I use both a cell phone and a PDA. They simply have requirements that are contradictory with each other, at least until technology advances to where one can project images into the air.
For a cell phone, I want it to be as small as possible. This is so I can carry it around with me wherever I go.
My PDA, however, I prefer with a decently large screen. I have a 320x240 screen, and that's only because I don't want to spend more money. That way I can read things without having to either hold it really close to my face or hitting page-down every other line. I use my PDA to read books in a nice portable format [mobipocket]. I would not want to do this on the screen of any cell phone, and if you put a screen this size on a cell phone, I would not find it comfortable to carry around in my pocket [my PDA travels in my backpack, not my pocket].
After reading the article all of this is based on one result and a bit of speculation. However, if true, I would hope Google quickly finds a way to block this.
What would be funny is if Google could detect when it is Microsoft sending a query through their system and return random results. Or return 5000 results all of which are redirects back to the MSN search page. And of course, Microsoft can't complain about such a thing because in doing so they'd admit they're trying to use Google's results.
I wonder how long some of the less intellegent MSN users would spend at the search page clicking on links that redirected back to the MSN search page?
The answer here is "complexity". I do some scientific computing (have done chemistry, then materials science, now doing photonic devices) and there's always more you want to be able to consider. Of course, the best I've used is an 8-processor SGI machine (although that one was a bit old - I think the 2-processor opteron system I'm using now is actually better). But especially with the materials studies, ideally we wanted to do everything with full quantum-mechanical calculations. which turns into gigantic matrices, even for a system of 100 atoms or so. And even then we put strict limits on what orbitals we consider and all that good stuff.
Slightly more concrete example - right now with my photonics simulations (finite element) on my dual-opteron rig the max I can handle is about 180,000 elements (which means a (4*180000)x(4*180000) matrix with complex elements needs to be diagonalized, among other things), and it takes about half an hour for a standing-wave calculation. To do any time propogation, repeat same calculation in picosecond increments. And with the gridding I can do, for a 100 micron disc resonator in 2-D I have to use light at about 40 microns. To go to the 320nm wavelength these resonators are operating at, I'd need roughly 2 orders of magnitude more memory. There's also the time factor to be considered. As with any design process, one must iterate. Tweak a little here, run the program, rinse, repeat. How long are you willing to spend in this process before you feel something is "good enough"? The faster the computer spits the answer out, the more things you can try, and the more you can think things over and hopefully make it better.
And this is a single component in what can be a fairly complex integrated-photonics chip. [And might I mention again I've been working in 2-D this entire time instead of doing a full 3-D simulation?] You give me the computational power and I'll use it. And I'm an experimentalist doing fairly basic research who just wants to check some stuff in the computer before sinking a lot of time and effort into fabricating a test device.
On the other hand, I actually don't want to have one of the T100 supercomputers in our lab. That would mean I'd be spending all day writing code and designing complex simulations instead of in the lab getting my hands dirty.
And as for the commonality of problems requiring such computational power, I think almost any sort of simulation can easily use it. Consider more terms (everything I've done to date is horribly linearized - let's see some more terms in the Taylor expansion) to account for nonlinear behavior, grid things up finer to get more accurate results, consider more possibilities when dealing with chaotic behavior... I would hope any good scientist would find the possibilties endless.
Having had elementary school in both Taiwan and the US, I've gotten a bit of an insight into this difference in education.
In taiwan they _made_ us do more. Everyone was expected to memorize multiplication tables and recite poems and write essays and everything else. If you didn't do well, often you got your knuckles hit with a ruler. (This was many years ago - I don't think they do that anymore). And the parents were in on it too - most kids I knew didn't spend that much time running around outside or playing video games. The problem was that we were getting injected with information, but a lot of the connections simply weren't there. We did not really explore things. Also, (partly due to class size, there was something like 60 kids in my class for one teacher to deal with) there wasn't much thought given to different learning styles or learning speeds.
In contrast, when I went to elementary school in the US (this was after Taiwan) I was encouraged to explore what I learned. In part because I had learned some of it in Taiwan, I ended up well ahead of most others in my class. But instead of just blindly learning what got put in front of me I was instead allowed to explore things where they took me. I guess I could say I learned how to learn, without it being forced on me.
Of course, this was just elemenatary school. However, given the systems, if I had stayed at Taiwan, I probably would have learned more, but in the end, might not have a very good idea how to apply it, or how to explore new avenues of thought. In contrast, I feel the most important thing I got out of my education here was how to find connections between what I already know and new things, and how to incorporate those things into my "working" knowledge rather then just have an encyclopedia on call in my brain. I sometimes feel it's the difference between a computer and the person in front of the computer.
This is not to say that foreign students are necessarily worse then American ones. It just that I think the emphasis is different between the systems. I know foreign countries have consistently done better in tests and physic and math competitions and whatnot, but I don't find that to be all that good an indication of whether an educational system is "better" or not. What happens when you give those kids something which is completely unrelated to anything they've seen in a textbook? Can they start breaking down the problem and even be able to figure out what needs to be answered to solve the problem?
And the other big difference I find is the motivation of the students. In school here in the US, many of my classmates' primary goal was to play as many video games as possible, or always be watching TV, or something like that. And I feel if the student doesn't want to learn, there really isn't much we can do about it. It's something parents have to instill into their children. Here in America, I feel that if you really want to learn, the opportunities are still better then anywhere else. Elsewhere, like in Taiwan, school is set up more to make you learn no matter what.
Just like it's quite valid to have the FAA to make sure we don't have drunk pilots flying a 747 into a high school, I think it's quite valid to put some regulations on any space vehicles a company wants to launch. It'd make people feel a bit safer if they know that some third party (in this case the government, which is reasonably trustworthy on these things) has made some sort of inspection of a rocket saying that unless something goes horribly wrong it won't be dropping a tail fin into your living room.
The article and gist of the original posting to Slashdot is that there are regulations (nominally safety ones, we'll see if that's the same in a few years) that the government is putting (and has already had) in place to ensure peoples' safety around these vehicles which will be dropping from 100km above the ground. I don't recall any mention of taxes.
Back to the FAA. Its rules may be a bit outdated, and it might be a big dinosaur of a bureacracy now, but it's there to make air travel safe. It's there so that when I'm shopping for airline tickets I don't have to wonder whether United Airlines has been maintaining its airliners correctly so it won't fall apart the next time a hard landing happens. Yes, the FAA taxes airports. But the money to run a national air traffic network and to hire and pay thousands of inspectors has to come from somewhere.
You keep your government conspiracy theories. I'd still rather have the safety regulations then not.
In a closed system like a space station the water is recycled endlessly. There really isn't any "waste" water, it just gets filtered and such and reused.
In the end, there needs to be some expendable which would need to be refilled in order to have reaction mass for propulsion. In the end, it's probably more efficient to only transport rocket fuel and liquid oxygen up from the Earth rather then water to be split into hydrogen and oxygen.
Antimatter-matter reaction might release vast amounts of energy, but how much energy does it take to create/store/transport/control the antimatter? Last I checked it takes a rather large particle accelerator to make antimatter. It's probably the ultimate in energy density, but it may not be all that efficient (with technology realizable in the near-future, at least).
Hence the second X prize for reaching orbit. I remember hearing something about it during the first launch of SS1. If I remember correctly, it's going to be for $50 million, too. Someone with time to search on Google please check this.
I agree with the whole cheating thing. I started played around beta 3, when cheating wasn't nearly as widespread. Then by the time 1.0/1.1 rolled around it was actually somewhat difficult to find servers where there weren't cheaters. Or maybe a bunch of people just got really good. This may just be my ego talking, but I doubt that many people can get that much better then me when I'm sure many weren't as experienced as I was on it. So I stopped playing. I tried to start back up again around January but after such a long time away from the game I simply could not play at the level I was used to playing at, and it frustrated me almost as much as the cheaters did. I know what people mean by the people who are simply too good - I used to be one of them. There's a pride that goes with honing your skills to a razor blade sharpness, but along with that is a huge frustration at the cheaters who come along and put all that work to naught. Although I personally tried to get on the team with the more inexperienced players. I loved single-handedly pulling out all those improbable wins where it always ended up me against most of the other team. And of course the Counterstrike has ruined me for any other FPS's. Maybe with this new CS I may pick it up again but I doubt it since I'm no longer a high school/college student that can spend 4-5 hours a day playing.
He actually came out with the sucessor to the Battlecruiser series a year or so ago, called Universal Combat. I haven't tried it yet because the requirements are a bit steep and a new computer isn't quite in my budget yet.
I don't block ads, even though I can. I find them amusing, for the most part. I do block popups because they are very disruptive. Also now that ads start using sound and whatnot, I disable stuff so that they don't make annoying noises. So in summary, as long as they are not annoying about it, I don't mind ads.
Once when I was gone my sister managed to set the case on fire. Large scorch marks along the side (and inside of the case), but everything worked fine afterwards.
As for intentional abuse, once at a tech fair in order to demonstrate a computer (old one) we took it out of its case and set it up with wires running everywhere with little labels and such. Then I opened up the HD, and then we turned it on, and I ran a little program I wrote which makes the HD head seek back and forth on purpose. Amazing thing is the HD survived (I attribute it partially to the fact that the head seeking back and forth prevented the little kids gawking at the thing from actually trying to touch it with their fingers). Not sure about the durability of the drive, though. The computer was going to be scrapped anyways, and other then a quick check when we brought all the equipment back from the fair, I'm not sure it ever got used again.
I second the nearsighted advantage. I'm extremely nearsighted, but wear glasses. And with my glasses off, I can do optical fiber work which everyone else in the lab needs to do under the microscope, which means I work a lot faster and have a much better depth of view. Of course, I'm a special case, most people don't have jobs which occassionaly require them to align objects to within a few microns....
Granted, this is judging by his own words. But I seriously think Lance is a masochist at heart. From the interviews I've read, he lives for the pain and suffering of the Tour. Kinda makes you wonder about the other 200 odd competitors.
I'm sure there is doping going on in the bicycling world. But the big competitors like Lance and Ulrich are probably clean, if nothing else because they're in the spotlight so much. This isn't a case like Sammy Sosa's bat which broke apart for everyone to see the insides, this is closer to the allegations against Barry Bonds, where all the evidence is anecdotal and quite circumstantial at best. I still adhere to the whole "innocent until proven guilty" line. Until you show solid proof that something is wrong, I'm not going to go around smearing people. But unfortunately, in this world sometimes being successful is enough to get your name reviled, from jealously or whatever.
At least in this statement he sounds reasonable (from June 17). He's worried about viruses, spyware, and such, but realizes the potential for p2p networks. Haven't been able to find the stuff opposing p2p yet, but searching senate writings is a grand pain.
1) during winter sun is weaker, would get less power
2) I'm sure some things, like the batteries, are affected by the temperature. In general lower temperatures increase activation energy barriers, so there's a chance the batteries will be weaker as well
4) Temperature gradient between relatively hot parts of operating rover (such as computer equipment, etc) and outside air will stress the rovers; also temperature cycling from turning off at night and turning back on in daytime will take the rover's equipment along a fairly large range of temperatures which is a good way to break delicate equipment.
3) I sure don't want to be chipping at rocks when it's -100C.... But then again the rovers probably don't care about frostbite as much
I probably use it more then the ALT or the CAPS LOCK keys. It's set to switch between my virtual desktops on FVWM, so I end up pressing them all the time to switch back and forth between different things.
I grew up on an IBM XT keyboard where the only arrow keys were the ones on the numberpad. To this day I still prefer that configuration for arrow keys - my fingers don't get in each others' way as much. Also useful to keying every single counterstrike command that I'd normally use to be easily reachable with one hand, but that's another thing entirely.
I'm probably one of the few people left in the world who always sets bios and software to default to num-lock "off".
I used to run a linux computer on 256 MB of RAM and no swap. Turned out it was a bad idea when playing with Gimp. I once tried to open a large image file which ended up taking on the order of 8 hours to load (I basically went to sleep and when I got back up it hadn't quite finished). From then on, I started implementing a swapfile.
If nothing else, now I have swap as a "just-in-case" measure so that in case I have to deal with something extremely memory intensive the computer won't slow to a crawl. I tend to implement swap using a swapfile, though, so that I can change it more easily, and in some cases turn off swapping.
Question is how do you deliniate when one "program" ends and another begins? At least when they zap primordial ooze to try to create life the individual "organisms" are clearly separated. And would the program be in assembly? Bytecode? Some programming language yet to be invented? There is unfortunately too many variables for such an experiment to work very well. At most you could try to scan for "begin" and "end" type commands and see if the stuff in between would also execute.
On the other hand, if someone does find a clever way to do the experiment, Monte-Carlo calculations would have just gotten a huge boost. And national labs would be buying huge hard drives instead of supercomputers.
Once this story gets out someone's going to realize that they can disguise an underground movement by naming it after a video game's bad guys. Then the FBI will think it's just a video game clan.
Slashdot Mirror
I use both a cell phone and a PDA. They simply have requirements that are contradictory with each other, at least until technology advances to where one can project images into the air. For a cell phone, I want it to be as small as possible. This is so I can carry it around with me wherever I go. My PDA, however, I prefer with a decently large screen. I have a 320x240 screen, and that's only because I don't want to spend more money. That way I can read things without having to either hold it really close to my face or hitting page-down every other line. I use my PDA to read books in a nice portable format [mobipocket]. I would not want to do this on the screen of any cell phone, and if you put a screen this size on a cell phone, I would not find it comfortable to carry around in my pocket [my PDA travels in my backpack, not my pocket].
After reading the article all of this is based on one result and a bit of speculation. However, if true, I would hope Google quickly finds a way to block this.
What would be funny is if Google could detect when it is Microsoft sending a query through their system and return random results. Or return 5000 results all of which are redirects back to the MSN search page. And of course, Microsoft can't complain about such a thing because in doing so they'd admit they're trying to use Google's results.
I wonder how long some of the less intellegent MSN users would spend at the search page clicking on links that redirected back to the MSN search page?
The answer here is "complexity". I do some scientific computing (have done chemistry, then materials science, now doing photonic devices) and there's always more you want to be able to consider. Of course, the best I've used is an 8-processor SGI machine (although that one was a bit old - I think the 2-processor opteron system I'm using now is actually better). But especially with the materials studies, ideally we wanted to do everything with full quantum-mechanical calculations. which turns into gigantic matrices, even for a system of 100 atoms or so. And even then we put strict limits on what orbitals we consider and all that good stuff.
Slightly more concrete example - right now with my photonics simulations (finite element) on my dual-opteron rig the max I can handle is about 180,000 elements (which means a (4*180000)x(4*180000) matrix with complex elements needs to be diagonalized, among other things), and it takes about half an hour for a standing-wave calculation. To do any time propogation, repeat same calculation in picosecond increments. And with the gridding I can do, for a 100 micron disc resonator in 2-D I have to use light at about 40 microns. To go to the 320nm wavelength these resonators are operating at, I'd need roughly 2 orders of magnitude more memory. There's also the time factor to be considered. As with any design process, one must iterate. Tweak a little here, run the program, rinse, repeat. How long are you willing to spend in this process before you feel something is "good enough"? The faster the computer spits the answer out, the more things you can try, and the more you can think things over and hopefully make it better.
And this is a single component in what can be a fairly complex integrated-photonics chip. [And might I mention again I've been working in 2-D this entire time instead of doing a full 3-D simulation?] You give me the computational power and I'll use it. And I'm an experimentalist doing fairly basic research who just wants to check some stuff in the computer before sinking a lot of time and effort into fabricating a test device.
On the other hand, I actually don't want to have one of the T100 supercomputers in our lab. That would mean I'd be spending all day writing code and designing complex simulations instead of in the lab getting my hands dirty.
And as for the commonality of problems requiring such computational power, I think almost any sort of simulation can easily use it. Consider more terms (everything I've done to date is horribly linearized - let's see some more terms in the Taylor expansion) to account for nonlinear behavior, grid things up finer to get more accurate results, consider more possibilities when dealing with chaotic behavior... I would hope any good scientist would find the possibilties endless.
Having had elementary school in both Taiwan and the US, I've gotten a bit of an insight into this difference in education.
In taiwan they _made_ us do more. Everyone was expected to memorize multiplication tables and recite poems and write essays and everything else. If you didn't do well, often you got your knuckles hit with a ruler. (This was many years ago - I don't think they do that anymore). And the parents were in on it too - most kids I knew didn't spend that much time running around outside or playing video games. The problem was that we were getting injected with information, but a lot of the connections simply weren't there. We did not really explore things. Also, (partly due to class size, there was something like 60 kids in my class for one teacher to deal with) there wasn't much thought given to different learning styles or learning speeds.
In contrast, when I went to elementary school in the US (this was after Taiwan) I was encouraged to explore what I learned. In part because I had learned some of it in Taiwan, I ended up well ahead of most others in my class. But instead of just blindly learning what got put in front of me I was instead allowed to explore things where they took me. I guess I could say I learned how to learn, without it being forced on me.
Of course, this was just elemenatary school. However, given the systems, if I had stayed at Taiwan, I probably would have learned more, but in the end, might not have a very good idea how to apply it, or how to explore new avenues of thought. In contrast, I feel the most important thing I got out of my education here was how to find connections between what I already know and new things, and how to incorporate those things into my "working" knowledge rather then just have an encyclopedia on call in my brain. I sometimes feel it's the difference between a computer and the person in front of the computer.
This is not to say that foreign students are necessarily worse then American ones. It just that I think the emphasis is different between the systems. I know foreign countries have consistently done better in tests and physic and math competitions and whatnot, but I don't find that to be all that good an indication of whether an educational system is "better" or not. What happens when you give those kids something which is completely unrelated to anything they've seen in a textbook? Can they start breaking down the problem and even be able to figure out what needs to be answered to solve the problem?
And the other big difference I find is the motivation of the students. In school here in the US, many of my classmates' primary goal was to play as many video games as possible, or always be watching TV, or something like that. And I feel if the student doesn't want to learn, there really isn't much we can do about it. It's something parents have to instill into their children. Here in America, I feel that if you really want to learn, the opportunities are still better then anywhere else. Elsewhere, like in Taiwan, school is set up more to make you learn no matter what.
Just like it's quite valid to have the FAA to make sure we don't have drunk pilots flying a 747 into a high school, I think it's quite valid to put some regulations on any space vehicles a company wants to launch. It'd make people feel a bit safer if they know that some third party (in this case the government, which is reasonably trustworthy on these things) has made some sort of inspection of a rocket saying that unless something goes horribly wrong it won't be dropping a tail fin into your living room.
The article and gist of the original posting to Slashdot is that there are regulations (nominally safety ones, we'll see if that's the same in a few years) that the government is putting (and has already had) in place to ensure peoples' safety around these vehicles which will be dropping from 100km above the ground. I don't recall any mention of taxes.
Back to the FAA. Its rules may be a bit outdated, and it might be a big dinosaur of a bureacracy now, but it's there to make air travel safe. It's there so that when I'm shopping for airline tickets I don't have to wonder whether United Airlines has been maintaining its airliners correctly so it won't fall apart the next time a hard landing happens. Yes, the FAA taxes airports. But the money to run a national air traffic network and to hire and pay thousands of inspectors has to come from somewhere.
You keep your government conspiracy theories. I'd still rather have the safety regulations then not.
In a closed system like a space station the water is recycled endlessly. There really isn't any "waste" water, it just gets filtered and such and reused. In the end, there needs to be some expendable which would need to be refilled in order to have reaction mass for propulsion. In the end, it's probably more efficient to only transport rocket fuel and liquid oxygen up from the Earth rather then water to be split into hydrogen and oxygen.
Antimatter-matter reaction might release vast amounts of energy, but how much energy does it take to create/store/transport/control the antimatter? Last I checked it takes a rather large particle accelerator to make antimatter. It's probably the ultimate in energy density, but it may not be all that efficient (with technology realizable in the near-future, at least).
Hence the second X prize for reaching orbit. I remember hearing something about it during the first launch of SS1. If I remember correctly, it's going to be for $50 million, too. Someone with time to search on Google please check this.
I agree with the whole cheating thing. I started played around beta 3, when cheating wasn't nearly as widespread. Then by the time 1.0/1.1 rolled around it was actually somewhat difficult to find servers where there weren't cheaters. Or maybe a bunch of people just got really good. This may just be my ego talking, but I doubt that many people can get that much better then me when I'm sure many weren't as experienced as I was on it. So I stopped playing. I tried to start back up again around January but after such a long time away from the game I simply could not play at the level I was used to playing at, and it frustrated me almost as much as the cheaters did. I know what people mean by the people who are simply too good - I used to be one of them. There's a pride that goes with honing your skills to a razor blade sharpness, but along with that is a huge frustration at the cheaters who come along and put all that work to naught. Although I personally tried to get on the team with the more inexperienced players. I loved single-handedly pulling out all those improbable wins where it always ended up me against most of the other team. And of course the Counterstrike has ruined me for any other FPS's. Maybe with this new CS I may pick it up again but I doubt it since I'm no longer a high school/college student that can spend 4-5 hours a day playing.
He actually came out with the sucessor to the Battlecruiser series a year or so ago, called Universal Combat. I haven't tried it yet because the requirements are a bit steep and a new computer isn't quite in my budget yet.
I don't block ads, even though I can. I find them amusing, for the most part. I do block popups because they are very disruptive. Also now that ads start using sound and whatnot, I disable stuff so that they don't make annoying noises. So in summary, as long as they are not annoying about it, I don't mind ads.
Once when I was gone my sister managed to set the case on fire. Large scorch marks along the side (and inside of the case), but everything worked fine afterwards. As for intentional abuse, once at a tech fair in order to demonstrate a computer (old one) we took it out of its case and set it up with wires running everywhere with little labels and such. Then I opened up the HD, and then we turned it on, and I ran a little program I wrote which makes the HD head seek back and forth on purpose. Amazing thing is the HD survived (I attribute it partially to the fact that the head seeking back and forth prevented the little kids gawking at the thing from actually trying to touch it with their fingers). Not sure about the durability of the drive, though. The computer was going to be scrapped anyways, and other then a quick check when we brought all the equipment back from the fair, I'm not sure it ever got used again.
The written language is universal. It's only the spoken dialects that differ.
I second the nearsighted advantage. I'm extremely nearsighted, but wear glasses. And with my glasses off, I can do optical fiber work which everyone else in the lab needs to do under the microscope, which means I work a lot faster and have a much better depth of view. Of course, I'm a special case, most people don't have jobs which occassionaly require them to align objects to within a few microns....
Granted, this is judging by his own words. But I seriously think Lance is a masochist at heart. From the interviews I've read, he lives for the pain and suffering of the Tour. Kinda makes you wonder about the other 200 odd competitors.
I'm sure there is doping going on in the bicycling world. But the big competitors like Lance and Ulrich are probably clean, if nothing else because they're in the spotlight so much. This isn't a case like Sammy Sosa's bat which broke apart for everyone to see the insides, this is closer to the allegations against Barry Bonds, where all the evidence is anecdotal and quite circumstantial at best. I still adhere to the whole "innocent until proven guilty" line. Until you show solid proof that something is wrong, I'm not going to go around smearing people. But unfortunately, in this world sometimes being successful is enough to get your name reviled, from jealously or whatever.
this link seems to work bettert .cfm?id=623&wit_id=51
http://judiciary.senate.gov/print_member_statemen
At least in this statement he sounds reasonable (from June 17). He's worried about viruses, spyware, and such, but realizes the potential for p2p networks. Haven't been able to find the stuff opposing p2p yet, but searching senate writings is a grand pain.
i d=623&wit_id=51
link: http://judiciary.senate.gov/member_statement.cfm?
darn, I forgot to format the above post. Hey, it's 3:30 in the morning - I'm allowed to be half asleep... wait.. I am... Stupid paper...
1) during winter sun is weaker, would get less power 2) I'm sure some things, like the batteries, are affected by the temperature. In general lower temperatures increase activation energy barriers, so there's a chance the batteries will be weaker as well 4) Temperature gradient between relatively hot parts of operating rover (such as computer equipment, etc) and outside air will stress the rovers; also temperature cycling from turning off at night and turning back on in daytime will take the rover's equipment along a fairly large range of temperatures which is a good way to break delicate equipment. 3) I sure don't want to be chipping at rocks when it's -100C.... But then again the rovers probably don't care about frostbite as much
I probably use it more then the ALT or the CAPS LOCK keys. It's set to switch between my virtual desktops on FVWM, so I end up pressing them all the time to switch back and forth between different things.
I grew up on an IBM XT keyboard where the only arrow keys were the ones on the numberpad. To this day I still prefer that configuration for arrow keys - my fingers don't get in each others' way as much. Also useful to keying every single counterstrike command that I'd normally use to be easily reachable with one hand, but that's another thing entirely. I'm probably one of the few people left in the world who always sets bios and software to default to num-lock "off".
This reminds me of the passkey system used in Johnny Mnemonic where a sequence of 3 random pictures unlocks the files.
I used to run a linux computer on 256 MB of RAM and no swap. Turned out it was a bad idea when playing with Gimp. I once tried to open a large image file which ended up taking on the order of 8 hours to load (I basically went to sleep and when I got back up it hadn't quite finished). From then on, I started implementing a swapfile. If nothing else, now I have swap as a "just-in-case" measure so that in case I have to deal with something extremely memory intensive the computer won't slow to a crawl. I tend to implement swap using a swapfile, though, so that I can change it more easily, and in some cases turn off swapping.
Question is how do you deliniate when one "program" ends and another begins? At least when they zap primordial ooze to try to create life the individual "organisms" are clearly separated. And would the program be in assembly? Bytecode? Some programming language yet to be invented? There is unfortunately too many variables for such an experiment to work very well. At most you could try to scan for "begin" and "end" type commands and see if the stuff in between would also execute. On the other hand, if someone does find a clever way to do the experiment, Monte-Carlo calculations would have just gotten a huge boost. And national labs would be buying huge hard drives instead of supercomputers.
Once this story gets out someone's going to realize that they can disguise an underground movement by naming it after a video game's bad guys. Then the FBI will think it's just a video game clan.