All food products sold in grocery stores should have a simple red, yellow, or green icon prominent on their packaging.
- Red would be high simple carbs or high salt or has transfats.
-Yellow would be "iffy foods" which have moderate simple-carb levels, fat levels, and low salt.
-Green would basically be veggies or very high-fibre carbs or plant protein etc.
Or the most complex you could go would be separate colors for heart health (lots of salt or fat = bad = red) and metabolic health (lots of simple carbs bad = red)
So a red heart icon beside a yellow circle would indicate something really bad for your heart if you keep eating them, but so-so for developing diabetes or obesity.
This would raise awareness, and if you shopped and bought lots of "Green" and some yellows, and maybe one "red" for the week, you'd be a healthy human, diet-wise at least.
As for the mouse, get a mac laptop and use the trackpad. Not a big issue.
The thing is about letting you understand context quickly. The context comprehension is vital to dong an insightful code addition or fix.
It is also good at showing the narrative aspect of code stories, which interleave through the single file-based view of the code. These code stories are essential to understanding the essential behaviors of the code you are adding to or modifying.
Because, with its gotos and numbered code satements, it made pretty explicit that the computer was implementing a "program counter" or "program current-instruction pointer" which was advancing step-by-step through the program and being redirected to another block of code using a jump of some kind.
Someone who is going to become an excellent programmer will take that, and discover for themselves that always structuring ifs with gotos as a standard pattern in an if then else organization makes their programs easier to write and to maintain and understand.
They will also learn to create standard patterns for looping while checking a condition, and for creating distinct subroutines with structured ways of going to them and returning, including creating extra variables which are used to pass arguments into a subroutine.
Thus you don't just learn structured programming. You learn what aspects are important about it (the patterning of control flow, localization of similar purpose code etc.) and you learn the mechanics of how a compiler is going to make it work i.e. what it will do under the hood.
Great stuff.
I'd put it this way. -Bad programmers will be outed sooner by starting with Basic. -Excellent programmers will become even better and wiser faster by starting with Basic and climbing up out of it. They will also have a quick straightforward path from Basic down to understanding assembly code and ways and advantages of structuring it.
Than a country full of sedentary layabouts twittering to each other like chickadees about the price of spice and admiring their own portraits on facebook.
The mechanic has entered into a legally binding contract with a person who owns a single physical car. So they get paid for fixing that one car, and since it is a physical object, it is easy for them to withhold it from the customer if they are not paid.
So the mechanic spends 4 hours working on the car, and gets paid, conservatively, $200 net. So let's say I write a novel, spend 4 years (say 4,000 hours) producing it.
So let's say my novel is only half as valuable per unit of effort as the car repair.
So I can sell my first copy of it, after which it is unsellable (by me or any other agent/distributor) because it is infinitely copied.
So I have to sell that first copy for, by my calculation, $100,000, and I'm selling it to someone who can get the next copy (indistinguishable from the original), for free.
Good luck to me I guess.
Seems to me like that would be the end of novel-writing.
The problem is this. The physical media versions of works of "information/art" (e.g. cds, dvds, books) are quickly going the way of the dodo. All such info/art creative products will soon live mostly in the cloud as pure information.
So in this context, how does the artist/creator earn their daily bread?
Or is that a "not my problem" kind of issue, as long as you have your rights?
Yeah, but what happens when we can all, with our 3D digital TVs, enter into most of the concert experience from home, courtesy of high-quality sound and VR reconstructions created automatically and in real time from 100 HD cellphone videos taken by fans in the audience?
I guess it would still be missing marijauna smell-o-vision.
I'm not actually opposed to your view, but I'm curious if you've thought through...
How will people whose productive output is something like a work of art (e.g. a novel, a movie, a new software program) earn their food and lodging?
We have a pretty brutal capitalistic society most places these days, and pretty pathetic welfare support in all but a few Skandinavian countries.
So what should we do about it to allow those who can't do anything useful except create new cool stuff survive and thrive. An open challenge. Any ideas?
One idea I personally can't tolerate (in the software realm) is to say: You can earn money on support or customizations: That just promotes the creation of crap dysfunctional and over-complex software that needs lots of support.
Another argument that doesn't work is to say: Allow people to download and use the digital product, because then they will buy the CD/DVD/whatever. If ever there was a doomed, transitional business model, that's it. Those artifacts won't exist soon. You won't even own a digital copy of something. You will just stream it or cache it in near real time from some distributed "noplace" in the cloud.
So any other ideas? Is "streetcorner beggar donationware" the only solution? Will that work? Distributed patronage based on the good will of the masses?
Then a key question is: With no scarcity, how do we ensure or make it probable that the artist does get paid?
The only scarcity that would exist then would be the artist - it would have to be an already famous artist (problematic) - saying: I will hold an auction, and if the collective donation bid reaches $X, I will release my masterpiece to all the world, otherwise, stuff it, I'm doing a disk-wipe of the original.
I hasten to add that this post would not be a troll in a rational world.
Perhaps a way the health care system could save money is if religious believers were offered the option to sign a "Let God's will take its course" declaration, which says that any time the person's health is getting really critical, the doctors and hospitals should lay off and let God's will take its course.
I was commissioned to contribute to a large information system development proposal to a government that shall remain nameless.
The first draft of the proposal I submitted had selling points like:
"If you let us build this information bridging system (essentially a data warehouse and workflow system), you will be able to process these applications many times faster, and with better information available to the application reviewers in different departments, so that better decisions can be made."
This, was a non-starter. In a meeting with the government representatives, I actually heard them say: "We don't want to be able to process applications faster. That would reduce our staff requirements and our departmental budget."
So we came back with a proposal that said: "We'll build this system so you can package up the government data you have from various departments, and sell it to corporations and the public. (Re-sell it back to the owners, more accurately, since the data was public property already paid for by taxpayers). This way, your departments can make a revenue stream, maybe even a profit."
Wow, think of the brownie points we'd get for that from our political overlords! They thought.
In his zealous creation of unorthodox network configurations, and his hoarding of all the administrative secrets, he probably thought he was creating a uniquely secure network. He was probably proud of the way he was doing it. While his intuition to keep password distribution to a minimum was correct, he apparently failed to recognize that some redundancy was required, and some network config documentation in trusted hands other than his own, in order to protect the network from "run over by bus" scenarios.
Other aspects of what the affidavit against him charges, such as connection of "unauthorized" devices, are spurious accusations, because Childs probably believed, and quite possibly with justification given his "total responsibility for that network's creation and operation" role, that it was within the discretion of his mandate and role to set up such access devices, if he saw fit. It sounds like no one was supervising him at all for a long time, then they came in with a whole bunch of regs & requirements after the fact which he was retroactively violating.
No. The real issue here is that poor mister Childs, and, it seems, his direct supervisors, were all guilty of a lack of the basic social skills that would have allowed each other to understand what the basis of each others' position on various issues was, and to come to some amicable agreement on those issues. Childs was clearly very senior, and had been given carte blanche authority in his domain. This led him to some excessive perceptions of his "rightful powers" and to his somewhat distorted sense of complete justification for retaining sole custody of the vital secrets of the network.
With better social skills, he would have understood why the organization wanted a more institutionalized, standard procedure based, and redundant way of operating the vital network, and he would have made concessions in this regard while still maintaining a high level of operational security and technical integrity.
With better social skills, his management should have had no real problem in convincing Childs of the reasonableness of some aspects of their requests. It seems as if it was all escalated to "conflict level" almost immediately, and that the organization's management, as well as Childs, each became rapidly paranoid about the others' motives.
I place most of the blame for the way it worked out on those managing Childs. They let the situation get out of hand, allowing non-documentation and informal operation for a long time, and allowing a non-team-based, non-redundant approach to the operation of the network. And they were unable to effectively use management and leadership skills to get the changes they needed from their senior technical employee, or failing that, to put in another senior technical person to whom Childs was ordered to train on the full operation of the network. Rather than saying "we're ordering you to hand over the loot", a competent management could have convinced him of the obvious benefits of becoming more methodical and implementing redundancy of critical operational knowledge. They could have made a rational argument about some of the specific ways in which redundancy needed to be added, and specific ways that security needed to be improved on the network. And if they were properly skilled, they could even have done that in a way that did not damage and threaten his fragile ego. They could have made it seem to him like it was his great idea.
This is all just a huge misunderstanding, and a situation that management let get out of control from the get-go of that network's creation. It does not justify the criminal skapegoating that has occurred.
Regardless of what else you may think of the book, there's an interesting discussion of the relationship of randomness and predictability and computational complexity in "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram.
Also, whether some climate change is unprecedented or not is logically unconnected with the three questions of:
1. Are we a substantial cause of the current change trends 2. Should we try to alter the current change trends 3. Can we alter the current change trends
Humans and current species have a particular climate regime we are used to and thrive in. The questions are about our role in moving climate out of that comfort zone, and whether we are smart and capable and collectively motivated enough to reverse the trend and keep it within the comfort zone of the currently constituted biosphere/current species and their current habitats, including our own, on the planet.
Climate is a chaotic, nonlinear system. In that context, it may or may not even make sense to state whether what is going on now is consistent with past climate variation. The question assumes that you can say something accurate about past climate variations, other than something as vague as: Well it seems to sometimes be random within these general bounds, and sometimes seems to have an attractor in its behaviour. What does it even mean to say that current changes are "consistent" or "inconsistent" with previous chaotic behaviour?
If you go to great enough detail, all climate changes at any time are unprecedented, in that their rates of change, and peaks and valleys, are different each time.
If the panel name was trying to emphasize unprecedented change, perhaps it would be called the "Intergovernmental Panel on Unprecedented Climate Change".
p.s. Minor fix: The climate has been changing for thousands of millions of years, not just hundreds of thousands.
In the name of balance, it would be good also if a financial audit panel were created to review and disclose in a public report the funding sources and amounts which prominent climate change skeptics and denier-advocates have received.
I'm not accusing anyone. I just think it is fair that, as part of the vitally important public debate,
we should know who is behind the various positions we are hearing on this issue.
So a truly random process is one that is so complex that, without being the process itself, or an exact equivalent process that will behave precisely the same in all pertinent detail that governs its exact (not statistical) evolution) you cannot have any information that would allow you to guess with greater than chance probability the value/characteristics of its next event, from among the possible values/configurations of the events generated by the process.
Random defined as "any given result is as likely as any other".
If you are applying that to a sequence of values that has already been produced, that would be called a uniform distribution, not randomness.
If what you mean is "for the next value to be generated by this process: any given result is as likely as any other" then yes, that being true would be equivalent to saying the process is random.
We have to consider the meaning of "equally likely" here. Equally likely as far as who or what is concerned? Likelihood of an event occurring is not objective, even without taking into quantum physics into account. It depends on how much information you have about the process that will generate the event.
If you are a maxwell's demon, and you have been tracking each atom in the air, then you know exactly when the next atom is going to pass through the gate between two air filled chambers, and which atom that will be. That event happening will not be random to you. If you are anything else than that daemon (being the daemon really stands for being the process that actually is the atoms and their movement and interactions) , i.e. if you are or have any predicting/modelling algorithm of the situation that is less complex than the process that is moving the atoms, or even have an algorithm that is as complex as the real physical process, but is not doing/modelling the exact same characteristics and changes as the real process is doing, then you will not be able to tell when the next atom will go through the gate, nor which nearby atom will go through next. As far as you are concerned, any particular future time is as likely as any other particular time, and any atom is as likely as any other to be next. You can tell me what the distribution of them will be over a period of time, but you have zero information on the nature of that next single event that the one in question.
You could not have predicted what I was going to type here, but you can understand it once I've typed it?
I have been accused of being random in the past.
Seriously though, to say whether the stock market is "random", you have to define the question more precisely. If you mean: is the next "index value" that the market is going to generate random? Yes. And thus is the sequence of those that it is going to generate "random". Yes. I am pretty sure that it is ok for the definition of random for the pattern that a sequence of random (unpredictable) events to have low complexity statistics.
e.g. a random process can generate a uniform distribution of values
"markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either)"
Ummmm. Isn't one of the leading definitions of a "random" process that it is a process which exhibits maximum complexity, and thus is not predictable except by the execution of the identical process. ?
i.e. "inherently unpredictable by any algorithm simpler than the process itself" = "random"
Most brilliant artists, composers, and revolutionary scientists were scoffed at or ignored during their lifetime, and their work was only recognized as genius some time after their death.
How will we manage to avoid losing all that good stuff, when no-one knows its worth saving, until later.
"Basically, your answer to how to survive a digital dark age is to assume that one will never occur?"
No. I'm stating that the best way to avert loss of the information is to improve our techniques for massively redundant and well distributed storage of that information. This by the way is the strategy that life uses to preserve its core (genome) information, so I'm in good company.
It wouldn't hurt to improve the sustainability and self-sufficient power generation of many more independent sites, either.
I'm basically saying that the redundancy and distribution solution is going to be more effective, and more probably successful, than a "stone tablet" solution.
If we experience a nearby supernova or a massive meteor, neither is going to be of any use, so hopefully we're agreed that we're talking about less extreme scenarios than that.
What we need are "fractally self-sufficient" nets-within-nets.
Slashdot Mirror
All food products sold in grocery stores should have a simple
red, yellow, or green icon prominent on their packaging.
- Red would be high simple carbs or high salt or has transfats.
-Yellow would be "iffy foods" which have moderate simple-carb levels,
fat levels, and low salt.
-Green would basically be veggies or very high-fibre carbs or
plant protein etc.
Or the most complex you could go would be separate
colors for heart health (lots of salt or fat = bad = red)
and metabolic health (lots of simple carbs bad = red)
So a red heart icon beside a yellow circle would indicate something
really bad for your heart if you keep eating them, but so-so for
developing diabetes or obesity.
This would raise awareness, and if you shopped and bought lots
of "Green" and some yellows, and maybe one "red" for the week,
you'd be a healthy human, diet-wise at least.
As for the mouse, get a mac laptop and use the trackpad. Not a big issue.
The thing is about letting you understand context quickly. The context comprehension is vital to dong an insightful code addition or fix.
It is also good at showing the narrative aspect of code stories, which interleave through the single file-based view of the code.
These code stories are essential to understanding the essential behaviors of the code you are adding to or modifying.
Works for me.
That said, the more automatic layout, the better.
Because, with its gotos and numbered code satements, it made pretty explicit that the computer
was implementing a "program counter" or "program current-instruction pointer" which was advancing
step-by-step through the program and being redirected to another block of code using a jump of some
kind.
Someone who is going to become an excellent programmer will take that, and discover for themselves
that always structuring ifs with gotos as a standard pattern in an if then else organization makes their
programs easier to write and to maintain and understand.
They will also learn to create standard patterns for looping while checking a condition, and
for creating distinct subroutines with structured ways of going to them and returning, including
creating extra variables which are used to pass arguments into a subroutine.
Thus you don't just learn structured programming. You learn what aspects are important about it
(the patterning of control flow, localization of similar purpose code etc.) and you learn the mechanics
of how a compiler is going to make it work i.e. what it will do under the hood.
Great stuff.
I'd put it this way.
-Bad programmers will be outed sooner by starting with Basic.
-Excellent programmers will become even better and wiser faster by starting with Basic and
climbing up out of it.
They will also have a quick straightforward path from Basic down to understanding assembly code and
ways and advantages of structuring it.
Than a country full of sedentary layabouts twittering to each other like chickadees
about the price of spice
and admiring their own portraits on facebook.
It's a pretty problematic analogy.
The mechanic has entered into a legally binding contract with a person who owns a single physical car. So they get paid for
fixing that one car, and since it is a physical object, it is easy for them to withhold it from the customer if they are not paid.
So the mechanic spends 4 hours working on the car, and gets paid, conservatively, $200 net.
So let's say I write a novel, spend 4 years (say 4,000 hours) producing it.
So let's say my novel is only half as valuable per unit of effort as the car repair.
So I can sell my first copy of it, after which it is unsellable (by me or any other agent/distributor) because it is infinitely copied.
So I have to sell that first copy for, by my calculation, $100,000, and I'm selling it to someone who can get the next
copy (indistinguishable from the original), for free.
Good luck to me I guess.
Seems to me like that would be the end of novel-writing.
The problem is this. The physical media versions of works of "information/art" (e.g. cds, dvds, books) are quickly
going the way of the dodo. All such info/art creative products will soon live mostly in the cloud as pure information.
So in this context, how does the artist/creator earn their daily bread?
Or is that a "not my problem" kind of issue, as long as you have your rights?
Yeah, but what happens when we can all, with our 3D digital TVs,
enter into most of the concert experience from home, courtesy of
high-quality sound and VR reconstructions created automatically
and in real time from 100 HD cellphone videos taken by fans in the audience?
I guess it would still be missing marijauna smell-o-vision.
I'm not actually opposed to your view, but I'm curious if you've thought through...
How will people whose productive output is something like a work of art (e.g. a novel, a movie, a new software program)
earn their food and lodging?
We have a pretty brutal capitalistic society most places these days, and pretty pathetic welfare support in all
but a few Skandinavian countries.
So what should we do about it to allow those who can't do anything useful except create new cool stuff survive
and thrive. An open challenge. Any ideas?
One idea I personally can't tolerate (in the software realm) is to say: You can earn money on support or customizations:
That just promotes the creation of crap dysfunctional and over-complex software that needs lots of support.
Another argument that doesn't work is to say: Allow people to download and use the digital product, because
then they will buy the CD/DVD/whatever. If ever there was a doomed, transitional business model, that's it.
Those artifacts won't exist soon. You won't even own a digital copy of something. You will just stream it or
cache it in near real time from some distributed "noplace" in the cloud.
So any other ideas? Is "streetcorner beggar donationware" the only solution? Will that work? Distributed patronage based
on the good will of the masses?
Then a key question is: With no scarcity, how do we ensure or make it probable that the artist does get paid?
The only scarcity that would exist then would be the artist - it would have to be an already famous artist (problematic) -
saying: I will hold an auction, and if the collective donation bid reaches $X, I will release my masterpiece
to all the world, otherwise, stuff it, I'm doing a disk-wipe of the original.
I hasten to add that this post would not be a troll in a rational world.
Perhaps a way the health care system could save money is if religious believers
were offered the option to sign a "Let God's will take its course" declaration,
which says that any time the person's health is getting really critical, the
doctors and hospitals should lay off and let God's will take its course.
I was commissioned to contribute to a large information system development proposal to a government that shall remain nameless.
The first draft of the proposal I submitted had selling points like:
"If you let us build this information bridging system (essentially a data warehouse and workflow system), you will be able to process these applications many times faster, and with better information available to the application reviewers in different departments,
so that better decisions can be made."
This, was a non-starter.
In a meeting with the government representatives, I actually heard them say: "We don't want to be able to process applications faster. That would reduce our staff requirements and our departmental budget."
So we came back with a proposal that said:
"We'll build this system so you can package up the government data you have from various departments, and sell it
to corporations and the public. (Re-sell it back to the owners, more accurately, since the data was public property already paid for by taxpayers). This way, your departments can make a revenue stream, maybe even a profit."
Wow, think of the brownie points we'd get for that from our political overlords! They thought.
And we got the multi-million dollar contract.
You forgot one:
Simplicity is power!
That is what Terry Childs is really "guilty" of.
In his zealous creation of unorthodox network configurations, and his hoarding of all the administrative secrets,
he probably thought he was creating a uniquely secure network. He was probably proud of the way he was doing
it. While his intuition to keep password distribution to a minimum was correct, he apparently failed to recognize
that some redundancy was required, and some network config documentation in trusted hands other than his own,
in order to protect the network from "run over by bus" scenarios.
Other aspects of what the affidavit against him charges, such as connection of "unauthorized" devices, are spurious
accusations, because Childs probably believed, and quite possibly with justification given his "total responsibility
for that network's creation and operation" role, that it was within the discretion of his mandate and role to set up such access
devices, if he saw fit. It sounds like no one was supervising him at all for a long time, then they came in with
a whole bunch of regs & requirements after the fact which he was retroactively violating.
No. The real issue here is that poor mister Childs, and, it seems, his direct supervisors, were all guilty of a lack of the basic social
skills that would have allowed each other to understand what the basis of each others' position on various issues
was, and to come to some amicable agreement on those issues. Childs was clearly very senior, and had been given
carte blanche authority in his domain. This led him to some excessive perceptions of his "rightful powers" and to his somewhat
distorted sense of complete justification for retaining sole custody of the vital secrets of the network.
With better social skills, he would have understood why the organization wanted a more institutionalized, standard procedure based, and redundant way of operating the vital network, and he would have made concessions in this regard while still maintaining
a high level of operational security and technical integrity.
With better social skills, his management should have had no real problem in convincing Childs of the reasonableness of some
aspects of their requests. It seems as if it was all escalated to "conflict level" almost immediately, and that the organization's
management, as well as Childs, each became rapidly paranoid about the others' motives.
I place most of the blame for the way it worked out on those managing Childs. They let the situation get out of hand, allowing non-documentation and informal operation for a long time, and allowing a non-team-based, non-redundant
approach to the operation of the network. And they were unable to effectively use management and leadership skills to
get the changes they needed from their senior technical employee, or failing that, to put in another senior technical person
to whom Childs was ordered to train on the full operation of the network. Rather than saying "we're ordering you to hand over
the loot", a competent management could have convinced him of the obvious benefits of becoming more methodical and implementing redundancy of critical operational knowledge. They could have made a rational argument about some of the specific
ways in which redundancy needed to be added, and specific ways that security needed to be improved on the network.
And if they were properly skilled, they could even have done that in a way that did not damage and threaten his fragile
ego. They could have made it seem to him like it was his great idea.
This is all just a huge misunderstanding, and a situation that management let get out of control from the get-go of that
network's creation. It does not justify the criminal skapegoating that has occurred.
Seriously though, Microsoft is just miffed because it can't start 10 years late and be competitive.
Regardless of what else you may think of the book, there's
an interesting discussion of the relationship of randomness and predictability
and computational complexity in "A New Kind of Science" by Stephen Wolfram.
Also, whether some climate change is unprecedented or not is logically unconnected
with the three questions of:
1. Are we a substantial cause of the current change trends
2. Should we try to alter the current change trends
3. Can we alter the current change trends
Humans and current species have a particular climate regime we are used to and thrive
in. The questions are about our role in moving climate out of that comfort zone, and whether
we are smart and capable and collectively motivated enough to reverse the trend and keep
it within the comfort zone of the currently constituted biosphere/current species and their
current habitats, including our own, on the planet.
Climate is a chaotic, nonlinear system. In that context, it may or may not even make sense to state whether
what is going on now is consistent with past climate variation. The question assumes that you can say something
accurate about past climate variations, other than something as vague as: Well it seems to sometimes be random within these general bounds, and sometimes seems to have an attractor in its behaviour. What does it even mean to say that current changes are "consistent" or "inconsistent" with previous chaotic behaviour?
If you go to great enough detail, all climate changes at any time are unprecedented, in that their rates of change, and peaks and valleys, are different each time.
If the panel name was trying to emphasize unprecedented change, perhaps it would be called the
"Intergovernmental Panel on Unprecedented Climate Change".
p.s. Minor fix: The climate has been changing for thousands of millions of years, not just hundreds of thousands.
In the name of balance, it would be good also if a financial audit panel were created to
review and disclose in a public report the funding sources and amounts which
prominent climate change skeptics and denier-advocates have received.
I'm not accusing anyone. I just think it is fair that, as part of the vitally important public debate,
we should know who is behind the various positions we are hearing on this issue.
So a truly random process is one that is so complex that, without being the process itself, or an exact equivalent process that will behave precisely the same in all pertinent detail that governs its exact (not statistical) evolution) you cannot have any information that would allow you to guess with greater than chance probability the
value/characteristics of its next event, from among the possible values/configurations of the events generated by the process.
Random defined as "any given result is as likely as any other".
If you are applying that to a sequence of values that has already been produced, that would be called a uniform distribution, not randomness.
If what you mean is "for the next value to be generated by this process: any given result is as likely as any other" then yes, that
being true would be equivalent to saying the process is random.
We have to consider the meaning of "equally likely" here. Equally likely as far as who or what is concerned?
Likelihood of an event occurring is not objective, even without taking into quantum physics into account.
It depends on how much information you have about the process that will generate the event.
If you are a maxwell's demon, and you
have been tracking each atom in the air, then you know exactly when the next atom is going to pass through the gate between two air filled chambers,
and which atom that will be. That event happening will not be random to you.
If you are anything else than that daemon (being the daemon really stands for being the process that actually is the atoms and their movement
and interactions) , i.e. if you are or have any predicting/modelling algorithm of the situation
that is less complex than the process that is moving the atoms, or even have an algorithm that is as complex as the real physical process,
but is not doing/modelling the exact same characteristics and changes as the real process is doing, then you will not be able to tell when
the next atom will go through the gate, nor which nearby atom will go through next. As far as you are concerned, any particular future time
is as likely as any other particular time, and any atom is as likely as any other to be next. You can tell me what the distribution of them
will be over a period of time, but you have zero information on the nature of that next single event that the one in question.
Kind of like?
You could not have predicted what I was going to type here, but you can understand it once I've typed it?
I have been accused of being random in the past.
Seriously though, to say whether the stock market is "random", you have to define the question more
precisely. If you mean: is the next "index value" that the market is going to generate random? Yes. And thus
is the sequence of those that it is going to generate "random". Yes. I am pretty sure that it is ok for the definition
of random for the pattern that a sequence of random (unpredictable) events to have low complexity statistics.
e.g. a random process can generate a uniform distribution of values
"markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either)"
Ummmm. Isn't one of the leading definitions of a "random" process that it is
a process which exhibits maximum complexity, and thus is not predictable
except by the execution of the identical process. ?
i.e. "inherently unpredictable by any algorithm simpler than the process itself" = "random"
A file is a sequence of bits carrying information.
A packet is a sequence of bits carrying information.
Should this legislation not logically apply to the installation of all software that transmits data packets from my computer to some other computer?
Most brilliant artists, composers, and revolutionary scientists were scoffed at or ignored during their lifetime, and their work was only recognized as genius some time after their death.
How will we manage to avoid losing all that good stuff, when no-one knows its worth saving, until later.
"Basically, your answer to how to survive a digital dark age is to assume that one will never occur?"
No. I'm stating that the best way to avert loss of the information is to improve our techniques for massively redundant and well distributed storage of that information. This by the way is the strategy that life uses to preserve its core (genome) information, so I'm in good company.
It wouldn't hurt to improve the sustainability and self-sufficient power generation of many more independent sites, either.
I'm basically saying that the redundancy and distribution solution is going to be more effective, and more probably successful, than a "stone tablet" solution.
If we experience a nearby supernova or a massive meteor, neither is going to be of any use, so hopefully we're agreed that we're talking about less extreme scenarios than that.
What we need are "fractally self-sufficient" nets-within-nets.