"Originally, e-mail was text only, and e-mail viruses were impossible."... Amen. Give me pine anyday
Back in the text-only e-mail days I was quite confident in telling to my users "text e-mail can't hurt you"...until a friend at a neighboring site (uucp) showed me what they'd found: An e-mail that ended with embedded escape sequences to program a key with a long string of commands, clear the screen, and then the something like "Mail file corrupted--press (whatever the key was) to continue."
The commands, which went back to the mail reader (or would have, if the user had followed the directions) would then 1) write the body of the message to a file, 2) exit the mail reader, 3) compile the source code it just saved, and 4) run the program.
There were a few bugs in the creature, so it hadn't worked as intended, but from then on I wasn't so sure about things being safe just because I couldn't see how to exploit them.
Don't get me wrong, I like XML but I don't see how the W3C should have any jurisdiction over it. They are a Web standards body and they should leave satellite radio alone.
Actually, I'd give this a +0.5 funny and a +0.5 obscure, but it totals to +1 both ways.
Besides, my rating system is just a figment of my imagination, right?
Uh, shouldn't that be "Just your average nitpicker."?
-- MarkusQ
+1 Funny on the MQR standard
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 3, Funny
As the battle lines are drawen between the Linux and Microsoft armies I would like to offer our new range of services.
Now in stock are our extensive range of pitchforks, which may be ordered with the Tux logo, Microsoft logo, or if you're in the wrong group BSD logo.
Do you still carry the Basket-o-rott'n-fruit? The three I bought from you at last year's emacs-vi-off were the best purchace I made all year!
I fail to see how you conclude that I am only "partly right" when the link you posted mentions the existence of the very TV show that you initially claimed was "an urban legend". If you recall, nobody said that there wasn't a $64 question on the radio first; but I do claim that the existance of the radio show doesn't magically make the TV "an urban legend".
Hang on, there is no $64,000 dollar question, it is an urban myth.
I believe that you are mistaken. There are many people still living who remember it and you can buy video tape copies of the show. This seams a little much for "an urban myth"
...has anyone else noticed that the most sure-fire way to get an article on Slashdot is to wreck complex electronics?
Or even significantly reduce its usefulness. That way your theory would also explain all the attention given to copy protected CDs and microsoft products. (*smile*)
On the other hand, I think a lot of evolutionists are neodarwinistic, they have this idea that everything happened via random mutations and natural selection, which is contrary to all the other processes of life.
I would expect that most people who think clearly about these things wind up "neodarwinists." The point is to come up with an explanation for "all the other processes of life" and we would be commiting classicly flawed logic if we used the-things-to-be-explained as the basis of the explanation.
If evolution depended on the existence of complex processes of life to work, it would be useless and likely wrong.
As it turns out, however, you can explain it all (including reto-viruses, co-operation, and even the first post trolls) as a simple consequnce of random mutation and natural selection.
Your statement is akin to fearing that "a lot of physisists are neonewtonist--they think everything can be explained in terms of a few types of forces acting on a few types of particles." In many cases you want to look at the higher consequences just to keep from swamping in the details, but you shouldn't slip into confusing consequences with causes.
*sigh* Some people seem to have gotten the point of what I was saying, and others seem to have missed it, which most likely means that I wasn't as clear as I should have been. One last try:
you're abstracting away the notion of an idea to the point that it's simply a number which the idea is encoded in, and thus not patentable
My whole point is that they are doing this; they are not saying "we have this invention, and we'd like to patent it" but instead are saying "this digital code (under some representation scheme) represents something that has some properties, and we'd like to patent the digital code (in this case DNA, but my point is more general) as if we'd actually invented something with the same properties."
So that leads us to the idea that anything that can be described in a quantitative way with finite detail should not be patentable
Not at all. I'm just saying that the patent should cover the invention not the representation. Suppose that there is some common illness and some small fraction of the people in the world have a natural immunity coded by DNA sequence XYZ. If you discover this and invent some treatment (based on your discovery) to cure people, fine, I'd grant a patent on the treatment. But there is no logic to giving you a patent on the sequence which may well: 1) occur naturaly in some segment of the population, which would then be in violation of your patent, 2) occur in other contexts (in humans, in plants, etc.) with some other effect or combination of effects (this is quite common), or (getting absurd to make a point) 3) sound just like some Metalica song if played with the right codec, or look like Micky Mouse when viewed with the proper image viewer or who knows what else?
Patents were originally restricted to working devices to prevent just this sort of over-broad nonsense. The patent should cover the device, technique, etc., that you invented, not the description of it or the math behind it or the colour of the chair you were sitting in or anything else you might like to throw in there.
Ultimately, I think we are talking of different things anyway.
I suspect you are correct.
Did you even read the SciAm article???
Yes, I looked through it back when people were talking about it as a way around the second law (which it isn't). I'd rate it "-1 pointless handwaving" (but then, I pretty much gave up on SciAm's reporting years ago. They still haven't fallen to the Discover/Omni level, but they're far from what I'd consider quality science news).
missed his point. All inventions consist of digital information.
No, gnovos got my point. There is a world of difference between trying to patent an invention (even if that invention can be expressed digitally) and trying to "patent" the digital representation itself. In general, what is/was/should be patentable are working inventions and tangible embodiments of techniques, not discoveries, facts, numbers, formulas, etc. and certainly not the representations of these things, digital or otherwise. If I come up with a clever machine that runs on ear wax, I should be able to patent it; if I come up with a clever way of spelling "ear wax" I should get a trade mark; if I write something new about ear wax I should be able to copyright what I have writen.
But if I measure the melting point of ear wax, or determine it's molecular weight or average denisty, all I should expect is the joy of increasing human understanding of this oft ignore substance. I certainly shouldn't expect to own ear wax itself, no matter how well I quantify it.
-- MarkusQ
P.s. Pardon the higher than normal typo rate. My 8-week old son is helping me.
If all this still doesn't persuade you then try asking yourself whether you would be happy if you asked God for a summary of all his knowledge, in digital form, and he handed you a printout of the set of all integers.
Actually, he did a little better than that. He also said, by way of a hint, "Some of these things are not like the others..."
Ok, now seriously again:
They are asking for a patent on a chemical which can be used to generate DNA with a certain sequence. The patent is only violated if you make the chemical that is used to make the DNA sequence.
That is not my understanding. I would agree that they would be entitled to a patent for some technique for making DNA, but 1) I would not agree that a "chemical" is a "technique", and 2) they seem to be seeking a patent on a particular sequence regardless of how it is constructed. This sounds much more like what should have been a copyright, but even there I maintain that it is more of a "discovery" than a "creation."
Different function, different number, so obviously the mapping function is doing a lot of work here
This does not follow. If I measure something in feet instead of meters, I get a different number--that doesn't mean that my measuring stick was "doing a lot of work" or that I should be able to patent that particular distance, preventing anyone from using 2.7385 meters without my permission.
I wrote: I am arguing that a random walk has no overall direction, even if the step-vectors are filtered by some set of random tests, provided only that the tests are independent of the definition of direction
killthiskid wrote: Not true.
Two random actions coupled can produce coherent action.
See this article (was at SciAm, had to use a google cache as I couldn't find the original) about how nature uses brownian motion in a ratchet and rotor combination to create motion
By definition a ratchet defines a prefered direction--that's what ratchets do. If you had a "ratchet" that turned or resisted turning based on some unrelated test (e.g. the day of the week, or the price of some stock) you wouldn't see any net effect.
To tie this back to the original discussion, evolution does not favour any particular solution (speed, strength, smarts, strong body smell, detatchable toes, etc., etc.)--it only selects for what works, and the claim that it was pushing towards some supposed goal can only (and erroniously) be made after the fact.
In short, I'm saying that it isn't a ratchet, no matter how comforting it may be to think so.
Digital information should not be patentable, period.
The space of all-possible-digital-information maps directly onto the space of integers. Asking for a patent on a chunk of digital information (DNA, object code, what have you) is the same as asking for a patent on an integer. The claim that "oh, but it's a very large integer" is specious. Patents are for inventions not facts-of-math.
I was saying: "evolution is a law of nature, just like gravity (and even more like the gas law). You can do things to work around these laws (put gas in containers, build rockets) but you haven't affected the law itself one iota."
You seem to be replying to a different claim, something along the lines of "gravity is still important in evolution"--that isn't anything close to what I was trying to say.
Haha, I never saw this from that angle. Yes, I think it's a valid (albeit a little funny) point, but you assume that you've got a rogue coder on your team.
Actually, the case in question involved code from a programmer in another company (we were in a joint venture) and the environment had gotten so convoluted that I was pointedly assuming as little as possible. I didn't assume he was rogue, just that I wanted to know what was really going on, not just what someone else thought was going on. I think my starting postulate was something like "I trust almost all of mathematics and a fair amount of physics. Everything else gets checked."
Let's face it: security holes are bugs, and good tests and documentation help spot them earlier. Obfuscating your code intentionally won't make your life easier:)
Agreed. But I also agree with the button that says "Don't get suckered in by the comments; the bugs are in the code."
You can look at a scenario, like proto-humans on their way to intelligence, and say "Given their environment and current set of abilities, it is likely that intelligence will be selected for."
Perhaps you can. I've seen eveolutionary solutions to problems that I never would have expected from a statement of the problem alone. Sure, intelligence (as we know it) seems obvious once you've got it, but I'm not convinced it's the only (or even the best) solution.
Technological mishaps just don't kill enough people to be significant. Even in the US, the sum total of deaths from crime, auto accidents, drug related, the high level of obesity, and you're still far less than the death rate of a few centuries ago.
You don't need a high death rate to evolve; many other things (such as a significant failure-to-breed rate) can do the job for you. Besides, evolution doesn't act on the "big picture" (dispite popular press to that effect). Evolution acts on very small fitness differentials.
You appear to be arguing that a vector does not have direction.
If so, then I was unclear. Vectors clearly have direction. I am arguing that a random walk has no overall direction, even if the step-vectors are filtered by some set of random tests, provided only that the tests are independent of the definition of direction (i.e. no fair saying "the grand plan is we will do whatever it takes to pass whatever tests we face" and then calling that direction "forward").
My point was that gravity is a law of physics, and still applies to us even if we "find a way around it"--floating "weightless" in orbit is, for example, a consequence of gravity. If you were in an orbiting ship and got some special "get out of gravity free card" you would stop floating and fall to the side of your ship farthest from the body you were orbiting.
Just because something counteracts a force we can not conclude that the force no longer applies.
Likewise, our technology is removing some causes of death-before-child-bearing but introducinglotsofnewones.
Why windows does not run off a ramdrive. I mean, modern PCs all have at least 512MB ram, why not load up Windows once, and then never access the disk drive again?
AFAIK Linux and Open BSD cannot do this either. It seems amazing to me that people have missed this idea.
You can do it in Linux (and probably in Windows too, though I'm not sure how)--but there generally isn't a reason to. The VM/RD cycle swings back and forth over the years, but at present the PC world seems to be running best with 2::1 VM ratio (using a chunk of HD about twice your RAM size to simulate more RAM) although part of this is that RAM is being used up by smart caching of disk. This holds for Windows, Linux, and (IIRC) Open BSD.
So, the short answer is: you could do it, but it would likely slow you down overall.
...where the emphasis is on good code with good documentation and many test-cases. Correct code only amounts to 50% of the final mark; the other half comes from documentation, comments, testcases and how well you followed the style-guide.
If I were to write a trojan-patch, I would want to have lots of reassuring documentation, good subroutine/variable names that sounded like they were doing what they should be doing, and follow the style guidelines to make sure it looked like I was a good guy.
If I were checking a patch in uber-paranoid mode, I'd strip out all the comments, rename everything to Fxxx and Ixxx etc. and run it through a formatter. Then I'd read it to see what the code actually does rather than seeing what I'm supposed to think it does.
And yes, I actually have done this on occasion. It's kind of fun, once you get into it, like working a crossword puzzle or solving the cube for the first time.
thats one less test of fitness for passing on your genes. If we slowly but surely remove all tests of fitness (even infertility!) then there is no particular direction the species is going, which would be the same as the end of evolution
There never was a "particular direction the species was going"--we are here because it is the vector sum of the set
[{all the random and often stupid things our ancestors did} minus
{the things that were uber-dumb enough to earn them a darwin award}]
. There isn't any "grand plan" to it at all.
So while we may not be selecting for "can see without artificial lenses", every technology we add creates myriad opportunities to toast yourself in new and interesting ways, and we are selecting for things like "smart enough not to bungey jump with a cord that's longer than the drop" (yes, several people used to think this was a good idea, but the number of them in the gene pool is declining).
We're like fish who have moved into a cave (or onto land)--just because the selective pressures have changed does not mean they've stopped.
One disturbing trend is an inverse relationship between wealth(social success) and number of children. Successful families with 1.2 children (below the replacement level, their genes are effectively selected against). Poverty level people having 3.6 children (genetically).
This actually argues for the statement that evolution is still in progress. (BTW, I think the article that started all this is as silly as saying "gravity doesn't apply to us now that we have rockets.")
The thing to note is that optimal reproduction is having as many offspring as you can afford to rear into your ecological niche. Flies can lay lots of eggs, because raising a baby fly is very, very cheap. Lions have orders of magnitude fewer cubs because raising baby lions (who must be defended, fed, taught to hunt, etc.) is a prolonged and time consuming enterprise. (Just try it some time if you doubt this.)
So the observed birth ratios are perfectly consistent with the notion that there is a lot more competition to be "wealthy" and "successful" than there is to be "poor"--and as a consequence, it takes disproportionately more effort to raise a successful child that to raise a luser.
Not only have we not "escaped evolution" we haven't even escaped this simple definition of "optimal" family size; Bill Gates could certainly afford to follow the "fly" strategy produce an army of tens of thousands ill educated brats that would assure his success in the gene pool, but instead (as we all do, on average) he follows the logic of optimal family size and chooses the "lion" strategy. Likewise, I had my first child at 40. I could have started at eighteen at had dozens of "I can count to twenty 'cause I ain't go no shoes!" kids, but I preferred to raise one that will be more likely to someday explain the zeta function.
Boba001 writes: Unlike (most) OSS projects, most commercial software projects programmers have these guys called bosses/managers above them. They tell them what to do and the programmer obeys if they want to keep their job.:)
Having spent many years as one of those guys called "bosses/managers" I got quite a laugh out of your theory about programmer obedience. The one time I actually recall seeing it work that way, the whole team got canned as soon as the manager flew them full speed down a box canyon. In the real world, there needs to be a lot of give and take, with the programmers giving technical insight and sweat while the manager gives political insight and stomach lining. If either side starts blindly obeying the other (which doesn't happen often), you're doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the text-only e-mail days I was quite confident in telling to my users "text e-mail can't hurt you"...until a friend at a neighboring site (uucp) showed me what they'd found: An e-mail that ended with embedded escape sequences to program a key with a long string of commands, clear the screen, and then the something like "Mail file corrupted--press (whatever the key was) to continue."
The commands, which went back to the mail reader (or would have, if the user had followed the directions) would then 1) write the body of the message to a file, 2) exit the mail reader, 3) compile the source code it just saved, and 4) run the program.
There were a few bugs in the creature, so it hadn't worked as intended, but from then on I wasn't so sure about things being safe just because I couldn't see how to exploit them.
-- MarkusQ
Actually, I'd give this a +0.5 funny and a +0.5 obscure, but it totals to +1 both ways.
Besides, my rating system is just a figment of my imagination, right?
-- MarkusQ
Uh, shouldn't that be "Just your average nitpicker."?
-- MarkusQ
Do you still carry the Basket-o-rott'n-fruit? The three I bought from you at last year's emacs-vi-off were the best purchace I made all year!
-- MarkusQ
I fail to see how you conclude that I am only "partly right" when the link you posted mentions the existence of the very TV show that you initially claimed was "an urban legend". If you recall, nobody said that there wasn't a $64 question on the radio first; but I do claim that the existance of the radio show doesn't magically make the TV "an urban legend".
-- MarkusQ
I believe that you are mistaken. There are many people still living who remember it and you can buy video tape copies of the show. This seams a little much for "an urban myth"
-- MarkusQ
Or even significantly reduce its usefulness. That way your theory would also explain all the attention given to copy protected CDs and microsoft products. (*smile*)
-- MarkusQ
I would expect that most people who think clearly about these things wind up "neodarwinists." The point is to come up with an explanation for "all the other processes of life" and we would be commiting classicly flawed logic if we used the-things-to-be-explained as the basis of the explanation.
If evolution depended on the existence of complex processes of life to work, it would be useless and likely wrong.
As it turns out, however, you can explain it all (including reto-viruses, co-operation, and even the first post trolls) as a simple consequnce of random mutation and natural selection.
Your statement is akin to fearing that "a lot of physisists are neonewtonist--they think everything can be explained in terms of a few types of forces acting on a few types of particles." In many cases you want to look at the higher consequences just to keep from swamping in the details, but you shouldn't slip into confusing consequences with causes.
-- MarkusQ
you're abstracting away the notion of an idea to the point that it's simply a number which the idea is encoded in, and thus not patentable
My whole point is that they are doing this; they are not saying "we have this invention, and we'd like to patent it" but instead are saying "this digital code (under some representation scheme) represents something that has some properties, and we'd like to patent the digital code (in this case DNA, but my point is more general) as if we'd actually invented something with the same properties."
So that leads us to the idea that anything that can be described in a quantitative way with finite detail should not be patentable
Not at all. I'm just saying that the patent should cover the invention not the representation. Suppose that there is some common illness and some small fraction of the people in the world have a natural immunity coded by DNA sequence XYZ. If you discover this and invent some treatment (based on your discovery) to cure people, fine, I'd grant a patent on the treatment. But there is no logic to giving you a patent on the sequence which may well: 1) occur naturaly in some segment of the population, which would then be in violation of your patent, 2) occur in other contexts (in humans, in plants, etc.) with some other effect or combination of effects (this is quite common), or (getting absurd to make a point) 3) sound just like some Metalica song if played with the right codec, or look like Micky Mouse when viewed with the proper image viewer or who knows what else?
Patents were originally restricted to working devices to prevent just this sort of over-broad nonsense. The patent should cover the device, technique, etc., that you invented, not the description of it or the math behind it or the colour of the chair you were sitting in or anything else you might like to throw in there.
-- MarkusQ
I suspect you are correct.
Did you even read the SciAm article???
Yes, I looked through it back when people were talking about it as a way around the second law (which it isn't). I'd rate it "-1 pointless handwaving" (but then, I pretty much gave up on SciAm's reporting years ago. They still haven't fallen to the Discover/Omni level, but they're far from what I'd consider quality science news).
-- MarkusQ
No, gnovos got my point. There is a world of difference between trying to patent an invention (even if that invention can be expressed digitally) and trying to "patent" the digital representation itself. In general, what is/was/should be patentable are working inventions and tangible embodiments of techniques, not discoveries, facts, numbers, formulas, etc. and certainly not the representations of these things, digital or otherwise. If I come up with a clever machine that runs on ear wax, I should be able to patent it; if I come up with a clever way of spelling "ear wax" I should get a trade mark; if I write something new about ear wax I should be able to copyright what I have writen.
But if I measure the melting point of ear wax, or determine it's molecular weight or average denisty, all I should expect is the joy of increasing human understanding of this oft ignore substance. I certainly shouldn't expect to own ear wax itself, no matter how well I quantify it.
-- MarkusQ
P.s. Pardon the higher than normal typo rate. My 8-week old son is helping me.
My point exactly.
-- MarkusQ
If all this still doesn't persuade you then try asking yourself whether you would be happy if you asked God for a summary of all his knowledge, in digital form, and he handed you a printout of the set of all integers.
Actually, he did a little better than that. He also said, by way of a hint, "Some of these things are not like the others..."
Ok, now seriously again:
They are asking for a patent on a chemical which can be used to generate DNA with a certain sequence. The patent is only violated if you make the chemical that is used to make the DNA sequence.
That is not my understanding. I would agree that they would be entitled to a patent for some technique for making DNA, but 1) I would not agree that a "chemical" is a "technique", and 2) they seem to be seeking a patent on a particular sequence regardless of how it is constructed. This sounds much more like what should have been a copyright, but even there I maintain that it is more of a "discovery" than a "creation."
Different function, different number, so obviously the mapping function is doing a lot of work here
This does not follow. If I measure something in feet instead of meters, I get a different number--that doesn't mean that my measuring stick was "doing a lot of work" or that I should be able to patent that particular distance, preventing anyone from using 2.7385 meters without my permission.
Your argument rules out all patents
Not so (as someone has already explained on this thread).
-- MarkusQ
killthiskid wrote: Not true. Two random actions coupled can produce coherent action. See this article (was at SciAm, had to use a google cache as I couldn't find the original) about how nature uses brownian motion in a ratchet and rotor combination to create motion
By definition a ratchet defines a prefered direction--that's what ratchets do. If you had a "ratchet" that turned or resisted turning based on some unrelated test (e.g. the day of the week, or the price of some stock) you wouldn't see any net effect.
To tie this back to the original discussion, evolution does not favour any particular solution (speed, strength, smarts, strong body smell, detatchable toes, etc., etc.)--it only selects for what works, and the claim that it was pushing towards some supposed goal can only (and erroniously) be made after the fact.
In short, I'm saying that it isn't a ratchet, no matter how comforting it may be to think so.
-- MarkusQ
The space of all-possible-digital-information maps directly onto the space of integers. Asking for a patent on a chunk of digital information (DNA, object code, what have you) is the same as asking for a patent on an integer. The claim that "oh, but it's a very large integer" is specious. Patents are for inventions not facts-of-math.
Copyright is only slightly more reasonable.
-- MarkusQ
I was saying: "evolution is a law of nature, just like gravity (and even more like the gas law). You can do things to work around these laws (put gas in containers, build rockets) but you haven't affected the law itself one iota."
You seem to be replying to a different claim, something along the lines of "gravity is still important in evolution"--that isn't anything close to what I was trying to say.
-- MarkusQ
Actually, the case in question involved code from a programmer in another company (we were in a joint venture) and the environment had gotten so convoluted that I was pointedly assuming as little as possible. I didn't assume he was rogue, just that I wanted to know what was really going on, not just what someone else thought was going on. I think my starting postulate was something like "I trust almost all of mathematics and a fair amount of physics. Everything else gets checked."
Let's face it: security holes are bugs, and good tests and documentation help spot them earlier. Obfuscating your code intentionally won't make your life easier :)
Agreed. But I also agree with the button that says "Don't get suckered in by the comments; the bugs are in the code."
-- MarkusQ
Perhaps you can. I've seen eveolutionary solutions to problems that I never would have expected from a statement of the problem alone. Sure, intelligence (as we know it) seems obvious once you've got it, but I'm not convinced it's the only (or even the best) solution.
Technological mishaps just don't kill enough people to be significant. Even in the US, the sum total of deaths from crime, auto accidents, drug related, the high level of obesity, and you're still far less than the death rate of a few centuries ago.
You don't need a high death rate to evolve; many other things (such as a significant failure-to-breed rate) can do the job for you. Besides, evolution doesn't act on the "big picture" (dispite popular press to that effect). Evolution acts on very small fitness differentials.
-- MarkusQ
If so, then I was unclear. Vectors clearly have direction. I am arguing that a random walk has no overall direction, even if the step-vectors are filtered by some set of random tests, provided only that the tests are independent of the definition of direction (i.e. no fair saying "the grand plan is we will do whatever it takes to pass whatever tests we face" and then calling that direction "forward").
-- MarkusQ
Just because something counteracts a force we can not conclude that the force no longer applies.
Likewise, our technology is removing some causes of death-before-child-bearing but introducing lots of new ones.
-- MarkusQ
AFAIK Linux and Open BSD cannot do this either. It seems amazing to me that people have missed this idea.
You can do it in Linux (and probably in Windows too, though I'm not sure how)--but there generally isn't a reason to. The VM/RD cycle swings back and forth over the years, but at present the PC world seems to be running best with 2::1 VM ratio (using a chunk of HD about twice your RAM size to simulate more RAM) although part of this is that RAM is being used up by smart caching of disk. This holds for Windows, Linux, and (IIRC) Open BSD.
So, the short answer is: you could do it, but it would likely slow you down overall.
-- MarkusQ
If I were to write a trojan-patch, I would want to have lots of reassuring documentation, good subroutine/variable names that sounded like they were doing what they should be doing, and follow the style guidelines to make sure it looked like I was a good guy.
If I were checking a patch in uber-paranoid mode, I'd strip out all the comments, rename everything to Fxxx and Ixxx etc. and run it through a formatter. Then I'd read it to see what the code actually does rather than seeing what I'm supposed to think it does.
And yes, I actually have done this on occasion. It's kind of fun, once you get into it, like working a crossword puzzle or solving the cube for the first time.
-- MarkusQ
There never was a "particular direction the species was going"--we are here because it is the vector sum of the set [{all the random and often stupid things our ancestors did} minus {the things that were uber-dumb enough to earn them a darwin award}] . There isn't any "grand plan" to it at all.
So while we may not be selecting for "can see without artificial lenses", every technology we add creates myriad opportunities to toast yourself in new and interesting ways, and we are selecting for things like "smart enough not to bungey jump with a cord that's longer than the drop" (yes, several people used to think this was a good idea, but the number of them in the gene pool is declining).
We're like fish who have moved into a cave (or onto land)--just because the selective pressures have changed does not mean they've stopped.
-- MarkusQ
This actually argues for the statement that evolution is still in progress. (BTW, I think the article that started all this is as silly as saying "gravity doesn't apply to us now that we have rockets.")
The thing to note is that optimal reproduction is having as many offspring as you can afford to rear into your ecological niche. Flies can lay lots of eggs, because raising a baby fly is very, very cheap. Lions have orders of magnitude fewer cubs because raising baby lions (who must be defended, fed, taught to hunt, etc.) is a prolonged and time consuming enterprise. (Just try it some time if you doubt this.)
So the observed birth ratios are perfectly consistent with the notion that there is a lot more competition to be "wealthy" and "successful" than there is to be "poor"--and as a consequence, it takes disproportionately more effort to raise a successful child that to raise a luser.
Not only have we not "escaped evolution" we haven't even escaped this simple definition of "optimal" family size; Bill Gates could certainly afford to follow the "fly" strategy produce an army of tens of thousands ill educated brats that would assure his success in the gene pool, but instead (as we all do, on average) he follows the logic of optimal family size and chooses the "lion" strategy. Likewise, I had my first child at 40. I could have started at eighteen at had dozens of "I can count to twenty 'cause I ain't go no shoes!" kids, but I preferred to raise one that will be more likely to someday explain the zeta function.
-- MarkusQ
Having spent many years as one of those guys called "bosses/managers" I got quite a laugh out of your theory about programmer obedience. The one time I actually recall seeing it work that way, the whole team got canned as soon as the manager flew them full speed down a box canyon. In the real world, there needs to be a lot of give and take, with the programmers giving technical insight and sweat while the manager gives political insight and stomach lining. If either side starts blindly obeying the other (which doesn't happen often), you're doomed.
-- MarkusQ (now happily back to coding)