I used "positive feedback" in the "control loop" sense, not in the "pat in the back" or "antropomorphic" sense.
You introduce a tiny, random perturbation in a control system. Positive feedback loops back to the input reinforcing that tiny perturbation in the same direction. Negative feedback subtracts from that perturbation in the input.
And please, positive/negative are not something intelligently designed, it's just positive=pass the characteristic along; negative=does not pass the characteristic along. Huge male sea elephants are a result of the "positive feedback" of females picking the bullies over generations. In the same "control loop" terminology, one could say the output "overshoot", and now the size may become a disadvantage (they may unintentionally squash the females) - that's "negative feedback" kicking in.
Hmm, I did not anthropomorphize evolution. It was a metaphor. Do you think incest is just a taboo? Isn't there a biological advantage in not interbreeding? When there's a possibly inheritable characteristic (not "designed"!) that has some slight advantage over another in terms of health/survival of the genes, won't that result in this characteristic being reinforced because of natural selection? Can then you "get" the metaphor of, say, "The urge for a cockroach to run to dark places is evolution's reaction to predators" without one having to explain the actual whole process? (well, my mistake for using metaphors in writing a scientific paper...)
But you must be right; incest is just a taboo - Nature almighty does not want us to mix up genes; that's why She created Eve from an Adam's body part; we all have the same genetic code, and that's the way it should be.
As you said "many animals have incestuous relations **when there's no better alternative**". How do they "decide" that not interbreeding is the "better alternative"? Do animals have taboos too? Or is that a behavior that could be explained by the advantage of not interbreeding being reinforced by natural selection?
(and yes, I know there are even animals that reproduce asexually, thus passing along the same code. I'm talking about the rest of us)
B) It's pretty well established that rebellious behavior is simply developing children wanting and needing to begin to set out on their own, and distance themselves from their dependence on their parents.
Indeed, but can't one of the reasons for this need to set out on their own be our instincts' way of avoiding inbreeding (instincts inherited from the times when they could set out on their own)? What is the reason we (and some mammals) have the urge to set out on our own, whereas other mammals (like meerkats, which then live in clans where only the alpha pair breeds) haven't?
No flame disclaimer: I'm not trying to present a "scientific explanation" here, just brainstorming and trying get free knowledge from you. My field observations are from Animal Planet, and I'm a semi-autistic engineer, so what do I know about human and animal social behavior? My first post was an attempt to do a funny musing I had about the subject.
The main evolutionary reaction to incest is the Westermarck effect, which basically means that people usually are not sexually attracted to anyone they spent a significant amount of time around during the first six years of their life. As that usually includes their parents and siblings, it greatly discourages incest.
That's really interesting! I wish I had mod points...
Would there be an opposite equivalent on the parents' side? An explanation for why parents are not sexually attracted to their offspring?
Only imprinting that on the offspring side surely works well to avoid sibling inbreeding, but maybe not as effective to avoid parent-offspring inbreeding (at least not consensual!)
Is there some similar imprinting in the parents, or is it just learned moral values?
The police are only there to solve crimes and write tickets.
(I was about to ask "Can't they be there to avoid crimes in the first place?" but then I though "Minority Report"...)
In Brazil (as far as I know) you ought to carry an ID, and ought to show it to the police officer, if asked for.
I have no problem showing my ID if asked (I'm 41, and was never asked to show it, except while driving through police "blocks", maybe 10 times or so). I'm Ok with exchanging this bit of "freedom" or "privacy" for better security.
It's not like "surrender this freedom today, and it's 1984 tomorrow". Even if you have the right not to, showing the ID makes it easier to you (unless you have something to hide) and to the police, who will then spend more taxpayer dollars going after criminals instead of going into a legal argument with you. What is the downside?
(and yes, criminality numbers are not good in Brazil, but that's not caused by the ID policy...)
Wow, I didn't know posts here were considered "scientific" explanations! I naively thought it was just a healthy exchange of ideas.
They would venture far enough not to interbreed, not necessarily away from the whole group. A lot of mammals get urges to leave the family when they get close to sexual maturity.
I though about this "scientific" explanation (I'm posting here, so it ought to be) when I saw a documentary where two cheetahs, brother and sister, who got along so far started to get aggressive towards each other and parted ways then they became "teenagers". The "scientific" explanation (this time from the most authoritative source of true - the telly) was that this diminished the chance of interbreeding.
Couldn't it be plausible that humans too had a mechanism to separate close-to-sexual-maturity from siblings and parents? Couldn't that be activated by something as simple as a pool of hormones also having effect on a developing brain? Maybe that is a bug now, but used to be a feature?
I don't suppose we (well, most of us) suddenly became morally aware that interbreeding was not correct, thus decided not to do it. Unless, of course we were intelligently designed this way.
When our primate ancestors stopped leaving the cave as soon as they could and started staying home with their parents until later in life, what better way to avoid interbreeding between offspring and parents than to make teenagers hate/piss off their parents, and do whatever they could to impregnate/get impregnated by someone else?
That's nature saying: "Get away from these same-gene carriers. Get out, and get wild. Multiply now!". And when they do, that's positive feedback for the evolutionary push. Interbreeding would reduce the probability of survival of the group in the long term (and short term, if <disgusting attempt to joke about people locked in basements removed>).
For instance if you had an O/S that will require applications/applets to list out the type of access they require.
Then the O/S can provide a meaningful and TRUE description to the user of what the application might do. And the O/S can also enforce the limits of the access.
When I read this part, I thought you would mention Symbian. At least it looks like it does what you suggest. I am not a Symbian specialist, but when you write something that needs access to more than simple GUI stuff, you need to sign the app (tied to a specific phone IMEI, at least with the free online signing process), and in the process request what you want to allow the app to access (GPS data, user data, comms etc). Then when installing the app, Symbian will warn you that the app requires access to special features. Of course nothing is unbreakable, but it's a step in the direction you described.
don't you realize that, being Open Source there will be much more peer-reviews, and lots of people contributing for addressing bugs and instabilities, thus drastically reducing crashes and downtimes?
The even releases will be stable enough that they will have very high uptimes and rarely crash - when compared with closed-source cars, so they won't even need crash testing (that will be done on odd releases).
Besides lowering insurance costs due to less crashing, it will also do so by being less prone to theft, since - you know - it will have less vulnerabilities which could allow break-ins.
Interesting. I only saw HP-UX, SunOS, AIX and Linux. No Windows used in T-Mobile, or they could not be cracked? Or T-Mobile just don't put anything important on Windows servers?
The "handlebars" on "M" and "S" look like they are directly above the wheels and foot plates. On the Segway and on the "L" model, they are positioned ahead of that point. Try to picture someone using the "M" and "S", and the handlebar will be tucked in the rider's stomach if the foot plates are horizontal.
"The original Emacs implementation was written for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) as a collection of TECO macros for ITS TECO. There was a custom of giving such macro packages names ending in ``mac'' or ``macs''. A further reason for choosing this particular name was that the abbreviation ``e'' was unused at the time on ITS. ? "
Re:Never more than one key at a time?
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Vim 7 Released
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My apologies. ed WAS not. ed IS. You probably have it on your linux default instalation.
(and to exit, type "q" and ENTER, without the ":");-)
Re:Never more than one key at a time?
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Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
I know most dinossaurs know this, but as a pre-historical information, before vi there was "ed", which was a "1-line" command line editor. People used teletypes (tty), you know, so there was no way to scroll up and down a "screen".
vi offered a "visual" editor, for those who had the luxury of a crt terminal.
The ":" was the way to tell vi you were issuing ed commands - not to reinvent the wheel for stuff that "ed" could do. So the "ESC" commands were "visual" commands, and the ":" commands were "ed" commands.
For me, it became the most used editor when I was an AIX customer support, and vi was what I could expect to find in any default installation (and most clients had only serial terminals).
So either remotely accessing a client's system, or doing on-site support, I could always count on vi to be there. That's why when I took the holy decision between diving into vi or emacs, I picked vi.
Now, I agree it has the most user-unfriendly interface, but once you know how to use it, it is very powerful. I still use it a LOT today, on Linux and Windows - certainlly not for making the company's catalog, but for configuration files, perl programming, html writing, comparing text files, etc.
Learning to ride a motorcycle is (arguably) harder than learning to drive a car, but for certain jobs, the bike is better.
Yes, there are even mm-precision GPS, but who can assure their accuracy on a urban environment, with potential sky view obstructions and multipath due to reflections? That doesn't happen on airpot runways. Narrow streets with buildings on both sides and trees would make the system useless.
Some (all?) in-car navigation systems use the map itself to correct for GPS errors (the software "knows" you can't be turning where there is no street, so it offsets you to the nearest possible street and computes that offset for optimizing the next fixes).
And AFAIK, you don't land planes on GPS+WAAS alone. The vertical error is enough to cause trouble. It's used for approach, but I believe LAAS will be used for actual landing.
Very often, by means of direction/break/reverse lights, headlight flashes, eye contact, gestures, short/long horn signs, more gestures, shouts, punching, and finally bullets.
Seriously, to co-exist wth human drivers, the robots would have to interpret the subtle car and driver attitude changes and signals which are in fact non-documented language.
My kids often ask the meaning of headlight blinks and horn signs. At least in Brazil, it's common use. For example:
- two short horn signs generally means "thanks", and the response is another short horn sign. - quick headlight flashes means watchout - speedtrap - one quick headlight flash means "you can merge in front on me" - one long headlight flash means "if you try to merge in front of me, I'll block you" - short horn sign means "excuse me, the lights are green already" - two long horn signs means "move you idiot! it's green!" etc
Stupid parents will be stupid parents. If the game is illegal for children, stupid parent's kids will play it anyway. If it is illegal for anyone, banned, and all the violent game coders are sentenced to death, stupid parent kids will be playing with their dad's 9mm automatic left in plain view and smoking cigarettes (or something better).
When was it that kids' decisions about what to play, where to go (real and virtual world), what to eat, etc. overrulled their parent's decisions??
Why is that supervising what your kids do on the computer is "intrusion", while not knowing where they are in the 'material' world is "negligence"??
Is parenthood obsolete in the information age?
A (real) parent knows what's appropriate for each of her/his children - not all children are alike, not all families are alike. Violent scenes may be bad to one child but not to another, independently of gender or age, even under the same roof ("bad" here is bad dreams, distress; NOT instant serial killer formation).
Parents who rely on "politics and lawmakers" to take even these small decisions about their children's formation are Doomed anyway.
> "devices like cell phones 'will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers.'"
"devices like cell phones 'will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical safety equipment such as fire detectors"
Yeah, given "someday" can happen from now to the end of the universe, and the vagueness of "devices like" and "instruments such as". It WILL certainly happen!
Someday a device like a tinfoil hat will in all likelihood save something such as someone's life. (and now that I read this, it sounds like it can, in all likelihood, mean the opposite of what I tried to say)
Re:So did Sinclair ZX80
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Scanjet Music
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RAND USR!
That was the thing! POKE the opcodes into the REM line, then RAND USR!
Man, that brings back tender, block-pixelized memories!
Slashdot Mirror
I used "positive feedback" in the "control loop" sense, not in the "pat in the back" or "antropomorphic" sense.
You introduce a tiny, random perturbation in a control system. Positive feedback loops back to the input reinforcing that tiny perturbation in the same direction. Negative feedback subtracts from that perturbation in the input.
And please, positive/negative are not something intelligently designed, it's just positive=pass the characteristic along; negative=does not pass the characteristic along. Huge male sea elephants are a result of the "positive feedback" of females picking the bullies over generations. In the same "control loop" terminology, one could say the output "overshoot", and now the size may become a disadvantage (they may unintentionally squash the females) - that's "negative feedback" kicking in.
Hmm, I did not anthropomorphize evolution. It was a metaphor. Do you think incest is just a taboo? Isn't there a biological advantage in not interbreeding? When there's a possibly inheritable characteristic (not "designed"!) that has some slight advantage over another in terms of health/survival of the genes, won't that result in this characteristic being reinforced because of natural selection? Can then you "get" the metaphor of, say, "The urge for a cockroach to run to dark places is evolution's reaction to predators" without one having to explain the actual whole process? (well, my mistake for using metaphors in writing a scientific paper...)
But you must be right; incest is just a taboo - Nature almighty does not want us to mix up genes; that's why She created Eve from an Adam's body part; we all have the same genetic code, and that's the way it should be.
As you said "many animals have incestuous relations **when there's no better alternative**". How do they "decide" that not interbreeding is the "better alternative"? Do animals have taboos too? Or is that a behavior that could be explained by the advantage of not interbreeding being reinforced by natural selection?
(and yes, I know there are even animals that reproduce asexually, thus passing along the same code. I'm talking about the rest of us)
A) Teen-aged rebellion may keep children and parents at a distance, but it will do the same for children raised by foster-parents.
But evolution didn't have time to adapt to foster-parenting yet :-)
It also does little to keep similarly-aged children of opposite sex apart, so it has no relation to "gene carriers" except in an incidental sense.
Then for this there's AnyoneEB's interesting reference below.
B) It's pretty well established that rebellious behavior is simply developing children wanting and needing to begin to set out on their own, and distance themselves from their dependence on their parents.
Indeed, but can't one of the reasons for this need to set out on their own be our instincts' way of avoiding inbreeding (instincts inherited from the times when they could set out on their own)? What is the reason we (and some mammals) have the urge to set out on our own, whereas other mammals (like meerkats, which then live in clans where only the alpha pair breeds) haven't?
No flame disclaimer: I'm not trying to present a "scientific explanation" here, just brainstorming and trying get free knowledge from you. My field observations are from Animal Planet, and I'm a semi-autistic engineer, so what do I know about human and animal social behavior? My first post was an attempt to do a funny musing I had about the subject.
The main evolutionary reaction to incest is the Westermarck effect, which basically means that people usually are not sexually attracted to anyone they spent a significant amount of time around during the first six years of their life. As that usually includes their parents and siblings, it greatly discourages incest.
That's really interesting! I wish I had mod points...
Would there be an opposite equivalent on the parents' side? An explanation for why parents are not sexually attracted to their offspring?
Only imprinting that on the offspring side surely works well to avoid sibling inbreeding, but maybe not as effective to avoid parent-offspring inbreeding (at least not consensual!)
Is there some similar imprinting in the parents, or is it just learned moral values?
The police are only there to solve crimes and write tickets.
(I was about to ask "Can't they be there to avoid crimes in the first place?" but then I though "Minority Report"...)
In Brazil (as far as I know) you ought to carry an ID, and ought to show it to the police officer, if asked for.
I have no problem showing my ID if asked (I'm 41, and was never asked to show it, except while driving through police "blocks", maybe 10 times or so). I'm Ok with exchanging this bit of "freedom" or "privacy" for better security.
It's not like "surrender this freedom today, and it's 1984 tomorrow". Even if you have the right not to, showing the ID makes it easier to you (unless you have something to hide) and to the police, who will then spend more taxpayer dollars going after criminals instead of going into a legal argument with you. What is the downside?
(and yes, criminality numbers are not good in Brazil, but that's not caused by the ID policy...)
Wow, I didn't know posts here were considered "scientific" explanations! I naively thought it was just a healthy exchange of ideas.
They would venture far enough not to interbreed, not necessarily away from the whole group. A lot of mammals get urges to leave the family when they get close to sexual maturity.
I though about this "scientific" explanation (I'm posting here, so it ought to be) when I saw a documentary where two cheetahs, brother and sister, who got along so far started to get aggressive towards each other and parted ways then they became "teenagers". The "scientific" explanation (this time from the most authoritative source of true - the telly) was that this diminished the chance of interbreeding.
Couldn't it be plausible that humans too had a mechanism to separate close-to-sexual-maturity from siblings and parents? Couldn't that be activated by something as simple as a pool of hormones also having effect on a developing brain? Maybe that is a bug now, but used to be a feature?
I don't suppose we (well, most of us) suddenly became morally aware that interbreeding was not correct, thus decided not to do it. Unless, of course we were intelligently designed this way.
...to incest, which is bad for the gene pool.
When our primate ancestors stopped leaving the cave as soon as they could and started staying home with their parents until later in life, what better way to avoid interbreeding between offspring and parents than to make teenagers hate/piss off their parents, and do whatever they could to impregnate/get impregnated by someone else?
That's nature saying: "Get away from these same-gene carriers. Get out, and get wild. Multiply now!". And when they do, that's positive feedback for the evolutionary push. Interbreeding would reduce the probability of survival of the group in the long term (and short term, if <disgusting attempt to joke about people locked in basements removed>).
For instance if you had an O/S that will require applications/applets to list out the type of access they require.
Then the O/S can provide a meaningful and TRUE description to the user of what the application might do.
And the O/S can also enforce the limits of the access.
When I read this part, I thought you would mention Symbian. At least it looks like it does what you suggest. I am not a Symbian specialist, but when you write something that needs access to more than simple GUI stuff, you need to sign the app (tied to a specific phone IMEI, at least with the free online signing process), and in the process request what you want to allow the app to access (GPS data, user data, comms etc). Then when installing the app, Symbian will warn you that the app requires access to special features. Of course nothing is unbreakable, but it's a step in the direction you described.
don't you realize that, being Open Source there will be much more peer-reviews, and lots of people contributing for addressing bugs and instabilities, thus drastically reducing crashes and downtimes?
The even releases will be stable enough that they will have very high uptimes and rarely crash - when compared with closed-source cars, so they won't even need crash testing (that will be done on odd releases).
Besides lowering insurance costs due to less crashing, it will also do so by being less prone to theft, since - you know - it will have less vulnerabilities which could allow break-ins.
...the dog ate my homework was good enough!
Interesting. I only saw HP-UX, SunOS, AIX and Linux. No Windows used in T-Mobile, or they could not be cracked? Or T-Mobile just don't put anything important on Windows servers?
Thanks! That makes more sense. I guess I was picturing reeeally short people riding those...
Are those real pictures, or just 3D CAD images?
The "handlebars" on "M" and "S" look like they are directly above the wheels and foot plates. On the Segway and on the "L" model, they are positioned ahead of that point. Try to picture someone using the "M" and "S", and the handlebar will be tucked in the rider's stomach if the foot plates are horizontal.
This search found my username inside a jpeg and in the binary contents of a pdf.
Need some algorithm refining. Would save a lot of processing - and probably lower the announced number of indexed pages!
...and that makes what you just said a blasphemy of the highest degree, so you better watch your back ;-)
(I'd make a religious analogy here, but nowadays it could cause an(other) international incident)
"I remember hearing that vi was programmed as a teco macro."
No, that was EMACS:
From http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ :
"The original Emacs implementation was written for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) as a collection of TECO macros for ITS TECO. There was a custom of giving such macro packages names ending in ``mac'' or ``macs''. A further reason for choosing this particular name was that the abbreviation ``e'' was unused at the time on ITS. ? "
My apologies. ed WAS not. ed IS. You probably have it on your linux default instalation.
;-)
(and to exit, type "q" and ENTER, without the ":")
I know most dinossaurs know this, but as a pre-historical information, before vi there was "ed", which was a "1-line" command line editor. People used teletypes (tty), you know, so there was no way to scroll up and down a "screen".
vi offered a "visual" editor, for those who had the luxury of a crt terminal.
The ":" was the way to tell vi you were issuing ed commands - not to reinvent the wheel for stuff that "ed" could do. So the "ESC" commands were "visual" commands, and the ":" commands were "ed" commands.
For me, it became the most used editor when I was an AIX customer support, and vi was what I could expect to find in any default installation (and most clients had only serial terminals).
So either remotely accessing a client's system, or doing on-site support, I could always count on vi to be there. That's why when I took the holy decision between diving into vi or emacs, I picked vi.
Now, I agree it has the most user-unfriendly interface, but once you know how to use it, it is very powerful. I still use it a LOT today, on Linux and Windows - certainlly not for making the company's catalog, but for configuration files, perl programming, html writing, comparing text files, etc.
Learning to ride a motorcycle is (arguably) harder than learning to drive a car, but for certain jobs, the bike is better.
BTW, it's WAAS, and WAAS -is- differential GPS, and these alone won't give you cm accuracy. The cm and mm accuracy are obtained by other means.
Yes, there are even mm-precision GPS, but who can assure their accuracy on a urban environment, with potential sky view obstructions and multipath due to reflections? That doesn't happen on airpot runways. Narrow streets with buildings on both sides and trees would make the system useless.
Some (all?) in-car navigation systems use the map itself to correct for GPS errors (the software "knows" you can't be turning where there is no street, so it offsets you to the nearest possible street and computes that offset for optimizing the next fixes).
And AFAIK, you don't land planes on GPS+WAAS alone. The vertical error is enough to cause trouble. It's used for approach, but I believe LAAS will be used for actual landing.
Very often, by means of direction/break/reverse lights, headlight flashes, eye contact, gestures, short/long horn signs, more gestures, shouts, punching, and finally bullets.
Seriously, to co-exist wth human drivers, the robots would have to interpret the subtle car and driver attitude changes and signals which are in fact non-documented language.
My kids often ask the meaning of headlight blinks and horn signs. At least in Brazil, it's common use. For example:
- two short horn signs generally means "thanks", and the response is another short horn sign.
- quick headlight flashes means watchout - speedtrap
- one quick headlight flash means "you can merge in front on me"
- one long headlight flash means "if you try to merge in front of me, I'll block you"
- short horn sign means "excuse me, the lights are green already"
- two long horn signs means "move you idiot! it's green!"
etc
Stupid parents will be stupid parents. If the game is illegal for children, stupid parent's kids will play it anyway. If it is illegal for anyone, banned, and all the violent game coders are sentenced to death, stupid parent kids will be playing with their dad's 9mm automatic left in plain view and smoking cigarettes (or something better).
When was it that kids' decisions about what to play, where to go (real and virtual world), what to eat, etc. overrulled their parent's decisions??
Why is that supervising what your kids do on the computer is "intrusion", while not knowing where they are in the 'material' world is "negligence"??
Is parenthood obsolete in the information age?
A (real) parent knows what's appropriate for each of her/his children - not all children are alike, not all families are alike. Violent scenes may be bad to one child but not to another, independently of gender or age, even under the same roof ("bad" here is bad dreams, distress; NOT instant serial killer formation).
Parents who rely on "politics and lawmakers" to take even these small decisions about their children's formation are Doomed anyway.
> "devices like cell phones 'will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers.'"
"devices like cell phones 'will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical safety equipment such as fire detectors"
Yeah, given "someday" can happen from now to the end of the universe, and the vagueness of "devices like" and "instruments such as". It WILL certainly happen!
Someday a device like a tinfoil hat will in all likelihood save something such as someone's life. (and now that I read this, it sounds like it can, in all likelihood, mean the opposite of what I tried to say)
RAND USR!
That was the thing! POKE the opcodes into the REM line, then RAND USR!
Man, that brings back tender, block-pixelized memories!
Thanks!