It's not your fault. The world has gotten steadily LESS cool for like the last 20 years. What's cool today is just trite and rehashed-without-awareness-of-its-rehashedness (whereas before it was rehashed-with-irony-of-its-rehashedness).
Hell no, what I was unfortunate to see about DS9 was basically . I really think they started aiming more towards the casual viewer and housewives. I basically stopped after STNG.
I don't know...a lot of the charm for me was that I could turn on STOS or STNG and know that they were going to find something new and wacky (and probably implausible), and not get drawn into a deep and complex drama. And if I missed a show I didn't have to read over scripts to figure out what happened to who and who is sleeping with who or who lost their job and is now a clown, etc.
Except things like smoke and alcohol are organic and more "natural". There are already mechanisms to deal with them. Nanotechnology presents an [even greater] opportunity for toxins for which the body has no, or very limited, coping mechanisms. Also, I can largely choose not to consume alcohol, and I know how to avoid smoke. But if EVERYTHING is toxic, how do I avoid that?
Well, not all ethical questions only concern living things. There of course is the issue of destroying life that we don't know exists, or that MAY develop there, or destroying geological features that might have scientific or archaeological value, or any number of issues.
I also don't necessarily concur automatically with the "well-somebody-will-eventually-do-it-so-let's-just -do-it-now" line of argumentation.
Note that none of this actually indicates I'm/against/ terraforming Mars, but just that I don't think its not an ethical issue at least to some degree.
It gets stranger. It may be that the "constants" and rules we observe in the universe have not always been so, and might not be so in the future. Godel's incompleteness theorem also gives us an inkling that there may indeed be truths that are unprovable.
Note however, I am completely NOT religous, and despite their only shortcoming, I think science and reason are the only feasible tools we can use to understand the universe. Or said in another way, for things which are knowable and understandable, science and reason are the best way to find them.
Technical community and pundits: OMIGOD the windows API is so crappy and kludgy and windows crashes a bazillon times a day and you shot my dog
Microsoft: no, it's actually YOUR badly written applications
TCP: OMIGOD it's still your fault
MS: That's ok we fixed it for you anwyay.
TCP: OMIGOD why did you waste all that energy on such and old and rotten API! You suck! HUZZAH! I'm throwing salt in your eyes
MS: Yeah, I know, we finally decided it was time to part with all that baggage and hired smart guys that you seemed to like and invented.NET and a whole bunch of other replacement APIs
TCP: OMIGOD why did you do this to me!? I thought you loved me!? I'm going to run off with my new lover "teh intarweb" where we will make complicated scientific visualization applications out of javascript and feed starving mouths with semantic web markup alone, and live in a utopian libertarian dream!
I don't buy it. I think Joel has entered the crank-o-sphere. While XUL shows some tentative promise as an application development platform, current web standards are pretty damn CRAPPY at creating rich interactive GUIs or applications of any complexity. That is why we see so much Flash cropping up.
I for one think.Net is a GREAT step forward (if not for everybody else, at least for people who previously lived lives subsisting off prior Microsoft C/C++/COM/ActiveX/etc. sludge).
".... You are not the car you drive You are not your fucking khaki's..."
You are not the school you went to. You are not your fucking degree.
If anything Fight Club is railing AGAINST this constant over acheiving for false goals, so it doesn't exactly support very well the "tough it out in school" idea.
College is like being a soldier. Being a great fighter as not as important as being able to be persistent and march in bad weather with no rations while being shot at, for long periods of time. Prepare yourself for a lot of mediocrity. Realize that a lot of people arrive at college still not knowing what the fuck they are interested in, and you will pay for that by long drawn out boring classes. The longer they keep you in school the more money they make.
I can't really give you much advice on staying in because I dropped out (and damn glad too, I am far ahead of where I would have been had I stayed in) but I can only say, be very very sensitive to when you are being burnt out, and to try to desperately latch on to professors, teachers and curriculum which is interesting and exciting. Fuck the rules and prereqs - talk to the dean if you have to. Otherwise you will get burnt out as it is wasting your time and decide to drop out.
I guess I just haven't seen the side you have seen. I have never had any problems with CD keys. I put it in once when I installed years ago, and then put it in once again when I had to rebuild my machine when my hard drive crashed. Even through upgrading to Steam I don't recall having any cd key related issues. It has not inconvenienced me in the slightest. I AM however very annoyed at games that INSIST your CD be inserted in the CD drive. I'm not going to walk all the damn way over and get my CD and pop it in and wait for the CDROM to spin up just to launch a freaking game. Of course Half Life has never done this. Other than a simple one-time CD key prompt at install I'm not aware of ANY "copy protections" for Half Life.
Since Counter Strike and DoD and other mods are popular, I don't find it unreasonable for Valve to be charging the supposed $35 (I haven't really checked so I can't confirm that price). Hell, people even PAY for Counter-Strike and DoD boxed editions which you can get free if you have Half Life anyway, so you can't blame Valve for that. It's not like they broke down the doors of Counter Strike and DoD developers and forced them to be hired at gunpoint. Valve gave these people jobs.
As for Linux support, other than Carmacks token moral gestures, Linux fundamentally is still a total waste of developer money. Some may do it, but only because one of 1) it may be easy 2) they believe in it despite it being a loss, and it gives them leverage against Microsoft 3) they want some hardcore gamer "cred" or "buzz". While it is certainly nice that some companies do this with some games, it is completely NOT obligatory, or expected. I'll note that Half Life and even Steam (according to reports) run on Wine in Linux.
Let's not forget, that while we can whine about all this Valve has also been working on their next game, Half Life 2, for something like FIVE YEARS. It would be dumb, and as a prospective HL2 player, I certainly wouldn't like it, if Valve dumped all their time into stellar support for an aging seven year old game. Let's note that in their lifetime they have essentially only put out ONE game. They are just wrapping up their second one, it's not even out yet. So I think it is a bit much to protest some sort of history of bad behavior. (HL2 is even supposedly going to support HL1 content, so your HL1 investment is leveraged even *further*).
Now Valve certainly could be "demonstrating greed and aggressive attempts at monopolization" at cyber cafes. I just don't know. From my experience on the consumer end it seems out of character, although I suppose it is possible they have a "love the community, screw the cyber cafes" philosophy, I just don't know.
It's fashionable to bitch about Valve and Steam, but Steam is a great system, and Valve has been great to its community. First off they hired Bram Cohen, the Bittorrent author, so they have serious technical chutzpah under the hood. Secondly, for a SEVEN YEAR OLD GAME I bought once for like $30-50, I have in my game list: Counter-Strike, Day of Default, Half Life, Team Fortress Classic, Death Match Classic, and Opposing Force, all games produced by Valve, for, you guessed it FREE. That is not to mention Ricochet (which is pretty useless) and tons of other mods I have (Natural Selection being probably the best). Now with these FREE games I get: A builtin server browser, a friends list, and guess what FREE UPDATES. Mod authors also get a channel to deploy their mods. For now it is, um, FREE, but they will in the future be able to license their games. Now for me, Joe Freeloader, that's not so great, but for mod authors that kicks ass. Where else has a company said: well, you're making a great mod for our game, you know what, we'll let you sell it, in OUR distribution channel on OUR bandwidth!
I think that is a hell of a lot for some piece of software I bought 7 FREAKING YEARS AGO. I think that is a pretty good deal. And if they perhaps want to get a cut from somebody else making profit off THEIR distribution and update system, that seems ok to me. I don't know the details of this particular incident, and perhaps Valve could have been more tactful, but Valve in general has been GREAT to the community. They even run forums wherein every luser on earth gets to post: "St34m 4re t3h suks. I h4te you. G1ve m3 m0re g4mes b1tch. kthxbai."
"Jumping this hurdle in a game is going to be a PITA."
Half Life 2 looks pretty good, and I've seen the extended high res demos. I don't have the "this is wrong" gut reaction. Then again, maybe the nature of playing a game makes it more prone to left-brain thinking ("pressing keys"). Who knows.
No, the point is that when you start to make a robot look human, your brain thinks "ah, that's a cute robot!", but when you make a robot look ALOT like a human your brain starts thinking "damn, that's a fucked up human".
"but really, are very realistic paintings of people creepy?"
Never seen a movie with a picture with cut out eyes so people can "spy" on people in the room? Yes, that looks creepy.
"then it is a bad mutation and will be pulled from the gene pool."
It will not be "pulled" from the gene pool. There is no "pulling". It will propagate up until the very moment (and past) that the environment cannot sustain the species, and the whole damn cycle will start over while those for whatever reason were able to survive. I'm not saying that it might coincidentally turn out to benefit a species to have a lower reproduction rate in some cases, but natural-selection never "knows" this - it will continue selecting towards more reproduction until the next crash - and of course natural selection doesn't "know" when this crash is going to come if it ever is, so it just steamrolls along.
Let me correct myself with regard to the analogy (and it WAS an ANALOGY "can be though of as...") to decompressing and decrypting - the human (probably mammalian) immune system is actually the only area I am now aware of that does this sort of self modification. I was probably wrong to extrapolate to all other DNA processes, although I suppose it is feasible a similar mechanism is found elsewhere.
I was also strangely enthused that our DNA also actually carries "stowaway" copies of eons-old archaic viruses which at some point stopped being "active" viruses altogether, and simply started "stowing away" in spaces in our DNA and getting propagated from generation to generation. Once in a while I am told, it is even possible under some circumstances for these old virus DNA sequences to be re-animated. For some reason I find the idea that we are all carrying copies of eons-old viruses very interesting, and strangely affirming:)
At some point the sun will burn out and everything will die regardless of whether it was more or less reproductive. However at any given instant in time, natural-selection will be selecting towards more reproduction. Suppose a genetic mutation at some point allows higher reproduction with the given resource potential remaining the same over time - that path is ALWAYS taken. If a mutation promotes reproduction is propagates. Period. It's immaterial to the argument of whether natural selection chooses more or less production whether someday down the road resources run out or humans come in and napalm the whole area - natural selection always chooses more reproduction by simple observation that the less-reproduction-gene does not get passed with less reproduction.
"And you don't believe that this could possibly be caused by natural selection?"
No, I don't think under-production is ever selected for. Natural-selection always chooses the highest feasible production. If it so happens some external force wipes out all those that produced the highest that doesn't change the fact. The situation will continue with the highest production being those that managed to survive, until they are again overpopulated.
From simple inspection it follows that the simple forces of "natural selection" operating at the individual level, never choose to preemptively kill the organism before reproduction. If this was the case, then no organims would be alive to spread the kill-yourself gene. Now, there may be social phenomena that arbitrary biological behaviors, and this is certainly true in "higher level" animals whos consciousness and culture actually informs modifies their actions, but at its basis natural-selection is dumb. There is no magical "Gaia" that hovers above a group of animals and predicts "well, if I keep the population low then I won't enter a famine cycle and can continue steady growth". It only operates on an individual basis. I'd also observe that short of sociological phenomena, organisms which have high time-to-reproductive-age are always the least populous. Just examine the insects-to-mammals ratio.
"Er no. Its just DNA. There is certainly nothing to do with compression or encryption going on."
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but your DNA itself does NOT describe how you end up after development. For fairly simple organisms it may, but not for humans who have very very complex developments. Instead what DNA does is essentially create a blueprint-builder, or a compiler-compiler if you will (no obviously don't take my analogies literally, that would be stupid). From my understanding the development process basically expands your DNA (not physically, semantically) into contextually meaningful segments. A piece of "junk" in your DNA might influence one process under one situation, and another in another situation.
"This is getting bizzare."
DNA is base4 and has a finite length. There is a finite amount of stuff it can describe.
"The darwinian reason for homosexuality, might be that, it might be a natural barrier to prevent certain species from overproducing itself."
Natural selection ALWAYS works on an individual basis and NEVER works on a group basis (this simply doesn't make physiological sense). The ONLY case in which it might limit lifespan is only until AFTER reproduction (because obviously the kill-yourself gene would not propagate). There is no such thing as natural selection producing a barrier to overproduction. Natural selection always chooses overproduction.
"If there's a darwinian reason for homosexuality, I've never heard it"
From my limited biological knowledge: Some species (e.g. some frogs) can actually/change sex/ to accomodate the environment. Some male frogs do this IIRC, changing from male to female when the male/female ratio is too high.
Granted primates are way more complicated, and the reason might be entirely different. There are tons of weird, "useless" crap that natural selection has left us with. Hell, most human behavior was designed to hunt animals, live in a cave, and die at age 30. Almost nothing about us is "natural" or "useful" any more. Remember natural selection may "select" towards fitness, but it doesn't necessarily deselect things that are not useful but not particularly harmful either. From what I hear about DNA, there is massive amounts of "junk" we carry around, and that we have to support by caloric intake. However that "junk" can really be thought of as a self-decompressing self-decrypting program that comes into affect essentially at birth and at various other times. If you think about it computationally, there is a "limit" to the amount of "stuff" you can describe with DNA. The fascinating thing is how it bootstraps, self-decompresses, self-decrypts, and self-modifies. It's all amazing that it even works at all. It would be like typing random characters into a computer and one day just popping out the Linux kernel.
Science does not progress equally on all fronts. It goes in fits and spurts. It has been true in the past (perhaps moreso in the past) where the whimsy or intellect of a single person advanced a given field greatly, whereas if they personally were not involved the field might only advance a quarter of what it could, or be completely abandoned in favor of some more "fashionable" discovery. We are constantly finding diaries and notes of inventors and scientists who come accross an astounding discovery but since it isn't related directly to their research they disregard it to be rediscovered maybe 50 or 100 years later. I think it is entirely possible for things like this to happen.
That being said, one of the major drivers FOR information technology was the sheer computation requires to advance in many OTHER fields, so computer science would probably have marched onwards.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not your fault. The world has gotten steadily LESS cool for like the last 20 years. What's cool today is just trite and rehashed-without-awareness-of-its-rehashedness (whereas before it was rehashed-with-irony-of-its-rehashedness).
Hell no, what I was unfortunate to see about DS9 was basically . I really think they started aiming more towards the casual viewer and housewives. I basically stopped after STNG.
I don't know...a lot of the charm for me was that I could turn on STOS or STNG and know that they were going to find something new and wacky (and probably implausible), and not get drawn into a deep and complex drama. And if I missed a show I didn't have to read over scripts to figure out what happened to who and who is sleeping with who or who lost their job and is now a clown, etc.
Except things like smoke and alcohol are organic and more "natural". There are already mechanisms to deal with them. Nanotechnology presents an [even greater] opportunity for toxins for which the body has no, or very limited, coping mechanisms. Also, I can largely choose not to consume alcohol, and I know how to avoid smoke. But if EVERYTHING is toxic, how do I avoid that?
Well, not all ethical questions only concern living things. There of course is the issue of destroying life that we don't know exists, or that MAY develop there, or destroying geological features that might have scientific or archaeological value, or any number of issues.
t -do-it-now" line of argumentation.
/against/ terraforming Mars, but just that I don't think its not an ethical issue at least to some degree.
I also don't necessarily concur automatically with the "well-somebody-will-eventually-do-it-so-let's-jus
Note that none of this actually indicates I'm
It gets stranger. It may be that the "constants" and rules we observe in the universe have not always been so, and might not be so in the future. Godel's incompleteness theorem also gives us an inkling that there may indeed be truths that are unprovable.
Note however, I am completely NOT religous, and despite their only shortcoming, I think science and reason are the only feasible tools we can use to understand the universe. Or said in another way, for things which are knowable and understandable, science and reason are the best way to find them.
Ok, let me get this straight:
.NET and a whole bunch of other replacement APIs
.Net is a GREAT step forward (if not for everybody else, at least for people who previously lived lives subsisting off prior Microsoft C/C++/COM/ActiveX/etc. sludge).
Technical community and pundits: OMIGOD the windows API is so crappy and kludgy and windows crashes a bazillon times a day and you shot my dog
Microsoft: no, it's actually YOUR badly written applications
TCP: OMIGOD it's still your fault
MS: That's ok we fixed it for you anwyay.
TCP: OMIGOD why did you waste all that energy on such and old and rotten API! You suck! HUZZAH! I'm throwing salt in your eyes
MS: Yeah, I know, we finally decided it was time to part with all that baggage and hired smart guys that you seemed to like and invented
TCP: OMIGOD why did you do this to me!? I thought you loved me!? I'm going to run off with my new lover "teh intarweb" where we will make complicated scientific visualization applications out of javascript and feed starving mouths with semantic web markup alone, and live in a utopian libertarian dream!
I don't buy it. I think Joel has entered the crank-o-sphere. While XUL shows some tentative promise as an application development platform, current web standards are pretty damn CRAPPY at creating rich interactive GUIs or applications of any complexity. That is why we see so much Flash cropping up.
I for one think
By my calculations that gets you either:
Plaid 10
Pain 10
Neither sound good.
".... ..."
You are not the car you drive
You are not your fucking khaki's
You are not the school you went to.
You are not your fucking degree.
If anything Fight Club is railing AGAINST this constant over acheiving for false goals, so it doesn't exactly support very well the "tough it out in school" idea.
No. Beer should be black and thick. Otherwise it is just bad soda.
College is like being a soldier. Being a great fighter as not as important as being able to be persistent and march in bad weather with no rations while being shot at, for long periods of time. Prepare yourself for a lot of mediocrity. Realize that a lot of people arrive at college still not knowing what the fuck they are interested in, and you will pay for that by long drawn out boring classes. The longer they keep you in school the more money they make.
I can't really give you much advice on staying in because I dropped out (and damn glad too, I am far ahead of where I would have been had I stayed in) but I can only say, be very very sensitive to when you are being burnt out, and to try to desperately latch on to professors, teachers and curriculum which is interesting and exciting. Fuck the rules and prereqs - talk to the dean if you have to. Otherwise you will get burnt out as it is wasting your time and decide to drop out.
I guess I just haven't seen the side you have seen. I have never had any problems with CD keys. I put it in once when I installed years ago, and then put it in once again when I had to rebuild my machine when my hard drive crashed. Even through upgrading to Steam I don't recall having any cd key related issues. It has not inconvenienced me in the slightest. I AM however very annoyed at games that INSIST your CD be inserted in the CD drive. I'm not going to walk all the damn way over and get my CD and pop it in and wait for the CDROM to spin up just to launch a freaking game. Of course Half Life has never done this. Other than a simple one-time CD key prompt at install I'm not aware of ANY "copy protections" for Half Life.
Since Counter Strike and DoD and other mods are popular, I don't find it unreasonable for Valve to be charging the supposed $35 (I haven't really checked so I can't confirm that price). Hell, people even PAY for Counter-Strike and DoD boxed editions which you can get free if you have Half Life anyway, so you can't blame Valve for that. It's not like they broke down the doors of Counter Strike and DoD developers and forced them to be hired at gunpoint. Valve gave these people jobs.
As for Linux support, other than Carmacks token moral gestures, Linux fundamentally is still a total waste of developer money. Some may do it, but only because one of 1) it may be easy 2) they believe in it despite it being a loss, and it gives them leverage against Microsoft 3) they want some hardcore gamer "cred" or "buzz". While it is certainly nice that some companies do this with some games, it is completely NOT obligatory, or expected. I'll note that Half Life and even Steam (according to reports) run on Wine in Linux.
Let's not forget, that while we can whine about all this Valve has also been working on their next game, Half Life 2, for something like FIVE YEARS. It would be dumb, and as a prospective HL2 player, I certainly wouldn't like it, if Valve dumped all their time into stellar support for an aging seven year old game. Let's note that in their lifetime they have essentially only put out ONE game. They are just wrapping up their second one, it's not even out yet. So I think it is a bit much to protest some sort of history of bad behavior. (HL2 is even supposedly going to support HL1 content, so your HL1 investment is leveraged even *further*).
Now Valve certainly could be "demonstrating greed and aggressive attempts at monopolization" at cyber cafes. I just don't know. From my experience on the consumer end it seems out of character, although I suppose it is possible they have a "love the community, screw the cyber cafes" philosophy, I just don't know.
It's fashionable to bitch about Valve and Steam, but Steam is a great system, and Valve has been great to its community. First off they hired Bram Cohen, the Bittorrent author, so they have serious technical chutzpah under the hood. Secondly, for a SEVEN YEAR OLD GAME I bought once for like $30-50, I have in my game list: Counter-Strike, Day of Default, Half Life, Team Fortress Classic, Death Match Classic, and Opposing Force, all games produced by Valve, for, you guessed it FREE. That is not to mention Ricochet (which is pretty useless) and tons of other mods I have (Natural Selection being probably the best). Now with these FREE games I get: A builtin server browser, a friends list, and guess what FREE UPDATES. Mod authors also get a channel to deploy their mods. For now it is, um, FREE, but they will in the future be able to license their games. Now for me, Joe Freeloader, that's not so great, but for mod authors that kicks ass. Where else has a company said: well, you're making a great mod for our game, you know what, we'll let you sell it, in OUR distribution channel on OUR bandwidth!
I think that is a hell of a lot for some piece of software I bought 7 FREAKING YEARS AGO. I think that is a pretty good deal. And if they perhaps want to get a cut from somebody else making profit off THEIR distribution and update system, that seems ok to me. I don't know the details of this particular incident, and perhaps Valve could have been more tactful, but Valve in general has been GREAT to the community. They even run forums wherein every luser on earth gets to post: "St34m 4re t3h suks. I h4te you. G1ve m3 m0re g4mes b1tch. kthxbai."
"Jumping this hurdle in a game is going to be a PITA."
Half Life 2 looks pretty good, and I've seen the extended high res demos. I don't have the "this is wrong" gut reaction. Then again, maybe the nature of playing a game makes it more prone to left-brain thinking ("pressing keys"). Who knows.
No, the point is that when you start to make a robot look human, your brain thinks "ah, that's a cute robot!", but when you make a robot look ALOT like a human your brain starts thinking "damn, that's a fucked up human".
"but really, are very realistic paintings of people creepy?"
Never seen a movie with a picture with cut out eyes so people can "spy" on people in the room? Yes, that looks creepy.
"then it is a bad mutation and will be pulled from the gene pool."
It will not be "pulled" from the gene pool. There is no "pulling". It will propagate up until the very moment (and past) that the environment cannot sustain the species, and the whole damn cycle will start over while those for whatever reason were able to survive. I'm not saying that it might coincidentally turn out to benefit a species to have a lower reproduction rate in some cases, but natural-selection never "knows" this - it will continue selecting towards more reproduction until the next crash - and of course natural selection doesn't "know" when this crash is going to come if it ever is, so it just steamrolls along.
1) patent task list
2) ???
3....******Dear Hard_Code, please cease and desist from using patented "task lists" in your jokes.******
Let me correct myself with regard to the analogy (and it WAS an ANALOGY "can be though of as...") to decompressing and decrypting - the human (probably mammalian) immune system is actually the only area I am now aware of that does this sort of self modification. I was probably wrong to extrapolate to all other DNA processes, although I suppose it is feasible a similar mechanism is found elsewhere.
:)
I was also strangely enthused that our DNA also actually carries "stowaway" copies of eons-old archaic viruses which at some point stopped being "active" viruses altogether, and simply started "stowing away" in spaces in our DNA and getting propagated from generation to generation. Once in a while I am told, it is even possible under some circumstances for these old virus DNA sequences to be re-animated. For some reason I find the idea that we are all carrying copies of eons-old viruses very interesting, and strangely affirming
At some point the sun will burn out and everything will die regardless of whether it was more or less reproductive. However at any given instant in time, natural-selection will be selecting towards more reproduction. Suppose a genetic mutation at some point allows higher reproduction with the given resource potential remaining the same over time - that path is ALWAYS taken. If a mutation promotes reproduction is propagates. Period. It's immaterial to the argument of whether natural selection chooses more or less production whether someday down the road resources run out or humans come in and napalm the whole area - natural selection always chooses more reproduction by simple observation that the less-reproduction-gene does not get passed with less reproduction.
"And you don't believe that this could possibly be caused by natural selection?"
No, I don't think under-production is ever selected for. Natural-selection always chooses the highest feasible production. If it so happens some external force wipes out all those that produced the highest that doesn't change the fact. The situation will continue with the highest production being those that managed to survive, until they are again overpopulated.
From simple inspection it follows that the simple forces of "natural selection" operating at the individual level, never choose to preemptively kill the organism before reproduction. If this was the case, then no organims would be alive to spread the kill-yourself gene. Now, there may be social phenomena that arbitrary biological behaviors, and this is certainly true in "higher level" animals whos consciousness and culture actually informs modifies their actions, but at its basis natural-selection is dumb. There is no magical "Gaia" that hovers above a group of animals and predicts "well, if I keep the population low then I won't enter a famine cycle and can continue steady growth". It only operates on an individual basis. I'd also observe that short of sociological phenomena, organisms which have high time-to-reproductive-age are always the least populous. Just examine the insects-to-mammals ratio.
"Er no. Its just DNA. There is certainly nothing to do with compression or encryption going on."
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but your DNA itself does NOT describe how you end up after development. For fairly simple organisms it may, but not for humans who have very very complex developments. Instead what DNA does is essentially create a blueprint-builder, or a compiler-compiler if you will (no obviously don't take my analogies literally, that would be stupid). From my understanding the development process basically expands your DNA (not physically, semantically) into contextually meaningful segments. A piece of "junk" in your DNA might influence one process under one situation, and another in another situation.
"This is getting bizzare."
DNA is base4 and has a finite length. There is a finite amount of stuff it can describe.
"The darwinian reason for homosexuality, might be that, it might be a natural barrier to prevent certain species from overproducing itself."
Natural selection ALWAYS works on an individual basis and NEVER works on a group basis (this simply doesn't make physiological sense). The ONLY case in which it might limit lifespan is only until AFTER reproduction (because obviously the kill-yourself gene would not propagate). There is no such thing as natural selection producing a barrier to overproduction. Natural selection always chooses overproduction.
"If there's a darwinian reason for homosexuality, I've never heard it"
/change sex/ to accomodate the environment. Some male frogs do this IIRC, changing from male to female when the male/female ratio is too high.
From my limited biological knowledge: Some species (e.g. some frogs) can actually
Granted primates are way more complicated, and the reason might be entirely different. There are tons of weird, "useless" crap that natural selection has left us with. Hell, most human behavior was designed to hunt animals, live in a cave, and die at age 30. Almost nothing about us is "natural" or "useful" any more. Remember natural selection may "select" towards fitness, but it doesn't necessarily deselect things that are not useful but not particularly harmful either. From what I hear about DNA, there is massive amounts of "junk" we carry around, and that we have to support by caloric intake. However that "junk" can really be thought of as a self-decompressing self-decrypting program that comes into affect essentially at birth and at various other times. If you think about it computationally, there is a "limit" to the amount of "stuff" you can describe with DNA. The fascinating thing is how it bootstraps, self-decompresses, self-decrypts, and self-modifies. It's all amazing that it even works at all. It would be like typing random characters into a computer and one day just popping out the Linux kernel.
Science does not progress equally on all fronts. It goes in fits and spurts. It has been true in the past (perhaps moreso in the past) where the whimsy or intellect of a single person advanced a given field greatly, whereas if they personally were not involved the field might only advance a quarter of what it could, or be completely abandoned in favor of some more "fashionable" discovery. We are constantly finding diaries and notes of inventors and scientists who come accross an astounding discovery but since it isn't related directly to their research they disregard it to be rediscovered maybe 50 or 100 years later. I think it is entirely possible for things like this to happen.
That being said, one of the major drivers FOR information technology was the sheer computation requires to advance in many OTHER fields, so computer science would probably have marched onwards.