Although my connection isn't as good as the AC who replied I download 900mb files in less than two hours. In fact 4 episodes of Lost downloaded in about 2 hours the other day so assuming that Bit-torrent can't download in real time is flawed.
If you are going to multiply the time by the people in the swarm then you have to remember two things: it gets faster with more people and when you compare to broadcast you have to make a fair comparison of the bandwidth involved. The people in the swarm are making point-to-point connections across a shared medium. The broadcast case uses the whole of the medium.
For the second reason it would make sense to replace broadcast tv with multi-cast over a shared network. To correct your assumption that nobody is doing this yet you should look up the BBC iPlayer. It's caused quite a stir amongst uk isps specifically because they are doing this on a large (national) scale.
It's sounds like the unix philosophy of small tools to do individual jobs. There hasn't been a good way to transform the collections of pipes and tools that we use on (mainly) textual data into a GUI for non-textual data.
I thought the Monad shell that Microsoft dropped from Vista sounded like a step in the right direction. Although it still operates as components running in a shell it formalises how to encoded the types that each tool can operate over.
Implementation of your idea would require extending this type information beyond stdin and stdout to interfaces for using windows / widgets as input/output.
It's a persuasive idea and I've liked it each time I've heard it. From Amiga back when they added the datatypes library to 3.0, from Microsoft when they first started describing Cairo (and again with Vista and again next time).
I'm not going to argue that Hofstadter presents a compelling alternative, but that doesn't add anything to Kurweil's points.
The crux of the matter is that Kurweil has not presented technical arguments leading to reasonable estimates. The nice thing about the quote from the article is that it explains quite simply why Kurzweil's argument is religious in nature. It presents the motive that he avoids mentioning.
If any of Kurweil's arguments had substance and lead to reasonable arguments then he would have to do something better than handwave the AI debate and say it will be done within some timeframe because that is what history suggests (based on the solution to other incomparable problems). As financial advisors have to explain by law "past performance is no indicator of future trends"...
The interview contains one of the best descriptions of the Singularity religion that I've heard:
I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.
You make some very interesting points. Your emphasis of the description "one of the traits" led me to do a little background reading. Nothing complex, just the wiki page on E. coli and it appears that you are quite correct. I think most scientists would describe this as a separate strain of E. coli rather than a new species.
On rereading the article again I would agree with you that there is an agenda there. I don't believe it was present in the original work by Lenski and I'm quite used to stripping editorial bias out of second hand sources (especially crap like New Scientist) so it had to be pointed out quite explicitly to me.
I had previously dismissed the "poke-in-the-eye" comment as journalistic spin, but you make a good point. There is a definite anti-creationist agenda in the article - which does not appear in the original work. So to some degree we have been arguing at cross purposes.
So from there the rest of your argument about the article follows naturally. Well spotted, and an interesting observation.
I don't think that you've read the article even a single time, although I'm sure that you've looked at the words. You don't seem to understand anything outside of your tiny bubble of assumption.
1. All experiments are based on an agenda. This is called a hypothosis. You should try and "read" something on the scientific method.
2. The definition of species is standard. It does not come from the experimenters but is part of a normal taxonomy of bacteria.
3. They have created an experiement to fit the definition. See point 1. See "scientific method".
4. Their experiment was a success. They showed the development of a complex trait under lab conditions. This demonstrates a crucial piece of evolution in action.
5. They did not announce they had knocked out creationism. Try "reading" the article just once.
This is a classic straw man argument. It is not convincing.
I covered this in the other reply if you look at the adjacent branch. When an organism is complex (like a mammel) then the ability to metabolize a different substance is quite a minor change. But for an organism that is so simple that it can only reproduce and metabolism a single compound, the change to metabolize a different comound is major. So yes, while the distinction of what is a species is subjective at this level it is quite clean division and the change is to a different type of lifeform.
Yes, that is the point of evolution - drastic changes coming from the cumulative effect of small changes. It doesn't change the fact that after many generations there was a new species, rather than a variation on a previously existing one.
Perhaps you don't consider the change of nutrient important, and for an organism the size of a mammal it would be much less important. But given the very low complexity of the bacteria (eating and reproducing) this is a very drastic change.
It says that they're still figuring out if the change was a random, incredibly rare mutation, or the result of many small changes
That's not true. They know it was a cumulation of smaller events with more-likely odds rather than a single unlikely event. This is because they can replay it from a sample of the 20000th generation. If it were a single unlikely event it wouldn't be replayable and would be equally likely from any of their population samples.
You assume that people come here for cool rational scientific debate. If so I pity them as this is not really the place. For childish religion bashing it is a premier venue on the net.
With all due respect you are not the target audience for an academic journal. The main audience for a journal is other scientists working in that field. The "trickle-down" effect that disseminates work is more likely to happen through textbooks than journals. This is not to diss your experience, I can see from your homepage that you know a lot about software and computers, but you are not actively researching within CS.
Your point about wikipedia is interesting. I've seen the same myself, that it contains much higher quality information than is to be expected from how it is put together. But this mirrors academic publication as well. The submitter (who clearly does not know very much) presented his argument as if journals were the only venue to publish in, and it was some kind of hinderance that it takes years to finalise. This is very deliberate.
Workshops are a venue for very quick turnaround, and also active work. The sessions at workshops tend to be more interactive and vocal than those at more prestigious venues and good work is hammered out. Once it becomes more stable it is presented at a conference, where it receives a much more rigerous review and so has a higher prestige when accepted.
Journals serve a difference purpose, they are "archiving" results in a sense. They are fixing in place the view of a subject so that it can be codified (into textbook form) for dissemenation to the next generation. It is not meant to be cutting-edge - it is meant to be solid. And if it takes a couple of years extra to reach that state of maturity then it doesn't affect the progression and teaching of that information as that occurs on timescales that are much longer.
One consequence of this is that plagarism is easier to detect. Even when it is not outright theft but an author trying to game the system by double publishing work it shows up quickly in search queries. I'm aware of (reviewed) two papers recently that were rejected because another reviewer spotted the previous publication of the work.
The submitter doesn't seem to know as much about academia as he believes. What kind of scientific publication is "obsolete"? More importantly when does that change occur?
The purpose of restricting published work to that which has passed peer review is to ensure that results do not become obsolete. They must uphold the same quality standards that we expect from all scientific disciplines - not blog-style fads that have become popular and at some stage will cease to be popular. The body of the literature should contain timeless observations that have resulted from hard study. These do not become obsolete, even if they are superceded by better methods.
Yeah maybe it's become common now. I seemed to have it for a long time while nobody else did. Of course it may not be the feedback, they may just roll things out to groups of randomly chosen beta testers so it's just pot luck.
It's good that other people have it now as it is a really useful feature and once it is standard gtalk will be a lot more useful for people in an office environment.
You should try asking them. All I wanted for Christmas was group chat and now I seem to be in some sort of group chat beta. While most of my friends can't initiate group chats I've got some extra icons in my user interface that lets me set them up. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure how I got into it other than I sent some feedback using the form buried in the gmail help and it magically appeared.
So who know, if you ask for it you might just get it.
But nVidia didn't claim that the GPU would replace the CPU. They even went to lengths to deny it in the article. The version that the poster linked to was void of details, a better description is available at the Inquirer who weren't under NDA.
The hi-light of the press conference seems to be the censored part revealing that nVidia will be fab'ing ARM-11s in the near future in direct competition with the Intel Atom. Looks like they're not planning to go down without a fight...
It sounds as if you and I share a method of working. I was a big fan of vts for a long time as well, the only thing that annoyed me was the pause and click to get onto vt7 to use firefox.
I've been down the route the other poster suggests of playing with bizarre and exotic window managers to get what I want. After all of that I run a really standard desktop, so this would be my suggestion to you. Fire up gnome. You can map a key that will push any window into fullscreen mode; for some versions of gnome it is not exposed in the keyboard shortcuts tool so you will need to use gconf to edit their "registry" type thing.
One you have this choose either xterm or gterm. Xterm has the advantage of being noticably faster at scrolling and updates - roughly vt speed. If you're used to a vt then you will find gterm a bit laggy. Choose a decent font, if necessary go and download one that works well for you. After playing around with alot I ended up using Monospace-11 which was the default anyway.
For fast switching, run full-screen terminals on each workspace and map alt-1, alt-2 as workspace switching. Now you have the speed and convenience of vts but with overlapping windows for firefox when you want it. The only thing that will really bug you is that fullscreen windows are in a different layer in gnome so they always appear over on-top windows. Bloody stupid design descision aimed at the 3 people who want kiosks rather than the thousands of people who want full-screen terminals with floating information panels.
Sorry but I can't help with your selection issues as I avoid using a mouse:)
You shouldn't assume that VPN access is per-machine. Our network for example authenticates each user on the VPN *and* ensures that the machine is registered. I don't think that is uncommon.
Your attitude is very strange. You are so blinded by the insistence that people should not complain about free software that are you missing the obvious point that the OP made. A non-gui, non-desktop-aware application is bound to a desktop-specific library. Whether or not it is possible to hack it into shape is irrelevant. It is bizarre that the developers have taken that decision, and it creates unnecessary work for their user base. Put your religious blinkers down for a second and consider the actual need for libgnome in that project.
I think that you missed his point - ImageMagik is a command-line tool for image manipulation. It doesn't have a GUI (or didn't last time I used it). He is not complaining about dependencies - but about unnecessary dependencies.
btw I've never heard someone with so much religosity on the subject, outside of this bizarre context that is slashdot you would be quite scary:) Thanks for the douche bag comment. I really don't see any reason to get personal here. I added the smiley that you deliberately left out of the quote so that there wasn't any ambiguity. Your level of fervour on the subject of copyright protection does reach religious levels. Maybe you can't see that because your social skills are underdeveloped (yes, that actually is a personal comment). I base this on you selectively quoting the rest of my post and ignoring the crux of the argument. Does it make sense for you to quote the part about the pool of people shrinking (but not the argument about why) just so that you can ask why?
Slashdot Mirror
Although my connection isn't as good as the AC who replied I download 900mb files in less than two hours. In fact 4 episodes of Lost downloaded in about 2 hours the other day so assuming that Bit-torrent can't download in real time is flawed.
If you are going to multiply the time by the people in the swarm then you have to remember two things: it gets faster with more people and when you compare to broadcast you have to make a fair comparison of the bandwidth involved. The people in the swarm are making point-to-point connections across a shared medium. The broadcast case uses the whole of the medium.
For the second reason it would make sense to replace broadcast tv with multi-cast over a shared network. To correct your assumption that nobody is doing this yet you should look up the BBC iPlayer. It's caused quite a stir amongst uk isps specifically because they are doing this on a large (national) scale.
It's sounds like the unix philosophy of small tools to do individual jobs. There hasn't been a good way to transform the collections of pipes and tools that we use on (mainly) textual data into a GUI for non-textual data.
:)
I thought the Monad shell that Microsoft dropped from Vista sounded like a step in the right direction. Although it still operates as components running in a shell it formalises how to encoded the types that each tool can operate over.
Implementation of your idea would require extending this type information beyond stdin and stdout to interfaces for using windows / widgets as input/output.
It's a persuasive idea and I've liked it each time I've heard it. From Amiga back when they added the datatypes library to 3.0, from Microsoft when they first started describing Cairo (and again with Vista and again next time).
But still, one day it will happen...
I'm not going to argue that Hofstadter presents a compelling alternative, but that doesn't add anything to Kurweil's points.
The crux of the matter is that Kurweil has not presented technical arguments leading to reasonable estimates. The nice thing about the quote from the article is that it explains quite simply why Kurzweil's argument is religious in nature. It presents the motive that he avoids mentioning.
If any of Kurweil's arguments had substance and lead to reasonable arguments then he would have to do something better than handwave the AI debate and say it will be done within some timeframe because that is what history suggests (based on the solution to other incomparable problems). As financial advisors have to explain by law "past performance is no indicator of future trends"...
You make some very interesting points. Your emphasis of the description "one of the traits" led me to do a little background reading. Nothing complex, just the wiki page on E. coli and it appears that you are quite correct. I think most scientists would describe this as a separate strain of E. coli rather than a new species.
On rereading the article again I would agree with you that there is an agenda there. I don't believe it was present in the original work by Lenski and I'm quite used to stripping editorial bias out of second hand sources (especially crap like New Scientist) so it had to be pointed out quite explicitly to me.
I had previously dismissed the "poke-in-the-eye" comment as journalistic spin, but you make a good point. There is a definite anti-creationist agenda in the article - which does not appear in the original work. So to some degree we have been arguing at cross purposes.
So from there the rest of your argument about the article follows naturally. Well spotted, and an interesting observation.
1. All experiments are based on an agenda. This is called a hypothosis. You should try and "read" something on the scientific method.
2. The definition of species is standard. It does not come from the experimenters but is part of a normal taxonomy of bacteria.
3. They have created an experiement to fit the definition. See point 1. See "scientific method".
4. Their experiment was a success. They showed the development of a complex trait under lab conditions. This demonstrates a crucial piece of evolution in action.
5. They did not announce they had knocked out creationism. Try "reading" the article just once.
How ironic.
I covered this in the other reply if you look at the adjacent branch. When an organism is complex (like a mammel) then the ability to metabolize a different substance is quite a minor change. But for an organism that is so simple that it can only reproduce and metabolism a single compound, the change to metabolize a different comound is major. So yes, while the distinction of what is a species is subjective at this level it is quite clean division and the change is to a different type of lifeform.
They are a different species of bacteria, no longer E coli. Bacteria is a domain rather than a species.
Yes, that is the point of evolution - drastic changes coming from the cumulative effect of small changes. It doesn't change the fact that after many generations there was a new species, rather than a variation on a previously existing one.
Perhaps you don't consider the change of nutrient important, and for an organism the size of a mammal it would be much less important. But given the very low complexity of the bacteria (eating and reproducing) this is a very drastic change.
I think you've missed the point that the bacteria have changed drastically enough that the later generations are of a different species.
That's not true. They know it was a cumulation of smaller events with more-likely odds rather than a single unlikely event. This is because they can replay it from a sample of the 20000th generation. If it were a single unlikely event it wouldn't be replayable and would be equally likely from any of their population samples.
You assume that people come here for cool rational scientific debate. If so I pity them as this is not really the place. For childish religion bashing it is a premier venue on the net.
With all due respect you are not the target audience for an academic journal. The main audience for a journal is other scientists working in that field. The "trickle-down" effect that disseminates work is more likely to happen through textbooks than journals. This is not to diss your experience, I can see from your homepage that you know a lot about software and computers, but you are not actively researching within CS.
Your point about wikipedia is interesting. I've seen the same myself, that it contains much higher quality information than is to be expected from how it is put together. But this mirrors academic publication as well. The submitter (who clearly does not know very much) presented his argument as if journals were the only venue to publish in, and it was some kind of hinderance that it takes years to finalise. This is very deliberate.
Workshops are a venue for very quick turnaround, and also active work. The sessions at workshops tend to be more interactive and vocal than those at more prestigious venues and good work is hammered out. Once it becomes more stable it is presented at a conference, where it receives a much more rigerous review and so has a higher prestige when accepted.
Journals serve a difference purpose, they are "archiving" results in a sense. They are fixing in place the view of a subject so that it can be codified (into textbook form) for dissemenation to the next generation. It is not meant to be cutting-edge - it is meant to be solid. And if it takes a couple of years extra to reach that state of maturity then it doesn't affect the progression and teaching of that information as that occurs on timescales that are much longer.
One consequence of this is that plagarism is easier to detect. Even when it is not outright theft but an author trying to game the system by double publishing work it shows up quickly in search queries. I'm aware of (reviewed) two papers recently that were rejected because another reviewer spotted the previous publication of the work.
The submitter doesn't seem to know as much about academia as he believes. What kind of scientific publication is "obsolete"? More importantly when does that change occur?
The purpose of restricting published work to that which has passed peer review is to ensure that results do not become obsolete. They must uphold the same quality standards that we expect from all scientific disciplines - not blog-style fads that have become popular and at some stage will cease to be popular. The body of the literature should contain timeless observations that have resulted from hard study. These do not become obsolete, even if they are superceded by better methods.
Yeah maybe it's become common now. I seemed to have it for a long time while nobody else did. Of course it may not be the feedback, they may just roll things out to groups of randomly chosen beta testers so it's just pot luck.
It's good that other people have it now as it is a really useful feature and once it is standard gtalk will be a lot more useful for people in an office environment.
You should try asking them. All I wanted for Christmas was group chat and now I seem to be in some sort of group chat beta. While most of my friends can't initiate group chats I've got some extra icons in my user interface that lets me set them up. It's pretty cool, and I'm not sure how I got into it other than I sent some feedback using the form buried in the gmail help and it magically appeared.
So who know, if you ask for it you might just get it.
Never underestimate the strategic importance of a school at the beginning of World War III.
A bug that thinks? I find the very idea offensive
But nVidia didn't claim that the GPU would replace the CPU. They even went to lengths to deny it in the article. The version that the poster linked to was void of details, a better description is available at the Inquirer who weren't under NDA.
The hi-light of the press conference seems to be the censored part revealing that nVidia will be fab'ing ARM-11s in the near future in direct competition with the Intel Atom. Looks like they're not planning to go down without a fight...
Do you mean that the aliens will be from Italy? Then ... surely they are already amongst us!
It sounds as if you and I share a method of working. I was a big fan of vts for a long time as well, the only thing that annoyed me was the pause and click to get onto vt7 to use firefox.
:)
I've been down the route the other poster suggests of playing with bizarre and exotic window managers to get what I want. After all of that I run a really standard desktop, so this would be my suggestion to you. Fire up gnome. You can map a key that will push any window into fullscreen mode; for some versions of gnome it is not exposed in the keyboard shortcuts tool so you will need to use gconf to edit their "registry" type thing.
One you have this choose either xterm or gterm. Xterm has the advantage of being noticably faster at scrolling and updates - roughly vt speed. If you're used to a vt then you will find gterm a bit laggy. Choose a decent font, if necessary go and download one that works well for you. After playing around with alot I ended up using Monospace-11 which was the default anyway.
For fast switching, run full-screen terminals on each workspace and map alt-1, alt-2 as workspace switching. Now you have the speed and convenience of vts but with overlapping windows for firefox when you want it. The only thing that will really bug you is that fullscreen windows are in a different layer in gnome so they always appear over on-top windows. Bloody stupid design descision aimed at the 3 people who want kiosks rather than the thousands of people who want full-screen terminals with floating information panels.
Sorry but I can't help with your selection issues as I avoid using a mouse
You shouldn't assume that VPN access is per-machine. Our network for example authenticates each user on the VPN *and* ensures that the machine is registered. I don't think that is uncommon.
Two words.
Biotech startups.
In the question for fucks sake.
Your attitude is very strange. You are so blinded by the insistence that people should not complain about free software that are you missing the obvious point that the OP made. A non-gui, non-desktop-aware application is bound to a desktop-specific library. Whether or not it is possible to hack it into shape is irrelevant. It is bizarre that the developers have taken that decision, and it creates unnecessary work for their user base. Put your religious blinkers down for a second and consider the actual need for libgnome in that project.
I think that you missed his point - ImageMagik is a command-line tool for image manipulation. It doesn't have a GUI (or didn't last time I used it). He is not complaining about dependencies - but about unnecessary dependencies.