There's a difference between a benevolent dictatorship and a malevolent dictatorship. Compare the US and England with security cameras. In the US, I'm pretty sure people use camera privately to have something to show in court. In England, they are forcing people to submit to being on camera 24/7, even though they have not been able to use then to effectively decrease crime. Indiscriminate use of power is wrong, even if you have the absolute authority to do so.
While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
I recently described the process of writing software to my journalism major/movie minor girlfriend as ten people all trying to work on the same screenplay at the same time. She was horrified, knowing how hard it is for just one person to write a screenplay. But in some ways it is true, and what you have to do is to set up coding guidelines that you follow rigorously so that coders don't fall over each other.
The problem is that all the old people set up methodologies that didn't do that, instead assuming that everyone was culturally similar to them. But that won't work anymore as the codebase is quickly blowing up and any one small change could result in catastrophe.
People can't be heroes in what they do anymore--it just won't work. At this point, we need to work together, or the whole thing is just going to fall apart. I'll give the older guys credit that they were still developing proper development practices, but now that we know what they are, we should use them and enforce them on even older code, so that when all the original developers are gone, the old can be seamlessly worked in with the new.
I rather agree with you--people should stop kidding themselves. Global warming is not about saving the planet--this stuff has happened repeatedly and all this life is still here--its about saving humanity. Because if the other species out there that we require start dying off because there's too much C02 or its too hot or the ocean is to acidic, then we're screwed unless we can evolve fast enough. It gives a lot of credence to the idea of being stewards of the planet, since at this point we are realizing that what we do/can/ have an effect on the planet as a whole. At this point, we've already worried about polluting the world's oceans, causing worldwide nuclear winter, and now global warming. Either way, it seems to me that carbon is too good of an energy transport to give up, so we should leverage it. Biofuels anyone? What if I said we genetically engineered algae to make them for us? Well, sure, not yet, but that's the logical next step.
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, but rail systems rarely made money on moving people. Every long distance hauler is really a way to move cargo, with the government mandating they throw on x number of passenger cars or something. And if you have a good enough system of long-haul, light rail, commuter bus and taxi service, not to mention new things like rentable bikes and publicly shared cars, all synchronized with our brand new internet, then you could get from here to anywhere in a minimal number of hops and cost, while also assuring fairly managed resources. So, like routing packets on the internet.
Actually, I'll go one further and say that the models are really best fit for the data. It just so happens that they fit so well, they can actually predict the future with varying (and hopefully well-defined) degrees of accuracy. That is what is so astounding about physics, because who'd though that all those silly abstractions mathematicians made up are actually worth something in describing the real world?
And besides, even though there is value in every piece of data on the internet, to fully explain why each piece of information is there is equivalent to knowing the mind and motivations of every person who's created that data, which in turn is a result of every event that has happened to that person since birth, which in turn is a result of... and on and on. And in that case, we still have to model things, or at least pick a model. Hell, even correlation is a model.
The only problem is that parenting is a learned skill just like everything else, and no matter how good of a parent you try to be, you will not always be able to provide your child with everything he or she needs. That's why it takes a town to raise a child...but wait, does anyone trust anybody else with their children anymore? Does anyone actually get to know anyone else anymore? You are not raising a child to take over the household or family business--many boomers are seeing house values drop and most don't own their own business. People should be raising kids to work in society, which requires interacting with society since a young age--and not just through school and organized activities, but though just being friendly to random people and forming a network of friends who are not just peers or part of your group, but elders, youngsters, oddballs, etc.
Bizarrely enough, even though I used to believe that a better voting system would help to fix America's political system, I think that first-past-the-post works well. It gives a lot of power to the moderates and severely punishes a party that manages to split its base. As a result, our political system goes through a shift in power quite frequently, since it is almost if one party runs out of steam and needs to regroup. What has happened lately is that the moderates were too comfy in their lifestyles and just let the gov't do what they wanted. But now that the economy is in the tank, people are losing their homes and jobs, and the world isn't buddy-buddy with us anymore, something's got to give. If Kerry was elected in 2004, don't you think McCain would be kicking him all over the campaign trail? But the Republics were able to operate behind our backs long enough to get in one more election, and now the Democrats are regrouped and ready to take over.
But that's just my two cents. What do I know about politics?
From reading the article, it seems like this guy is one of the old guard, trying to convince everyone that FOSS is dangerous to their business models and to act accordingly. The problem is that he is right--the people, not companies, that create Free Software have a different business model in mind than a corporate-dominated one based upon lock-in.
Verizon Wireless is a great example of corporate lock-in: the entire system on every phone is written to corporate spec, and if it had any free software as a part of the operating system, they would have to open-source a lot of it because they were not following the rules of the GPL (assuming they were using, say, a network stack culled from Linux). So either they play the game by the rules of the copyright holders, or they write their own software at their own expense.
But a clueful open-source company will be careful not to let their proprietary software get get too close to the FOSS they use, or better yet, make it company policy to GPL every last piece of code they write. This is where the article begins to expound FUD, because anything you write with the aid of a FOSS program (EMACS, Eclipse, I'm writing this in Firefox) does not have to be under a free license. And even more, any open-source company will be careful not to base their business model on being proprietors of software but as something else, such as selling another service like support.
The problem with "intellectual property" is that, when compared with the other governmental abstractions we use, such as copyright and patents, it is extraordinarily hard to enforce. That is why the United States constitution gives the federal government the right and responsibility to enforce both--but notice there is no mention of intellectual property. But let us compare the two:
* Copyright acknowledges that when you buy a book, you are buying two things: the physical book with letters on it, and the right to a copy of the information expressed by the letters (since copying is increasingly trivial). It is up to the government (and in a democratic-republic, the legislators and the people represented) to determine what rights the holders of a copy of the work have.
* Patents acknowledge that once you know how to build something, it is just a matter of technology to recreate it. That is why you give the public a full description of how you built it in order to acquire a patent, in exchange for exclusive rights to produce the thing for a period of time.
And then we have property rights, where that item is not trivial to copy perfectly (we don't yet have replicators) and all rights are exclusive to the property owner. The problem with intellectual property is that it pretends that information is not trivial to copy, and also keeps all rights for the copyright owner. But in a fundamental way, there must be copies made along the way, and to say that the recipient of that copy has no rights not explicitly granted by the copyright owner is unfair, since not even the copyright owner can control what the person does with that information once it is absorbed in the mind. And so we inevitably have fair use in one form or the other.
Essentially, all the people insisting on intellectual property need to suck it up and deal with a world where it is trivial to copy things--they can't have unlimited rights AND distribute copies of their works.
My girlfriend's dad just got her a Mac, and for the first day I found that I had a vicious Mac envy. But on the second day of using it, I am ready to go back to my three year Dell with Kubuntu. The explanation is simple: Mac OS X looks great and is intuitive, but doesn't fit my workflow well. This is pretty much the same reasoning Linus has against GNOME--the stuff he wants to do is not trivially possible.
In most ways, GNU+Linux is ready for the desktop: it has almost all of the required applications, they provide the requisite features, and they work. These are the requirements for 80% of the people who use a computer: they just want something that works and are willing to learn, but just once. As long as you don't change anything, they are fine. These people would adapt to a KDE, GNOME, Mac OS X, Windows, or Sugar desktop equally well, for that matter. And the main reason is that they feel they have far too many other things that are important in their lives to worry about how efficient they are on their computer, regardless of how many hours of their life they could reclaim by investing another hour learning a new interface.
But those 20% of users who are power users are the ones who are worried about whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Once you didn't/need/ to do anything from the commandline, Linux was ready. But for those power users, they typically have some efficiency axe to grind (myself included). Linus complained that GNOME didn't let him map some mouse key to some obscure function (among others). Mac weenies demand that everything looks as though it works out of the box the first time, even though it really doesn't. Windows junkies want to be able to download some spyware-laden utility to magically give them 2 fps more on Quake or make the desktop do something goofy. I just want an orthogonal interface--is that too much to ask? Needless to say, these people will never be appeased.
It seems to me that one day, we will be able to combine all of these concepts programmatically, and the result would be a really wonderful piece of software. But that has got to be at least 20 years away.
Either way, GNU+Linux is ready for the desktop for most people, but the cost of retraining 80% of the computer-using population is high. That is why I thought it was great to install Linux by default on these tiny laptops, because it is extremely appropriate to use Linux over Windows XP to take advantage of the low power and storage, and people are willing to learn a new piece of hardware. But Micro$oft is quickly killing that idea with XP on the new EEE PCs. Oh well.
It seems to me that switching to a microkernel just because people have been abusing the Big Kernel Spinlock is like using a nuclear bomb to drive in a nail: sure, it is a technically pure solution, but the problems involved exceed the number of solutions. It seems to me that the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel only in the fact that everything shares the same address space. Linus seems to be a smart guy, and considering how Linux scales in real world scenarios and its general popularity (no disrespect for QNX), it seems that the only reason to bash its monolithic design is that it is conceptually inferior. You have to admire how well the kernel was able to grow from being 386+ uniprocessor only to what it can do now, and if real time performance (something it was not designed for in the first place) is suffering because so much code is improperly using the deprecated Big Kernel Lock, then I don't see why there should be this animosity. And furthermore, the solution is fairly straightforward and has been done before; it just requires a lot of code to be reworked. And besides, the BKL had been made preemptible anyway for a good 15 stable kernel releases anyway. These patches are only against an experimental fork to remove the BKL.
I think that the HURD still takes the cake. From the project page:
`Hurd' stands for `Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons'. And, then, `Hird' stands for `Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth'. We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.
the appendix comes to mind of something which on the surface has no identifiable reason for being, but has not been "flushed" form the gene pool because it doesn't "harm" the gene pool (or more acurrately we "fix" the people it does harm).
Actually, the purpose of the appendix is to culture good bacteria to repopulate the intestines for when they are flushed out due to sickness or diarrhea. Very important for places with bad sanitation. interesting picture here of the appendix in action
First of all, there isn't such a thing as "too much" freedom of speech, or "too much" freedom of the press.
Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and defamation are standard counterexamples to your statement. And as such, if a guy dressed like Rambo started parading around NYC, I'm sure everyone would be intimidated. So is he exercising his right to bear arms or is he trying to intimidate people?
And besides, the minute you take up arms against the government, you become an outlaw, and therefore RPG's and the like are no longer such a big deal when you are wanted for treason.
Funny, I was studying for a Jewish history class and it turns out that some of the Kabbalists believe that God made several other universes before ours. They also believed in reincarnation, and the need for man to restore the symmetry and balance in the emanations of God.
The effective laws of the universe vary with space, time and scale. For example, at very high energy densities, or just after the Big Bang, electroweak forces dominate, acting differently from either standard E&M or weak forces. In modern day life, Newtonian physics dominates. At very large scales, General Relativity dominates. At very small scales Quantum effects dominate. So what is the difference? That is why physicists are looking for a unified theory. But perhaps this sort of law changeover is something fundamental, in sort of the way that most of the basic philosophies of *nix work the same way they did years ago, even though the underlying software, hardware, and implementation details have changed drastically. Maybe the universe took the same approach: why throw out the old rules when we can just build on top of them? The problem is that we would need to know what the implementation is in order to know how it affects the expression of the laws of physics. And then, wouldn't the underlying implementation just be a different law of physics? Personally, I think the answer is in fractals and cellular automata, but indeed, this is all metaphysics and likely unprovable.
I think about this every once in a while. It would almost make programming like playing with legos -- just connect the bumps err pipes. But what the problem is is that there usually needs to be some control, which kernel designers frequently run in to. Sure, I can cat/dev/cdrom, but I can't pipe a file into it and expect it to burn. For that, and lots of other things, you need ioctls, which sort of destroy your "everything is a pipe" approach. Everything becomes a sort of typed pipe, and you can't link everything together anymore. And how would you design a GUI this way? Sure, each X client connects to the X server by a pipe, but you then you need IPC, and both of these use specialized protocols, again destroying the "everything can connect to everything by a pipe" idea. Sigh, I guess it will be at least another 20 years until we have the Lego Block programming language.
Thankfully, the programs required for Linux desktops are already multiprocess to a large degree by design. We have X11, the window manager, the file manager and the panels all running in separate processes, just to name a few. And they use well defined IPC so they aren't going to get blindsided by multithreading problems. I remember that only a couple years ago did the Linux kernel start putting things in separate processes, and now I see about 25 kernel processes.
Now Microsoft Windows may have a bit of a problem, since most of the desktop functionality is run by explorer.exe. I imagine they might have trouble splitting that thing up just like they had trouble going to a simple multiuser environment without breaking things.
I have a feeling that while there is certainly a genetic component that directly corresponds to intelligence, there are probably a bunch of genes that affect intelligence in a way that is difficult to predict. So, imagine if you had a gene that tells you to start learning language, and you get the one that makes you learn your first words three months late. How does that affect your intelligence? I would think that overall it would be a wash since maybe it would make you an introvert. Or, if those three extra months were spent learning the subtle differences between the sounds you hear, you could become a great singer or actor due to your advanced knowledge of sound. Some of the most intelligent people out there are also the most unstable or borderline psychotic. Perhaps the only thing that made them not completely psychotic is one gene that kept their minds sane enough to live almost normally.
But hey, I don't have a "reasonably strong understanding of genetics". And besides, if I remember correctly, the problem in Idiocracy wasn't genetic but due to the 1984-esque totalitarian media telling the public bad information through advertising in a consumption based society gone mad.
Besides, who wants to listen to program-created music anyway? Music is always created from the culture of the generation, and created by a person with years of life to think about what kind of music he wants to write and what he thinks people will listen to. Sure, you could data-mine the internet, but then you only have a program using second-hand data. Until computers hear, see, and understand what people do in their daily lives, nothing they can produce can be culturally significant except for being the first. After that, its already been done.
Well, not quite three cents, but when I worked at target, iPods would go on sale for literally 99 cents off just so they had something to put in the circular. Just simply moronic.
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There's a difference between a benevolent dictatorship and a malevolent dictatorship. Compare the US and England with security cameras. In the US, I'm pretty sure people use camera privately to have something to show in court. In England, they are forcing people to submit to being on camera 24/7, even though they have not been able to use then to effectively decrease crime. Indiscriminate use of power is wrong, even if you have the absolute authority to do so.
While the headline might be good for a light giggle, there's a good reason why it's 10 years behind. Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die. That especially goes for a plane that uses a flying wing design (which are historically hard to stabilize without computer control), and potentially carries nuclear warheads.
You mean like this?
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
I recently described the process of writing software to my journalism major/movie minor girlfriend as ten people all trying to work on the same screenplay at the same time. She was horrified, knowing how hard it is for just one person to write a screenplay. But in some ways it is true, and what you have to do is to set up coding guidelines that you follow rigorously so that coders don't fall over each other.
The problem is that all the old people set up methodologies that didn't do that, instead assuming that everyone was culturally similar to them. But that won't work anymore as the codebase is quickly blowing up and any one small change could result in catastrophe.
People can't be heroes in what they do anymore--it just won't work. At this point, we need to work together, or the whole thing is just going to fall apart. I'll give the older guys credit that they were still developing proper development practices, but now that we know what they are, we should use them and enforce them on even older code, so that when all the original developers are gone, the old can be seamlessly worked in with the new.
I rather agree with you--people should stop kidding themselves. Global warming is not about saving the planet--this stuff has happened repeatedly and all this life is still here--its about saving humanity. Because if the other species out there that we require start dying off because there's too much C02 or its too hot or the ocean is to acidic, then we're screwed unless we can evolve fast enough. It gives a lot of credence to the idea of being stewards of the planet, since at this point we are realizing that what we do /can/ have an effect on the planet as a whole. At this point, we've already worried about polluting the world's oceans, causing worldwide nuclear winter, and now global warming. Either way, it seems to me that carbon is too good of an energy transport to give up, so we should leverage it. Biofuels anyone? What if I said we genetically engineered algae to make them for us? Well, sure, not yet, but that's the logical next step.
Yeah, but rail systems rarely made money on moving people. Every long distance hauler is really a way to move cargo, with the government mandating they throw on x number of passenger cars or something. And if you have a good enough system of long-haul, light rail, commuter bus and taxi service, not to mention new things like rentable bikes and publicly shared cars, all synchronized with our brand new internet, then you could get from here to anywhere in a minimal number of hops and cost, while also assuring fairly managed resources. So, like routing packets on the internet.
Actually, I'll go one further and say that the models are really best fit for the data. It just so happens that they fit so well, they can actually predict the future with varying (and hopefully well-defined) degrees of accuracy. That is what is so astounding about physics, because who'd though that all those silly abstractions mathematicians made up are actually worth something in describing the real world?
And besides, even though there is value in every piece of data on the internet, to fully explain why each piece of information is there is equivalent to knowing the mind and motivations of every person who's created that data, which in turn is a result of every event that has happened to that person since birth, which in turn is a result of ... and on and on. And in that case, we still have to model things, or at least pick a model. Hell, even correlation is a model.
The only problem is that parenting is a learned skill just like everything else, and no matter how good of a parent you try to be, you will not always be able to provide your child with everything he or she needs. That's why it takes a town to raise a child...but wait, does anyone trust anybody else with their children anymore? Does anyone actually get to know anyone else anymore? You are not raising a child to take over the household or family business--many boomers are seeing house values drop and most don't own their own business. People should be raising kids to work in society, which requires interacting with society since a young age--and not just through school and organized activities, but though just being friendly to random people and forming a network of friends who are not just peers or part of your group, but elders, youngsters, oddballs, etc.
Bizarrely enough, even though I used to believe that a better voting system would help to fix America's political system, I think that first-past-the-post works well. It gives a lot of power to the moderates and severely punishes a party that manages to split its base. As a result, our political system goes through a shift in power quite frequently, since it is almost if one party runs out of steam and needs to regroup. What has happened lately is that the moderates were too comfy in their lifestyles and just let the gov't do what they wanted. But now that the economy is in the tank, people are losing their homes and jobs, and the world isn't buddy-buddy with us anymore, something's got to give. If Kerry was elected in 2004, don't you think McCain would be kicking him all over the campaign trail? But the Republics were able to operate behind our backs long enough to get in one more election, and now the Democrats are regrouped and ready to take over.
But that's just my two cents. What do I know about politics?
From reading the article, it seems like this guy is one of the old guard, trying to convince everyone that FOSS is dangerous to their business models and to act accordingly. The problem is that he is right--the people, not companies, that create Free Software have a different business model in mind than a corporate-dominated one based upon lock-in.
Verizon Wireless is a great example of corporate lock-in: the entire system on every phone is written to corporate spec, and if it had any free software as a part of the operating system, they would have to open-source a lot of it because they were not following the rules of the GPL (assuming they were using, say, a network stack culled from Linux). So either they play the game by the rules of the copyright holders, or they write their own software at their own expense.
But a clueful open-source company will be careful not to let their proprietary software get get too close to the FOSS they use, or better yet, make it company policy to GPL every last piece of code they write. This is where the article begins to expound FUD, because anything you write with the aid of a FOSS program (EMACS, Eclipse, I'm writing this in Firefox) does not have to be under a free license. And even more, any open-source company will be careful not to base their business model on being proprietors of software but as something else, such as selling another service like support.
The problem with "intellectual property" is that, when compared with the other governmental abstractions we use, such as copyright and patents, it is extraordinarily hard to enforce. That is why the United States constitution gives the federal government the right and responsibility to enforce both--but notice there is no mention of intellectual property. But let us compare the two:
* Copyright acknowledges that when you buy a book, you are buying two things: the physical book with letters on it, and the right to a copy of the information expressed by the letters (since copying is increasingly trivial). It is up to the government (and in a democratic-republic, the legislators and the people represented) to determine what rights the holders of a copy of the work have.
* Patents acknowledge that once you know how to build something, it is just a matter of technology to recreate it. That is why you give the public a full description of how you built it in order to acquire a patent, in exchange for exclusive rights to produce the thing for a period of time.
And then we have property rights, where that item is not trivial to copy perfectly (we don't yet have replicators) and all rights are exclusive to the property owner. The problem with intellectual property is that it pretends that information is not trivial to copy, and also keeps all rights for the copyright owner. But in a fundamental way, there must be copies made along the way, and to say that the recipient of that copy has no rights not explicitly granted by the copyright owner is unfair, since not even the copyright owner can control what the person does with that information once it is absorbed in the mind. And so we inevitably have fair use in one form or the other.
Essentially, all the people insisting on intellectual property need to suck it up and deal with a world where it is trivial to copy things--they can't have unlimited rights AND distribute copies of their works.
My girlfriend's dad just got her a Mac, and for the first day I found that I had a vicious Mac envy. But on the second day of using it, I am ready to go back to my three year Dell with Kubuntu. The explanation is simple: Mac OS X looks great and is intuitive, but doesn't fit my workflow well. This is pretty much the same reasoning Linus has against GNOME--the stuff he wants to do is not trivially possible.
/need/ to do anything from the commandline, Linux was ready. But for those power users, they typically have some efficiency axe to grind (myself included). Linus complained that GNOME didn't let him map some mouse key to some obscure function (among others). Mac weenies demand that everything looks as though it works out of the box the first time, even though it really doesn't. Windows junkies want to be able to download some spyware-laden utility to magically give them 2 fps more on Quake or make the desktop do something goofy. I just want an orthogonal interface--is that too much to ask? Needless to say, these people will never be appeased.
In most ways, GNU+Linux is ready for the desktop: it has almost all of the required applications, they provide the requisite features, and they work. These are the requirements for 80% of the people who use a computer: they just want something that works and are willing to learn, but just once. As long as you don't change anything, they are fine. These people would adapt to a KDE, GNOME, Mac OS X, Windows, or Sugar desktop equally well, for that matter. And the main reason is that they feel they have far too many other things that are important in their lives to worry about how efficient they are on their computer, regardless of how many hours of their life they could reclaim by investing another hour learning a new interface.
But those 20% of users who are power users are the ones who are worried about whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Once you didn't
It seems to me that one day, we will be able to combine all of these concepts programmatically, and the result would be a really wonderful piece of software. But that has got to be at least 20 years away.
Either way, GNU+Linux is ready for the desktop for most people, but the cost of retraining 80% of the computer-using population is high. That is why I thought it was great to install Linux by default on these tiny laptops, because it is extremely appropriate to use Linux over Windows XP to take advantage of the low power and storage, and people are willing to learn a new piece of hardware. But Micro$oft is quickly killing that idea with XP on the new EEE PCs. Oh well.
It seems to me that switching to a microkernel just because people have been abusing the Big Kernel Spinlock is like using a nuclear bomb to drive in a nail: sure, it is a technically pure solution, but the problems involved exceed the number of solutions. It seems to me that the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel only in the fact that everything shares the same address space. Linus seems to be a smart guy, and considering how Linux scales in real world scenarios and its general popularity (no disrespect for QNX), it seems that the only reason to bash its monolithic design is that it is conceptually inferior. You have to admire how well the kernel was able to grow from being 386+ uniprocessor only to what it can do now, and if real time performance (something it was not designed for in the first place) is suffering because so much code is improperly using the deprecated Big Kernel Lock, then I don't see why there should be this animosity. And furthermore, the solution is fairly straightforward and has been done before; it just requires a lot of code to be reworked. And besides, the BKL had been made preemptible anyway for a good 15 stable kernel releases anyway. These patches are only against an experimental fork to remove the BKL.
Organic code writing FTW!
So it's safe to drink beer again. And to think I was actually going to cut down!
Actually, the purpose of the appendix is to culture good bacteria to repopulate the intestines for when they are flushed out due to sickness or diarrhea. Very important for places with bad sanitation. interesting picture here of the appendix in action
Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater and defamation are standard counterexamples to your statement. And as such, if a guy dressed like Rambo started parading around NYC, I'm sure everyone would be intimidated. So is he exercising his right to bear arms or is he trying to intimidate people?
And besides, the minute you take up arms against the government, you become an outlaw, and therefore RPG's and the like are no longer such a big deal when you are wanted for treason.
Funny, I was studying for a Jewish history class and it turns out that some of the Kabbalists believe that God made several other universes before ours. They also believed in reincarnation, and the need for man to restore the symmetry and balance in the emanations of God.
The effective laws of the universe vary with space, time and scale. For example, at very high energy densities, or just after the Big Bang, electroweak forces dominate, acting differently from either standard E&M or weak forces. In modern day life, Newtonian physics dominates. At very large scales, General Relativity dominates. At very small scales Quantum effects dominate. So what is the difference? That is why physicists are looking for a unified theory. But perhaps this sort of law changeover is something fundamental, in sort of the way that most of the basic philosophies of *nix work the same way they did years ago, even though the underlying software, hardware, and implementation details have changed drastically. Maybe the universe took the same approach: why throw out the old rules when we can just build on top of them? The problem is that we would need to know what the implementation is in order to know how it affects the expression of the laws of physics. And then, wouldn't the underlying implementation just be a different law of physics? Personally, I think the answer is in fractals and cellular automata, but indeed, this is all metaphysics and likely unprovable.
I think about this every once in a while. It would almost make programming like playing with legos -- just connect the bumps err pipes. But what the problem is is that there usually needs to be some control, which kernel designers frequently run in to. Sure, I can cat /dev/cdrom, but I can't pipe a file into it and expect it to burn. For that, and lots of other things, you need ioctls, which sort of destroy your "everything is a pipe" approach. Everything becomes a sort of typed pipe, and you can't link everything together anymore. And how would you design a GUI this way? Sure, each X client connects to the X server by a pipe, but you then you need IPC, and both of these use specialized protocols, again destroying the "everything can connect to everything by a pipe" idea. Sigh, I guess it will be at least another 20 years until we have the Lego Block programming language.
Thankfully, the programs required for Linux desktops are already multiprocess to a large degree by design. We have X11, the window manager, the file manager and the panels all running in separate processes, just to name a few. And they use well defined IPC so they aren't going to get blindsided by multithreading problems. I remember that only a couple years ago did the Linux kernel start putting things in separate processes, and now I see about 25 kernel processes.
Now Microsoft Windows may have a bit of a problem, since most of the desktop functionality is run by explorer.exe. I imagine they might have trouble splitting that thing up just like they had trouble going to a simple multiuser environment without breaking things.
I have a feeling that while there is certainly a genetic component that directly corresponds to intelligence, there are probably a bunch of genes that affect intelligence in a way that is difficult to predict. So, imagine if you had a gene that tells you to start learning language, and you get the one that makes you learn your first words three months late. How does that affect your intelligence? I would think that overall it would be a wash since maybe it would make you an introvert. Or, if those three extra months were spent learning the subtle differences between the sounds you hear, you could become a great singer or actor due to your advanced knowledge of sound. Some of the most intelligent people out there are also the most unstable or borderline psychotic. Perhaps the only thing that made them not completely psychotic is one gene that kept their minds sane enough to live almost normally.
But hey, I don't have a "reasonably strong understanding of genetics". And besides, if I remember correctly, the problem in Idiocracy wasn't genetic but due to the 1984-esque totalitarian media telling the public bad information through advertising in a consumption based society gone mad.
Besides, who wants to listen to program-created music anyway? Music is always created from the culture of the generation, and created by a person with years of life to think about what kind of music he wants to write and what he thinks people will listen to. Sure, you could data-mine the internet, but then you only have a program using second-hand data. Until computers hear, see, and understand what people do in their daily lives, nothing they can produce can be culturally significant except for being the first. After that, its already been done.
Well, not quite three cents, but when I worked at target, iPods would go on sale for literally 99 cents off just so they had something to put in the circular. Just simply moronic.
Yeah, but geeks would probably wipe out Vista and install Linux instead, freeing up most of those 14 GB. Not sure about Linux compatibility, though.