thus getting paid to entertain me) I suppose I owe you something as well.
Unless, of course, we are doing the unthinkable and entertaining each other without a viable business model!
For how long can we give content away for free?
I hate this question. You might as well ask "For how long can we afford to have sex without charging each other?" or "For how long can we make idle chit chat with random strangers without getting their billing information first?"
Or how about "How long can the sun shine without protection of its intellectual property?"
I'm as capitalistic as the next guy, but capitalism is a specific mechanism to resolve a certain specific class of problems in an efficient manner. It is not some universal mandate, and there's no reason to suspect that it imposes any sorts of limits on conduct that isn't covered by the model.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Please respond with your credit card numbers so I can bill you for spouting off. I've gotta eat, you know.
Back to IP over avian carrier?
Oh great. As if the botnets and spam and phishing and all the other nonsense aren't enough to drive a simple sysadmin mad, now I'm going to have to wory about bird flu as well?
--MarkusQ
Imagine, for instance, if Senator McCarthy had been able to steam open every letter in the United States. In the age of ubiquitous e-mail and filtering software, budding McCarthys are abel and willing to do so.
As an administrator of a few reasonably small domains, my first thought was oh, the fools!
You don't want to read every piece of e-mail that comes into even one site, let alone the whole internet. You don't even want to try to write programs to do it.
You would be better off trying to understand the inner thoughts of a lava lamp then trying to figure out why anyone thinks anyone would buy "farmasuiticals (the 1 U've been lOOking 4!)", let alone ingest them! Or invest in "s+0cks" that are about to "+ake 0ff" based on the say so of a stranger named "Brandice Hornyslut." Or the pointlessly malformed sludge, the server errors from misconfigured machines...if anyone really wanted to hide something they'd be about as well off e-mailing it as flushing it down the toilet--and trying to find it would be about as pleasant.
--MarkusQ
Sadly, no. I read the research as part of a marketing course I took ages ago (trying to understand the other side--I'm strictly a development guy); I've seen it alluded to here and there, but have long lost the original handouts. It's also come up occasionally in the context of people's reaction to technology (if you don't understand something, it's easy to make a quick judgment on an assumption that technology is either pure good or pure evil, and assume that it is very important that everyone agree with you; paradoxically, if you do understand it, you're likely to spend a lot of your time on "vi-vs.-emacs" fiddling--and still assume that it's very important that everyone agree with you).
--MarkusQ
This fits in nicely with another finding that seems amazing when you first hear about it, but is obviously true:
People spend more conscious thinking time on a choice when it doesn't really matter.
Hard to believe, right? You'd think we would think long and hard about things that matter (in the sense that one or the other of the choices will be far better or worse than the other) and not waste time on choices where the outcome is pretty much the same regardless of what we decided. But that's not, in fact, how we operate.
If you give people a choice between, say, being paid a dollar or getting hit with a stick, they make up their minds much quicker than if (to choose an example at the other end of the spectrum) you let them pick a candy out of a box of identical chocolates. You can even induce the effect; people will eat potato chips out of a bag one after another without even looking at them, but if you spread the same chips out on the table and ask "which chip do you want to eat next?" so that it becomes something they have to decide they will generally slow to a crawl.
--MarkusQ
For the most part, I agree with you. However <rant>
I think there's room for both business models.
Except, in this case, I don't have a business model. None, nada, ziltch.
And you know what? Not only do I produce software without a business model, I've been known to sing songs I just made up on the spur of the moment, without an agent or a recording contract. I say things to people without testing them on a focus group, and I don't care what my Q factor is. I got up this morning with a few interesting ideas which I spent the morning working on, but I didn't update my vision statement because I don't have one.
Does anyone else remember the days when people just did things because they felt like it?
</rant>
Ah hem. Thank you.
My point being, of course, that the fundamental thing so many people seem to miss about OSS is that it isn't a business so it doesn't need a business model, anymore than algebra or sex do. Yes, you can build a business around any of them, and it may succeed or fail, but that's your problem. The algebra, the sex, and the open source software will still be there whether you make money off them or not.
--MarkusQ
I thought to myself as I typed that line: sure as anything, someone will point out that somewhere it's been done.
But then I though: you're just being silly. A cow with an IPod!?
Thanks for confirming my belief that, with enough eyeballs, you can find a real world example of any random joke.
--MarkusQ
This is a crock. As others have pointed out already, immature software is unlikely to be used in an enterprise environment (unless it was developed in house) regardless of the license. But wait, there's more. I happen to have a number of immature open source projects of my own at the moment, and I don't give a flying fig if they "make it" in an enterprise environment.
Why? Because unlike Microsoft, I don't expect any revenue from them and thus won't be disappointed if I don't get any. I wrote them because I needed them and open sourced them because I wanted a few more eyeballs on them. But even if no one else ever even downloads them, I'm not <voice='spooky'> Dooomed </voice> because I'm not selling them in the first place. For the vast majority of open source projects, saying that they won't make it in "the Enterprise" is about as relevant as saying that cows will never use the iPod.
--MarkusQ
Nobody expected this sharp increase.
George, is that you?
--MarkusQ
P.S. I agree with most of your post, but the straight line was too good to pass up.
The station yes, but the remaining tether, assuming it is trailing down into the atmosphere, would create drag,
How, if there's no relative motion? Remember, the tether is attached to the counterweight--it isn't as if there are two independent things here, one in an orbit and the other held up by magic. It's the entire thing that is in geostationary orbit, and that means that all of it is going to stay over one point on the Earth's surface. And with no relative motion, there's no drag; to use your car analogy, if you stick your hand out of the window of a car that is stationary with respect to the Earth's surface, do you create drag and slow it down? No.
--MarkusQ
The downside would be that the end of the tether attached to the orbital station would set up a drag in the Earth's atmosphere
No, it wouldn't. It's in a geostationary orbit, so it's moving at the same speed the earth's surface is. There wouldn't be any relative velocity, so no drag.
--MarkusQ
A breadboarded 4004 with gobs of 74xx series support goo to make it act like a computer. Then an IMSAI 8080, with the coolest front panel ever.
--MarkusQ
The heck with things we buy; you should see how irrational we get over things we vote for.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Although I structured this as a joke (did you notice?) the point is quite serious. There have even been studies (at least one of which made it to /.) where people were more adamant in insisting that they liked something after they had selected it (as a gift, IIRC) for someone else.
And (perhaps most interestingly) the harder we resist changing, the more extreme we are likely to be when we finally do admit--not that we made a mistake, mind you--but that we were fooled by the foul tricksters that we once supported.
Happens in relationships too.
Variation is what leads to diversity.
No. Variation is necessary for diversity (since without it there would be nothing for natural selection to act on) but random variation on its own simply can not lead to adaptive diversity. The universe isn't nearly old enough for this to be even remotely plausible. Remember, that random walks are, at any given step, as likely to revert as advance; their mean net progress only scales with the square root of time.
But, if you add a bias (i.e. natural selection in this case) progress--however you define it--can be much faster.
Imagine a little solar powered toy that occasionally hops straight up a centimeter or so, standing on a level table top, and another identical toy standing on a slightly tilted table top. Which do you suppose will make it to the edge first? And, more importantly, in which case can we make meaningful explanatory/predictive statements about which edge of the table it will ultimately fall off of?
Specialtion of house mice on different Pacific islands is a common example - the environments and therefore selective pressures are presumably the same. Yet the mice have very different genetic content between populations.
Yes, this is a classic case of population geneticists missing the trees for the forests. Why? Because the environments are so glaringly different, yet the difference is so easy to miss if your mind is stuck on populations that it makes a wonderful ah-ha! teachable moment.
Spotted the difference yet?
I won't do the "scroll down...." trick you see in e-mail, and I suspect slashcode wouldn't let me get away with if I tried, so here goes. If you think about populations of mice instead of individual mice, you will miss the fact that one of the key factors in the environment of any individual mouse is other mice. The very fact that the populations differ in genetically significant ways means that mice in these populations are in significantly different environments, because they have to deal with different sorts of mice. That, and time, is all it takes to get a peacock's tail or a human brain.
As far as the definition of evolution, I give up. I've given you citations and sound fundamental philisophical resaoning as to why the correct view is that evolution is change in genetic population. I don't have anything else.
If you gave any sound fundamental philosophical reasons, I missed them. I will go back and read through your posts again. As I recall, the only arguments you gave favoring your definition were 1) argument by authority (which, in this case, is doubly suspect because so many "experts" on evolution these day are either closet ID proponents trying to discredit it from within, or honest but timid to the point where they will misstate their case to avoid confrontation with the former), and 2) because it is measurable.
Contrast that with the facts that 1) it isn't what people in general mean by evolution, or even what specialists mean, in my experience, and 2) it cuts out all the interesting questions, leaving only tautologies. I've explained the second point previously, but let's look at the first:
Suppose I have a puppy with short, straight brown hair, and one day I buy two poodles with long, curly black hair. Is that evolution? I suspect most people, even population geneticists, would say no. But, as you will note, it does meet your over broad definition, and, if you really pelived what you wrote, you would have to say that it was evolution.
--MarkusQ
Yes, but 1G is an enormously difficult acceleration to sustain for any length of time. Any technology capable of sustaining that for even a few days, let alone a few months, and still delivering a useful payload, would definitely be in the indistinguishable-from-magic regime.
Basically, controlled fusion and a whole lot of engineering should get you there (days, probably not months, unless you're talking some sort of tam jet). Certainly not doable today, but not that far past (say) a beanstalk or reasonable intellectual property laws.
--MarkusQ
At first I was astounded by your response; then, I realized, that you had systematically missed the point, by substituting the concept of variation (differences amongst individuals) for the concept of diversity (the range of different types of creatures in existence) that I explicitly used. Thus, you are (consistently, at least) talkinmg about why Spot has large brown spots and Rover has small black spots and ignoring the larger issue of why dogs exist in the first place.
So going back over it again, but keeping these two concepts straight:
As an aside, your argument that "it MUST work that way because an organism cannot predict what kind of variation will turn out to be adaptive in advance" is flawed. Evolution is no guarantee that organisms will be adaptive in the future; it only appears that way when (as is often the case) the future turns out to be fairly similar to the past. And, in any case, you are confusing levels; even if organisms could predict what would be adaptive in the future, they have no way (short of genetic engineering on themselves) to act on the information.
That's just silly. Suppose that some manned mission to Mars were to find crates and crates of hand-copied volumes of Jane Eyre just sitting around on the sand. And suppose, after careful study by a team of experts, it was found that the books weren't all identical; that, in fact, there were minor differences between them and, so far as the experts could tell, no two copies were alike. Further, by doing some detailed statistical analysis, they were to determine that (to within some margin of error) all of the differences between the books could be explained by random processes, and anounced this as their explanation.
Suppose further (but just a little bit further) they were accused of missing the main question, and by defining the question to be "why do these books vary", producing a theory with no predictive or explanatory power. If they responded "my definition is superior in explanatory value because it is measurable," would you just accept it?
I have read On the Origin of Species cover to cover twice, and a few things are clear:
I appologize for the probably higher level of typos in this post; I've had a sick one-year old sleeping on my lap through most of it.
--MarkusQ
[1] Unless you're going to drag in some sort of anthropic argument.
No, we have reduced to the problem of how to accelerate only part of the ship, while the other parts can hitch a ride on the first. I suspect the sweet spot would be the first part at 2/3 of the total mass.
If you're correct, then we're done:
--MarkusQ
Oh wait, I almost forgot:
And we're not just talking about any old object here. From the article:
So we've reduced the problem of how to accelerate a ship to near light speed to the problem of how to accelerate a star to near light speed.
Big improvement.
-- MarkusQ
Funny, I feel the same way about your argument. A quick google shows about a 50/50 split in the definitions which specify "adaptive change" (in some form or another) as opposed to the ones such as you site. To give just a few examples:
But, as I pointed out, this isn't a problem that can be solved with dueling citations; even starting down that path misses the fundamental point that genetic drift alone can't explain any of the key observations about life:
- It is very diverse
- The diversity is (to a good first approximation) perfectly adaptive
- When you drill down to a more detailed accounting it is still adaptive, but at the level of genes, not individuals or populations (e.g. see Dawkins "Extended Phenotype")
- It is optimal, in the sense that permuting the diversity in any way (e.g. hanging giraffes from cave roofs) would destroy one or more of the points above.
So if you define "evolution" as above, you wind up faced with the fact (from your source) that "Drift produces evolutionary change, but there is no guarantee that the new population will be more fit than the original one. Evolution by drift is aimless, not adaptive." and you have done nothing but muddy the waters. By calling every change "evolution" you admit more causes which can do nothing to explain anything that needed explaining.For example, suppose a new school of "economic biologists" broadened the definition of evolution still further, to include (say) a change in the average market value of a member of the species or the number of books in which it is mentioned. What good would that do? Now there would be a whole bunch more things that could cause "evolution" but they would have done nothing to clarify the question--instead, they would have confused things horribly.
And that, pretty much, is what "population genetics" has done. The questions are murky enough at the level of the individual organisms, but by considering populations you effectively average out all the interesting questions and wind up making vacuous statements such as "genetic drift causes evolution" where "genetic drift" is defined (again from your source) as what happens when, by chance "the frequency of an allele may begin to drift toward higher or lower values."
Combining this with your definition of evolution, we have:
Which, as I hope you can see, has no explanatory value whatsoever and makes no testable predictions to speak of (though the converse would be world shaking news).
--MarkusQ
Changes in the statistics of the presence of genes in a population over time is evolution.
No, this is a meme of the anti-evolution crowd (part of the "scientists dispute evolution" nonsense) that is to often repeated by loose-thinking scientists and popularizations. You are confusing one of the intermediate effects of evolution (an effect which, as you note, could have multiple causes apart from evolution) with evolution itself. Lets see how that sort of fuzzy thinking looks like in another environment:
To which, of course, you reply: No, no, no! The heliocentric theory of the solar system explains why we see the sort of pattern of sunlight that we do--it isn't just the change in sunlight, but a specific theory that predicts why we see the sort of patterns of change of sunlight that we do.
Same deal in evolution. Or to bring it on home: giraffes, bats and whales all had a reasonably recent common ancestor. There is no reason what so ever for genetic drift to have taken this common ancestor towards any of the three forms in particular. The amazing fact is, we do not find whales grazing the savanna, bats swimming in the open sea, and giraffes hanging upside down in caves. The odds against the situation we do see are already pretty steep, and when you throw in polar bears, monkeys, elephants, house cats, foxes, and so on it gets down right amazing that every population seems to have "drifted" from the common ancestor in a way that suited its environment.
Now, the genetic drift idea just leaves this hanging out there, and doesn't even attempt to offer an explanation (which is why the closet Intelligent Design people keep trying to keep it in play). But Darwin makes a bold prediction; this directed change is not the result of any magical force, but rather the effect of a simple, natural process; the change was random, but the maladapted variants died off at a faster rate than the rest. In the ocean, bat-like mutations just didn't do as well as the whale-like mutations.
There are many studies of such populations in absence of at least known natural selection factors that show evolution (changes in gene distribution statistics).
Same problem: evolution isn't just change, it's adaptive change.
While genetic drift is a stochastic process, an allele is truth state, and eventually it will propagate throughout the population, or disappear completely.
Granted. But it's a string of nonsequitors.
The power of genetic drift effects can be seen in a striking example in the human race - every living human has mitochondrial DNA originating from a single female. There are many other examples of human populations (where natural selection is generally not a factor) that for one reason or another are genetically isolated and are quite divergent in their genetic statistics.
This is another Intelligent Design meme: that some how, humans are magically out of reach of natural selection now. It is completely unfounded--unless you are claiming that something like "everyone has exactly the same number of children" or "people's inherited characteristics have no effect on their breeding success", you'll see it as soon as you stop to think about it.
But in any case, even if it wasn't begging the question, why should we be the least bit surprised about the mitochondrail DNA?
The evidence is pretty clear that genetic drift is an important cause of evolution. Some feel it is more important than natural selection.
The evidence is smoke and mirrors and the people who have been taken in by it either 1) have an agenda or 2) aren't thinking very clearly. You can trot out all the "experts" that you want, but if an idea doesn't hold water (or, as in this case, needs a supernatural entity to care the w
But (as I'm sure you'll admit) evolution isn't the same thing as speciation; you could, for example, have two different species (say, hares and foxes) engaged in an ongoing arms race, evolving quite rapidly, yet neither population splitting into two or more sub-species. Conversely, you could, at least in principle, have two populations of the same species that were separated in some way gradually "drift" into separate species. So the evolution of adaptive traits is not the same thing as speciation, and, as I said before, it is natural selection, not genetic drift, which drives evolution.
But even the case for genetic drift "causing" speciation is not as strong as you seem to think; for it to work the two populations would have to occupy very similar environments (to prevent differential natural selection from swamping out the effects of drift--remember, random walks scale with sqrt(t), while a typical bias tends to be liniar or better). When you consider that the "environment" consists of all the other species in the two environments, as well as the physical environment, and whatever is keeping them apart, and so forth...even the article you linked to doesn't make a very strong case (mostly argument from authority) for what is a rather implausible theory.
-- MarkusQ
The second part, the proposal that natural selection is the mechanism has been understood to be not the best mechanism for the process of evolution has been understood for nearly 100 years.
Understood by whom? And, more to the point, what alternative do they supposedly posit as a replacement?
Darwin did not understand genes, genetics, nor the mechanisms of genetic drift that occur within populations. This knowedge postdates Darwin's original work.
He didn't need to. An understanding of genes and genetics is no more important to understanding natural selection than it is to understanding artificial selection (which, you may note, was successfully practiced for eons before Mendel or Watson and Crick).
And genetic drift, while it may or may not be a significant factor in the way species change over time, it is not (and demonstrably can not be) a significant factor in how they evolve. Remember, the power of evolution isn't that it explains change in general but that it explains apparently purposeful change without needing to use a ghost in the machine somewhere. If you plan to use random drift for that, you'll have a heck of a time explaining why things consistently "randomly drift" in the right direction. The correct explanation (and totally in keeping with Darwin's work) is that they don't consistently drift in the right direction, but that every branch who's genes drift in the wrong direction dies out (by the definition of "the wrong direction") and thus we don't see them and feel the need to explain them. This process is, of course, called "natural selection".
--MarkusQ
a gazillon lawyers are gettings paid a gazillon dollars per hour and they would have spotted this
I'm not so sure. My lawyer misses things that I think are obvious, but catches things that I never would have thought to look for. There may be a reason we spent years studying different subjects. I don't read whatever it is he reads, and I doubt he'd know what an RFC was or where to find it unless someone told him.
--MarkusQ
No, not really. They may get caught in a spam filter or something, but a non-paranoid SMPT server just looks at the SMTP commands and ignores the headers in the DATA block. SMTP is a protocol born in a more trusting era, when people on the net more or less knew each other--and if you did something stupid, you were likely to get a call ("Hey Bob, did you read the RFC, or just print it out to look at later?") from your neighbors.
--MarkusQ