yeah for those that are new, slashdot superbowl ad threads are an annual tradition that was codified in 2000 during the dot com bubble, featuring big-ticket flashes in the pan such as pets.com.
This is incorrect. No mainstream models of dark matter are based directly in string theory. It's hard to demonstrate directly that this is the case but if you'll do a search for 'string' in the dark matter wiki article you'll see no mentions barring one at the end, a tangential mention under the 'alternate theories' section.
Also I think you overstate the case when calling dark matter a 'questionable' theory. It is widely accepted among cosmologists, at least as a tentative explanation that fits the available data.
what you are saying isn't strictly speaking meaningful. all physical constants are relational. which you pick as 'fundamental' versus 'derived' is at some point arbitrary. if this article was about the speed of light, you could just as well ask which constant isn't, the length of a unit of space or the duration of a unit of time?
i still think you're being too harsh on computational analogies in general though. i'll admit that my knowledge of molecular biology is meager, but maybe you can point me in a good direction to dispel my misconceptions.
as i understand it, we have a strings of a formal language (DNA, RNA) which are operated on by state machines (proteins, protein/RNA complexes) that act (relatively) deterministically to either modify the original string or create/modify a new/existing one (proteins, DNA, RNA).
obviously this description is nowhere near complete; proteins are a much more functionally complex kind of 'string', for instance. but as far as i can tell the basic idea of molecular biology is first-and-foremost the basic idea of molecular chemistry: discrete, combinatorial entities composed of atomic constituents that interact with one-another in deterministic ways to produce other such entities. biology adds a new layer of abstraction by representing functionally distinct units (proteins) in a common, (relatively) functionally homogeneous formal language.
accepting certain glosses for the purposes of brevity, is this a fundamentally incorrect way of looking at it?
That may indeed be the case. The problem is, this usage is simply wrong.
yes, i agree.
considering genomes as programs
They're not,
yes, obviously.
and any line of reasoning built on the assumption that they are fails on that basis.
i don't see how this follows. nothing is 'the same' as anything else but yet the same methods of reasoning can apply if one can draw a formal analogy, with clearly delineated constraints. this is the premise of mathematical modelling, the common feature shared by all hard sciences. this particular analogy is unsupported, and it is probably not terribly useful, but their clearly are similarities, and it might be at least didactively useful to address them.
i mean, admittedly the OP rings hollow, but the idea that the potential for 'total viral immunity' is suspect on a logical (mathematical) basis might have some grounding doesn't seem on-its-face ridiculous. but maybe you can enlighten me.
i think a lot of non-mathy people colloquially use 'godel's theorem/s' to refer to the pretty general notion that 'there exist simple formal problems which can be proven to admit no general solution.' like how there is no compression algorithm which can compress all strings of data. is there a good term for this situation?
i'm not totally convinced that even a direct godel reference is necessarily bullshit here either, or rather i could imagine that computability comes into the issue. like, trying to state an assertion in a slightly more formal manner: considering genomes as programs, there exists no 'host' program which can distinguish all viral programs from native programs without actually executing enough of some viral programs to ensure replication. something close to this statement should be true i think (?).
you got three out of four ghost behaviors wrong. actually i'm not sure that the yellow ghost description is wrong per see because there is no yellow ghost.:)
are you suggesting it's somehow 'more natural' to write a 2-variable operator/between/ the operands? mostly it's just two different ways of linearizing a tree... but the non-rpn way is pretty hack-y e.g. it has no obvious extension to three-variable operators.
>> but the 1% is not planning to take the mule train next time they travel cross-country.
the slowdown being described is precisely an elite slowdown, the shuttle, concord, etc. the average speed of travel for 'average' people is still increasing worldwide, and the cost is decreasing.
"Multiverse theories don't turn me on anymore. Perhaps it's because of 9/11 and all its bloody consequences, especially the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
you're right, of course. nonetheless i think it's worthwhile to look at OP's post from a 'more personal' perspective. OP probably agrees with you after having thought about it. the comment is likely an overgeneralized reactionary response to a legitimate issue: it is practically maniacal how difficult almost everybody is making it to talk about the actual issue of publishing leaked information. the anger, though, is legitimate.
it's our own fault; 'the media' is simply reflecting our cultural compulsion to anthropomorphize every abstract issue, and to furthermore identify that abstraction to a real person. this is just one of the more obvious consequence to how our own rationality operates with the instinctual expectation of a 'tribal' social structure. such an individual is not merely a token representing the abstraction; they inform and transform that abstraction through their actions, and culture's interpretations of those actions.
but it fucks us doubly when in concert with mass media. anthropomorphic fallacies are one thing; it is another entirely when their respective 'gods' therein engendered are/idolized/, created incarnate in the body of a real living human. translocal issues, to say nothing of a globally distributed publishing organization, are reduced to the impolitic vagaries of their scapegoat-prophets in the village of our minds.
of course, we can abstract ourselves. recognizing a trap is the first step in evading it. but i see so very few taking the 'high ground' here. the high ground is that, unless we can already agree on certain fundamentals at the get-go, it is useless and likely detrimental to even agree to have a discussion about both wikileaks and the albino austrian teenage computer hacker who is apparently their PR guy*.
* some of this descriptor may not be strictly accurate: please understand that i don't give a fuck.
which brings me, finally, to the point:
while this article is legitimate in terms of content, the context is downright noisome. it has become a legitimate thing to do for *bill keller* to write such an article, and for *the new york times* to publish it as a feature, and for *slashdot etc* to republish it, and for perhaps for vaguely intelligent individuals to comment on that republishing... even if all these are in fact legitimate think to do, it doesn't make how we got here any less disgusting.
we were not suddenly transported: all of these legitimacies came about from small steps of editorial imprudence. we hear about 'collateral murder'; from that we learn about wikileaks. wikileaks now becomes a thing you can talk about. mentions of the albino are kept within reasonable bounds, as properly defined through his relation to the actual story. wikileaks (or rather: the guardian, der speigel, etc) then releases the first round of cablegate. wikileaks as a topic is increased in prominence, and the albino is elevated proportionally. the news media pays due diligence, puts he-or-she-who-shall-nit-be-named on the air, where she/he/it turns out to be outspoken, self-possessed and - more importantly - polarizing.
suddenly the net weight of a thousand minor missteps collapse on itself and tips the scale, before breaking it. the albino becomes more talked about, more known, than wikileaks. then wikileaks becomes vestigial. which is a problem, because 'wikileaks' is itself intellectually problematic, even before considering 'the actual issues'. this problem is also obvious: 'wikileaks' has yet to be properly acknowledged by/the news media/ as a/media organization/. there are no quibbles here, no blurry line: wikileaks is a news media organization; full stop.
we are now talking about the albino as an avatar for the idea of news, the notion of 'being informed'. we have undone any remaining attachment of the 'news media' and reality by marrying it to entertainment: to/celebrity gossip/. the content of the text is now irrelevant; t
why is it a problem, though? how often does the transposition of 'then' and 'than' produce actual ambiguity in communication? the same goes for orient and orientate. likewise for "intensive purposes" and other phrases having fixed meaning, at least insofar as they are used in a casual (non-didactic) context.
i think the reason you perceive things as having 'been better' because in the past is less of the population was actually committing thought to the written word. that they are now can only be to our mutual advantage, unless that 'advantage' is simply elitism; 99% of everything will still be crap, and at least there are more eyes on it. the only problem i see here is your unmitigated gall in supposing your prescriptivist notion of language is a 'canary in a coal mine' for collaborative cultural achievement and enlightenment.
i mean, if you want to rail on about the vulgar masses, just do it.
don't try to hide the fact that you're just another aristocrat bemoaning the fact that the peons don't know the right fork to use.
wow, that sounds like incredible bullshit, or/at best/ incompetence on your part. it's certainly not reproducible; unlike most of the anecdotal fud filling the comments we can at least verify that what you claim is not currently the case. good thing you deleted it quickly, if you had only been able to delete it slowly/god knows/ what would've happened to your computer.
well if you read slashdot for the commentary this doesn't strictly matter. even people who RTFA probably scan the comments for better links before and/or after. starting with a good link versus a bad link is basically moot; the collective acts almost immediately to link and vote up better sources. this convergence can be relied on to cast a wider net and find better sources than even a (theoretical) moderately competent editor.
i mean really they could just posted "DURR WIKILEAKS STUF HAPPENINS"* and after a ~ 20-minute convergence period the result would be about the same. this perhaps leads to a crisis in motivation among the editorial staff. as it is the worst they can do is provide a crappy 'zeroth post'.
as much as much as it's tempting to attribute this to another good Christian apologist applying rationality like unto scripture: when rhetorically convenient...
...it/sounds/ to me like OP/might/ be saying: it's not so much that you're not comparing your partner to others, it's that you know they are not comparing you.
which, if mutual, does complete the loop... so i can't rightly say i find it gross. i do however find it a little skeezy, probably in a similar hue to that in which OP perceives the alternative.
Authoritarian dictatorship is the best form of government provided you get the right dictator. The (eventual) problem is that there is no good way to insure dictatorial successors who entertain the same notion of 'rightness'. Or to protect against senility, for that matter.
Although I don't doubt that these projects are sincere, their actual value is in testing the limits (and hopefully expanding the limits) of online GUIs.
I mean, why bother posting about this things being slow as all get out? Anyone who has ever used any heavy flash or poorly designed AJAX app knows these things crawl.
The thing is, the basic feature set for an app like photoshop is more-or-less stabilized. The issue with putting it online is one of overhead. Sure, it will always be slower then something kissing the ICs, but that's not going to be relevant if the application requirements stay approximately constant while hardware progresses. Give it 5 years. Online software will explode.
Take a domain name "domain" with a tld (.tld), and rename the domain "domain.tld". The.tld would just be part of the name. All you would have to do is retain a list of the 'old' tlds so a domain is not interpreted as a subdomain. This would all be done through DNS; completely transparent for the user. Eventually old URLs would become redirects to new ones w/o tlds.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah for those that are new, slashdot superbowl ad threads are an annual tradition that was codified in 2000 during the dot com bubble, featuring big-ticket flashes in the pan such as pets.com.
Can you explain why it's important to you that (A) you have to wait to open the start menu and (B) that it takes up only a portion of the screen?
This is incorrect. No mainstream models of dark matter are based directly in string theory. It's hard to demonstrate directly that this is the case but if you'll do a search for 'string' in the dark matter wiki article you'll see no mentions barring one at the end, a tangential mention under the 'alternate theories' section.
Also I think you overstate the case when calling dark matter a 'questionable' theory. It is widely accepted among cosmologists, at least as a tentative explanation that fits the available data.
tell me about it, i was potty trained via flashcards and now i can't write an exam without pooping EVERYWHERE.
what you are saying isn't strictly speaking meaningful. all physical constants are relational. which you pick as 'fundamental' versus 'derived' is at some point arbitrary. if this article was about the speed of light, you could just as well ask which constant isn't, the length of a unit of space or the duration of a unit of time?
Interestingly enough these considerations apply precisely to EVE as well.
fair enough, your annoyance is justified.
i still think you're being too harsh on computational analogies in general though. i'll admit that my knowledge of molecular biology is meager, but maybe you can point me in a good direction to dispel my misconceptions.
as i understand it, we have a strings of a formal language (DNA, RNA) which are operated on by state machines (proteins, protein/RNA complexes) that act (relatively) deterministically to either modify the original string or create/modify a new/existing one (proteins, DNA, RNA).
obviously this description is nowhere near complete; proteins are a much more functionally complex kind of 'string', for instance. but as far as i can tell the basic idea of molecular biology is first-and-foremost the basic idea of molecular chemistry: discrete, combinatorial entities composed of atomic constituents that interact with one-another in deterministic ways to produce other such entities. biology adds a new layer of abstraction by representing functionally distinct units (proteins) in a common, (relatively) functionally homogeneous formal language.
accepting certain glosses for the purposes of brevity, is this a fundamentally incorrect way of looking at it?
That may indeed be the case. The problem is, this usage is simply wrong.
yes, i agree.
considering genomes as programs
They're not,
yes, obviously.
and any line of reasoning built on the assumption that they are fails on that basis.
i don't see how this follows. nothing is 'the same' as anything else but yet the same methods of reasoning can apply if one can draw a formal analogy, with clearly delineated constraints. this is the premise of mathematical modelling, the common feature shared by all hard sciences. this particular analogy is unsupported, and it is probably not terribly useful, but their clearly are similarities, and it might be at least didactively useful to address them.
i mean, admittedly the OP rings hollow, but the idea that the potential for 'total viral immunity' is suspect on a logical (mathematical) basis might have some grounding doesn't seem on-its-face ridiculous. but maybe you can enlighten me.
i think a lot of non-mathy people colloquially use 'godel's theorem/s' to refer to the pretty general notion that 'there exist simple formal problems which can be proven to admit no general solution.' like how there is no compression algorithm which can compress all strings of data. is there a good term for this situation?
i'm not totally convinced that even a direct godel reference is necessarily bullshit here either, or rather i could imagine that computability comes into the issue. like, trying to state an assertion in a slightly more formal manner: considering genomes as programs, there exists no 'host' program which can distinguish all viral programs from native programs without actually executing enough of some viral programs to ensure replication. something close to this statement should be true i think (?).
you got three out of four ghost behaviors wrong. actually i'm not sure that the yellow ghost description is wrong per see because there is no yellow ghost. :)
ozone depletion
yeah, for example catwoman was both a critical and financial success.
are you suggesting it's somehow 'more natural' to write a 2-variable operator /between/ the operands? mostly it's just two different ways of linearizing a tree... but the non-rpn way is pretty hack-y e.g. it has no obvious extension to three-variable operators.
>> but the 1% is not planning to take the mule train next time they travel cross-country.
the slowdown being described is precisely an elite slowdown, the shuttle, concord, etc. the average speed of travel for 'average' people is still increasing worldwide, and the cost is decreasing.
"Multiverse theories don't turn me on anymore. Perhaps it's because of 9/11 and all its bloody consequences, especially the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
yes, this is an actual quote from the article.
you're right, of course. nonetheless i think it's worthwhile to look at OP's post from a 'more personal' perspective. OP probably agrees with you after having thought about it. the comment is likely an overgeneralized reactionary response to a legitimate issue: it is practically maniacal how difficult almost everybody is making it to talk about the actual issue of publishing leaked information. the anger, though, is legitimate.
it's our own fault; 'the media' is simply reflecting our cultural compulsion to anthropomorphize every abstract issue, and to furthermore identify that abstraction to a real person. this is just one of the more obvious consequence to how our own rationality operates with the instinctual expectation of a 'tribal' social structure. such an individual is not merely a token representing the abstraction; they inform and transform that abstraction through their actions, and culture's interpretations of those actions.
but it fucks us doubly when in concert with mass media. anthropomorphic fallacies are one thing; it is another entirely when their respective 'gods' therein engendered are /idolized/, created incarnate in the body of a real living human. translocal issues, to say nothing of a globally distributed publishing organization, are reduced to the impolitic vagaries of their scapegoat-prophets in the village of our minds.
of course, we can abstract ourselves. recognizing a trap is the first step in evading it. but i see so very few taking the 'high ground' here. the high ground is that, unless we can already agree on certain fundamentals at the get-go, it is useless and likely detrimental to even agree to have a discussion about both wikileaks and the albino austrian teenage computer hacker who is apparently their PR guy*.
* some of this descriptor may not be strictly accurate: please understand that i don't give a fuck.
which brings me, finally, to the point:
while this article is legitimate in terms of content, the context is downright noisome. it has become a legitimate thing to do for *bill keller* to write such an article, and for *the new york times* to publish it as a feature, and for *slashdot etc* to republish it, and for perhaps for vaguely intelligent individuals to comment on that republishing... even if all these are in fact legitimate think to do, it doesn't make how we got here any less disgusting.
we were not suddenly transported: all of these legitimacies came about from small steps of editorial imprudence. we hear about 'collateral murder'; from that we learn about wikileaks. wikileaks now becomes a thing you can talk about. mentions of the albino are kept within reasonable bounds, as properly defined through his relation to the actual story. wikileaks (or rather: the guardian, der speigel, etc) then releases the first round of cablegate. wikileaks as a topic is increased in prominence, and the albino is elevated proportionally. the news media pays due diligence, puts he-or-she-who-shall-nit-be-named on the air, where she/he/it turns out to be outspoken, self-possessed and - more importantly - polarizing.
suddenly the net weight of a thousand minor missteps collapse on itself and tips the scale, before breaking it. the albino becomes more talked about, more known, than wikileaks. then wikileaks becomes vestigial. which is a problem, because 'wikileaks' is itself intellectually problematic, even before considering 'the actual issues'. this problem is also obvious: 'wikileaks' has yet to be properly acknowledged by /the news media/ as a /media organization/. there are no quibbles here, no blurry line: wikileaks is a news media organization; full stop.
we are now talking about the albino as an avatar for the idea of news, the notion of 'being informed'. we have undone any remaining attachment of the 'news media' and reality by marrying it to entertainment: to /celebrity gossip/. the content of the text is now irrelevant; t
why is it a problem, though? how often does the transposition of 'then' and 'than' produce actual ambiguity in communication? the same goes for orient and orientate. likewise for "intensive purposes" and other phrases having fixed meaning, at least insofar as they are used in a casual (non-didactic) context.
i think the reason you perceive things as having 'been better' because in the past is less of the population was actually committing thought to the written word. that they are now can only be to our mutual advantage, unless that 'advantage' is simply elitism; 99% of everything will still be crap, and at least there are more eyes on it. the only problem i see here is your unmitigated gall in supposing your prescriptivist notion of language is a 'canary in a coal mine' for collaborative cultural achievement and enlightenment.
i mean, if you want to rail on about the vulgar masses, just do it.
don't try to hide the fact that you're just another aristocrat bemoaning the fact that the peons don't know the right fork to use.
wow, that sounds like incredible bullshit, or /at best/ incompetence on your part. it's certainly not reproducible; unlike most of the anecdotal fud filling the comments we can at least verify that what you claim is not currently the case. good thing you deleted it quickly, if you had only been able to delete it slowly /god knows/ what would've happened to your computer.
well if you read slashdot for the commentary this doesn't strictly matter. even people who RTFA probably scan the comments for better links before and/or after. starting with a good link versus a bad link is basically moot; the collective acts almost immediately to link and vote up better sources. this convergence can be relied on to cast a wider net and find better sources than even a (theoretical) moderately competent editor.
i mean really they could just posted "DURR WIKILEAKS STUF HAPPENINS"* and after a ~ 20-minute convergence period the result would be about the same. this perhaps leads to a crisis in motivation among the editorial staff. as it is the worst they can do is provide a crappy 'zeroth post'.
as much as much as it's tempting to attribute this to another good Christian apologist applying rationality like unto scripture: when rhetorically convenient...
which, if mutual, does complete the loop... so i can't rightly say i find it gross. i do however find it a little skeezy, probably in a similar hue to that in which OP perceives the alternative.
"to the best of my knowledge, you know."
is a very odd phrase.
Authoritarian dictatorship is the best form of government provided you get the right dictator. The (eventual) problem is that there is no good way to insure dictatorial successors who entertain the same notion of 'rightness'. Or to protect against senility, for that matter.
The Internet is the part of your computer that is non-local.
Although I don't doubt that these projects are sincere, their actual value is in testing the limits (and hopefully expanding the limits) of online GUIs.
I mean, why bother posting about this things being slow as all get out? Anyone who has ever used any heavy flash or poorly designed AJAX app knows these things crawl.
The thing is, the basic feature set for an app like photoshop is more-or-less stabilized. The issue with putting it online is one of overhead. Sure, it will always be slower then something kissing the ICs, but that's not going to be relevant if the application requirements stay approximately constant while hardware progresses. Give it 5 years. Online software will explode.
Take a domain name "domain" with a tld (.tld), and rename the domain "domain.tld". The .tld would just be part of the name. All you would have to do is retain a list of the 'old' tlds so a domain is not interpreted as a subdomain. This would all be done through DNS; completely transparent for the user. Eventually old URLs would become redirects to new ones w/o tlds.