70 years ago was 1941. Things like atoms were only suspected.
What do you mean by "only suspected", here? Mendeleev's periodic table, arranged by atomic number, was in 1869. The electron was discovered in 1897.
Maybe you mean artificial atomic reactions?
in 1953 came the double helix DNA.
Yet DNA itself was known about since 1869, and it was known to have a regular structure in 1937. In 1943, it was clear that DNA carried genetic data.
The double-helix model is tremendously important to biology, but not at all important to the fundamental ideas of DNA that makes it a household term today.
These are people who thought tv's in color was amazing,
I'm sorry, but they still are. I'm 24, and it still blows my mind how much we're living in the future. I often wish I could give Isaac Newton, or, say, Benjamin Franklin, a tour of our modern world -- and the TV is the first thing that comes to mind.
UI's don't matter. The elderly will simply not use the devices.
UIs absolutely do matter, but I don't agree with the article here -- modern UIs are generally decent, and the biggest thing the elderly lack is the understanding that it's OK to poke at them and play with them to figure out how they work. When the motivation is there, well, they're not likely to be the ones jailbreaking or programming or anything fancy, but my grandparents (the ones still alive) have all at least learned to use email, because that's really important to them -- keeping in touch.
It's just that the bar is a bit higher -- if they have an alarm clock that works, and they don't already magically know how to use the iPhone alarm clock, they'll go with the one they already know how to use instead of actually trying to learn the new one for a minute or two.
I find that the longer I wait to eat, the hungrier I get, so the more I'm likely to eat. I'll eat less overall if I don't let myself get that hungry.
I've experienced exactly the same thing you and GP have, it's just that at least for me, this does result in an increased food intake, since the game distracted me from how hungry I actually was.
I suppose it depends on the school and the professor, but in every class I've taken so far where I'm allowed to use a calculator on the exams, I've gone out of my way to ask if anyone cares what calculator I use, and no one does, so I've happily kept my HP 50G through all of them.
...which is why I was so surprised that not a single professor I've had so far who allows calculators has asked for a specific version, or even a specific company. HP is much kinder to enthusiasts, but no one even blinks when I bring a high-end HP model.
It's worse than that: In every college exam where I've been allowed a calculator so far, no one cared about the model of calculator. Their attitude is, time spent playing with the calculator, attempting to cheat or to exploit some advanced feature for an edge, is time wasted by not actually doing the math or physics you need to do. The exams where they would care, they just disallowed all calculators to make things easier.
Now, I barely hacked my calculator to help with the exam -- I just put a few physical constants in more-accessible locations, might have written a few macros for formulas which were easy to remember but tedious -- but I did deliberately buy an HP so I could hack it if I wanted to.
So I just killed about an hour listening to the mp3 and thinking about how I'd respond... not much new there.
Starts with a few intelligence-insulting analogies, like "Bricks don't build houses." Yeah, bricks also don't reproduce.
"We ought to be able to put the contents of life into a test tube and see that it would build life." In other words, if we can't put something in a test tube and get something out of it, we require an intelligent agency for that process? Seriously? If we assume this guy isn't as dumb as he seems to be, and that by "test tube" he meant "any artificial apparatus", then we have experiments which show that things like amino acids can be formed through entirely natural, mechanical processes.
He then goes on to describe intelligence as the "third column of the universe" -- that is, matter, energy, and information -- and also that "nobody knows how to define it." Actually, we can define information, and we can do so quite precisely. If you can't, then maybe you shouldn't be claiming it's a fundamental property of the universe. When we do use precise definitions, we find that either DNA is not information, or that information does not require a designer, but this argument is almost deliberately vague.
He then goes on to talk about codes, pointing out that SOS is only a code by convention, and that if we didn't have that convention, SOS wouldn't communicate "distress" or, really, anything at all -- that sequences of syllables, or letters, or nucleotides, are meaningless unless some meaning is assigned to them -- that in this case, without the ribosomes, a particular sequence of DNA wouldn't correspond to a particular sequence of DNA into a protein. So he's already given up his premise, which he's repeated constantly, that a convention can only be established when two intelligences come together and agree on something, unless he's willing to call ribosomes "intelligent".
So why couldn't ribosomes be what assigns the "meaning"? Why is an additional entity required? Well, he says, ribosomes are needed to decode DNA, but ribosomes are themselves encoded in DNA, so there's a chicken-and-egg problem. Sounds a bit to me like irreducible complexity, and we know how well that's worked out. It's exactly the same argument -- "Half an eye is useless, so the eye couldn't evolve by steps!" It turns out that half an eye is useful, just not for quite the same things a whole eye is -- and in this case, there are entirely plausible ideas for how this mechanism could itself have evolved piecewise. (Yes, evolution can happen without DNA, it's just that DNA is the mechanism that won.)
Finally, and this is where I'm really disappointed in the supposed "software engineer" who linked to this -- the lecturer starts talking about the information that's encoded in DNA, and how much work we've had to put into just finding out what the sequence is -- that "our best computers can scarcely..." what, assemble DNA sequences? Takes some pretty heavy hardware (you want at least 24 gigs of RAM), but it's far from our best. Yes, the Human Genome Project was massive, but these days, it's fast and cheap to sequence stuff -- you could almost do it as a hobby, it's that cheap. On top of all of this, when he says that the amount of information in DNA is "almost infinite" -- there are a number of things I could nitpick, but really? It's not only finite, it's trivial by modern standards -- the entire genome is, according to Wikipedia, just over 3 billion base pairs. If each can be A, T, G, or C, that's 4 options, so you can store it in 2 bits, or 4 of them to a byte, so about 750 million bytes -- just barely doesn't fit on a single CD-R.
None of the above paragraph really affects his argument, but it shows just how little he knows about information in the modern age.
Is there anything about this argument that is worth the time I just put into it?
And hey, big surprise, comments disabled on that article. "You must log in to post a comment." And even if I did want yet another account just for commenting on a single blog, I don't see anywhere to register.
Just for fun, I'll respond here. I might even try to email it to him, if that works.
There are three fundamental entities that make up our universe, matter, energy and information.
I'm not sure information is an "entity" in any relevant sense. It's a phenomenon. More in a moment...
Now, creating and communicating information is demonstrably a mental process, requiring an intelligent mind to create and to receive the information.
Actually, it's demonstrably a physical process, one which can be performed entirely by machines, unless you are willing to describe my laptop as an "intelligent mind." But it depends what you mean by "information", in this case, as you point out:
In this way, information is distinct from data, which Shannon unfortunately referred to as "information" in his work on statistical-level information-theory, leading to the present ambiguity.
If that is the way in which information is distinct from data, then I work with a hell of a lot more data than information. My computer creates, interprets, communicates, and manipulates all sorts of data that no "intelligent mind" will ever touch, unless, again, you're willing to allow that my cell phone is an "intelligent mind."
This reality has been demonstrated amply in the book by Gitt and is expressed in a streamlined form in this lecture by Wilder-Smith.
I'm not willing to buy and read a book, but maybe I'll listen to the lecture.
Yet, so many software engineers remain evolutionists.
...what? Unless you're referring to the arguments you referenced via an amazon link and an mp3 file, I see nothing in your argument which requires intelligent design or negates evolution. Even if I accepted your premise that information must have an intelligent designer -- sorry, a god -- as its originator, as a "software engineer," I'd hope you understand that humans can and have written programs which simulate the genetic process at various levels -- why, then, could this god not design evolution as part of the "program" of the universe, fire it off and let it run, exactly as human beings do all the time?
Despite interpreting and often designing language conventions every day, very few software engineers seem to have considered the implications of language and information-theory for genetics, biology and metaphysics.
Again, out of the blue, you're introducing a new topic -- languages -- along with committing a stupidly trivial fallacy. Just guessing here, because you didn't actually deliver an argument, but if you did, I imagine it would look like this:
1. Humans can create languages. 2. Humans have intelligent minds. 3. Given 1 and 2, intelligent minds can create languages. 4. DNA is a language. 5. Given 3 and 4, an intelligent mind can create DNA (the language). Therefore, only an intelligent mind could have created DNA.
Both 5 and the conclusion are absurd on their face, and I hope you can see that. 5 is fallacious because 3 asserts only that intelligent minds can create languages, not that they can create all languages. Even if 5 were sound, the conclusion is fallacious because 5 asserts only that an intelligent mind can create DNA, and not that only an intelligent mind can create (or could have created) DNA.
And again, what about this falsifies evolution? If it worked, it would falsify abiogenesis. Evolution can happen without intervention once we have DNA, just as a program can run without human intervention once we start it running.
Why is this? Well that's a discussion for another post.
I agree it's worthless, but I really don't see what it has to do with the religion. If it was worth reading, it'd be worth reading even with the religious stuff across the top, right?
They tend not to be, certainly not more than the hardware -- but I did remember reading about someone who made a profit that way. He bought some fairly large mining rigs and put them to work, with the assumption that the hardware he was buying would still be worth something even if it didn't work out. Something to think about the next time I build a gaming rig -- when it's not mining for bitcoins, it can be, well, a very nice gaming rig.
Of course, I'm also in the situation where I don't pay for power separately...
But in this case, he ended up more than breaking even, even considering the hardware cost. Not because he beat the system -- it's supposed to limit coin production to where mining isn't economically viable except as a hobby -- but because of inflation. He was always mining a large number of coins, but the large number of coins mined early on is now worth much more.
Because it's a zero-sum game. The more popular the jails get, the more opportunities are available in the jails but not in the world outside, and the closer we get to not having freedom at all.
Or, let me put it this way: Suppose Apple does make the Mac App Store the only way to get software onto your Mac. That kills one entire platform for freedom -- your choice is now to violate your license agreement and crack it (potentially illegal), or switch to another OS, possibly different hardware. And what happens when there are no more open hardware platforms, or when the only open hardware platforms left cost millions of dollars?
Ok, yes, there's always going to be homebrew in some form, legal or not, even if people have to start building computers from scratch in their garage again, but it's certainly not the case that people who want freedom are unaffected by people wanting and using jails.
Users are complaining though. Check/. everytime an App Store article comes out and watch all the Android is better folk chime in on how the Market is freer.
That's on Slashdot. Even the Slashdot Effect is waning, and Slashdot itself never really was the voice of every nerd, let alone every consumer.
Not enough users are complaining to actually fix the situation, and I don't really see that changing anytime soon. In other words:
people don't care.
It's kind of similar to the Windows situation. I don't know many people (though there are some) who, all things being equal, wouldn't prefer an open source system to a proprietary one. But all things aren't equal, and it's usually one or two remaining apps which are keeping the person on Windows.
Or take web browsers -- we saw some real stagnation for a long time, and the only reason users started caring about Firefox was they saw a direct impact in the form of things like tabbed browsing and interesting extensions (as opposed to Yet Another Spam Toolbar). To this day, even the people who are using Firefox and Chrome don't get that using IE6 (or, to a lesser degree, IE at all) harms the web. People don't see that kind of indirect effect, and even when they do, even when they care about it, it takes a certain amount of willpower to actually do something like, say, use Firefox instead of IE whenever possible back when every website was IE-only.
And people knowing much about cars? Honestly, that's a laugh. They know a little bit only because their driver's ed course taught them.
Of which there really isn't a computer version. What's more, many states require driver's education, or at least a test, before they let you on the road, whereas I would guess that most people online today have had exactly zero training.
That said, from what I've seen, "computer newbie" training is truly horrendous anyway. Give me the same budget and timeframe as a driver's education program, and I could do much better.
the vast majority of people don't know that much about cars period - not even simple things like ensuring the tires are at the right pressure.
Knowing that the oil has to be changed occasionally, that the car needs to be filled with gas, that those rubber blades at the gas station are for cleaning the bugs and bird crap off your windshield, that rust is a Bad Thing, and actually paying attention when the Check Engine light comes on (or listening for funny noises or watching smoke), are all things that most people (in my experience) do with cars, but not equivalent things with computers. By contrast, people tend to not notice or ignore spyware and assume their computer is running slower because it's "old", not do basic maintenance like patching, completely ignore any and every popup and just click whatever looks closest to "OK" to get what they want...
I mean, it's not exactly common these days, but I imagine a lot more people know how to change their oil than know how to do anything inside their computer case. Hell, most people know how to jump start a car, even if they might muck it up -- how many people know how to use a livecd or install cd to rescue an unbootable computer?
Things like NESticle are software emulators. The idea is to reverse-engineer an existing piece of hardware so that you can figure out how to make software which does the same thing, but not necessarily in the same way -- you want to be able to run software that runs on the NES, say, but you don't care at all whether the program in your computer contains an exact replica of every chip on the NES. Even if you wanted the identical behavior, you still wouldn't need to give it an exact replica.
This is a hardware emulator in both senses -- it is itself a big pile of hardware, and it's emulating hardware, exhaustively, in every detail. The idea here is that you want to have as much assurance as is reasonably possible that when you actually fab that chip, it's going to do what you think it will. You're not just testing that your software which will run on that card will do what it's supposed to do -- that'd be considerably easier, we have things like CUDA and software implementations of OpenGL if that was the only issue. No, you want to be sure that the hardware itself, as you designed it, will work when you actually build it.
However, it seems like this stuff doesn't scale. DOS-era games, N64, PS1, all seem to work well -- but as soon as we hit the PS2, it seems like emulation isn't a viable option anymore, unless something's changed.
don't download warez, stay within the walled garden.
False dichotomy. You could also download safe/sane third-party software -- open source stuff, or even the dozens of proprietary apps that the Mac had before there was a Mac store for Apple to be able to take a slice of the profits.
In fact, you seem to be suggesting just that -- but understand that, if it really was the sort of walled garden you've got on the iPhone, you wouldn't have Steam.
Is it possible to protect a user from themselves?... If Apple made the installation of non-App Store software on the Mac possible then it would stop a lot of rogue applications.
That's how you protect users from themselves.
But then people would complain about lack of freedom.
Unfortunately, iPhones are still selling like hotcakes, so I'm not convinced this is the reason. But I really, really don't like either direction. If people could be bothered to learn anywhere near as much about their computers as they typically understand about their cars, we wouldn't have this situation.
I don't know why Ubuntu is so insistant on only having 1 choice,
Well, that's actually been one of the core themes of Ubuntu -- if you want another choice, you go elsewhere. It was very early that they removed the "GNOME or KDE" choice by fiat -- if you want KDE, either install it yourself, or use Kubuntu, which is at least presented as an entirely different distro.
However, even this LiveCD option seems broken -- it seems like they also include packages, which means anything they expose in the LiveCD environment has to be on the disk twice, once in the LiveCD filesystem, and once as a deb. This is also confusing -- wouldn't it make more sense to be able to store those just once somehow? Either do it the old way, where the deb must be installed to a ramdisk (or the LiveCD's unionfs+tmpfs), or store the metadata and a list of files and let the system construct a deb from the LiveCD's filesystem as needed.
And I really, really don't see the point in Ubuntu including all that crap on the disk in the first place. Where's the netinst option?
Give me a small option that can be booted from a CD or USB, which downloads packages as needed for the installation. They're likely to be patched anyway.
Except I don't like Ubuntu for bleeding-edge. I like Ubuntu for being reasonably up-to-date (that is, not years out of date, as Debian seemed to be), but also relatively stable, since it's not on a rolling-release model. I like having a modern web browser so I can keep up with the Internet, modern eye candy to impress friends with, modern reverse-engineered clients (say, IM clients) to keep up with what people are doing with their networks, and I like being able to patch absolutely everything all the time for security, and expect no major breakage, or even time wasted looking at a diff between old and new config files, except when I have a week off from work and school.
Even then, I'd appreciate it if it was somewhat more stable. I tend to grab new releases at least a few weeks if not a few months after they come out, and I still find major functionality will just disappear, and I'll have to enable some random PPA to get it back.
And by the way, if you're a Kubuntu or KDE developer, and you think this way, that explains a lot. Generally the first part of my Kubuntu setup to start smelling like "bleeding-edge" and otherwise ruining my whole day is KDE. For that matter, Kubuntu has a reputation for being among the worst in terms of packaging KDE.
Because the kind of random library that might be immediately useful to a web app (crypto, etc) strikes me as the sort of thing which either has already been ported, or was written in (at least) C, making it reasonably portable -- though, granted, it could take a bit of work if it's truly "random" and also poorly-written code.
That's a bit unfair, don't you think? Aside from how rare this is...
No, I don't think it's unfair at all. What does "Google is down" mean to someone trying to use GMail? It can mean Google itself isn't responding, which happens from time to time.
Well, again, rare. Rare enough that it tends to make headlines.
It can also mean that the path between Google and you is down, which also happens.
Much more likely is the path from you to your ISP. Beyond that, we're again talking about the sort of outages which make headlines.
Or it can mean that the path is so clogged with other material that using GMail isn't practical. Or it can mean that your local ISP or the company network is down or doing maintainance. In all of these are situations you can read and write email with a local client;
Unless you're using IMAP.
Or, if you want to be fair, you can enable offline mode for either Gmail or IMAP. It is exactly as simple for Gmail as it is for IMAP -- and even if it were more complex, it's possible to use IMAP with Gmail.
And then there are the substandard limits of GMail as compared to a full-featured client, of which there are plenty...
Which? I actually miss a few features from Gmail with my local clients, though I imagine they've been catching up.
and the problems with attachments,
Again, which?
and the limits on storage.
On my machine, I haven't deleted a single email since before 2006, and I'm using about 4.1 gigs. I also get a hell of a lot more spam there than I do on Gmail -- that's the address I display here on Slashdot with no obfuscating -- and while I do filter that and ultimately put it in the "trash", I still don't delete it permanently, so all of that is still counted. I imagine that I still wouldn't have exceeded Gmail's limits had I been using it since it came out in 2004, and they do routinely expand those limits.
So no. Not unfair.
Yes. I've told you once about offline mode for web apps, and you have a Gmail account, yet you assume Gmail can only work online. You claim "substandard" limits, without being explicit other than the space restriction, which just is not an issue for the vast majority of users, myself included.
No. You didn't read carefully enough. If a machine isn't connected, it's not at risk to/from the network, period;
...until you put a USB disk in there, unless by "not connected" you mean you never transfer data into or out of the machine in any way...
And it looks like you couldn't be bothered to read the rest of my objection. There's also the part where you're putting your data at risk to software bugs not related to security by not patching those.
OTOH, with a connected throw-away machine, limiting execution to html, css, standard forms and server side CGI resolves any local execution issues, as long as you aren't naive enough to download something and run it;
Translation: You're either unaware of or in denial of drive-bys through means other than this.
...It's a bit like boycotting paper because some newspapers censor their content.
And I don't agree that censorship is irrelevant. It is one of the critical pillars of almost every form of malign governance that ever existed, definitely including my government.
What we're talking about isn't a malign government censoring anyone posting videos on the net. What we're talking about is a corporation offering a free service, limiting what content can be posted there -- particularly relevant when they're making a profit from that content.
But no, it's not relevant at all. What's much more relevant is the fact that you don't see anything you thin
Babies can learn and grow and become something more than they are.
What can this become? It's born a freak of nature, a frankenbaby, and really ought to be put out of its misery. I put it much more in the category of stuff like hanoimania than stuff like WebGL and Native Client -- the latter are kind of security and stability hazards now, need better user controls to avoid random websites burning even more battery life than Flash, and don't have any applications proving themselves, but could be really fucking cool later on, whereas hanoimania is really cool, but was never meant to be taken seriously.
So, seriously, why would you ever want this? Let's run through those again...
DOS games? I suppose it could work, but it's never going to be as efficient as a native DOSbox. But I guess that could be cool, and maybe even useful, if there's some old DOS app that you absolutely, positively cannot get running any other way.
Crypto libraries? There are tons of libraries for JavaScript, even crypto libraries. And even if this was the way to do it, surely there are better choices than x86 as an instruction set for something you know is going to be pure emulation -- and surely there are better APIs than running the entire thing in a VM.
Training? I don't really see it. I mean, yes, Try Ruby is awesome, and having something similar for Linux and the shell would be similarly awesome. But Try Ruby lasts about 15 minutes before it's really time to move on, there's nothing more you can do here, go download the actual software. Even Heroku seems to be deprecating their web-only approach in favor of downloadable commandline utils.
And that's if it was a fully-functional VM-in-a-browser, with decent enough performance, etc. Those are the best uses I can come up with for when it's no longer a baby, and it can't do any of those things right now. Again, the most useful things seem to be tech demo and benchmark, even if it could play Doom and run a LAMP server.
Yeah, I was actually a bit annoyed about that. I'm not convinced he killed his wife, but fine, suppose he did. The code didn't murder anyone, and it's open source. Why abandon it?
But yeah, the project did die, and looking at btrfs, I see most of the ideas from Reiser4 and ZFS. There are still a few big things missing, though. Biggest idea that I miss from Reiser4 is the prospect of real transactions -- it looks like there's something similar happening, but I'd still really like to have a situation where, for instance, a software update, config change, etc, could be done atomically.
Slashdot Mirror
70 years ago was 1941. Things like atoms were only suspected.
What do you mean by "only suspected", here? Mendeleev's periodic table, arranged by atomic number, was in 1869. The electron was discovered in 1897.
Maybe you mean artificial atomic reactions?
in 1953 came the double helix DNA.
Yet DNA itself was known about since 1869, and it was known to have a regular structure in 1937. In 1943, it was clear that DNA carried genetic data.
The double-helix model is tremendously important to biology, but not at all important to the fundamental ideas of DNA that makes it a household term today.
These are people who thought tv's in color was amazing,
I'm sorry, but they still are. I'm 24, and it still blows my mind how much we're living in the future. I often wish I could give Isaac Newton, or, say, Benjamin Franklin, a tour of our modern world -- and the TV is the first thing that comes to mind.
UI's don't matter. The elderly will simply not use the devices.
UIs absolutely do matter, but I don't agree with the article here -- modern UIs are generally decent, and the biggest thing the elderly lack is the understanding that it's OK to poke at them and play with them to figure out how they work. When the motivation is there, well, they're not likely to be the ones jailbreaking or programming or anything fancy, but my grandparents (the ones still alive) have all at least learned to use email, because that's really important to them -- keeping in touch.
It's just that the bar is a bit higher -- if they have an alarm clock that works, and they don't already magically know how to use the iPhone alarm clock, they'll go with the one they already know how to use instead of actually trying to learn the new one for a minute or two.
I find that the longer I wait to eat, the hungrier I get, so the more I'm likely to eat. I'll eat less overall if I don't let myself get that hungry.
I've experienced exactly the same thing you and GP have, it's just that at least for me, this does result in an increased food intake, since the game distracted me from how hungry I actually was.
Yes, I would be pretty amazed if DNA was compressible at all, aside from things like 2-bit encoding. Metadata might be, though.
I suppose it depends on the school and the professor, but in every class I've taken so far where I'm allowed to use a calculator on the exams, I've gone out of my way to ask if anyone cares what calculator I use, and no one does, so I've happily kept my HP 50G through all of them.
Since when does "How many people do X?" become an argument for "Fuck X."
...which is why I was so surprised that not a single professor I've had so far who allows calculators has asked for a specific version, or even a specific company. HP is much kinder to enthusiasts, but no one even blinks when I bring a high-end HP model.
It's worse than that: In every college exam where I've been allowed a calculator so far, no one cared about the model of calculator. Their attitude is, time spent playing with the calculator, attempting to cheat or to exploit some advanced feature for an edge, is time wasted by not actually doing the math or physics you need to do. The exams where they would care, they just disallowed all calculators to make things easier.
Now, I barely hacked my calculator to help with the exam -- I just put a few physical constants in more-accessible locations, might have written a few macros for formulas which were easy to remember but tedious -- but I did deliberately buy an HP so I could hack it if I wanted to.
While I would agree with that if you wrote it, it also seems obvious that you could download answers and programs to deal with this sort of thing.
So I just killed about an hour listening to the mp3 and thinking about how I'd respond... not much new there.
Starts with a few intelligence-insulting analogies, like "Bricks don't build houses." Yeah, bricks also don't reproduce.
"We ought to be able to put the contents of life into a test tube and see that it would build life." In other words, if we can't put something in a test tube and get something out of it, we require an intelligent agency for that process? Seriously? If we assume this guy isn't as dumb as he seems to be, and that by "test tube" he meant "any artificial apparatus", then we have experiments which show that things like amino acids can be formed through entirely natural, mechanical processes.
He then goes on to describe intelligence as the "third column of the universe" -- that is, matter, energy, and information -- and also that "nobody knows how to define it." Actually, we can define information, and we can do so quite precisely. If you can't, then maybe you shouldn't be claiming it's a fundamental property of the universe. When we do use precise definitions, we find that either DNA is not information, or that information does not require a designer, but this argument is almost deliberately vague.
He then goes on to talk about codes, pointing out that SOS is only a code by convention, and that if we didn't have that convention, SOS wouldn't communicate "distress" or, really, anything at all -- that sequences of syllables, or letters, or nucleotides, are meaningless unless some meaning is assigned to them -- that in this case, without the ribosomes, a particular sequence of DNA wouldn't correspond to a particular sequence of DNA into a protein. So he's already given up his premise, which he's repeated constantly, that a convention can only be established when two intelligences come together and agree on something, unless he's willing to call ribosomes "intelligent".
So why couldn't ribosomes be what assigns the "meaning"? Why is an additional entity required? Well, he says, ribosomes are needed to decode DNA, but ribosomes are themselves encoded in DNA, so there's a chicken-and-egg problem. Sounds a bit to me like irreducible complexity, and we know how well that's worked out. It's exactly the same argument -- "Half an eye is useless, so the eye couldn't evolve by steps!" It turns out that half an eye is useful, just not for quite the same things a whole eye is -- and in this case, there are entirely plausible ideas for how this mechanism could itself have evolved piecewise. (Yes, evolution can happen without DNA, it's just that DNA is the mechanism that won.)
Finally, and this is where I'm really disappointed in the supposed "software engineer" who linked to this -- the lecturer starts talking about the information that's encoded in DNA, and how much work we've had to put into just finding out what the sequence is -- that "our best computers can scarcely..." what, assemble DNA sequences? Takes some pretty heavy hardware (you want at least 24 gigs of RAM), but it's far from our best. Yes, the Human Genome Project was massive, but these days, it's fast and cheap to sequence stuff -- you could almost do it as a hobby, it's that cheap. On top of all of this, when he says that the amount of information in DNA is "almost infinite" -- there are a number of things I could nitpick, but really? It's not only finite, it's trivial by modern standards -- the entire genome is, according to Wikipedia, just over 3 billion base pairs. If each can be A, T, G, or C, that's 4 options, so you can store it in 2 bits, or 4 of them to a byte, so about 750 million bytes -- just barely doesn't fit on a single CD-R.
None of the above paragraph really affects his argument, but it shows just how little he knows about information in the modern age.
Is there anything about this argument that is worth the time I just put into it?
And hey, big surprise, comments disabled on that article. "You must log in to post a comment." And even if I did want yet another account just for commenting on a single blog, I don't see anywhere to register.
Just for fun, I'll respond here. I might even try to email it to him, if that works.
There are three fundamental entities that make up our universe, matter, energy and information.
I'm not sure information is an "entity" in any relevant sense. It's a phenomenon. More in a moment...
Now, creating and communicating information is demonstrably a mental process, requiring an intelligent mind to create and to receive the information.
Actually, it's demonstrably a physical process, one which can be performed entirely by machines, unless you are willing to describe my laptop as an "intelligent mind." But it depends what you mean by "information", in this case, as you point out:
In this way, information is distinct from data, which Shannon unfortunately referred to as "information" in his work on statistical-level information-theory, leading to the present ambiguity.
If that is the way in which information is distinct from data, then I work with a hell of a lot more data than information. My computer creates, interprets, communicates, and manipulates all sorts of data that no "intelligent mind" will ever touch, unless, again, you're willing to allow that my cell phone is an "intelligent mind."
This reality has been demonstrated amply in the book by Gitt and is expressed in a streamlined form in this lecture by Wilder-Smith.
I'm not willing to buy and read a book, but maybe I'll listen to the lecture.
Yet, so many software engineers remain evolutionists.
...what? Unless you're referring to the arguments you referenced via an amazon link and an mp3 file, I see nothing in your argument which requires intelligent design or negates evolution. Even if I accepted your premise that information must have an intelligent designer -- sorry, a god -- as its originator, as a "software engineer," I'd hope you understand that humans can and have written programs which simulate the genetic process at various levels -- why, then, could this god not design evolution as part of the "program" of the universe, fire it off and let it run, exactly as human beings do all the time?
Despite interpreting and often designing language conventions every day, very few software engineers seem to have considered the implications of language and information-theory for genetics, biology and metaphysics.
Again, out of the blue, you're introducing a new topic -- languages -- along with committing a stupidly trivial fallacy. Just guessing here, because you didn't actually deliver an argument, but if you did, I imagine it would look like this:
1. Humans can create languages.
2. Humans have intelligent minds.
3. Given 1 and 2, intelligent minds can create languages.
4. DNA is a language.
5. Given 3 and 4, an intelligent mind can create DNA (the language).
Therefore, only an intelligent mind could have created DNA.
Both 5 and the conclusion are absurd on their face, and I hope you can see that. 5 is fallacious because 3 asserts only that intelligent minds can create languages, not that they can create all languages. Even if 5 were sound, the conclusion is fallacious because 5 asserts only that an intelligent mind can create DNA, and not that only an intelligent mind can create (or could have created) DNA.
And again, what about this falsifies evolution? If it worked, it would falsify abiogenesis. Evolution can happen without intervention once we have DNA, just as a program can run without human intervention once we start it running.
Why is this? Well that's a discussion for another post.
If you're going to m
I agree it's worthless, but I really don't see what it has to do with the religion. If it was worth reading, it'd be worth reading even with the religious stuff across the top, right?
They tend not to be, certainly not more than the hardware -- but I did remember reading about someone who made a profit that way. He bought some fairly large mining rigs and put them to work, with the assumption that the hardware he was buying would still be worth something even if it didn't work out. Something to think about the next time I build a gaming rig -- when it's not mining for bitcoins, it can be, well, a very nice gaming rig.
Of course, I'm also in the situation where I don't pay for power separately...
But in this case, he ended up more than breaking even, even considering the hardware cost. Not because he beat the system -- it's supposed to limit coin production to where mining isn't economically viable except as a hobby -- but because of inflation. He was always mining a large number of coins, but the large number of coins mined early on is now worth much more.
Because it's a zero-sum game. The more popular the jails get, the more opportunities are available in the jails but not in the world outside, and the closer we get to not having freedom at all.
Or, let me put it this way: Suppose Apple does make the Mac App Store the only way to get software onto your Mac. That kills one entire platform for freedom -- your choice is now to violate your license agreement and crack it (potentially illegal), or switch to another OS, possibly different hardware. And what happens when there are no more open hardware platforms, or when the only open hardware platforms left cost millions of dollars?
Ok, yes, there's always going to be homebrew in some form, legal or not, even if people have to start building computers from scratch in their garage again, but it's certainly not the case that people who want freedom are unaffected by people wanting and using jails.
Users are complaining though. Check /. everytime an App Store article comes out and watch all the Android is better folk chime in on how the Market is freer.
That's on Slashdot. Even the Slashdot Effect is waning, and Slashdot itself never really was the voice of every nerd, let alone every consumer.
Not enough users are complaining to actually fix the situation, and I don't really see that changing anytime soon. In other words:
people don't care.
It's kind of similar to the Windows situation. I don't know many people (though there are some) who, all things being equal, wouldn't prefer an open source system to a proprietary one. But all things aren't equal, and it's usually one or two remaining apps which are keeping the person on Windows.
Or take web browsers -- we saw some real stagnation for a long time, and the only reason users started caring about Firefox was they saw a direct impact in the form of things like tabbed browsing and interesting extensions (as opposed to Yet Another Spam Toolbar). To this day, even the people who are using Firefox and Chrome don't get that using IE6 (or, to a lesser degree, IE at all) harms the web. People don't see that kind of indirect effect, and even when they do, even when they care about it, it takes a certain amount of willpower to actually do something like, say, use Firefox instead of IE whenever possible back when every website was IE-only.
And people knowing much about cars? Honestly, that's a laugh. They know a little bit only because their driver's ed course taught them.
Of which there really isn't a computer version. What's more, many states require driver's education, or at least a test, before they let you on the road, whereas I would guess that most people online today have had exactly zero training.
That said, from what I've seen, "computer newbie" training is truly horrendous anyway. Give me the same budget and timeframe as a driver's education program, and I could do much better.
the vast majority of people don't know that much about cars period - not even simple things like ensuring the tires are at the right pressure.
Knowing that the oil has to be changed occasionally, that the car needs to be filled with gas, that those rubber blades at the gas station are for cleaning the bugs and bird crap off your windshield, that rust is a Bad Thing, and actually paying attention when the Check Engine light comes on (or listening for funny noises or watching smoke), are all things that most people (in my experience) do with cars, but not equivalent things with computers. By contrast, people tend to not notice or ignore spyware and assume their computer is running slower because it's "old", not do basic maintenance like patching, completely ignore any and every popup and just click whatever looks closest to "OK" to get what they want...
I mean, it's not exactly common these days, but I imagine a lot more people know how to change their oil than know how to do anything inside their computer case. Hell, most people know how to jump start a car, even if they might muck it up -- how many people know how to use a livecd or install cd to rescue an unbootable computer?
Things like NESticle are software emulators. The idea is to reverse-engineer an existing piece of hardware so that you can figure out how to make software which does the same thing, but not necessarily in the same way -- you want to be able to run software that runs on the NES, say, but you don't care at all whether the program in your computer contains an exact replica of every chip on the NES. Even if you wanted the identical behavior, you still wouldn't need to give it an exact replica.
This is a hardware emulator in both senses -- it is itself a big pile of hardware, and it's emulating hardware, exhaustively, in every detail. The idea here is that you want to have as much assurance as is reasonably possible that when you actually fab that chip, it's going to do what you think it will. You're not just testing that your software which will run on that card will do what it's supposed to do -- that'd be considerably easier, we have things like CUDA and software implementations of OpenGL if that was the only issue. No, you want to be sure that the hardware itself, as you designed it, will work when you actually build it.
However, it seems like this stuff doesn't scale. DOS-era games, N64, PS1, all seem to work well -- but as soon as we hit the PS2, it seems like emulation isn't a viable option anymore, unless something's changed.
don't download warez, stay within the walled garden.
False dichotomy. You could also download safe/sane third-party software -- open source stuff, or even the dozens of proprietary apps that the Mac had before there was a Mac store for Apple to be able to take a slice of the profits.
In fact, you seem to be suggesting just that -- but understand that, if it really was the sort of walled garden you've got on the iPhone, you wouldn't have Steam.
Is it possible to protect a user from themselves?... If Apple made the installation of non-App Store software on the Mac possible then it would stop a lot of rogue applications.
That's how you protect users from themselves.
But then people would complain about lack of freedom.
Unfortunately, iPhones are still selling like hotcakes, so I'm not convinced this is the reason. But I really, really don't like either direction. If people could be bothered to learn anywhere near as much about their computers as they typically understand about their cars, we wouldn't have this situation.
I don't know why Ubuntu is so insistant on only having 1 choice,
Well, that's actually been one of the core themes of Ubuntu -- if you want another choice, you go elsewhere. It was very early that they removed the "GNOME or KDE" choice by fiat -- if you want KDE, either install it yourself, or use Kubuntu, which is at least presented as an entirely different distro.
However, even this LiveCD option seems broken -- it seems like they also include packages, which means anything they expose in the LiveCD environment has to be on the disk twice, once in the LiveCD filesystem, and once as a deb. This is also confusing -- wouldn't it make more sense to be able to store those just once somehow? Either do it the old way, where the deb must be installed to a ramdisk (or the LiveCD's unionfs+tmpfs), or store the metadata and a list of files and let the system construct a deb from the LiveCD's filesystem as needed.
And I really, really don't see the point in Ubuntu including all that crap on the disk in the first place. Where's the netinst option?
Give me a small option that can be booted from a CD or USB, which downloads packages as needed for the installation. They're likely to be patched anyway.
Except I don't like Ubuntu for bleeding-edge. I like Ubuntu for being reasonably up-to-date (that is, not years out of date, as Debian seemed to be), but also relatively stable, since it's not on a rolling-release model. I like having a modern web browser so I can keep up with the Internet, modern eye candy to impress friends with, modern reverse-engineered clients (say, IM clients) to keep up with what people are doing with their networks, and I like being able to patch absolutely everything all the time for security, and expect no major breakage, or even time wasted looking at a diff between old and new config files, except when I have a week off from work and school.
Even then, I'd appreciate it if it was somewhat more stable. I tend to grab new releases at least a few weeks if not a few months after they come out, and I still find major functionality will just disappear, and I'll have to enable some random PPA to get it back.
And by the way, if you're a Kubuntu or KDE developer, and you think this way, that explains a lot. Generally the first part of my Kubuntu setup to start smelling like "bleeding-edge" and otherwise ruining my whole day is KDE. For that matter, Kubuntu has a reputation for being among the worst in terms of packaging KDE.
Because the kind of random library that might be immediately useful to a web app (crypto, etc) strikes me as the sort of thing which either has already been ported, or was written in (at least) C, making it reasonably portable -- though, granted, it could take a bit of work if it's truly "random" and also poorly-written code.
That's a bit unfair, don't you think? Aside from how rare this is...
No, I don't think it's unfair at all. What does "Google is down" mean to someone trying to use GMail? It can mean Google itself isn't responding, which happens from time to time.
Well, again, rare. Rare enough that it tends to make headlines.
It can also mean that the path between Google and you is down, which also happens.
Much more likely is the path from you to your ISP. Beyond that, we're again talking about the sort of outages which make headlines.
Or it can mean that the path is so clogged with other material that using GMail isn't practical. Or it can mean that your local ISP or the company network is down or doing maintainance. In all of these are situations you can read and write email with a local client;
Unless you're using IMAP.
Or, if you want to be fair, you can enable offline mode for either Gmail or IMAP. It is exactly as simple for Gmail as it is for IMAP -- and even if it were more complex, it's possible to use IMAP with Gmail.
And then there are the substandard limits of GMail as compared to a full-featured client, of which there are plenty...
Which? I actually miss a few features from Gmail with my local clients, though I imagine they've been catching up.
and the problems with attachments,
Again, which?
and the limits on storage.
On my machine, I haven't deleted a single email since before 2006, and I'm using about 4.1 gigs. I also get a hell of a lot more spam there than I do on Gmail -- that's the address I display here on Slashdot with no obfuscating -- and while I do filter that and ultimately put it in the "trash", I still don't delete it permanently, so all of that is still counted. I imagine that I still wouldn't have exceeded Gmail's limits had I been using it since it came out in 2004, and they do routinely expand those limits.
So no. Not unfair.
Yes. I've told you once about offline mode for web apps, and you have a Gmail account, yet you assume Gmail can only work online. You claim "substandard" limits, without being explicit other than the space restriction, which just is not an issue for the vast majority of users, myself included.
No. You didn't read carefully enough. If a machine isn't connected, it's not at risk to/from the network, period;
...until you put a USB disk in there, unless by "not connected" you mean you never transfer data into or out of the machine in any way...
And it looks like you couldn't be bothered to read the rest of my objection. There's also the part where you're putting your data at risk to software bugs not related to security by not patching those.
OTOH, with a connected throw-away machine, limiting execution to html, css, standard forms and server side CGI resolves any local execution issues, as long as you aren't naive enough to download something and run it;
Translation: You're either unaware of or in denial of drive-bys through means other than this.
...It's a bit like boycotting paper because some newspapers censor their content.
And I don't agree that censorship is irrelevant. It is one of the critical pillars of almost every form of malign governance that ever existed, definitely including my government.
What we're talking about isn't a malign government censoring anyone posting videos on the net. What we're talking about is a corporation offering a free service, limiting what content can be posted there -- particularly relevant when they're making a profit from that content.
But no, it's not relevant at all. What's much more relevant is the fact that you don't see anything you thin
Babies can learn and grow and become something more than they are.
What can this become? It's born a freak of nature, a frankenbaby, and really ought to be put out of its misery. I put it much more in the category of stuff like hanoimania than stuff like WebGL and Native Client -- the latter are kind of security and stability hazards now, need better user controls to avoid random websites burning even more battery life than Flash, and don't have any applications proving themselves, but could be really fucking cool later on, whereas hanoimania is really cool, but was never meant to be taken seriously.
So, seriously, why would you ever want this? Let's run through those again...
DOS games? I suppose it could work, but it's never going to be as efficient as a native DOSbox. But I guess that could be cool, and maybe even useful, if there's some old DOS app that you absolutely, positively cannot get running any other way.
Crypto libraries? There are tons of libraries for JavaScript, even crypto libraries. And even if this was the way to do it, surely there are better choices than x86 as an instruction set for something you know is going to be pure emulation -- and surely there are better APIs than running the entire thing in a VM.
Training? I don't really see it. I mean, yes, Try Ruby is awesome, and having something similar for Linux and the shell would be similarly awesome. But Try Ruby lasts about 15 minutes before it's really time to move on, there's nothing more you can do here, go download the actual software. Even Heroku seems to be deprecating their web-only approach in favor of downloadable commandline utils.
And that's if it was a fully-functional VM-in-a-browser, with decent enough performance, etc. Those are the best uses I can come up with for when it's no longer a baby, and it can't do any of those things right now. Again, the most useful things seem to be tech demo and benchmark, even if it could play Doom and run a LAMP server.
Yeah, I was actually a bit annoyed about that. I'm not convinced he killed his wife, but fine, suppose he did. The code didn't murder anyone, and it's open source. Why abandon it?
But yeah, the project did die, and looking at btrfs, I see most of the ideas from Reiser4 and ZFS. There are still a few big things missing, though. Biggest idea that I miss from Reiser4 is the prospect of real transactions -- it looks like there's something similar happening, but I'd still really like to have a situation where, for instance, a software update, config change, etc, could be done atomically.