We don't necessarily have 100% of the information here, but this whole thing seriously sounds to me like a typical case of governmental recto-cranial inversion.
Why would cartographers be taking pictures of airforce bases... Does sound just a tad suspicious.
And if they had "taken pictures of young girls playing in school yards" it would also sound suspicious.
If people are making GPS maps and taking generic video/photos as part of it, then yes, that video and those photos will include the little girls in the school yards of that area, or video and pictures of the airport and military base in the area. Saying they were "taking pictures of little girls" or "military bases" is a disgustingly convenient "sounds bad" way to imply innocent people are pedophiles or terrorists.
I live not far from the World Trade Center towers. I got to watch armed combat-active military aircraft orbiting over my house after 9/11. Yes, I know there are terrorists, and yes I want them caught. However I do not support idiocy in pursuit of that goal. The idea that GPS devices and GPS mapping are criminal, the idea that they are even particularly suspicious, is idiocy. Pulling over, searching, and arresting people merely because they have a "weird antenna" on the roof of their car is idiocy.
They called the company these guys said work for, and the company said yes, these are our employees and yes we did send them to collect GPS and mapping data. Now I see only two possibilities here. Either (1) these are innocent innocent people, or (2) the company itself is a terrorist setup and they are exceptionally stupid (exceptionally stupid even for terrorists) to admit that that two guys that got caught were working for them.
While option (2) is certainly possible, it just doesn't seem to me to be particularly likely. It doesn't seem to be to be anywhere near as likely as typical government idiocy. If option (2) isn't true, then what we have here are ordinary people who were victimized for having a "weird antenna" on their car. We would have have the idiotic idea that GPS units indicate criminality - or even worse idiocy if the GPS units actually are criminal. And we would have the absolutely disgusting situation of police propping up this travesty making these guys sound like pedophiles because their routine video/pictures happened to include the schoolyards and the little girls that they passed. Ooops, my bad... I mean making these guys sound like terrorists because their routine video/pictures happened to include the airport and military base that they passed.
<sarcasm> Because geee, what what telecom or other company wold want to map out some strategic area like around the major airport serving a city? Obviously such companies would be most interested in GPS data for non-strategic areas like farmland and uninhabited forests. Cellphone tower placement and travel route data is most critically important for farmland and uninhabited forests. </sarcasm>
Unless there is more justification than has been released in the story - unless these guy were already being specifically tracked for known terrorist ties or something - then it would require a pure dumb luck lightening strike hit for this to be anything other than innocent people being victimized by idiocy and anti-terrorism paranoia.
Yeah, bacteria have a couple of neat tricks, but they fall far short of the power of sexual recombination. In just one thousand years bacteria can run through about as many generations as mammals have ever had since they first appeared. The per-generation asexual rate of evolution is virtually zero, compared to the rate of sexual evolution.
And on top of that, bacteria population sizes are something like a trillion times larger. The per-individual asexual rate of evolution is virtually zero, compared to the rate of sexual evolution.
On a per-individual per-generation basis, the rate of asexual evolution is pretty much zero squared. Chuckle. Even with the best tricks bacteria have, sexual evolution is many many orders of magnitude more powerful as an information processing and information creation engine.
if 2 genders are good why wouldn't more be better?
The benefit of sex is you get to shuffle and recombine the genetic information. You don't really gain anything new by having 3 or more genders. It doesn't much alter the rate of shuffling nor the value of the shuffling. There's little-to-nothing to justify the added complexities and costs of additional genders.
>sexual recombination is where the real power lies in evolution. Could you elaborate
The real and advanced answer is a bit of mathematics called the Schemata Theorem. It demonstrates there is an effect called Implicit Parallelism that supplies a free power multiplier going on in sexual evolution, and that the multiplier effect is essentially exponential in the size of the genome. I'm not going to try to explain this math here, but I will explain some simple aspects demonstrating how sexual recombination makes evolution more powerful.
Imagine you have some mammal species with a population of say a million, and we follow them for a number of generations. Lets say conservatively ten million mutations happen in this population. Lets say 90% are neutral - nine million neutral mutations and one million non-neutral mutations. Lets conservatively say 99.999% of those are harmful an 0.001% are beneficial. That gives us 9,999,990 harmful mutations and 10 beneficial mutations. One beneficial mutation gives a five point IQ boost, another gives resistance to the flu, another gives the ability to self-produce some essential vitamin, another gives the ability to digest some new foodstuff, another gives the ability to see in color instead of black and white, another gives better resistance to various toxins like snake venom, another gives better long distance running stamina, another reduces the risk of cancer, another slightly modifies the hands for better manual dexterity with tools and whatnot, and lets say the tenth beneficial mutation gives a different five point IQ boost that can add with the previous IQ boost listed.
Now... the chance of any two of these mutations happening at the exact same moment in one particular individual out of the million population is virtually nill. So we are generally talking about ten different individuals in the population with these ten swell advantages. With asexual reproduction you have no way to combine them. What happens is that these ten individuals each have one advantage and they multiply and out-compete and eventually displace all of the "normal" individuals of their species. So umpteen generations you still have a population of a million, a hundred thousand with each of these ten benefits. And then these ten groups are competing with each other. Some of these groups will get competed to extinction and their beneficial mutation will cease to exist, or perhaps they will wind up diverging to a different species. Either way, no individual gets to inherit more than one beneficial mutation. The only way for one of these individuals to get two of these mutations would be by the insanely rare chance of randomly re-evolving one of the other beneficial traits. In order to get all ten beneficial traits you would have to keep reinventing the wheel over and over and over, over countless generations, trying to sequentially rediscover each mutation in a single line of descent.
In sexual reproduction what will happen is that each of the ten mutations will provide and advantage and they will all spread throughout the population pretty quickly. One parent with a 5 IQ point boost will mate with someone with the other 5 IQ point boost and they will have four children. Basic genetics says that one child will inherit neither benefit, a second child will inherit the first IQ boost mutation, the third child will inherit the other IQ benefit, and the fourth child will inherit BOTH and get a 10 IQ point benefit. The first "dumb" child is most likely to die or fail to find a mating partner, and the super-smart child with both benefits is the most likely to succeed and have lots of kids passing on the double intelligence combination. In fact that super smart kid may choose the weird/interesting person with color vision as their partner, and immediately have smart color-vision children.
There's another huge problem with asexuality - if you inherit some ad mutation, there's no way to get rid of it except for all your descendants to die off. Lets say you g
I have hobby expertise in this subject. I've studied the subject in general, I have studied the math behind it, and I have programmed several evolving systems.
You always need a target.
Nope. Evolution works great even when you don't have the faintest clue what a successful "target" might look like. In fact evolutionary methods are most valuable exactly when you lack a lack a target and when you are unable to "intelligently design" a solution yourself.
The technical term for what you need is a 'fitness function'.
However even that overstates what you need. While it is convenient if you have a function to numerically evaluate fitness, all you really need is a comparison ability - some means of comparing individual A and individual B and selecting which on is "better", for any definition of "better". It doesn't even have to be an absolute or accurate comparison - all you need is some means of selection that chooses the "better" individual more than 50% of the time.
As for this article, it is a visually nice demo for introducing people to the subject, but in fact it uses one of the most limited and least powerful aspects of evolving processes. It is a simple asexual hillclimbing of a single individual.
Sexual recombination in an evolving population is almost infinitely more powerful. There's some deep mathematics behind the power of sexual recombination, but it is so powerful that essentially all species above bacteria have seized on it. Asexual reproduction has many obvious advantages and simplicity, but virtually all species abandon it whenever possible because sexual recombination is where the real power lies in evolution.
The naked human body is a testament to the Creator's majesty and perfection, not a sin, and I see no reason why we should cover-up a naked human anymore than we cover-up a naked deer or naked bear or naked seal.
Not directly related to your point, but do you really think that largest use of this device is going to be downloading public-domain books with this thing? Be honest.
Firstly, your use of the word "device" there really irks me. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The DMCA use the word "device" to cover software and math and text. Very wrong and very very annoying. A "device" is a physical object. A Firefox extension is not a device.
But to answer your question, I honestly believe the actual meaningful usage of this extension will be pretty well nill. This extension is hysterical, and it makes an excellent point, but its usability value is nearly nonexistent or even negative value. Anyone with this sort of interest in general future searing of torrents would be much better off simply adding thepiratebay to the Firefox search box. Installing an extension just to munge up every amazon page and fire off a zillion largely worthless piratebay searches is silly.
pull the book from gutenberg.org
Yes, as someone else noted this extension could trivially be tweaked to fire off gutenberg searches instead. And that really only serves to highlight the issue here. The authors wrote a legitimate extension that could work on amazon.com or on any other site, and that could search piratebay or gutenberg or any of countless other sites, and the authors have no ability and no responsibility to sort out what might or might not be copyright infringement.
Even downloading from gutenberg, some people downloading some of the books would be copyright infringement! For example England passed a law granting Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children an eternal copyright on Peter Pan. Many of the books in gutenberg are legal in one country and not in some other.
Yeah, that's potentially a valid issue. In fact I did think of it myself while I was making the list. I deleted a few items with the intent to make it into an English-only list, but as you noticed I didn't completely follow through on that thought. However I bet for at least some of those foreign language titles Amazon.com does carry editions that are either (1) original language texts or (2) non-copyright-covered translations.
In the beginning I was actually searching Amazon.com for pages selling exact public domain edition books and I was going to linky them, but it was getting to be messy with all those tabs open and it was becoming way too much work. Much easier to just make the point like I did and then deal with the nitpickers later:)
The "official" answer is that a current version of something like Ulysses is going to have lots of notes at the back
Publishers do often add some "co-author" text in order to slap a renewed copyright on the edition, however as I said amazon.com carries all or nearly all of the texts I listed - editions listing the original author and only the original author. So while you are raising a significant and valid aspect of copyright law, it doesn't really alter the issue at hand.
Because the artist doesn't get paid if you make a copy yourself.
(1) None of them have any right to get paid. (2) None of them would get paid if you buy from amazon.com.
There.... HAPPY????
Your failure to read the subject of my post, your failure to grasp the point of the list written in my post, and your comically wrong answer, they managed to give me a brief half-chuckle. But no, it did not provide me with any happiness.
I wonder how the glasses distinguish between the two?
You know how a drill bit or a corkscrew spirals from front to back? That spiral can twist clockwise as you go from front to back, or it can twist counterclockwise.
Imagine the front surface of one lens - a sheet one molecule thick - is a vertically polarized filter. The light then passes deeper into the lens, and again you have a one-molecule-thick sheet of polarizing material, except this layer is tilted 5 degrees to the left (or tilted 5 degrees to the right). As you pass deeper through the lens you keep hitting a series of layers each twisted slightly to the left (or twisted to the right). The light has to twist like a drill bit does, as it passes from front to back. A left twist or a right twist.
Some materials naturally corkscrew the arrangement of their atoms. It is random whether the second layer it will twist left or right compared to the first layer, but after that the material will keep twisting left or keep twisting right as it forms.
I think he was explaining that you can have two-component horizontal+vertical signals from a single rope. The wave can have a diagonal displacement carrying both signals.
The stuff you explained was correct as far as I recall, and the stuff he explained was correct as far as I recall. Whether he was correct or not in saying you were "wrong"... I think that is mostly a communication issue and I offer no particular input on who was unclear in their speech or in their understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, that explains all the Slashdot Suggestion submissions wanting to replace the -1 Troll moderation option with -1 Squid.
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Under no circumstances should attempts be made to communicate with them until the safe return of the captive octopus hostages
OMG! Bush is an octopus!
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Or we could just selectively breed humans for a shorter lifespan.
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I was going to post a simple joke about ecocondoms...
then I saw your post and my head asploded.
Those are speed holes. They make the font faster.
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I always recycle my electrons.
Ahh, that explains why your posts always seemed a bit dull. I thought it was just you.
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We don't necessarily have 100% of the information here, but this whole thing seriously sounds to me like a typical case of governmental recto-cranial inversion.
Why would cartographers be taking pictures of airforce bases...
Does sound just a tad suspicious.
And if they had "taken pictures of young girls playing in school yards" it would also sound suspicious.
If people are making GPS maps and taking generic video/photos as part of it, then yes, that video and those photos will include the little girls in the school yards of that area, or video and pictures of the airport and military base in the area. Saying they were "taking pictures of little girls" or "military bases" is a disgustingly convenient "sounds bad" way to imply innocent people are pedophiles or terrorists.
I live not far from the World Trade Center towers. I got to watch armed combat-active military aircraft orbiting over my house after 9/11. Yes, I know there are terrorists, and yes I want them caught. However I do not support idiocy in pursuit of that goal. The idea that GPS devices and GPS mapping are criminal, the idea that they are even particularly suspicious, is idiocy. Pulling over, searching, and arresting people merely because they have a "weird antenna" on the roof of their car is idiocy.
They called the company these guys said work for, and the company said yes, these are our employees and yes we did send them to collect GPS and mapping data. Now I see only two possibilities here. Either (1) these are innocent innocent people, or (2) the company itself is a terrorist setup and they are exceptionally stupid (exceptionally stupid even for terrorists) to admit that that two guys that got caught were working for them.
While option (2) is certainly possible, it just doesn't seem to me to be particularly likely. It doesn't seem to be to be anywhere near as likely as typical government idiocy. If option (2) isn't true, then what we have here are ordinary people who were victimized for having a "weird antenna" on their car. We would have have the idiotic idea that GPS units indicate criminality - or even worse idiocy if the GPS units actually are criminal. And we would have the absolutely disgusting situation of police propping up this travesty making these guys sound like pedophiles because their routine video/pictures happened to include the schoolyards and the little girls that they passed. Ooops, my bad... I mean making these guys sound like terrorists because their routine video/pictures happened to include the airport and military base that they passed.
<sarcasm>
Because geee, what what telecom or other company wold want to map out some strategic area like around the major airport serving a city? Obviously such companies would be most interested in GPS data for non-strategic areas like farmland and uninhabited forests. Cellphone tower placement and travel route data is most critically important for farmland and uninhabited forests.
</sarcasm>
Unless there is more justification than has been released in the story - unless these guy were already being specifically tracked for known terrorist ties or something - then it would require a pure dumb luck lightening strike hit for this to be anything other than innocent people being victimized by idiocy and anti-terrorism paranoia.
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That's like voluntarily choosing (and paying!) to live in a universe where you know the Gods (or demigods at least) are evil and corrupt.
I never understood why anyone would ever buy into that.
Gotta run... time for Bible Study.
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How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers?
Everyone knows elves go barefoot.
Oh wait, no, that's hobbits. Nevermind, my bad.
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Ok, on January 1st everyone drinks their year's worth of coffee, and on January 2nd we drive on it.
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Yeah, bacteria have a couple of neat tricks, but they fall far short of the power of sexual recombination. In just one thousand years bacteria can run through about as many generations as mammals have ever had since they first appeared. The per-generation asexual rate of evolution is virtually zero, compared to the rate of sexual evolution.
And on top of that, bacteria population sizes are something like a trillion times larger. The per-individual asexual rate of evolution is virtually zero, compared to the rate of sexual evolution.
On a per-individual per-generation basis, the rate of asexual evolution is pretty much zero squared. Chuckle. Even with the best tricks bacteria have, sexual evolution is many many orders of magnitude more powerful as an information processing and information creation engine.
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if 2 genders are good why wouldn't more be better?
The benefit of sex is you get to shuffle and recombine the genetic information. You don't really gain anything new by having 3 or more genders. It doesn't much alter the rate of shuffling nor the value of the shuffling. There's little-to-nothing to justify the added complexities and costs of additional genders.
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How worthless is a sunrise? Air? A baby's smile? A hug?
Ok on that air thing... but this is Slashdot. We're not too familiar with those other three things.
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Your neighbor has a garden...
he gives away the vegetables
Oh, it's even WORSE that that!
He's eating his vegetables and giving away the SEEDS for free!
Damn pinko commie!
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>sexual recombination is where the real power lies in evolution.
Could you elaborate
The real and advanced answer is a bit of mathematics called the Schemata Theorem. It demonstrates there is an effect called Implicit Parallelism that supplies a free power multiplier going on in sexual evolution, and that the multiplier effect is essentially exponential in the size of the genome. I'm not going to try to explain this math here, but I will explain some simple aspects demonstrating how sexual recombination makes evolution more powerful.
Imagine you have some mammal species with a population of say a million, and we follow them for a number of generations. Lets say conservatively ten million mutations happen in this population. Lets say 90% are neutral - nine million neutral mutations and one million non-neutral mutations. Lets conservatively say 99.999% of those are harmful an 0.001% are beneficial. That gives us 9,999,990 harmful mutations and 10 beneficial mutations. One beneficial mutation gives a five point IQ boost, another gives resistance to the flu, another gives the ability to self-produce some essential vitamin, another gives the ability to digest some new foodstuff, another gives the ability to see in color instead of black and white, another gives better resistance to various toxins like snake venom, another gives better long distance running stamina, another reduces the risk of cancer, another slightly modifies the hands for better manual dexterity with tools and whatnot, and lets say the tenth beneficial mutation gives a different five point IQ boost that can add with the previous IQ boost listed.
Now... the chance of any two of these mutations happening at the exact same moment in one particular individual out of the million population is virtually nill. So we are generally talking about ten different individuals in the population with these ten swell advantages. With asexual reproduction you have no way to combine them. What happens is that these ten individuals each have one advantage and they multiply and out-compete and eventually displace all of the "normal" individuals of their species. So umpteen generations you still have a population of a million, a hundred thousand with each of these ten benefits. And then these ten groups are competing with each other. Some of these groups will get competed to extinction and their beneficial mutation will cease to exist, or perhaps they will wind up diverging to a different species. Either way, no individual gets to inherit more than one beneficial mutation. The only way for one of these individuals to get two of these mutations would be by the insanely rare chance of randomly re-evolving one of the other beneficial traits. In order to get all ten beneficial traits you would have to keep reinventing the wheel over and over and over, over countless generations, trying to sequentially rediscover each mutation in a single line of descent.
In sexual reproduction what will happen is that each of the ten mutations will provide and advantage and they will all spread throughout the population pretty quickly. One parent with a 5 IQ point boost will mate with someone with the other 5 IQ point boost and they will have four children. Basic genetics says that one child will inherit neither benefit, a second child will inherit the first IQ boost mutation, the third child will inherit the other IQ benefit, and the fourth child will inherit BOTH and get a 10 IQ point benefit. The first "dumb" child is most likely to die or fail to find a mating partner, and the super-smart child with both benefits is the most likely to succeed and have lots of kids passing on the double intelligence combination. In fact that super smart kid may choose the weird/interesting person with color vision as their partner, and immediately have smart color-vision children.
There's another huge problem with asexuality - if you inherit some ad mutation, there's no way to get rid of it except for all your descendants to die off. Lets say you g
I have hobby expertise in this subject. I've studied the subject in general, I have studied the math behind it, and I have programmed several evolving systems.
You always need a target.
Nope. Evolution works great even when you don't have the faintest clue what a successful "target" might look like. In fact evolutionary methods are most valuable exactly when you lack a lack a target and when you are unable to "intelligently design" a solution yourself.
The technical term for what you need is a 'fitness function'.
However even that overstates what you need. While it is convenient if you have a function to numerically evaluate fitness, all you really need is a comparison ability - some means of comparing individual A and individual B and selecting which on is "better", for any definition of "better". It doesn't even have to be an absolute or accurate comparison - all you need is some means of selection that chooses the "better" individual more than 50% of the time.
As for this article, it is a visually nice demo for introducing people to the subject, but in fact it uses one of the most limited and least powerful aspects of evolving processes. It is a simple asexual hillclimbing of a single individual.
Sexual recombination in an evolving population is almost infinitely more powerful. There's some deep mathematics behind the power of sexual recombination, but it is so powerful that essentially all species above bacteria have seized on it. Asexual reproduction has many obvious advantages and simplicity, but virtually all species abandon it whenever possible because sexual recombination is where the real power lies in evolution.
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The naked human body is a testament to the Creator's majesty and perfection, not a sin, and I see no reason why we should cover-up a naked human anymore than we cover-up a naked deer or naked bear or naked seal.
You forgot naked beaver.
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Note to self: Remember never to allow Albert sit on the couch without plastic seat covers.
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Not directly related to your point, but do you really think that largest use of this device is going to be downloading public-domain books with this thing? Be honest.
Firstly, your use of the word "device" there really irks me.
It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. The DMCA use the word "device" to cover software and math and text. Very wrong and very very annoying. A "device" is a physical object. A Firefox extension is not a device.
But to answer your question, I honestly believe the actual meaningful usage of this extension will be pretty well nill. This extension is hysterical, and it makes an excellent point, but its usability value is nearly nonexistent or even negative value. Anyone with this sort of interest in general future searing of torrents would be much better off simply adding thepiratebay to the Firefox search box. Installing an extension just to munge up every amazon page and fire off a zillion largely worthless piratebay searches is silly.
pull the book from gutenberg.org
Yes, as someone else noted this extension could trivially be tweaked to fire off gutenberg searches instead. And that really only serves to highlight the issue here. The authors wrote a legitimate extension that could work on amazon.com or on any other site, and that could search piratebay or gutenberg or any of countless other sites, and the authors have no ability and no responsibility to sort out what might or might not be copyright infringement.
Even downloading from gutenberg, some people downloading some of the books would be copyright infringement!
For example England passed a law granting Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children an eternal copyright on Peter Pan. Many of the books in gutenberg are legal in one country and not in some other.
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translation
Yeah, that's potentially a valid issue. In fact I did think of it myself while I was making the list. I deleted a few items with the intent to make it into an English-only list, but as you noticed I didn't completely follow through on that thought. However I bet for at least some of those foreign language titles Amazon.com does carry editions that are either (1) original language texts or (2) non-copyright-covered translations.
In the beginning I was actually searching Amazon.com for pages selling exact public domain edition books and I was going to linky them, but it was getting to be messy with all those tabs open and it was becoming way too much work. Much easier to just make the point like I did and then deal with the nitpickers later :)
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burning-for-fuel is the only suitable application for DRM-encumbered garbage.
[SarcasticTone]
Oh, that's just Great.
[/SarcasticTone]
So now DRM causes global warming, too.
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The "official" answer is that a current version of something like Ulysses is going to have lots of notes at the back
Publishers do often add some "co-author" text in order to slap a renewed copyright on the edition, however as I said amazon.com carries all or nearly all of the texts I listed - editions listing the original author and only the original author. So while you are raising a significant and valid aspect of copyright law, it doesn't really alter the issue at hand.
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Because the artist doesn't get paid if you make a copy yourself.
(1) None of them have any right to get paid.
(2) None of them would get paid if you buy from amazon.com.
There.... HAPPY????
Your failure to read the subject of my post, your failure to grasp the point of the list written in my post, and your comically wrong answer, they managed to give me a brief half-chuckle. But no, it did not provide me with any happiness.
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I wonder how the glasses distinguish between the two?
You know how a drill bit or a corkscrew spirals from front to back? That spiral can twist clockwise as you go from front to back, or it can twist counterclockwise.
Imagine the front surface of one lens - a sheet one molecule thick - is a vertically polarized filter. The light then passes deeper into the lens, and again you have a one-molecule-thick sheet of polarizing material, except this layer is tilted 5 degrees to the left (or tilted 5 degrees to the right). As you pass deeper through the lens you keep hitting a series of layers each twisted slightly to the left (or twisted to the right). The light has to twist like a drill bit does, as it passes from front to back. A left twist or a right twist.
Some materials naturally corkscrew the arrangement of their atoms. It is random whether the second layer it will twist left or right compared to the first layer, but after that the material will keep twisting left or keep twisting right as it forms.
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I think he was explaining that you can have two-component horizontal+vertical signals from a single rope. The wave can have a diagonal displacement carrying both signals.
The stuff you explained was correct as far as I recall, and the stuff he explained was correct as far as I recall. Whether he was correct or not in saying you were "wrong"... I think that is mostly a communication issue and I offer no particular input on who was unclear in their speech or in their understanding.
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Wait... I've been watching hockey all these years on my smallscreen set...
and now you tell me there's a PUCK?!
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