When I was in India a year ago, I was surprised at how strong the presence of Microsoft was in science. Virtually none of the people I spoke to had had any Linux exposure, let alone Linux experience. This is in stark contrast with 'the West'; Linux prospers in most of the sciences.
OK, I'm very short on details, but
when Adler came with the idea of quantum
computing for the Traveling Salesman problem and a proof of concept experiment (1995 I think),
it was immediately refuted, because
for any practical problem, the number of
different oligo's required to sample the solution
space would take too long to synthesize and
weigh far too much. But I didn't read the original
document, admittedly.
iris scanning to be introduced at Amsterdam Airpor
on
Biometrics in Airports
·
· Score: 1
OK, this is not the same as face recognition,
but still, they are actually building the booths in the Customs area; I'm sure they trust and in terestingly, I read somewhere that 60% of the
business travelers for whom this is meant are supportive.
See
http://www.iaae.org/publications/pdf/iaae_2000_1 2. pdf
(couldn't find a more recent quote).
Journals do actually do quite a bit of work. You submit a paper to them.
No they dont, not given the amount of money that
they get for free. I happen to know the operation
of a leading title in bioinformatics. Apart from the editors and reviewers, it is run by 1 (one) person, the secretary.
Then they need to decide if they want to
publish it, first of all. That takes some expertise to begin with.
Which is done by the editors and reviewers, who are not
paid. Editors (who choose the reviewers, and who
under whose auspicies the paper finally is published)
do get paid but only a litte, as being an editor is more a prestige thing (and rightly so) than anything else.
All of this takes effort, and much of it is non-trivial.
On the contrary; most of it is trivial
in the scientifici world . You simply can't compare it to another, say commercial effort.
Scientists could get together and run their own free journals with quality research in them, but that's that much less
time spent doing science.
Firstly, it seems to have worked out
quite well in the physics community. Secondly,
ask any department what they'd rather have: the current situtation, or shifting $10,000 from the library to the research budget + free access to all literature in exchange for a bit of work to
get/keep the free literature initiative going... go ahead, I'm waiting:-)
The big question, indeed, is why the researchers and libraries in Medicin and Biology (and humanities etc.) haven't gotten
their act together in the way the physicicts have... but it's coming.
Uh, yes, indirectly. Without publications, your
stream of grants will soon dry up.
Also, as I think Bertrand Rusell has argued,
people are not driven by money, but by power
(and you can get the latter by having the former,
though not necessarily the other way around).
Without publications, you'll have no standing, so
no power.
BTW, being driven by power does not imply being
a total asshole; it's natural because with power you have more freedom. Kindathing.
until hot chimneys were discovered at the bottom of the Atlantic, most scientist took for granted
that life needed oxygen
uh, wrong analogy. anaerobic lifeforms (e.g. lactic acid bacteria) were already well
known to early biochemists (19th century stuff). The extremophile analogy is closer. Speaking of which: the fact that life will occur almost everywhere, I think, is
further reason to doubt that the Mars Meteorite (I forgot the number) contained evidence of Martian microbes:
if they were there, they should still be there and thriving and easily found, even in the Martian extremes.
ignoring the huge
democratic deficit at the heart of the EU that Holland and other European countries
Are you insane or what? Have you ever lived in Holland? No one who has lived there (or in Germany or in Belgium, or France or Britain or the Scandinavian countries or elsewhere in Europe) could in his right mind claim this.
Now admittedly, the EU is a bureaucratic monster that tries to nibble at national souvereignties, but so far that is really marginal, certainly much less than the power of Washington over the US states.
And in terms of 'progressive goodies' (sex, drugs, rock^W, justice system, gay rights, religion, health care, welfare, euthanasia, Holland is really about as good as it gets. Certainly better than the UK and its 'subsidiaries' (let alone good'ol US of A ):-)
Re:GM food is not a good idea yet
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
When it comes to new medicines we insist upon years and years of scientifically
conducted trials before allowing them to be used on people, and even then look at the things that crop up years later.
Here is some news for you: genetically modified foods are subjected to years of very rigorous testing before approval. And actually, they have been used for years and years in the U.S., without even the slightest hint of any adverse effects.
It's good to have this testing. It's not good to be paranoid. The GMO people have actually far more insight in what they are doing than the traditional breeders. A GMO scientist adds/changes removes one gene (say around 4 kBase of info), from among around 4Gigabase of genome (depending on the species).
In contrast, a traditional plant breeder just
smashes up (using gamma or Xrays), 10-20% (which is a very unpredictable change 5 orders of magnitude larger ) of two genomes, puts them back together, then waits what 'll happen. In most cases, nothing; in some cases, something useful; in a few cases, a dangerous new plant. E.g, a traditionally bred
new potato variety was taken off the market, because it produced unaccpetable levelss of some glycoside. Oops, should have tested for that. With the tests in place for GMO, this could not have happened.
Look: Nature is not benign. The most dangerous substances are biogenic. The most devastating ecological disasters were not caused by man-produced (gmo or traditionally bred) organisms, but by existing wild species that found new niches (for many such introductions, man is of course to blame).
I could go on and on, but let me just say that sticking your head in the sand is potentially more harmful. Where would we be without antibiotics (which BTW already are produced by GMO's), or non-animal produced insulin (same).
Re:Haven't I seen all this before?
on
Perl 6 Showcase
·
· Score: 1
years ago, there was a great programming language called "Lisp". It had lexical scoping, was both interpreted and compiled...
and maybe more importantly: interactive (like Python is; perl is only interactive if you run it inside the debugger !?).
why should Perl succeed where Lisp failed?
Uhr... lisp failed? As far as I can see, Lisp (in different forms, including Scheme), is more alive
than ever. This includes, by the way, some fancy robotics stuff in the Deep Space 2 mission (but I fear it won't be long before perl is in space too...)
It may not be used as widely as other languages, but why is that 'failure' ? Hey, apparently only 0.2% of the world is of Judaist belief. Bit of a failure, that. (What a bollocks).
Lastly, I do agree with the author that this 'different syntaxes for perl' thing prolly
going to fail: for most code, the aim is not just
functionality, but readability to others. Inventing your own 'little language' is all nice and well, but things only really start to take of
if this 'little language' is spoken by more than
person. And BTW, this is nothing new, we've had this 'little language'
thing before: they are called API's and libraries.
E.g., even if you have written some brilliant library
that does cgi stuff in perl, it 'd prolly have
little chance against CGI.pm: everybody knows it,
and even if it has rough edges, IT'S BETTER BECAUSE MANY MORE PEOPLE KNOW IT. . (And also, why bother?)
This, unfortunately, won't work all that easily.
A while ago, this pharmacist developed Linux software for automatically administering drugs on a drip so as to keep the drug at some level.
IIRC, the problem1 were 1) who is liable and
2) who will pay the certification costs for it to be approved by the FDA (because without FDA approval, you're nowhere).
Read the story here. (I believe this was once on/.)
OK, it's easy enough to overwrite the bytes with
^@s, but this prolly won't deter the real spooks.
Due to slight inaccuracies with disk head positioning, their is still magnetisation that can be recovered from the edges of the little area that holds the byte (bit?). This is recoverable
relatively easily from magtape, but I wouldn't be
surprised if the same technique now also applies to high density hard disks.
In other words, if the judge wants to protect us all against this, that'd be pretty difficult to
achieve tecnically.
In principle, this could be used for a whole bunch of other
things. And BTW it's easy enough to obtain totally unique DNA from e.g. a chicken or rabbit.
The real problem is that the bad guys may eventually succeed in extracting the tagging DNA from the tagged item (not that this is trivial, currently). Once they have that, they can simply copy it (using PCR, a standard technique in genetics and forensic science; see my other post) into large batches of tagging ink, and use it by themselves to tag more stuff. I guess this technique will be useful for a few more years, but then become too easy to fake.
The athlete's DNA was most likely simply 'copied' using PCR (polymerase chain reaction). This is a
standard technique that sort of mimicks the DNA
replication process that goes on in real life. It's the cornerstone of the molecular biology revolution.
See http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~jbrown/pcr.html
or http://www.accessexcellence.com/AB/GG/polymerase.h tml
storage management via reference count really, REALLY, REALLY sucks.
I concur.
I have to assume that CORBA is forcing the use of reference counting here.
There are two things: 1) resource management within the client or server 2) object management.
For 1), it depends on the language being used (and there are more language bindings for CORBA than for any other technology: Java, SmallTalk, C, C++, Lisp, Cobol, Eiffel, Lisp, Ada, Python, Perl. Try this with DCOM (or it's nom du jour). If you use a garbage-collected language, then there is no
reference counting. For other languages, there is.
For 2), the question is entirely different: CORBA is designed as an Internet-wide, distributed object infrastructure (which in addition is an open standard and language-neutral). As such, it would need robust distributed garbage collection, which is simply an unsolved problem in Comp. Sci. All attempts at this have failed miserably so far. Does the web suck because of unreachable pages or 404 Not found errors? That's exactly the problem.
If that's so, then CORBA sucks even
worse than I thought.
I'll assume you are just badly informed, rather than arrogant.
... but my own experience and observation of others leads me to believe that part of the reason of the fatigue is in fact using C++. Seriously. It is simply such a tiresome language.
I know, I know, you often don't get to choose your language, but working in especially Lisp, or Delphi, Modula-3, Simula, Java, Forth, even plain C seems so much more rewarding...
I really think that the widespread use of genetic engineering can only turn out to be a mistake of
the worst kind.
Mmm... not so clear. First of all, we have been using genetic 'engineering' since time began (think of mate choice) and since the Mesolithicum (think of crop and cattle breeding). Also, so far, no examples of transgenic engineering (transfering genes from one species to another) or even invidual directed gene transfer in humans has been shown to be feasible, let alone desirable. Given the reaction towards Dolly the Sheep Cloneage, it seems very likely that any such technique will be forbidden, and I will probably agree. I will, however, vehemently advocate the use of genetic therapy (if they become available) for the 'definitive treatment' of very obvious heriditary diseases (such as metabolic defects (cystic fibrosis etc.). Unfortunately it's not clear-cut when a disorder is a disabling disease, I admit.
What will knowledge of our genome allow us to do? Firstly it'll be "improving" our children, removing congenital defects and then enhancing their natural characteristics.
Again, it's not that simple. Your 'improving' has been a possibility ever since we started studying chromosomes; this allowed ever better pre-natal diagnostics, with the obvious possibility of terminating pregnancies for foetuses that might have a more or less severe disability. I am not at all convinced it is morally repugnant to avoid suffering in very serious cases (the big question, of course, is what is 'serious').
So far, most techological advances have been put to reasonable use in democracies . (I think Popper came up with this) There will have to be a great deal of public education about matters (to make sure democracies keep getting it right).
PS: rants about God, Satan etc. do not inspire much confidence in the likelihood of a serious debate on these issues, which indeed is very necessary.
Why on earth do these sources always talk about 'computers' without being more specific ? As if computer == 'a PC running DOS'. I smell a rat here (even though I'm sure CNN doesn't run their web servers under Mega$lob software, be that operating system-wise or application-wise)
Imagine the following press release:
REUTERS -- Somewhere.
A major car company has decide to issue a callback on one of their models. Under certain conditions a particular safe-critical part of the car might fail. Although the total cost of the recall is purported to be high, officials at the company were confident that it would not influence their quarterly results, due at some point.
OK, this may be flamebait, and I certainly don't want to be disrepectful of a guy who apparently is a major pioneer, in many other respects. But I just wonder if packet switching wasn't just an idea whose time had come? It is a fairly natural solution to traffic problems in general. Certainly more obvious than rendering mouse pointers on bit-mapped graphical terminals using XOR in hardware... anyway, thank god packet switching was not patented...
Very cool indeed; as a matter of fact, I had exactly the same idea (co-evolving in a simulator) after reading the recent snakebot stuff. If even I can have such an idea, why wasn't this tried earlier. The next thing to do is to evolve locomotion for snakebots, along the same lines.
But it is a long way to achieve the capabilities of even the lowly nematode, let alone ant or cat! (and mind you, this is just locomotion on a flat surface; makes you wonder if the critters could invent^Wevolve the wheel:-)
dream on... they have done everything so right, even the DoJ thinks this. Marketingwise, they have indeed done very well. Technologywise, they have done evertything sooo right, that no single heavy traffic site (think cnn, porn sites, even Micros~1's own hotmail.com) uses NT because it's too slow and too unstable. As for DCOM, point me to one large deployed installation. Troll on...
regulon is biological non-sense
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
.... the exponential proliferation of biological life [... ] means that
[ life ] would cover the earth...
uh, yes, that sums it up pretty succinctly; there's few places where there's
no life.
... unless something stopped it.
uh, yes, that is actually happening: lack of resources (water, light, room,
heat, food) and predation stops it.
Therefore, Gopnik quotes the economist as saying,
there must exist in the
biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon, which prevents
this from happening.
uh, no: Darwinian theory presupposes no such thing. There are only limiting
factors (see above). By the look of it, either Katz, Gopnik or said economist
are confused. A regulon (by the description given here) is utter teleological
nonsense. Pretty much all that is needed for the sponaneous
emergence of order is an information carrying medium, a coping mechanism, and
an entropy sink (the Sun). Oh, and some time:-)
Ddirectly after the announcement of the findings of fact, the International Herald Tribune (and possibly one or both of the parent papers, New York Times and Washington Post) ran a story on a connection with the legions of lawyers that served in the tobacco wars (i.e., smokers claiming damages from the major tobacco companies) and who might soon be out of work. There are some interesting parallels. The big weakness in M$ litigation would be that most of Windows has been soled through original equipment manufactorers (OEMs). The only strong case, the article stated, was for Win98 updates bought as CD-ROMs in shops.
Slashdot Mirror
Might this fire have something to do with this, one cannot escape wondering?
When I was in India a year ago, I was surprised
at how strong the presence of Microsoft was in
science. Virtually none of the people
I spoke to had had any Linux exposure, let alone
Linux experience. This is in stark contrast with
'the West'; Linux prospers in most of the sciences.
This makes this movement all the more remarkable.
OK, I'm very short on details, but
when Adler came with the idea of quantum
computing for the Traveling Salesman problem and a proof of concept experiment (1995 I think),
it was immediately refuted, because
for any practical problem, the number of
different oligo's required to sample the solution
space would take too long to synthesize and
weigh far too much. But I didn't read the original
document, admittedly.
OK, this is not the same as face recognition,1 2. pdf
but still, they are actually building the booths in the Customs area; I'm sure they trust and in terestingly, I read somewhere that 60% of the
business travelers for whom this is meant are supportive.
See
http://www.iaae.org/publications/pdf/iaae_2000_
(couldn't find a more recent quote).
No they dont, not given the amount of money that they get for free. I happen to know the operation of a leading title in bioinformatics. Apart from the editors and reviewers, it is run by 1 (one) person, the secretary.
Then they need to decide if they want to publish it, first of all. That takes some expertise to begin with.
Which is done by the editors and reviewers, who are not paid. Editors (who choose the reviewers, and who under whose auspicies the paper finally is published) do get paid but only a litte, as being an editor is more a prestige thing (and rightly so) than anything else.
All of this takes effort, and much of it is non-trivial.
On the contrary; most of it is trivial in the scientifici world . You simply can't compare it to another, say commercial effort.
Scientists could get together and run their own free journals with quality research in them, but that's that much less time spent doing science.
Firstly, it seems to have worked out quite well in the physics community. Secondly, ask any department what they'd rather have: the current situtation, or shifting $10,000 from the library to the research budget + free access to all literature in exchange for a bit of work to get/keep the free literature initiative going ... go ahead, I'm waiting :-)
The big question, indeed, is why the researchers and libraries in Medicin and Biology (and humanities etc.) haven't gotten their act together in the way the physicicts have ... but it's coming.
Uh, yes, indirectly. Without publications, your stream of grants will soon dry up. Also, as I think Bertrand Rusell has argued, people are not driven by money, but by power (and you can get the latter by having the former, though not necessarily the other way around).
Without publications, you'll have no standing, so no power.
BTW, being driven by power does not imply being a total asshole; it's natural because with power you have more freedom. Kindathing.
uh, wrong analogy. anaerobic lifeforms (e.g. lactic acid bacteria) were already well known to early biochemists (19th century stuff). The extremophile analogy is closer. Speaking of which: the fact that life will occur almost everywhere, I think, is further reason to doubt that the Mars Meteorite (I forgot the number) contained evidence of Martian microbes: if they were there, they should still be there and thriving and easily found, even in the Martian extremes.
Are you insane or what? Have you ever lived in Holland? No one who has lived there (or in Germany or in Belgium, or France or Britain or the Scandinavian countries or elsewhere in Europe) could in his right mind claim this.
Now admittedly, the EU is a bureaucratic monster that tries to nibble at national souvereignties, but so far that is really marginal, certainly much less than the power of Washington over the US states.
And in terms of 'progressive goodies' (sex, drugs, rock^W, justice system, gay rights, religion, health care, welfare, euthanasia, Holland is really about as good as it gets. Certainly better than the UK and its 'subsidiaries' (let alone good'ol US of A ):-)
Here is some news for you: genetically modified foods are subjected to years of very rigorous testing before approval. And actually, they have been used for years and years in the U.S., without even the slightest hint of any adverse effects.
It's good to have this testing. It's not good to be paranoid. The GMO people have actually far more insight in what they are doing than the traditional breeders. A GMO scientist adds/changes removes one gene (say around 4 kBase of info), from among around 4Gigabase of genome (depending on the species).
In contrast, a traditional plant breeder just smashes up (using gamma or Xrays), 10-20% (which is a very unpredictable change 5 orders of magnitude larger ) of two genomes, puts them back together, then waits what 'll happen. In most cases, nothing; in some cases, something useful; in a few cases, a dangerous new plant. E.g, a traditionally bred new potato variety was taken off the market, because it produced unaccpetable levelss of some glycoside. Oops, should have tested for that. With the tests in place for GMO, this could not have happened.
Look: Nature is not benign. The most dangerous substances are biogenic. The most devastating ecological disasters were not caused by man-produced (gmo or traditionally bred) organisms, but by existing wild species that found new niches (for many such introductions, man is of course to blame).
I could go on and on, but let me just say that sticking your head in the sand is potentially more harmful. Where would we be without antibiotics (which BTW already are produced by GMO's), or non-animal produced insulin (same).
and maybe more importantly: interactive (like Python is; perl is only interactive if you run it inside the debugger !?).
why should Perl succeed where Lisp failed? ... lisp failed? As far as I can see, Lisp (in different forms, including Scheme), is more alive
than ever. This includes, by the way, some fancy robotics stuff in the Deep Space 2 mission (but I fear it won't be long before perl is in space too ...)
Uhr
It may not be used as widely as other languages, but why is that 'failure' ? Hey, apparently only 0.2% of the world is of Judaist belief. Bit of a failure, that. (What a bollocks).
Lastly, I do agree with the author that this 'different syntaxes for perl' thing prolly going to fail: for most code, the aim is not just functionality, but readability to others. Inventing your own 'little language' is all nice and well, but things only really start to take of if this 'little language' is spoken by more than person. And BTW, this is nothing new, we've had this 'little language' thing before: they are called API's and libraries.
E.g., even if you have written some brilliant library that does cgi stuff in perl, it 'd prolly have little chance against CGI.pm: everybody knows it, and even if it has rough edges, IT'S BETTER BECAUSE MANY MORE PEOPLE KNOW IT. . (And also, why bother?)
IIRC, the problem1 were 1) who is liable and 2) who will pay the certification costs for it to be approved by the FDA (because without FDA approval, you're nowhere).
Read the story here. (I believe this was once on /.)
OK, it's easy enough to overwrite the bytes with
^@s, but this prolly won't deter the real spooks.
Due to slight inaccuracies with disk head positioning, their is still magnetisation that can be recovered from the edges of the little area that holds the byte (bit?). This is recoverable
relatively easily from magtape, but I wouldn't be
surprised if the same technique now also applies to high density hard disks.
In other words, if the judge wants to protect us all against this, that'd be pretty difficult to
achieve tecnically.
In principle, this could be used for a whole bunch of other
things. And BTW it's easy enough to obtain totally unique DNA from e.g. a chicken or rabbit.
The real problem is that the bad guys may eventually succeed in extracting the tagging DNA from the tagged item (not that this is trivial, currently). Once they have that, they can simply copy it (using PCR, a standard technique in genetics and forensic science; see my other post) into large batches of tagging ink, and use it by themselves to tag more stuff. I guess this technique will be useful for a few more years, but then become too easy to fake.
The athlete's DNA was most likely simply 'copied' using PCR (polymerase chain reaction). This is a
h tml
standard technique that sort of mimicks the DNA
replication process that goes on in real life. It's the cornerstone of the molecular biology revolution.
See http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~jbrown/pcr.html
or http://www.accessexcellence.com/AB/GG/polymerase.
I concur.
There are two things:1) resource management within the client or server
2) object management.
For 1), it depends on the language being used (and there are more language bindings for CORBA than for any other technology: Java, SmallTalk, C, C++, Lisp, Cobol, Eiffel, Lisp, Ada, Python, Perl. Try this with DCOM (or it's nom du jour). If you use a garbage-collected language, then there is no reference counting. For other languages, there is.
For 2), the question is entirely different: CORBA is designed as an Internet-wide, distributed object infrastructure (which in addition is an open standard and language-neutral). As such, it would need robust distributed garbage collection, which is simply an unsolved problem in Comp. Sci. All attempts at this have failed miserably so far. Does the web suck because of unreachable pages or 404 Not found errors? That's exactly the problem.
I'll assume you are just badly informed, rather than arrogant.... but my own experience and observation of others leads me to believe that part of the reason of the fatigue is in fact using C++. Seriously. It is simply such a tiresome language.
...
I know, I know, you often don't get to choose your language, but working in especially Lisp, or Delphi, Modula-3, Simula, Java, Forth, even plain C seems so much more rewarding
What were the results? My experience is that as a rule, public forums are far better (faster, more accurate, even more polite) than paid support.
It depends, of course, on the product.
Mmm
genes from one species to another) or even invidual directed gene transfer in humans has been shown to be feasible, let alone desirable. Given the reaction towards Dolly the Sheep Cloneage, it seems very likely that any such technique will be forbidden, and I will probably agree. I will, however, vehemently advocate the use of genetic therapy (if they become available) for the 'definitive treatment' of very obvious heriditary diseases (such as metabolic defects (cystic fibrosis etc.). Unfortunately it's not clear-cut when a disorder is a disabling disease, I admit.
Again, it's not that simple. Your 'improving' has been a possibility ever since we started studying chromosomes; this allowed ever better pre-natal diagnostics, with the obvious possibility of terminating pregnancies for foetuses that might have a more or less severe disability. I am not at all convinced it is morally repugnant to avoid suffering in very serious cases (the big question, of course, is what is 'serious').
So far, most techological advances have been put to reasonable use in democracies . (I think Popper came up with this) There will have to be a great deal of public education about matters (to make sure democracies keep getting it right).
PS: rants about God, Satan etc. do not inspire much confidence in the likelihood of a serious debate on these issues, which indeed is very necessary.
Why on earth do these sources always talk about 'computers' without being more specific ? As if computer == 'a PC running DOS'. I smell a rat here (even though I'm sure CNN doesn't run their web servers under Mega$lob software, be that operating system-wise or application-wise)
Imagine the following press release:
REUTERS -- Somewhere.
A major car company has decide to issue a callback on one of their models. Under certain conditions a particular safe-critical part of the car might fail. Although the total cost of the recall is purported to be high, officials at the company were confident that it would not influence their quarterly results, due at some point.
OK, this may be flamebait, and I certainly don't want to be disrepectful of a guy who apparently is a major pioneer, in many other respects. ... anyway, thank god packet switching was not patented ...
But I just wonder if packet switching wasn't just an idea whose time had come? It is a fairly natural solution to traffic problems in general.
Certainly more obvious than rendering mouse pointers on bit-mapped graphical terminals using XOR in hardware
Using this, there's finally a chance to beat the bandwith of a truckload of backup tapes :-)
Very cool indeed; as a matter of fact, I had exactly the same idea (co-evolving in a simulator) after reading the recent snakebot stuff. If even I can have such an idea, why wasn't this tried earlier. The next thing to do is to evolve locomotion for snakebots, along the same lines.
:-)
But it is a long way to achieve the capabilities of even the lowly nematode, let alone ant or cat!
(and mind you, this is just locomotion on a flat surface; makes you wonder if the critters could invent ^W evolve the wheel
dream on ... they have done everything so right, even the DoJ thinks this. Marketingwise, they have indeed done very well. Technologywise, they have done evertything sooo right, that no single heavy traffic site (think cnn, porn sites, even Micros~1's own hotmail.com) uses NT because it's too slow and too unstable. As for DCOM, point me to one large deployed installation. Troll on ...
uh, yes, that is actually happening: lack of resources (water, light, room, heat, food) and predation stops it.
Therefore, Gopnik quotes the economist as saying, there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon, which prevents this from happening.
uh, no: Darwinian theory presupposes no such thing. There are only limiting factors (see above). By the look of it, either Katz, Gopnik or said economist are confused. A regulon (by the description given here) is utter teleological nonsense. Pretty much all that is needed for the sponaneous emergence of order is an information carrying medium, a coping mechanism, and an entropy sink (the Sun). Oh, and some time :-)
Ddirectly after the announcement of the findings of fact, the International Herald Tribune (and possibly one or both of the parent papers, New York Times and Washington Post) ran a story on a connection with the legions of lawyers that served in the tobacco wars (i.e., smokers claiming damages from the major tobacco companies) and who might soon be out of work. There are some interesting parallels. The big weakness in M$ litigation would be that most of Windows has been soled through original equipment manufactorers (OEMs). The only strong case, the article stated, was for Win98 updates bought as CD-ROMs in shops.