As a thought experiment, imagine the genome to be a very big, very modular program, with lots of clusters of specialized subclasses of functionality that are occasionally or potentially useful.
This program is represented by a coding sequence of molecules; at essence a copyable and readable bitstring.
Time and living in a complex, energetic environment tend to break down complex structures which must be "binary-precise" to maintain their meaning. All else being equal, a longer program, a longer bitstring, has a higher probability of losing parts of itself to mutation. Longer programs; longer genomes, require cleverer techniques to preserve themselves over evolutionary time scales.
The cool thing is, longer programs are precisely those that have the capacity to implement cleverer strategies for keeping their own program information reliably preserved.
That is the essential battle that life and evolution wage against entropy; More bits (longer genome) = more or better strategies for building bit-containers (organisms) and better strategies for taking advantage of environments or pacifying environments. But more bits = harder to preserve without critical errors breaking the program.
The life bitstrings are in different states of adaptation to their environment as time passes and both environments and genomes change. In a dynamic environment (or a wide, general niche) more modules and subclasses (waiting in the wings, ready for activation if needed) is probably advantageous to a set of generations of the organism, whereas in a highly adapted state in a stable environment, and an environment with well established niches and in fact cross-supporting functions of those niches (a long-lived relatively stable ecosystem in relatively stable climate), the extra adaptability may carry costs of it being too difficult to retain that extra information reliably for the potential benefit it might have if things changed. The extra program bits can also be dangerous. Most organized variants of code-sections of the life-program are organism-killers, most of the time.
In summary, a longer bitstring at the core of life can only be supported by evolution if it earns its keep in life-preserving strategy execution.
I think life bitstrings (genomes) on Earth have GENERALLY been growing by 1 or 2 bits a year since life began (give or take an enormous waffle factor). But in some, relatively stable, organism-environment pairings, temporary program shortening trends may be advantageous prunings of the more wild-ass life mechanism "ideas".
How dumb, or seriously ADD, do you have to be, when the major question you ask about a new technology is: Yeah, but how fast is it?
"We've invented this program that is smarter than the average bear"
"Yeah, but how fast is it?"
"You don't understand! This baby even knows that you're not SUPPOSED to fight forest fires!"
"Yeah, but how fast is it?"
Seriously, these speed evaluations are irrelevant, boring, and inane to the extreme. How about some evaluation of the possible uses this new technology will be put to, and how its abilities to support these uses compares to other competing or similar technologies.
"Look at this new amp we've got! Look at this. It goes up to 11! Unbelievable!"
"Yeah, but how fast does it go pedal to the metal, man?"
As long as scientific results and techniques are hidden in very expensive privately-run journals and conference proceedings, it cannot in any sense be considered open in the same sense as open-source or "fsf-free" software.
I would like to pursue scientific research as an amateur, but am prevented from doing so.
And this problem doesn't apply only to me, but to countless fully qualified scientists whose institutions cannot afford the knowledge.
I believe that a PKI-based ballot receipt kept in escrow may an adequate solution. In other words, at the simplest level, the e-voter receives a receipt, which does not contain the information on how they voted, but can be supplied to the system at a later date, where it will allow them to check their ballot. There is also a mathematical way to verify that that ballot contributed one vote's worth to the result, through hashing technology.
Of course, receipts are a problem as long as we have unequal power relationships, such as the mullah or husband demanding to see the vote. So you probably just go with you get a receipt that you can use to verify that your vote made into the final tally, via a math algorithm that can be verified by as many wonks as you want.
I think the real problem is that people don't trust geeks, no matter how many of them would attest en mass to the correctness of an algorithm or a result.
With money, I don't go in for all this debit-card, credit card, bank account nonsense. Complete hocus-pocus. In fact, I don't even hold with paper notes. If it isn't solid metal weighing and clanking in my pocket, I don't trust it.
1. If you are concerned about a single e-voting system corrupting the data, you could have the data passed in parallel to multiple independently developed open-source systems for recording and tallying the votes.
2. Why should we trust the electronic financial systems that manage our bank accounts, and billions of local and international financial transactions every day, yet not trust e-voting systems? Clearly there is just as much incentive to syphon off a billion or two dollars here or there as there is to sway an election.
What property is it of the electronic financial systems that enable us to, in general, trust them (despite a few occasional fraud cases)? Why could we not build that property in to our way of conducting computerized elections?
3. In "poorer" or disorganized countries and failed states, paper-based elections, when conducted, are generally a complete joke. There is usually profound disagreement about cheating and results claims varying by 5 or 10 per cent. The things are decided by which side has the army or judges on side.
Are you seriously claiming that an independently run, cross-national, e-voting organization could not run a fairer election in these places?
It seems to me that the major problem we would have there is that powerful interests in the country, being used to being able to rig the elections, would not accept the use of the technology, paradoxically because it might elicit the truth about the voting intentions of its public, particularly if the election was conducted, as is eminently feasible with an e-voting system, over a period of several months or even six months, to minimize the possibilities for voter intimidation.
4. In the first US election that George Bush was declared by some arbitrary legal powr broking and arm wrestling to have won, mathematically there was no result. That is, the voting process did not reach a decision, because the difference in result was within the margin of error of the manual voting and vote counting process.
or we could fight AGAINST the stupidity and apathy I suppose.:-) The nefarious forces of entrenched hierarchy fighting to increase the general level of stupidity and apathy need no assistance.
An Internet based vote is way more cost-effective and easy to setup and conduct than a paper one.
This kind of technology will become the norm.
It will permit consultation of populations on a much more frequent basis.
The security issues are solvable through use of open-source standards, and clever encryption schemes, that can be verified by thousands of independent programmers and mathematicians.
Admittedly we don't have the level of techno-scrutiny we need on these things yet, but it will come.
The bigger problem with democracy is how to educate people so they can maintain a relatively rational and independent opinion in the face of media carpet-mindbombing campaigns, and how we motivate people to believe that their opinion matters. Stupidity and apathy. That's what we have to fight for for democracy.
At least now the bone-headed practice of this discrimination is known by the outside world, and the appropriate amount of scorn, ridicule, and disapproval can be heaped on the superstitious throw-back practitioners of the discrimination.
Companies and governments from elsewhere could check whether this practice is occurring, and blacklist Japanese companies that are shown to practice this human-rights violation.
One thing about the iphone, love it or hate it, is that the apps on it all use the same constrained user interface, and thus many of the same ui widgets and conventions.
This, for users, makes Apple app store apps EASY TO USE.
Also, each one is resource constrained, and ui constrained, so it is SINGLE PURPOSE, making it trivial to explain and no fuss to use.
People can get started using their app easily and are seldom disappointed, and NEVER confused in their attempt to use the app. It just works.
And it costs from 0 to $5 bucks (vast majority).
The above are REQUIREMENTS for a mass consumer software distribution infrastructure.
I hope sun doesn't screw up by allowing freedom to put whatever the heck program you want on there, following whatever ui conventions you want, and with 100 buttons each.
1. Boss interrupts every hour with "just a little thing. This customer is experiencing a problem. Can you fix it for them?"
2. Boss puts team of developers together in big room, with the "belly-laugh sales guy", confident that this will encourage productivity and connectedness with the customer's issues.
3. Boss evaluates your progress on the new user interface you can show him today, and how it is so much better and more complete than the one you showed him yesterday. "Architecture is for later when we can afford it. Maybe for large companies. We're about customers. We're agile!"
Because most of them would take most competent software engineers about 5 minutes to think up themselves if presented with the problem that the patent claims to be a solution to.
The programmatic solution is often obvious from a routine logical analysis of the problem and its domain, and standard modelling techniques.
The examiners seem not to be able to have a proper idea of non-obviousness (to a practitioner in the field), when it comes to software patents.
This causes areas of software work to be unreasonably closed off to any reasonable creative developer, and that's just a pain in the ass. So we basically say, look, if I could have thought of that without breaking a sweat just by using the standard analysis and coding techniques of the trade, then I'm pretty much going to ignore the "patent" on it, aren't I.
Ironically, there's a good argument that, because human memory works on a "remember the exceptions" basis, a simpler set of rules will encourage forgetting the existence or meaning of some words, and thus will lead to reduction in usable vocabulary. Some words were remembered (their existence remembered and their meaning remembered) BECAUSE of their unusual grammar or spelling rule, and/or the word family lineage patterns that marble-texture the full version of English.
Remove this texture and these landmarks of weirdness in the natural language, and you remove the map that helps the brain comprehend a rich-vocabulary version of the language.
If you compare a) British/Canadian/Indian/Australian/NZ English b) U.S. English spelling and pronunciation, it is invariably the case that the American version (b) is the one that reflects either -
ignorance of special rules of the language and therefore a resort to simplified general rules,
or a lazier and more utilitarian use of a subset of the language vocabulary and its grammar rules.
e.g. (First form not used by most Americans)
-Lego plural of Lego is a special case (possibly related to Latin or Greek derived English words)
-through instead of thru is special-case pronunciation and spelling
-colour vs color is an extra letter (not lazy) and is a special pronunciation rule
-cheque vs check reflects knowledge and acceptance of the origins of English words in words of other languages
Please remember that the architecture of the Internet makes it the world's first P2P system; albeit with a lousy user interface.
All regulation of P2P systems and what you can do with them or not logically must apply to the Internet as a whole, because there is no fundamental functional difference between a fancy P2P system and the raw Internet.
This is why all legislation targeted specifically at P2P systems is both misguided and extremely dangerous to the future of the net as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
As a thought experiment, imagine the genome to be a very big, very modular program, with lots of clusters of specialized subclasses of functionality that are occasionally or potentially useful.
This program is represented by a coding sequence of molecules; at essence a copyable and readable bitstring.
Time and living in a complex, energetic environment tend to break down complex structures which must be "binary-precise" to maintain their meaning. All else being equal, a longer program, a longer bitstring, has a higher probability of losing parts of itself to mutation. Longer programs; longer genomes, require cleverer techniques to preserve themselves over evolutionary time scales.
The cool thing is, longer programs are precisely those that have the capacity to implement cleverer strategies for keeping their own program information reliably preserved.
That is the essential battle that life and evolution wage against entropy;
More bits (longer genome) = more or better strategies for building bit-containers (organisms) and better strategies for taking advantage of environments or pacifying environments.
But more bits = harder to preserve without critical errors breaking the program.
The life bitstrings are in different states of adaptation to their environment as time passes and both environments and genomes change. In a dynamic environment (or a wide, general niche) more modules and subclasses (waiting in the wings, ready for activation if needed) is probably advantageous to a set of generations of the organism, whereas in a highly adapted state in a stable environment, and an environment with well established niches and in fact cross-supporting functions of those niches (a long-lived relatively stable ecosystem in relatively stable climate), the extra adaptability may carry costs of it being too difficult to retain that extra information reliably for the potential benefit it might have if things changed. The extra program bits can also be dangerous. Most organized variants of code-sections of the life-program are organism-killers, most of the time.
In summary, a longer bitstring at the core of life can only be supported by evolution if it earns its keep in life-preserving strategy execution.
I think life bitstrings (genomes) on Earth have GENERALLY been growing by 1 or 2 bits a year since life began (give or take an enormous waffle factor). But in some, relatively stable, organism-environment pairings, temporary program shortening trends may be advantageous prunings of the more wild-ass life mechanism "ideas".
How dumb, or seriously ADD,
do you have to be, when the major question you ask about
a new technology is: Yeah, but how fast is it?
"We've invented this program that is smarter than the average bear"
"Yeah, but how fast is it?"
"You don't understand! This baby even knows that you're not SUPPOSED
to fight forest fires!"
"Yeah, but how fast is it?"
Seriously, these speed evaluations are irrelevant, boring, and inane to
the extreme. How about some evaluation of the possible uses this new
technology will be put to, and how its abilities to support these uses
compares to other competing or similar technologies.
"Look at this new amp we've got! Look at this. It goes up to 11! Unbelievable!"
"Yeah, but how fast does it go pedal to the metal, man?"
As long as scientific results and techniques are hidden in very expensive privately-run journals and conference proceedings,
it cannot in any sense be considered open in the same sense as open-source or "fsf-free" software.
I would like to pursue scientific research as an amateur, but am prevented from doing so.
And this problem doesn't apply only to me, but to countless fully qualified scientists whose institutions cannot
afford the knowledge.
Science badly needs a Bastille day.
I believe that a PKI-based ballot receipt kept in escrow may an adequate solution. In other words, at the simplest level, the e-voter receives a receipt, which does not contain the information on how they voted, but can be supplied to the system at a later date, where it will allow them to check their ballot. There is also a mathematical way to verify that that ballot contributed one vote's worth to the result, through hashing technology.
Of course, receipts are a problem as long as we have unequal power relationships, such as the mullah or husband demanding to see the vote.
So you probably just go with you get a receipt that you can use to verify that your vote made into the final tally, via a math algorithm that
can be verified by as many wonks as you want.
I think the real problem is that people don't trust geeks, no matter how many of them would attest en mass to the correctness of an algorithm or a result.
With money, I don't go in for all this debit-card, credit card, bank account nonsense.
Complete hocus-pocus.
In fact, I don't even hold with paper notes.
If it isn't solid metal weighing and clanking in my pocket,
I don't trust it.
Also,
you do know that paper is flammable, I presume. In the country of my great repeatedly elected
supreme leader, we know this very well.
Hey,
Have you ever heard of disappearing ink?
Yes, and those of you who are analogy-impaired still don't get what he successfully and accurately communicated to the general public, do you?
1. If you are concerned about a single e-voting system corrupting the data, you could have the data passed in parallel to multiple independently developed open-source systems for recording and tallying the votes.
2. Why should we trust the electronic financial systems that manage our bank accounts, and billions of local and international financial transactions every day,
yet not trust e-voting systems? Clearly there is just as much incentive to syphon off a billion or two dollars here or there as there is to sway an election.
What property is it of the electronic financial systems that enable us to, in general, trust them (despite a few occasional fraud cases)?
Why could we not build that property in to our way of conducting computerized elections?
3. In "poorer" or disorganized countries and failed states, paper-based elections, when conducted, are generally a complete joke. There is usually profound disagreement about
cheating and results claims varying by 5 or 10 per cent. The things are decided by which side has the army or judges on side.
Are you seriously claiming that an independently run, cross-national, e-voting organization could not run a fairer election in these places?
It seems to me that the major problem we would have there is that powerful interests in the country, being used to being able to rig the elections,
would not accept the use of the technology, paradoxically because it might elicit the truth about the voting intentions of its public, particularly if the
election was conducted, as is eminently feasible with an e-voting system, over a period of several months or even six months, to minimize the
possibilities for voter intimidation.
4. In the first US election that George Bush was declared by some arbitrary legal powr broking and arm wrestling to have won, mathematically there
was no result. That is, the voting process did not reach a decision, because the difference in result was within the margin of error of the manual
voting and vote counting process.
or we could fight AGAINST the stupidity and apathy I suppose. :-)
The nefarious forces of entrenched hierarchy fighting to increase the general level of stupidity and apathy
need no assistance.
An Internet based vote is way more cost-effective and easy to setup and conduct than a paper one.
This kind of technology will become the norm.
It will permit consultation of populations on a much more frequent basis.
The security issues are solvable through use of open-source standards, and clever
encryption schemes, that can be verified by thousands of independent
programmers and mathematicians.
Admittedly we don't have the level of techno-scrutiny we need on these things yet,
but it will come.
The bigger problem with democracy is how to educate people so they can maintain a
relatively rational and independent opinion in the face of media carpet-mindbombing
campaigns, and how we motivate people to believe that their opinion matters.
Stupidity and apathy. That's what we have to fight for for democracy.
We at the Science of Churchology speak nothing but the truth!
We preach the attainment of happiness through the understanding
of the evolution of religion.
We will not be SILENCED!
At least now the bone-headed practice of this discrimination is known by the outside world, and the appropriate amount of scorn, ridicule, and disapproval can be heaped on the superstitious throw-back practitioners of the discrimination.
Companies and governments from elsewhere could check whether this practice is occurring, and blacklist Japanese companies that are shown to practice this human-rights violation.
If he did what he has been accused of.
And an uncivil b@st@rd.
For the record.
Let's not lose that point amidst
the discussion of the incompetence of
the police in the case.
One thing about the iphone, love it or hate it, is that the apps on it all use the same constrained user interface, and thus many of the same ui widgets and conventions.
This, for users, makes Apple app store apps EASY TO USE.
Also, each one is resource constrained, and ui constrained, so it is SINGLE PURPOSE, making it trivial to explain and no fuss to use.
People can get started using their app easily and are seldom disappointed, and NEVER confused in their attempt to use the app. It just works.
And it costs from 0 to $5 bucks (vast majority).
The above are REQUIREMENTS for a mass consumer software distribution infrastructure.
I hope sun doesn't screw up by allowing freedom to put whatever the heck program you want on there, following whatever ui conventions you want, and with 100 buttons each.
EPIC FAIL if so.
1. Boss interrupts every hour with "just a little thing. This customer is experiencing a problem. Can you fix it for them?"
2. Boss puts team of developers together in big room, with the "belly-laugh sales guy", confident that this will encourage productivity and connectedness with the customer's issues.
3. Boss evaluates your progress on the new user interface you can show him today, and how it is so much better and more complete than the one you showed him yesterday. "Architecture is for later when we can afford it. Maybe for large companies. We're about customers. We're agile!"
Because most of them would take most competent software engineers about 5 minutes to think up themselves if presented with the problem that the patent claims to be a solution to.
The programmatic solution is often obvious from a routine logical analysis of the problem and its domain, and standard modelling techniques.
The examiners seem not to be able to have a proper idea of non-obviousness (to a practitioner in the field), when it comes to software patents.
This causes areas of software work to be unreasonably closed off to any reasonable creative developer, and that's just a pain in the ass. So we basically say, look, if I could have thought of that without breaking a sweat just by using the standard analysis and coding techniques of the trade, then I'm pretty much going to ignore the "patent" on it, aren't I.
For the detection of differences in things.
I am pretty sure that trumps their patent.
Royalties!!!
Like, you know, I go: ...words with no guts no power.
When we eviscerate and castrate the language,
we get...
He goes:
Then she goes:
As if
Ironically, there's a good argument that, because human memory works on a "remember the exceptions" basis, a simpler set of rules will encourage forgetting the existence or meaning of some words, and thus will lead to reduction in usable vocabulary. Some words were remembered (their existence remembered and their meaning remembered) BECAUSE of their unusual grammar or spelling rule, and/or the word family lineage patterns that marble-texture the full version of English.
Remove this texture and these landmarks of weirdness in the natural language, and you remove the map that helps the brain comprehend a rich-vocabulary version of the language.
If you compare
a) British/Canadian/Indian/Australian/NZ English
b) U.S. English
spelling and pronunciation,
it is invariably the case that the American version (b) is the one that reflects either -
ignorance of special rules of the language and therefore a resort to simplified general rules,
or a lazier and more utilitarian use of a subset of the language vocabulary and its grammar rules.
e.g. (First form not used by most Americans)
-Lego plural of Lego is a special case (possibly related to Latin or Greek derived English words)
-through instead of thru is special-case pronunciation and spelling
-colour vs color is an extra letter (not lazy) and is a special pronunciation rule
-cheque vs check reflects knowledge and acceptance of the origins of English words in words of other languages
Please remember that the architecture of the Internet makes it the world's first P2P system; albeit with a lousy user interface.
All regulation of P2P systems and what you can do with them or not logically must apply to the Internet as a whole, because there is
no fundamental functional difference between a fancy P2P system and the raw Internet.
This is why all legislation targeted specifically at P2P systems is both misguided and extremely dangerous to the future of the net as a whole.
Find out interesting keywords in what people say they are doing or talking about.
Advertise something local and highly related to that person, in the form of a discount offer or something.
Google ads for the attention-span-of-a-gnat generation?
Even if your name is Apple.
Seriously though, this would be a better fit for Google wouldn't it, since they are an information and advertising company.
Or P.I.G. Flu
- suggested by CBC radio's "The Current" program this morning.