If a gene in a protozoan mutates into a new form that processes sugar better, or causes the host to swim faster, or in general be a better and more well adjusted individual, then that gene will spread through the population, causing all its hosts to swim faster. Thus you might in a way say that the host is just a way for gene to spread through the population. The gene doesn't care exactly why the host causes a faster spread of genes.
In humans, on the other hand, if you have a gene that will - what - cause you to want to explore space? Or mate with astronauts, or become a rocket scientist? That gene will have absolutly no effect on its own future, or the future of the human race. Instead, kids will want to become astronauts if Disney makes a cool film, with a cool space-exploring astronaut in the leading role. Or if Newsweek publishes an article showing how astronauts make most money, or become CEOs of companies, or are in general cool dudes.
Genes have very little to do with what happens to humans, and they have very little control of what happens to themselves.
Now, I agree with your second point. We have absolutely no way of knowing that e-coli do not also study quantum physics. All we know is that till now it seems that genes do have quite a lot of control of bacteria in the lab. So, if I offended any protozoan, I am sorry - protozoans, just as humans, might also not be controlled by their genes, but by their morals.
No. Humans are not a gene's way to make more genes. They might be "an idea's way to make more ideas", since what humans do is mainly governed by culture, not genes. But even that is simplistic, since the actual contents of ideas matters. Some are morals, beliefs or scientific theories, all of which can utterly change the trans mission patterns of ideas, and human dynamics in general.
Maybe I misunderstand something, but... It seems that this scheme will work ONLY IF the internet carried only VOIP packets. Then you can tag your own VOIP packets as precious, and the others' get lost. But the net carries many other packets - http, ftp, mail for instance. Won't the scheme that he describes make the net worse for all these other packets? I don't think that that will be implemented. Suddenly the whole net slows down.
Well, maybe this will kill the net as a whole.
Or if all traffic but the others' VOIP is tagged precious, VOIP will just disguise itself as mail. Or maybe all your traffic is tagged precious and everything that belongs to competitors as not - they already would have done that. This has nothing to do with VOIP.
Yes, as a chemist, you should realy know a lot about this stuff. I think only chemists really know their entropy well. I wish I really understood thermodynamics as chemists do....I need it.
And yet, I disagree. By and large the earth is a steady state system. It is true that part of the sunlight is stored in chemical bonds by plants, and some of these bonds might not be broken up at the same rate as they are created - if, for example we would currently be producing fossil fuels. It might also be that there is currently a mountain lake somewhere that is slowly filling up with rain water, and thus storing gravitational energy. Just as it could be that there is one that is emptying out. But overall that, I think, is a miniscule amount of the flow we talk about here. Most of the bonds that form are broken up, to produce other bonds and some heat. Most of the gravitational work that is done is released to produce kinetic energy and heat. Most of the kinetic energy is turned into heat. Therefore in my oppinion virtually all sunlight shining onto the earth is either reflected, or turns into heat while doing various other work on the way. Everything turns into heat, which is then radiated out into space as black body radiation.
Now lets turn to immidiate effects: I don't have numbers, but I bet that the first thing that happens to most photons arriving from the sun is that they are reflected, or heat something up. Putting up large scale solar pannels will affect reflection. It will not affect the heat created. If sunlight excites atomic bonds, it probably happens in the atmosphere, and in biological systems, though here I am not quite sure - does sunlight excite chemical bonds in the ground? If sunlight is stored as gravitational potential, it is through heating up of things which then rise up. Since heating should not be affected by solar pannels, this effect will not disappear. So, I do not see where a large scale effect of changing weather patterns would come from. A solar pannel has no more effect than a block of cement. Well, cement does change weather pattern by causing more heating and changing water flow. But this is not a result of "producing stored energy".
It is easier to see where large scale effects of fossil fuel/nulear energy would come from. Both introduce an additional source of heat into the system. Of course that heat is nothing compared to the heating effect of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Eventually, though, we might have to deal with the ultimate waste product - heat. You really can't easily get rid of that. (as pointed out by Assimov, though I forgot in which book...)
A known amount of energy is radiated from the sun to the earth. Luckily, exactly the same amount of energy is radiated from the earth out into space. So, what matters here is not energy, but instead entropy differences. High frequency photons hit the earth, and that energy is then radiated out as low frequency photons. On the way of becoming low-frequency photons, they can power some things on earth. Now, if sunlight heats up a solar pannel, or a part of the roof, that pannel still gets hot (thermodynamics), and still will create rising air currents, still creating winds. You also get electricity, which powers, say cars, producing heat, producing air currents, creating winds, and driving on streets moving air arround, creating air-currents. So, you will change the weather patterns, but it isn't as if you use up all the power of the sun or the wind. Thermodynamics... it's complicated.
gzip is really horrible in error recovery. Trying to recover data from a damaged tar.gzip file is hard, because gzip does not keep byte boundaries. bzip2 is much better in this respect, and it is much better to recover from problems. Never backup using tar.gz - use tar.bz2 instead. Not on topic, but I had to say it, 'cause I've been hurt (nothing like finding that your.tar.gz backup was damaged, just when you need it)
I remember the Amiga RAM disk that would survive resets. Why does such a thing not exist for Linux? Does the RAM on a PC get erased more on warm reboot or on cold reboot?
I would just automatically add a copyright notice to off-site referrers, i.e. generate images with copyright notices. If trafic becomes too high, you could use another solution, but it does hot sound as if that's the problem. I think linking is much preferable to copying, since you still have control over the images, and can track who sees them.
A desktop search engine will replace the file browser. This will give the company that gets the marketshare a platform that all users use whenever they interact with files. On top of that platform you can now do anything - make your own API, distributed it with an integrated web browser, or movie-viewer, and in general get all the nice benefits that microsoft gets from having a virtual OS monopoly. It is the whole reason why the browser war started, now on the desktop. There is a sequence of events from where the user wants to do something till he/she gets it done. Once you get you foot in the door somewhere, you control much of the process, and can start milking the cow.
Where "living" means confined to a point? People walk around. They might have friends a few blocks away, maybe they jog. Radiation might fall with the inverse square, but what happens when you integrate over the 1km radius in which people tend to "live"?
Send it to an e-mail account in europe, with a few interesting words added (I'm not sure that's even neccessary). Delete it at the destination with an automated script. Retrieve it a couple of years later using the freedom of information act.
1. This assumes that the people voting for a certain party don't have more animosity towards the media. This, for example, happens in Israel, where right-wing votes see the media as left-wing, and like having their exit polls fail. 2. And, if the exit polls don't agree with the vote what happens? All voting is done again? And if exit polls by one outlet agree with the polls, but those of another do not? 3. In order to rig an election you just need a few percent in selected booths, which will then not be detectable.
Slashdot Mirror
To make things more interesting, german also has "milliarde", "billiarde", "trilliarde"
milliarde = 1000 million (UK) = 1 billion (US) = 10^9
billiarde = 1000 billion (UK) = 1 quadrillion (US)= 10^15
trilliarde = 1000 trillion (UK) = 1 sextillion= 10^21
(It seems that this is also sometimes used in english - milliard, billiard, triliard(?))
John Conway
No, it wouldn't be the wrong time. It would nevertheless be wrong:
protozoan n. pl. protozoans or protozoa (-z) also protozoons
Any of a large group of single-celled, usually microscopic, eukaryotic organisms, such as amoebas, ciliates, flagellates, and sporozoans.
It would, however, be the right time to point out that e-coli aren't protozoa! Sorry.
If a gene in a protozoan mutates into a new form that processes sugar better, or causes the host to swim faster, or in general be a better and more well adjusted individual, then that gene will spread through the population, causing all its hosts to swim faster. Thus you might in a way say that the host is just a way for gene to spread through the population. The gene doesn't care exactly why the host causes a faster spread of genes.
In humans, on the other hand, if you have a gene that will - what - cause you to want to explore space? Or mate with astronauts, or become a rocket scientist? That gene will have absolutly no effect on its own future, or the future of the human race. Instead, kids will want to become astronauts if Disney makes a cool film, with a cool space-exploring astronaut in the leading role. Or if Newsweek publishes an article showing how astronauts make most money, or become CEOs of companies, or are in general cool dudes.
Genes have very little to do with what happens to humans, and they have very little control of what happens to themselves.
Now, I agree with your second point. We have absolutely no way of knowing that e-coli do not also study quantum physics. All we know is that till now it seems that genes do have quite a lot of control of bacteria in the lab.
So, if I offended any protozoan, I am sorry - protozoans, just as humans, might also not be controlled by their genes, but by their morals.
No. Humans are not a gene's way to make more genes.
They might be "an idea's way to make more ideas", since what humans do is mainly governed by culture, not genes. But even that is simplistic, since the actual contents of ideas matters. Some are morals, beliefs or scientific theories, all of which can utterly change the trans mission patterns of ideas, and human dynamics in general.
But what about non-VOIP packets?
Maybe I misunderstand something, but...
It seems that this scheme will work ONLY IF the internet carried only VOIP packets. Then you can tag your own VOIP packets as precious, and the others' get lost. But the net carries many other packets - http, ftp, mail for instance. Won't the scheme that he describes make the net worse for all these other packets? I don't think that that will be implemented. Suddenly the whole net slows down.
Well, maybe this will kill the net as a whole.
Or if all traffic but the others' VOIP is tagged precious, VOIP will just disguise itself as mail. Or maybe all your traffic is tagged precious and everything that belongs to competitors as not - they already would have done that. This has nothing to do with VOIP.
Am I misunderstanding?
Yes, as a chemist, you should realy know a lot about this stuff. I think only chemists really know their entropy well. I wish I really understood thermodynamics as chemists do....I need it.
And yet, I disagree. By and large the earth is a steady state system. It is true that part of the sunlight is stored in chemical bonds by plants, and some of these bonds might not be broken up at the same rate as they are created - if, for example we would currently be producing fossil fuels. It might also be that there is currently a mountain lake somewhere that is slowly filling up with rain water, and thus storing gravitational energy. Just as it could be that there is one that is emptying out. But overall that, I think, is a miniscule amount of the flow we talk about here. Most of the bonds that form are broken up, to produce other bonds and some heat. Most of the gravitational work that is done is released to produce kinetic energy and heat. Most of the kinetic energy is turned into heat. Therefore in my oppinion virtually all sunlight shining onto the earth is either reflected, or turns into heat while doing various other work on the way. Everything turns into heat, which is then radiated out into space as black body radiation.
Now lets turn to immidiate effects: I don't have numbers, but I bet that the first thing that happens to most photons arriving from the sun is that they are reflected, or heat something up. Putting up large scale solar pannels will affect reflection. It will not affect the heat created. If sunlight excites atomic bonds, it probably happens in the atmosphere, and in biological systems, though here I am not quite sure - does sunlight excite chemical bonds in the ground? If sunlight is stored as gravitational potential, it is through heating up of things which then rise up. Since heating should not be affected by solar pannels, this effect will not disappear.
So, I do not see where a large scale effect of changing weather patterns would come from. A solar pannel has no more effect than a block of cement. Well, cement does change weather pattern by causing more heating and changing water flow. But this is not a result of "producing stored energy".
It is easier to see where large scale effects of fossil fuel/nulear energy would come from. Both introduce an additional source of heat into the system. Of course that heat is nothing compared to the heating effect of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Eventually, though, we might have to deal with the ultimate waste product - heat. You really can't easily get rid of that. (as pointed out by Assimov, though I forgot in which book...)
A known amount of energy is radiated from the sun to the earth. Luckily, exactly the same amount of energy is radiated from the earth out into space. So, what matters here is not energy, but instead entropy differences. High frequency photons hit the earth, and that energy is then radiated out as low frequency photons. On the way of becoming low-frequency photons, they can power some things on earth.
Now, if sunlight heats up a solar pannel, or a part of the roof, that pannel still gets hot (thermodynamics), and still will create rising air currents, still creating winds.
You also get electricity, which powers, say cars, producing heat, producing air currents, creating winds, and driving on streets moving air arround, creating air-currents.
So, you will change the weather patterns, but it isn't as if you use up all the power of the sun or the wind.
Thermodynamics... it's complicated.
gzip is really horrible in error recovery. Trying to recover data from a damaged tar.gzip file is hard, because gzip does not keep byte boundaries. bzip2 is much better in this respect, and it is much better to recover from problems. .tar.gz backup was damaged, just when you need it)
Never backup using tar.gz - use tar.bz2 instead.
Not on topic, but I had to say it, 'cause I've been hurt (nothing like finding that your
I remember the Amiga RAM disk that would survive resets. Why does such a thing not exist for Linux? Does the RAM on a PC get erased more on warm reboot or on cold reboot?
Invisible stalker?
I should have better things to do at 5:33 AM!
I would just automatically add a copyright notice to off-site referrers, i.e. generate images with copyright notices.
If trafic becomes too high, you could use another solution, but it does hot sound as if that's the problem.
I think linking is much preferable to copying, since you still have control over the images, and can track who sees them.
Research found that 92% of newspaper editors can not tell the difference between a scientific study and a cleverly disguised add.
A desktop search engine will replace the file browser. This will give the company that gets the marketshare a platform that all users use whenever they interact with files.
On top of that platform you can now do anything - make your own API, distributed it with an integrated web browser, or movie-viewer, and in general get all the nice benefits that microsoft gets from having a virtual OS monopoly.
It is the whole reason why the browser war started, now on the desktop.
There is a sequence of events from where the user wants to do something till he/she gets it done. Once you get you foot in the door somewhere, you control much of the process, and can start milking the cow.
No no no!
John Holland popularized genetic algorithms.
Koza popularized genetic programming which according to him is totaly different.
But I could imagine circumstances in antarctica in which it would be very hard.
stars!
Where "living" means confined to a point? People walk around. They might have friends a few blocks away, maybe they jog.
Radiation might fall with the inverse square, but what happens when you integrate over the 1km radius in which people tend to "live"?
I think that could be the day free VOIP stops.
Send it to an e-mail account in europe, with a few interesting words added (I'm not sure that's even neccessary). Delete it at the destination with an automated script. Retrieve it a couple of years later using the freedom of information act.
1. This assumes that the people voting for a certain party don't have more animosity towards the media. This, for example, happens in Israel, where right-wing votes see the media as left-wing, and like having their exit polls fail.
2. And, if the exit polls don't agree with the vote what happens? All voting is done again? And if exit polls by one outlet agree with the polls, but those of another do not?
3. In order to rig an election you just need a few percent in selected booths, which will then not be detectable.
I don't know anything about this particular story, but any gamble needs two sides to provide money. As in:
"I'll be willing to pay 1000000$ against YOUR 1000$ that no faster-than-light travel will be found in the next 20 years."
A laser printer.
The people behind the lawsuit are using their own product.