... we develop low-cost, fast-charging, quiet and low-polluting portable power sources with enough capacity to power a human-sized android to walk around untethered for a few days.
That's it. That's the major remaining bottleneck for the development of general machine intelligence that can start to compete with humans and other animals. I expect this WILL happen in the next 3 decades.
Once those power sources are developed, we will see a proliferation of robots walking around all over the place. Production and deployment of large numbers of robots that can walk around and interact with the outside world is the *key* remaining step for developing powerful machine intelligence. These are the reasons why:
1) Sensors and Perception Being free to interact in the external environment will require a much richer array of sensors and actuators on the robot armature. Sensors will measure things like temperature, moisture and pressure in addition to current inputs like position, acceleration, sound and light. Along with the richer sensor networks will come the computational subsystems for processing and integrating them. These subsystems will be the perceptual circuits of the robot mind.
2) Emotions When robots are free to roam around in the real world (not just driving along streets, but almost everywhere that humans and other animals can go), they will acquire capabilities for monitoring damage and preventing harm to themselves. In order for a robot to protect itself and survive outside, it must be able to identify, prioritize, categorize and compare all sorts of unexpected stimuli, threats and opportunities. As with animals, these low-level circuits will be the foundation for emotional behavior, which is a requirement for true intelligence. Until a robot has a well-developed capacity to sense and react to sudden and unexpected stimuli, it feels *nothing*. Current robot 'emotions' are simulations, nothing more.
3) Large Numbers Once you have perceptual and emotional networks in machines that can move almost everywhere in the outside world, only then do you have the playing field to develop true, general-purpose intelligence. Intelligence that includes the ability to model the outside world, to make predictions and solve unusual and difficult problems. Once you have the playing field, all it takes are large numbers - large-scale and widespread deployment of millions of mobile robots to produce the rapid cycles of technological innovation and evolution, such as we have already seen in many other areas.
Only this time, the end result will be able to compete with human beings and that's *not* good for us, despite what you may hear from techno-optimists promising a future of global human leisure and luxury. Sorry, but it's not going to work out that way. If you need convincing, start considering what happened in the past when superior biological and technological groups encountered and competed with inferior ones for resources and space in the environment.
There's plenty more to this story, including the inherent dynamics of our current economic systems, energy issues and the trajectory of autonomous industrial manufacturing systems, but that will require quite a bit more explanation.
I got a PhD in biochemistry 7 years ago. I'm now back in IT working as a sysadmin. If I didn't have that previous computer experience, I would be doing day labor right now. I am not kidding.
I've always thought it obvious that the proliferative capabilities of cancer cells resulted from leveraging ancient genes but I give the authors credit for stating it explicitly. However, I believe their conclusions that this improves hope for a cure are dead wrong, for the following reasons:
1. One billions years old is not very old biochemically. Most of the intracellular biochemical tricks are already old hat to the one-billion year old cell - they are not the gullible rubes you think they are.
2. You might expect cancer cells to be predictable because they fall back on early evolved mechanisms. Your expectations are just as likely to be wrong because proto-multicellular life could be a lot more mutable and adaptable than later, highly-constrained organisms. An analogy would be the greater speed and flexibility of older, smaller and simpler human cities and governments to form and adapt compared to the modern regulation-bound and bureaucratic ones.
In fact, if mutability itself turns out to be a 'tunable' property of ancient life, we can expect to be continually surprised by those 'primitive' cancer cells.
Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 1
That's like saying an airline that flies to everywhere in the world except the US, India and China is not really an 'international' airline. Not correct. Cross-platform essentially means that it runs on multiple important platforms, not necessarily including the largest one.
" Sunstein admits that 'some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true' Sunstein has also recently advocated banning websites which post 'right-wing rumors'"
is false. I read the linked pdf and banning websites is explicitly _not_ a part of Sunstein and Vermeule's policy recommendations (page 14, paragraph 3).
RTFA before you make false and inflammatory statements.
If the purpose of the Drake Equation is to stimulate conversation, I wish more people would pay attention to the middle factor, fl, because it's the most significant one. The reason is that the value of the middle factor is the biggest unknown, by far.
Here is why: each of the other factors, even those that are based on singular events like the origin of life, are conceptually more extrapolatable (if that is a word):
1) Rate of star creation - multiple events
2) Stars with planets - multiple
3) Number of Earth-like planets - inferred from just a few factors (size, distance, temp, composition, etc)
5) Fraction of life that is intelligent - extrapolate from multiple events (humans, chimps, dolphins, elephants, etc)
6) Fraction able and willing to communicate - this seems almost to follow naturally from 5)
7) Persist long enough for long transmissions through space - trickier, but not too hard to imagine emergence of mature, stable societies.
4) is the big unknown. Really big. TOTALLY unknown at this point. Because once you dig a little into the chemistry and molecular biology, you realize that currently we do not have ANY comprehensive, detailed hypotheses to estimate how non-living molecular systems made the transition to self-replicating living ones.
Note the emphasis is on comprehensive AND detailed, because there are many very interesting and detailed speculations on parts of the process, such as Wachtershauser's Iron-Sulfur theories, and Szostak's ideas about the emergence of RNA replicators.
However, the huge number of parts and complex interactions involved in creating the simplest living organisms places the estimation of probability of origin of life in a whole other category of difficult, compared to the other factors.
At this time, fl is TOTALLY unknown, and so any use of the Drake Equation for computing a final result is likewise totally unknown.
I agree with the previous recommendations for Doxygen. A while back I wanted to become familiar with the source code for a game engine and tried various tools to help with the 'grok' factor. I found the doxygen docs, with full source code generation in html, to be the fastest and most convenient way to walk around the code. After a while, it just clicked.
Creating small demo apps that use the code can also help.
>How about a fish that fed on the brainwaves of verbal activity, excreting thoughts compatible with the brain it's most proximate to, usually by way of it being stuck in one's ear.
Yeah, that's a good one too. And not only does it disprove evolution, it disproves the existence of God!
These days, evolutionary theory is routinely making many 'small' predictions, such as time-of-speciation events inferred from phylogenetic distances, which can be confirmed or disproven by independent paleological data.
For a total disproof of the entire theory of evolution, one could imagine all sorts of hypothetical observations that might do so. One category would be to find a phenotype that is so improbable that common sense tells us that something other than evolutionary mechanisms must be involved.
Of course, deciding what is too improbable is precisely what is disputed between evolutionists and ID/creationists these days. So, rather than attempt a precise definition of 'too improbable' at this time (although it is an interesting question), we could just consider a situation that is so implausible that presumably the vast majority of evolutionists would agree with it.
One example might be a genetically-determined pattern of biomolecules found on the surface of every human brain cell that spelled out the complete text of the Bible (or Torah or Koran, etc). I'm sure others can think of plenty of other insanely improbable examples.
So there is no question that evolutionary theory is disprovable in principle.
Some comments above seem to either overestimate or underestimate the importance of what Venter is anticipating. Here is a computer-based analogy for what he is doing: it's equivalent to being able to boot to a new operating system of your choice.
Some people under-estimate the potential significance by saying that we've been able to insert new genes in organisms for quite some time. That is true, but it misses the point, because for the first time the complete genome (operating system code) can be replaced with a different externally supplied version. That is a very significant and important capability, as it allows you to escape from the constraints of an existing operating system.
However, because it relies on the existing hardware (protein synthesis machinery, metabolic enzymes, etc.), it's not the same as creating a whole new computer system (hardware and software) from scratch. In the beginning, of course a lot of the new genes will just be copies of those from existing genomes. But just like free/open-source software, having complete control of the OS will enable a much faster rate of development of new code.
Complete assembly of ALL of the biomolecular components of a cell from basic non-living building blocks will certainly be another great milestone in biotechnology. But just as with computers, I personally expect advances in biotechnology will occur with much greater speed and diversity by modifying the software (genes) as opposed to the hardware.
Here's a simple analogy to clarify the argument. The complaints of FreeBSD people about the GPL are like slave-owners complaining to abolitionists: "You're not really a supporter of freedom because you're trying to take away my freedom to own slaves!"
People might dismiss this as an inadequate analogy, saying that free software is not as important as human liberty. However, I would argue that a lot of these people are not considering the long-term importance of free software. As our world becomes enmeshed with software, the right to free software will merge indistinguisably with the more general rights of intellectual inquiry and the free exchange of ideas.
A lot of the freedoms that we now take for granted, such as free speech and the right to vote, were not respected as rights in the past (and not even considered as necessary by some!). These rights only came into being after they were proposed and vigorously defended by truly enlightened visionaries, not just by people interested in immediate, short-term practical benefits.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. I like my newspaper, because I'm a gadfly, but up until just a couple of years ago, I was a village bumpkin, for my entire life. I managed to make it through apothecary school, get a job pulling rotten teeth, and all of that. My lack of dental correspondence didn't hamper me one bit.
I still don't see what else I need it for. The yearly almanac was and is a bit of a hassle, but I can still get the job done.
BTW, some of what these countries call a postal service really amount to a 5-10 week delivery cycle.
Only very recently have I even been able to justify having a mailbox to my wife - we've requested some musical scores from the Merry Calliope Co.
So, without a postal service, these people won't be able to buy feathered caps from Switzerland and will have to send for traveling minstrels or hire a stagecoach, and somehow this is going to topple our economy.
You have good reason to be angry RS, and the lame broadband issue is just the tip of the iceberg. We're getting screwed on healthcare for the same reasons. Another huge one: the miltary industrial complex and their current campaign to burn trillions of our dollars while generating more war and terrorism around the world.
You are correct as to the cause: too many politically clueless people led by right-wing robber-barons and their propaganda-spewing lackeys. I also wonder why things aren't worse than they are. I suspect it's due in part to inertia, and in part to the large number of people in this country who do have at least some clue about good government, economics, education, environment, social and foreign policy. The recent elections were a hopeful sign that we might be headed back in the right direction.
I was 37 with a BSEE and 10 years experience in software development when I went back to school. After taking some undergrad courses in molecular biology, I received some wonderful encouragement from a professor who became my mentor, and so went to grad school. Got my PhD in biochemistry last year, at 43! It was hard work, but I loved every bit of the intellectual stimulation and opportunity for creativity. Since then my scientific career has been on hold somewhat, as I haven't been willing to leave town for a postdoc (son in school). Instead, I've been teaching as an adjunct professor, which has been a lot of work but with its own rewards.
The only hard part is the ludicrously low pay and non-existent benefits. It really really sucks not having medical coverage for my family. But for me, it's still been worth it. After a grueling first semester of teaching, I went back to a high tech job for six months at 4 times the pay. But it quickly grew VERY tedious, so now I'm back teaching again.
The programming experience was also a great help for my research. There is SO much opportunity for software development in the biosciences, that I strongly recommend it to all who value creative intellectual work over financial benefit. As an additional (more speculative) incentive, I'm hopeful that biotech will someday make the transition from risky research to profitable engineering. If and when that happens, those with the experience should expect opportunities and payoffs that make the dotcom boom pale in comparison.
I recently removed a nasty trojan (a member of the 'Wareout' family) from my laptop, with the aid of the free Sophos Anti-Rootkit and fantastic free technical support from the great folks at the
spybot forums. My best guess was that I got the infection when I logged into a free wifi connection at a local cafe. I saw a brief message from my antivirus software that a trojan had been detected, but afterwards, it reported nothing. After reading the eweek article, I learned that my Intel Pro/Wireless driver had major security vulnerabilities. I just downloaded the update and hopefully will be malware-free for a little while. So much precious time development time was wasted because of this infection!
I don't have any association with the author or the other creators of the language, so perhaps my opinion will add some legitimate support for the book and the language. I developed my previous project (Ribosome Builder) with Lua and found it to be very stable, easy-to-use, small, fast and powerful. That said, I was eagerly looking forward to the release of this next edition of the book, because I'm using Lua again for my current projects, and hope to make even better use of Lua 5.1. I'm especially excited about the new support for modules, and also the fact that Lua is now supported by SWIG. Previously, I had to do a lot of manual hacking to define the interface functions between my core code (in C++) and the lua scripts.
I've read about 3/4 of the book so far and I completely agree with the reviewer's assessment. It's very cleanly and clearly written, with many things explained in a concise and elegant style. For example, Ierusalimschy's explanation of closures allowed me to immediately grasp them and appreciate why they are useful. I remember reading about them way back years ago in Larry Wall's book 'Programming Perl', and was remained rather confused about the concept. I don't know if the additional years of experience helped, but the clear style of the Lua book certainly did.
Using a scripting language for enhancing and extending a complex project just seems to be a given for most serious projects these days, and after surveying the field, I considered only two main choices: Python and Lua. Python is also really well designed and powerful, but I decided to go with Lua because it does pretty much everything I need it to do, does it very well, but best of all, it is so very small. These days when even the most basic projects can quickly grow into complex, interconnected monstrosities with a zillion dependencies, I believe that the values of small and simple are more important than ever. So for that reason especially, I'm really excited about Lua and the prospect for using it more effectively after I finish swallowing this Blue PIL.
I've been a very happy owner of a ThinkPad for almost a year now, mostly because its excellent GNU-Linux compatibility. But Frank Kardonski's statement just lost me as a future Lenovo customer. I'll be looking elsewhere for my next laptop purchase.
I propose Missoula, Montana for next Silicon Valley, in hopes that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This has long been such a beautiful place to live that many PhDs choose to live here in humble poverty instead of seeking fortunes elsewhere (myself included). So all you rich people and nerds, come check it out! There's plenty of room to grow in Montana and thanks to global warming, the weather in Missoula just gets warmer each year!
The term hacker is established and apt. It would be a mistake and most likely a failure to try to establish a different name. The ambiguity in the meaning is normal and based in reality. Consider a similar term, 'rebel'. This can also take on very negative connotations in certain contexts, like for example where rebel militias may have engaged in executions and torture. But it would be silly to drop the usage of the term 'rebel' in response to something like that. Hackers just need to keep hacking the public perception of their name, just like they hack computer systems to improve them over time.
Your criticisms may be more valid for computational chemistry, but they are certainly not as valid for biomolecular modeling. Modern interactive molecular dynamics simulations have become very useful for investigating complex sequences and interactions between biomolecules. They don't necessarily require high accuracy forcefields or QM methods to discover features such as hydrogen bonding patterns, steric clashes and distance constraints. It's true that having the accuracy will help, and modern forcefields and hybrid MM/QM software are making good progress in this direction. But there is a lot of higher-level information that can be displayed and utilized with rich 3D graphics and haptic simulations, especially in complex macromolecular systems.
After all, they have profited the most from science and technology, so they should pay the most.
And the irony is that they stand to benefit the most in the long term from such increased access. As a graduate student in science, I can attest to the fact that online free student access to journal articles has UTTERLY TRANSFORMED my ability to make use of the scientific literature. I believe that this is especially true for interdisciplinary research.
Futhermore, I confidently predict that we will see a large burst of scientific productivity in the years ahead that is a direct consequence of this online free access. The difference from the way things were done in the past is simply profound. I can download, scan, absorb and reference hundreds and hundreds of journal articles in a way that simply wasn't possible before. And this comes just in the nick time to help deal with the increasing avalanche of scientific literature.
Creating free access to all scientific journal articles is probably one of the most rewarding investments our society could make.
No need to do that either. Before too long, we'll have kick-ass combat robots with rapidly evolving artificial intelligence. Because they will have even less empathy and wisdom than either of you two twits, they will just cleanly pop a few rounds through this guy's skull, along with yours and the rest of the other slow and stupid humans on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
... we develop low-cost, fast-charging, quiet and low-polluting portable power sources with enough capacity to power a human-sized android to walk around untethered for a few days.
That's it. That's the major remaining bottleneck for the development of general machine intelligence that can start to compete with humans and other animals. I expect this WILL happen in the next 3 decades.
Once those power sources are developed, we will see a proliferation of robots walking around all over the place. Production and deployment of large numbers of robots that can walk around and interact with the outside world is the *key* remaining step for developing powerful machine intelligence. These are the reasons why:
1) Sensors and Perception
Being free to interact in the external environment will require a much richer array of sensors and actuators on the robot armature. Sensors will measure things like temperature, moisture and pressure in addition to current inputs like position, acceleration, sound and light. Along with the richer sensor networks will come the computational subsystems for processing and integrating them. These subsystems will be the perceptual circuits of the robot mind.
2) Emotions
When robots are free to roam around in the real world (not just driving along streets, but almost everywhere that humans and other animals can go), they will acquire capabilities for monitoring damage and preventing harm to themselves. In order for a robot to protect itself and survive outside, it must be able to identify, prioritize, categorize and compare all sorts of unexpected stimuli, threats and opportunities. As with animals, these low-level circuits will be the foundation for emotional behavior, which is a requirement for true intelligence. Until a robot has a well-developed capacity to sense and react to sudden and unexpected stimuli, it feels *nothing*. Current robot 'emotions' are simulations, nothing more.
3) Large Numbers
Once you have perceptual and emotional networks in machines that can move almost everywhere in the outside world, only then do you have the playing field to develop true, general-purpose intelligence. Intelligence that includes the ability to model the outside world, to make predictions and solve unusual and difficult problems. Once you have the playing field, all it takes are large numbers - large-scale and widespread deployment of millions of mobile robots to produce the rapid cycles of technological innovation and evolution, such as we have already seen in many other areas.
Only this time, the end result will be able to compete with human beings and that's *not* good for us, despite what you may hear from techno-optimists promising a future of global human leisure and luxury. Sorry, but it's not going to work out that way. If you need convincing, start considering what happened in the past when superior biological and technological groups encountered and competed with inferior ones for resources and space in the environment.
There's plenty more to this story, including the inherent dynamics of our current economic systems, energy issues and the trajectory of autonomous industrial manufacturing systems, but that will require quite a bit more explanation.
Well said.
I got a PhD in biochemistry 7 years ago. I'm now back in IT working as a sysadmin. If I didn't have that previous computer experience, I would be doing day labor right now. I am not kidding.
I've always thought it obvious that the proliferative capabilities of cancer cells resulted from leveraging ancient genes but I give the authors credit for stating it explicitly. However, I believe their conclusions that this improves hope for a cure are dead wrong, for the following reasons:
1. One billions years old is not very old biochemically. Most of the intracellular biochemical tricks are already old hat to the one-billion year old cell - they are not the gullible rubes you think they are.
2. You might expect cancer cells to be predictable because they fall back on early evolved mechanisms. Your expectations are just as likely to be wrong because proto-multicellular life could be a lot more mutable and adaptable than later, highly-constrained organisms. An analogy would be the greater speed and flexibility of older, smaller and simpler human cities and governments to form and adapt compared to the modern regulation-bound and bureaucratic ones.
In fact, if mutability itself turns out to be a 'tunable' property of ancient life, we can expect to be continually surprised by those 'primitive' cancer cells.
That's like saying an airline that flies to everywhere in the world except the US, India and China is not really an 'international' airline. Not correct. Cross-platform essentially means that it runs on multiple important platforms, not necessarily including the largest one.
is false. I read the linked pdf and banning websites is explicitly _not_ a part of Sunstein and Vermeule's policy recommendations (page 14, paragraph 3). RTFA before you make false and inflammatory statements.
If the purpose of the Drake Equation is to stimulate conversation, I wish more people would pay attention to the middle factor, fl, because it's the most significant one. The reason is that the value of the middle factor is the biggest unknown, by far.
Here is why: each of the other factors, even those that are based on singular events like the origin of life, are conceptually more extrapolatable (if that is a word):
1) Rate of star creation - multiple events
2) Stars with planets - multiple
3) Number of Earth-like planets - inferred from just a few factors (size, distance, temp, composition, etc)
5) Fraction of life that is intelligent - extrapolate from multiple events (humans, chimps, dolphins, elephants, etc)
6) Fraction able and willing to communicate - this seems almost to follow naturally from 5)
7) Persist long enough for long transmissions through space - trickier, but not too hard to imagine emergence of mature, stable societies.
4) is the big unknown. Really big. TOTALLY unknown at this point. Because once you dig a little into the chemistry and molecular biology, you realize that currently we do not have ANY comprehensive, detailed hypotheses to estimate how non-living molecular systems made the transition to self-replicating living ones.
Note the emphasis is on comprehensive AND detailed, because there are many very interesting and detailed speculations on parts of the process, such as Wachtershauser's Iron-Sulfur theories, and Szostak's ideas about the emergence of RNA replicators.
However, the huge number of parts and complex interactions involved in creating the simplest living organisms places the estimation of probability of origin of life in a whole other category of difficult, compared to the other factors.
At this time, fl is TOTALLY unknown, and so any use of the Drake Equation for computing a final result is likewise totally unknown.
mhack
Creating small demo apps that use the code can also help.
mhack
>How about a fish that fed on the brainwaves of verbal activity, excreting thoughts compatible with the brain it's most proximate to, usually by way of it being stuck in one's ear.
Yeah, that's a good one too. And not only does it disprove evolution, it disproves the existence of God!
mhack
These days, evolutionary theory is routinely making many 'small' predictions, such as time-of-speciation events inferred from phylogenetic distances, which can be confirmed or disproven by independent paleological data.
For a total disproof of the entire theory of evolution, one could imagine all sorts of hypothetical observations that might do so. One category would be to find a phenotype that is so improbable that common sense tells us that something other than evolutionary mechanisms must be involved.
Of course, deciding what is too improbable is precisely what is disputed between evolutionists and ID/creationists these days. So, rather than attempt a precise definition of 'too improbable' at this time (although it is an interesting question), we could just consider a situation that is so implausible that presumably the vast majority of evolutionists would agree with it.
One example might be a genetically-determined pattern of biomolecules found on the surface of every human brain cell that spelled out the complete text of the Bible (or Torah or Koran, etc). I'm sure others can think of plenty of other insanely improbable examples.
So there is no question that evolutionary theory is disprovable in principle.
mhack
Some people under-estimate the potential significance by saying that we've been able to insert new genes in organisms for quite some time. That is true, but it misses the point, because for the first time the complete genome (operating system code) can be replaced with a different externally supplied version. That is a very significant and important capability, as it allows you to escape from the constraints of an existing operating system.
However, because it relies on the existing hardware (protein synthesis machinery, metabolic enzymes, etc.), it's not the same as creating a whole new computer system (hardware and software) from scratch. In the beginning, of course a lot of the new genes will just be copies of those from existing genomes. But just like free/open-source software, having complete control of the OS will enable a much faster rate of development of new code.
Complete assembly of ALL of the biomolecular components of a cell from basic non-living building blocks will certainly be another great milestone in biotechnology. But just as with computers, I personally expect advances in biotechnology will occur with much greater speed and diversity by modifying the software (genes) as opposed to the hardware.
mhack
Here's a simple analogy to clarify the argument. The complaints of FreeBSD people about the GPL are like slave-owners complaining to abolitionists: "You're not really a supporter of freedom because you're trying to take away my freedom to own slaves!"
People might dismiss this as an inadequate analogy, saying that free software is not as important as human liberty. However, I would argue that a lot of these people are not considering the long-term importance of free software. As our world becomes enmeshed with software, the right to free software will merge indistinguisably with the more general rights of intellectual inquiry and the free exchange of ideas.
A lot of the freedoms that we now take for granted, such as free speech and the right to vote, were not respected as rights in the past (and not even considered as necessary by some!). These rights only came into being after they were proposed and vigorously defended by truly enlightened visionaries, not just by people interested in immediate, short-term practical benefits.
mhack
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. I like my newspaper, because I'm a gadfly, but up until just a couple of years ago, I was a village bumpkin, for my entire life. I managed to make it through apothecary school, get a job pulling rotten teeth, and all of that. My lack of dental correspondence didn't hamper me one bit.
I still don't see what else I need it for. The yearly almanac was and is a bit of a hassle, but I can still get the job done.
BTW, some of what these countries call a postal service really amount to a 5-10 week delivery cycle.
Only very recently have I even been able to justify having a mailbox to my wife - we've requested some musical scores from the Merry Calliope Co.
So, without a postal service, these people won't be able to buy feathered caps from Switzerland and will have to send for traveling minstrels or hire a stagecoach, and somehow this is going to topple our economy.
You have good reason to be angry RS, and the lame broadband issue is just the tip of the iceberg. We're getting screwed on healthcare for the same reasons. Another huge one: the miltary industrial complex and their current campaign to burn trillions of our dollars while generating more war and terrorism around the world. You are correct as to the cause: too many politically clueless people led by right-wing robber-barons and their propaganda-spewing lackeys. I also wonder why things aren't worse than they are. I suspect it's due in part to inertia, and in part to the large number of people in this country who do have at least some clue about good government, economics, education, environment, social and foreign policy. The recent elections were a hopeful sign that we might be headed back in the right direction.
The only hard part is the ludicrously low pay and non-existent benefits. It really really sucks not having medical coverage for my family. But for me, it's still been worth it. After a grueling first semester of teaching, I went back to a high tech job for six months at 4 times the pay. But it quickly grew VERY tedious, so now I'm back teaching again.
The programming experience was also a great help for my research. There is SO much opportunity for software development in the biosciences, that I strongly recommend it to all who value creative intellectual work over financial benefit. As an additional (more speculative) incentive, I'm hopeful that biotech will someday make the transition from risky research to profitable engineering. If and when that happens, those with the experience should expect opportunities and payoffs that make the dotcom boom pale in comparison.
mhack
Second that. FLTK is sweet!
I recently removed a nasty trojan (a member of the 'Wareout' family) from my laptop, with the aid of the free Sophos Anti-Rootkit and fantastic free technical support from the great folks at the spybot forums. My best guess was that I got the infection when I logged into a free wifi connection at a local cafe. I saw a brief message from my antivirus software that a trojan had been detected, but afterwards, it reported nothing. After reading the eweek article, I learned that my Intel Pro/Wireless driver had major security vulnerabilities. I just downloaded the update and hopefully will be malware-free for a little while. So much precious time development time was wasted because of this infection!
I've read about 3/4 of the book so far and I completely agree with the reviewer's assessment. It's very cleanly and clearly written, with many things explained in a concise and elegant style. For example, Ierusalimschy's explanation of closures allowed me to immediately grasp them and appreciate why they are useful. I remember reading about them way back years ago in Larry Wall's book 'Programming Perl', and was remained rather confused about the concept. I don't know if the additional years of experience helped, but the clear style of the Lua book certainly did.
Using a scripting language for enhancing and extending a complex project just seems to be a given for most serious projects these days, and after surveying the field, I considered only two main choices: Python and Lua. Python is also really well designed and powerful, but I decided to go with Lua because it does pretty much everything I need it to do, does it very well, but best of all, it is so very small. These days when even the most basic projects can quickly grow into complex, interconnected monstrosities with a zillion dependencies, I believe that the values of small and simple are more important than ever. So for that reason especially, I'm really excited about Lua and the prospect for using it more effectively after I finish swallowing this Blue PIL.
mhack
I've been a very happy owner of a ThinkPad for almost a year now, mostly because its excellent GNU-Linux compatibility. But Frank Kardonski's statement just lost me as a future Lenovo customer. I'll be looking elsewhere for my next laptop purchase.
I propose Missoula, Montana for next Silicon Valley, in hopes that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This has long been such a beautiful place to live that many PhDs choose to live here in humble poverty instead of seeking fortunes elsewhere (myself included). So all you rich people and nerds, come check it out! There's plenty of room to grow in Montana and thanks to global warming, the weather in Missoula just gets warmer each year!
The term hacker is established and apt. It would be a mistake and most likely a failure to try to establish a different name. The ambiguity in the meaning is normal and based in reality. Consider a similar term, 'rebel'. This can also take on very negative connotations in certain contexts, like for example where rebel militias may have engaged in executions and torture. But it would be silly to drop the usage of the term 'rebel' in response to something like that. Hackers just need to keep hacking the public perception of their name, just like they hack computer systems to improve them over time.
mhack
mhack
That's brilliant.
And the irony is that they stand to benefit the most in the long term from such increased access. As a graduate student in science, I can attest to the fact that online free student access to journal articles has UTTERLY TRANSFORMED my ability to make use of the scientific literature. I believe that this is especially true for interdisciplinary research.
Futhermore, I confidently predict that we will see a large burst of scientific productivity in the years ahead that is a direct consequence of this online free access. The difference from the way things were done in the past is simply profound. I can download, scan, absorb and reference hundreds and hundreds of journal articles in a way that simply wasn't possible before. And this comes just in the nick time to help deal with the increasing avalanche of scientific literature.
Creating free access to all scientific journal articles is probably one of the most rewarding investments our society could make.
mhack
No need to do that either. Before too long, we'll have kick-ass combat robots with rapidly evolving artificial intelligence. Because they will have even less empathy and wisdom than either of you two twits, they will just cleanly pop a few rounds through this guy's skull, along with yours and the rest of the other slow and stupid humans on the planet.
mhack