Re:How does this mock religion?
on
Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 2
Quite so. A ``minimal'' organism could survive only under laboratory conditions, not in the real world, because it would lack adaptations needed to make it in any non-ideal environment.
In fact, this wouldn't be much of a novelty. Most domesticated plants are basically incapbable of life without human intervention. Domestic cereals in general can't outcompete native grasses, and have difficulty reproducing without human intervention. Maize is the extreme example: it's completely incapable of reproducing on its own. The seeds won't come off the cob, and they're trapped inside the husk.
-- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Most of this doesn't have anything to do with keyboards at all, but is just vi (vs. Emacs) advocacy. Bah. When I edit a file, I want an editor. Not a viitor, not an emacsitor, but an editor. Ed is the standard text editor.
Enough of that. The point about penalty zones on keyboards is relevant though. It's worth noting that Emacs was designed in an era when keyboards were such that it didn't force you in and out of the penalty zones. ESC was normally where backtick (`) is on peecee keyboards. Ctrl was large and normally where Caps Lock is on peecee keyboards. Starting to get the picture?
Now take a look at the Happy Hacking keyboard. (Link is in article) ESC in backtick position? Check. Ctrl in capslock position? Check. The only problem I see with the Happy Hacking keyboard is that it doesn't have sufficient bucky bits. I need at least control, alt, meta, super, and hyper. I have long fingers and I'm a touch typist, so most cases of going into the penalty zone are no penalty for me. Function keys are the exception, but I rarely use function keys for anything.
Long-time emacs users have no trouble attaining the Zen of programming (or whatever -- I mostly write academic papers in Emacs with AUC-TeX mode) in Emacs. I find many of vi's features are optimal for quick edits to config files (home-row cursor movement, D, cw, etc), but it's line-oriented nature and aversion to filling and indenting makes it most pessimal for writing text or long stretches of code. As far as keyboard optimality and editors goes, it's probably much more important what your fingers get used to than what the actual keys used are.
-- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Having said that, I will say the same about close-source software. Stallman can whine all he wants, but closed-source software is still a force to be reckoned with. If he doesn't like it - fine; he can ignore it too.
Well, that's the point of the GNU project, to enable users to completely ignore non-free software by providing free (libre) functional replacements for everything they commonly use.
-- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Although this is an interesting idea, it makes an assumption that all language is based off of one abstract "map". IMHO different languages have different maps.
Actually, the dominant paradigm in formal linguistics, generative grammar, implies that all languages are generated from one abstract "map", the so-called Universal Grammar. Now, actual grammars vary a lot, but the idea is that they can be generated from the Universal Grammar by tweaking various parameters. The main evidence for this is the specialized language-learning ability of human children, and particular evidence about how that ability works and doesn't.
Now, as to whether this will make universal automated translation via a metalanguage possible, that depends a lot on the metalanguage. I envision the metalanguage looking a lot like "glosses" in syntax papers, rather than an actual language, so that you preserve all of the language features of the original in the metalanguage. The more languages the metalanguage is supposed to accomodate, the larger it will be.
Even if the metalanguage is perfect for all the supported languages, there will be problems with idioms, probably with slang, and certainly with cultural concepts. But in general, how important those failings are will probably vary depending on the conversation. On the whole, I think that both the most enthusiastic and most critical posts I've seen in the comments to this article are underinformed.
-- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
If the seeds that they had to buy every year produced bigger vegetables, more wheat, larger potatoes, but if those seeds don't do that through genetic engineering what's the point in using those seeds.
The main feature that's genetically engineered into Monsanto's GM crops is resistance to particular herbicides. This lets farmers using Monsanto crops drench their fields in Monsanto herbicides to kill off weeds without killing off the crops. Deciding whether that's actually such a bright idea is left as an exercize to the reader.
My opinion: I'm not against genetically modified food in general; all agricultural products are genetically modified, that's what defines a domesticated plant or animal. It doesn't make that much of a difference that traditional crops are genetically modified by breeding as opposed to transgenic methods. I think some GM crops, like Flavor Saver tomatoes, are a Good Thing. But when GM techniques are used 1) to create artificial monopolies, as with terminator seeds, or 2) to allow agricultural intensification (higher energy inputs per calorie returned) in cash crops, I'm not so happy.
-- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
I have whirled with the earth at the dawning, When the sky was a vaporous flame; I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
--from Nemesis, by H.P. Lovecraft -- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
All WYSIWYG is, is a realtime preview. Realtime feedback in any application has been shown in user studies to increase productivity.
It's same as compilation vs interpretation. The shorter the compile-edit-debug cycle, the better.
Well, that's sort of true, but on the other hand, having to do preview in realtime means that you can't do computationally expensive processing very much in a WYSIWYG system. That's one reason that output from [La]TeX looks so much better than output from Word. For a lot of basic things like tight-setting blocks of text and hyphenation, even high-end DTP packages like Pagemaker don't do as well as TeX.
Also it's relatively easy to "repurpose" documents in any kind of markup, be it TeX, SGML, whatever, by changing the processing you do on them.
-- The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Sharing printers works fine. I've set it up using SAMBA for the windows machines and netatalk for the Macs. Netatalk requires rather more set-up for print serving, but the advantage is that you can use non-postscript printers with the "LaserWriter 8" postscript driver on the Mac for a very cheap network printing solution.
Not that I'm fnord net filters, but I think we should stop schools fnord banning books first.
Hehe. But I guess the Illuminati wouldn't want us to think for ourselves.
No, we^H^Hthey just want to put significant blocks in the way of you thinking for yourselves. Then those that manage fnord somehow to think for themselves anyway can be recruited into the inner circles of fnord the Illuminati.
For the record, the 'why does a loving God allow bad things' argument has been settled for rather more than a thousand years now. It has to do with free will; you cannot allow free action without allowing evil action with it. Then you get to the question of why free will; the answer is that automata don't provide the same joy that individuals do. To be slightly on-topic, imagine the difference between a computer, which does always as it is told, and a child, who disobeys but is an intelligent individual. Which would you rather have? I'd rather have the kid. YMMV, of course.
I don't think the question is settled, and I doubt that it ever will be. Many of the main heresies that arose in early Christianity had to do with trying to answer this question; no one found a solution that was both orthodox and an actual solution. The best run at it was the Gnostics, who decided that they couldn't salvage the idea of an all-good God and posited that the world was created by Satan when God wasn't looking!
The problem with your solution is that you assume that the dichotomy between "free to be bad" beings and automata is the only choice there is. Couldn't a good God have made us a little better than we are? Couldn't he have made us free to disobey but made us stronger-willed, more knowledgable, and more empathetic, so that it would never happen (like the Angels)? If you can imagine a world that's infinitesimally better than the one we live in, you have to deal with the Problem of Evil.
The idea that consciousness is meme-like goes back thousands of years. Read the Heart Sutra. Don't blame Blackmore if you don't like the idea.
The fearful insistence that consciousness is special is yet another example of the desperate provincialism that insists that the Earth is flat, that the solar system is geocentric, and that humans are the final goal of evolution.
There are plenty of other reasons besides believing that consciousness is special to doubt that consciousness is composed of memes. You could agree with Dennett that consciousness is an illusion created by the interaction of different specialized processing units in the brain, yet contend that many of these processing units are operating the way they are on the basis of biological evolution and that memes, as units of cultural evolution, only come into play "on-top-of" consciousness.
Oddly enough, one of the screensavers in the new version of XScreensaver would always cause my console to get munged-until-no-good to the point where a three-fingered salute wouldn't work.
I was able to log in on my serial terminal ($8 from a garage sale) and run 'shutdown -r now' to restart. Needless to say, that particular screensaver is now commented out of my.xscreensaver.
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Quite so. A ``minimal'' organism could survive only under laboratory conditions, not in the real world, because it would lack adaptations needed to make it in any non-ideal environment.
In fact, this wouldn't be much of a novelty. Most domesticated plants are basically incapbable of life without human intervention. Domestic cereals in general can't outcompete native grasses, and have difficulty reproducing without human intervention. Maize is the extreme example: it's completely incapable of reproducing on its own. The seeds won't come off the cob, and they're trapped inside the husk.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Most of this doesn't have anything to do with keyboards at all, but is just vi (vs. Emacs) advocacy. Bah. When I edit a file, I want an editor. Not a viitor, not an emacsitor, but an editor. Ed is the standard text editor.
Enough of that. The point about penalty zones on keyboards is relevant though. It's worth noting that Emacs was designed in an era when keyboards were such that it didn't force you in and out of the penalty zones. ESC was normally where backtick (`) is on peecee keyboards. Ctrl was large and normally where Caps Lock is on peecee keyboards. Starting to get the picture?
Now take a look at the Happy Hacking keyboard. (Link is in article) ESC in backtick position? Check. Ctrl in capslock position? Check. The only problem I see with the Happy Hacking keyboard is that it doesn't have sufficient bucky bits. I need at least control, alt, meta, super, and hyper. I have long fingers and I'm a touch typist, so most cases of going into the penalty zone are no penalty for me. Function keys are the exception, but I rarely use function keys for anything.Long-time emacs users have no trouble attaining the Zen of programming (or whatever -- I mostly write academic papers in Emacs with AUC-TeX mode) in Emacs. I find many of vi's features are optimal for quick edits to config files (home-row cursor movement, D, cw, etc), but it's line-oriented nature and aversion to filling and indenting makes it most pessimal for writing text or long stretches of code. As far as keyboard optimality and editors goes, it's probably much more important what your fingers get used to than what the actual keys used are.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Well, that's the point of the GNU project, to enable users to completely ignore non-free software by providing free (libre) functional replacements for everything they commonly use.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
The main feature that's genetically engineered into Monsanto's GM crops is resistance to particular herbicides. This lets farmers using Monsanto crops drench their fields in Monsanto herbicides to kill off weeds without killing off the crops. Deciding whether that's actually such a bright idea is left as an exercize to the reader.
My opinion: I'm not against genetically modified food in general; all agricultural products are genetically modified, that's what defines a domesticated plant or animal. It doesn't make that much of a difference that traditional crops are genetically modified by breeding as opposed to transgenic methods. I think some GM crops, like Flavor Saver tomatoes, are a Good Thing. But when GM techniques are used 1) to create artificial monopolies, as with terminator seeds, or 2) to allow agricultural intensification (higher energy inputs per calorie returned) in cash crops, I'm not so happy.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without
knowledge or lustre or name.
--from Nemesis, by H.P. Lovecraft
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Try this patch:
/* must be visible from outside */
/* flags */
/* must be visible from outside */ /* = stdin; */ /* = stdout; */
/* flags */
*** t1asm.c Sun May 23 13:36:48 1999
--- t1asm.c.new Tue Sep 14 11:10:11 1999
***************
*** 85,92 ****
typedef unsigned char byte;
! FILE *ifp = stdin;
! FILE *ofp = stdout;
static int pfb = 0;
--- 85,92 ----
typedef unsigned char byte;
! FILE *ifp;
! FILE *ofp;
static int pfb = 0;
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Well, that's sort of true, but on the other hand, having to do preview in realtime means that you can't do computationally expensive processing very much in a WYSIWYG system. That's one reason that output from [La]TeX looks so much better than output from Word. For a lot of basic things like tight-setting blocks of text and hyphenation, even high-end DTP packages like Pagemaker don't do as well as TeX.
Also it's relatively easy to "repurpose" documents in any kind of markup, be it TeX, SGML, whatever, by changing the processing you do on them.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
So the Libertarian party supports my right to join (or form) a labour union?
Thought not. We all know whose freedoms the Libertarian party supports, and it's not ours.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
Sharing printers works fine. I've set it up using SAMBA for the windows machines and netatalk for the Macs. Netatalk requires rather more set-up for print serving, but the advantage is that you can use non-postscript printers with the "LaserWriter 8" postscript driver on the Mac for a very cheap network printing solution.
No, we^H^Hthey just want to put significant blocks in the way of you thinking for yourselves. Then those that manage fnord somehow to think for themselves anyway can be recruited into the inner circles of fnord the Illuminati.
I don't think the question is settled, and I doubt that it ever will be. Many of the main heresies that arose in early Christianity had to do with trying to answer this question; no one found a solution that was both orthodox and an actual solution. The best run at it was the Gnostics, who decided that they couldn't salvage the idea of an all-good God and posited that the world was created by Satan when God wasn't looking!
The problem with your solution is that you assume that the dichotomy between "free to be bad" beings and automata is the only choice there is. Couldn't a good God have made us a little better than we are? Couldn't he have made us free to disobey but made us stronger-willed, more knowledgable, and more empathetic, so that it would never happen (like the Angels)? If you can imagine a world that's infinitesimally better than the one we live in, you have to deal with the Problem of Evil.
There are plenty of other reasons besides believing that consciousness is special to doubt that consciousness is composed of memes. You could agree with Dennett that consciousness is an illusion created by the interaction of different specialized processing units in the brain, yet contend that many of these processing units are operating the way they are on the basis of biological evolution and that memes, as units of cultural evolution, only come into play "on-top-of" consciousness.
Oddly enough, one of the screensavers in the new version of XScreensaver would always cause my console to get munged-until-no-good to the point where a three-fingered salute wouldn't work.
I was able to log in on my serial terminal ($8 from a garage sale) and run 'shutdown -r now' to restart. Needless to say, that particular screensaver is now commented out of my .xscreensaver.