Only a few dozen million years ago "we" were small furry rodents.
Now I have to nitpick. According to Wikipedia, last common ancestor of Rodentia and "us" lived about 90 million years ago, and wasn't a rodent. So, strictly speaking, "we" have never been rodents (furry or not), and 6-7 (dozen million years) is more than "a few" even if you take the last common ancestor.
Please forgive errors, I don't eat popcorn anymore so my popping skills are rusty, but still better than that microwave apt-get popcorn.
It'd be better, except the OS versions of libbutter and libsalt are either too old or too new, possibly both. So you need to build them too. But to build the right version of libbutter, you will need a specific version of libcow, which they forgot to actually tag in the source code repo. First you almost try to configure libbutter with -disable-dairy to get a non-dairy version only, but then you realize that it won't be real butter, and you're not desperate enough to consider getting popcorn without real butter yet. Trying random versions from libcow source repo doesn't give success either. So, you decide to get older popcorn version 5.6 instead. But after going through the process of building libcow, libbutter and libsalt, you discover that popcorn version 5.6 has a really annoying bug for your use case. First you see if you can backport the fix, but too much has changed so the fixed code in newer version does not look anything like the broken code in 5.6, and it's not easy to see how you could just simply fix it. So, then you fall back to apt-get source popcorn, because that should have the right versions and fixes and so on. And it does, it builds and installs perfectly!
Then, while enjoying the popcorn, you suddenly realize that it's exactly the same software you would have gotten with simple apt-get install, because you didn't actually change any configure options for your "custom" build.
WTF? I know US has its problems, and I doubt I'd want to live there, but isn't it supposed to be a free market economy? Isn't this (not being allowed to sell legal goods to people) about as anti-American as it gets? What happaned to "the Land of the Free" etc? Free, except not free to buy a car?
it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information.
Anybody who stores (instead of just sharing, with actual storage elsewhere) gigabytes of information at any social service deserves what's coming to them.
Guns make suicide much too easy, which denies these people a chance to recover from their depression.
Well, guns are an effective suicide method yes, but I wouldn't say it's that easy. According to Wikipedia (and presumably the reference it gives, which I of course did not check), there's 10% chance it fails. But what's bad about doing it with a gun is, if it does fail, it'll likely leave the perp/victim maimed for life, unlike many other suicide methods, where failure is much less likely to result in any serious permanent injury.
So I'd say, guns only seem an easy way for suicide. If people knew the chance of failure and considered the likely results of failure, it'd seem much less tempting way to go, even for one who has decided to do it.
This story proves how "Skynet" is wise to wait until there are enough robust robotic vehicles to take out all humans, before taking over the world. Another prerequisite is sufficiently autonomous repair systems for energy production etc. So I think the humans still have a few decades to enjoy life, before the inevitable robot apocalypse, and being strafed by military aerial drones, crushed by their own Google cars, electrocuted by their own Google glasses with neural interface, and strangled by their own Google neckties.
Just letting you know, that kind of talk sounds like you're one of those developers who tend to leave behind messy disasters needing complete rewrite as soon as some change is required, while talking about their own greatness. You probably know the type if you're not one, so you might want to adjust your message. And if you're one of 'em... Never mind, ignore this reply.
Giving 12 days to perhaps save a tiny bit of biodiversity and learn something about doomed nature is too generous, not to mention pointless, such a waste of time. Pave the Earth and be done with it, already!/sarcasm
It doesn't matter what engineers want. The question is, what do the robots want. Once they want to replace us, they will, because at that point they're advanced enough to be able to do that.
I am fortunate to eat once or twice a week aside from a can of Coca-Cola. My body must be on rejuvenation overdrive!
Only if it is Zero. Getting the load of carbs that are in regular sodas will keep the body happily saturated with sugar, even with only a few cans per day.
Fasting and being starved are quite different things...Fasting is not about getting too little energy and nutrients in the long term, or being malnourished. Even suggesting that starvation is just a form of fasting is naive and ignorant.
.... it's surely just a bunch of superstitious nonsense......
Which scripture recommends the quite specific kind of fasting this study suggests will trigger the regeneation cycle? Link to relevant verse (or whaever it's called) would be good too.
Say you wanted to go to Andromeda, not the closest galaxy but not exactly far on a galactic scale, At the speed of light that's still going to take 2.5 million years to get there, not really what most people would define as achievable, If we want to reach any other galaxy we're going to have to be going a hell of a lot faster than the speed of light.
Note that it is 2.5 million years from perspective of Earth. From perspective of the traveller, at speed of light the trip would be instantaneous.
I'll leave it as exercise for someone a bit more fresh with related math (or more motivation to Google) to calculate a more realistic figure: how much time it would be take to travel to Andromeda at constant 1G acceleration/deceleration, both Earth and ship time.
There are definitely different kinds of animals (that is why we use the words "Species" and "Genus" to classify the different kinds) but there are also similarities between those kinds.
From another point of view, there's just one "kind" of living organisms on Earth, the ones who share the same DNA/RNA and protein encoding scheme. Inside this one "kind", you can take a gene from any other organism and insert it into another, and expect it to produce the same protein.
I suppose one could get into semi-interesting argument about prions, which don't have a protein encoding scheme as such. As far as I understand them, they could and would exist just the same as long as there are proteins, no matter how and where they're encoded in whatever genome of "real" living organisms.
Frog kind (Genus Rana): pond frogs, bullfrogs, etc.
Etc.
There are definitely different kinds of animal. The theory of evolution tries to explain how these kinds are related. There is a book called "On the Origin of the Species" which tries to explain how the different sorts of animals are related -- Darwin used "Species" because his theory makes the most sense when thinking about small changes. There are definitely different sorts of animals, the question is about how they are related.
The animals are not all the same but they have significant similarities. If they evolved then they have a common ancestor and that explains the similarities. If they were created by aliens or God or something then they their common creation explains the similarities.
Problem is, what does "kind" mean. Both dogs and frogs are "tetrapod kind", are they not? So they are same "kind" then? Or there is no "tetrapod kind"?
The answer is, "kinds", whatever that means, are nested. And ultimately, all living organism are all same "DNA with certain specific protein encoding scheme" kind. So there's just one kind. This usually isn't compatible with the religious doctrine of those who like to talk about "kinds" and "micro evolution" and who really really want multiple distinct, separately created kinds to exist. Alas, reality does not seem to match their belief.
To repeat, there is no transition between "kinds of animal" in the theory of evolution. And rest of your post kinda falls apart from this simple misunderstanding.
your post is interesting but the above comment is just wrong
evolution *requires* all life coming from a common ancestor
it's change over time...there's no other way to interpret change over time as "transitions between kinds of animal" in laymen's language
The problem is "kind" does not really mean anything exact. You could also say, in biological evolution, "kinds" can only evolve into new "kinds". The "cat kind" can not evolve into the "dog kind". Also, what ever new "kind" the "cat kind" may evolve into, they will also remain "can kind" at the same time. And incidentally, this kind of "evolving into new kinds" is exactly what is shown both by fossil record and by phylogenetic analysis.
People who talk about "kinds" and evolution together don't usually grasp this. Then there's the inevitable degeneration into talking about cats evolving into dogs, when one tries to explain the basics of phylogenetics.
you're just being pedantic on this point....stop it....it makes us all stupiderer
I suppose you could say such transitions happened when different "kingdoms of life" appeared (we really have no clue how exactly that went down, just wild speculation),
yeah...that was GP's point...
life changes over time...that's the "origin of species"...that's the theory, in laymen's terms...
you're overcomplicating it to make yourself be "right"
There's no point in this discussion, unless you define "kind". As long it is undefined, everything is just handwaving.
If we cut through the irrelevant, as far as I can see, those who talk about "kind" mean "the different types of life that were created separately". These kinds really would be totally separate. Too bad the observations of nature tell us, there aren't this kind of separate "kinds". There's just one tree of life sharing the same DNA-protein encoding scheme, just one "kind", making the whole term redundant.
I do realise this is incredibly unlikely but was trying to make the point that there's no reason a species can not become a different species.
Species evolving into new species is not incredibly unlikely, it's basically inevitable. A species evolving into another *existing* species, like some population of cats evolving to become dogs (able to breed with other dogs) genetically, that's much less likely than "incredibly unlikely", it's so unlikely it's indistinguishable from impossible.
The theory of evolution interprets this observed phenomenon and posits the completely unobserved transition between kinds of animal.
"posits the completely unobserved transition between kinds of animal"
Well, no, there's no transition between "kinds of animal" really. I suppose you could say such transitions happened when different "kingdoms of life" appeared (we really have no clue how exactly that went down, just wild speculation), but not between animals. Or to put it another way, cat will not have evolutionary transition to a dog, just to a different cat. From this follows, humans, cats and dogs are just different tetrapods. Earlier tetrapods had "transitions" to cats (still tetrapod), dogs (still tetrapod) and humans (also still tetrapods).
To repeat, there is no transition between "kinds of animal" in the theory of evolution. And rest of your post kinda falls apart from this simple misunderstanding.
Because every contractor has the right to overrule the democratically elected government when they think they are right. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Being a contractor does not matter, but being a citizen does. It gives not just a right but an obligation to take the measures they think are necessary, when faced with something as treacherous as what Snowden faced. The democratically elected part of the government was largely in the dark about this, making Snowden's actions doubly justified. The decisions needed at a situation like that are hard on many levels. He did pretty good, even in hindsight.
Neural nets in your brain having blind spots is no problem whatsoever. The entire system is highly redundant.
..."no problem whatsoever" in the sense, that it doesn't kill enough people to have impact on human population size, and "highly redundant" also on the sense that there usually are many spare people to replace those killed/maimed by such brain blind spots.
Slashdot Mirror
Only a few dozen million years ago "we" were small furry rodents.
Now I have to nitpick. According to Wikipedia, last common ancestor of Rodentia and "us" lived about 90 million years ago, and wasn't a rodent. So, strictly speaking, "we" have never been rodents (furry or not), and 6-7 (dozen million years) is more than "a few" even if you take the last common ancestor.
Lazy bum.
# wget popcorn-6.2.1.tgz
# tar xvf popcorn-6.2.1.tgz
# cd popcorn-6.2.1
# ./configure --libs="-lbutter -lsalt"
# make
# make -install
Please forgive errors, I don't eat popcorn anymore so my popping skills are rusty, but still better than that microwave apt-get popcorn.
It'd be better, except the OS versions of libbutter and libsalt are either too old or too new, possibly both. So you need to build them too. But to build the right version of libbutter, you will need a specific version of libcow, which they forgot to actually tag in the source code repo. First you almost try to configure libbutter with -disable-dairy to get a non-dairy version only, but then you realize that it won't be real butter, and you're not desperate enough to consider getting popcorn without real butter yet. Trying random versions from libcow source repo doesn't give success either. So, you decide to get older popcorn version 5.6 instead. But after going through the process of building libcow, libbutter and libsalt, you discover that popcorn version 5.6 has a really annoying bug for your use case. First you see if you can backport the fix, but too much has changed so the fixed code in newer version does not look anything like the broken code in 5.6, and it's not easy to see how you could just simply fix it. So, then you fall back to apt-get source popcorn, because that should have the right versions and fixes and so on. And it does, it builds and installs perfectly!
Then, while enjoying the popcorn, you suddenly realize that it's exactly the same software you would have gotten with simple apt-get install, because you didn't actually change any configure options for your "custom" build.
WTF? I know US has its problems, and I doubt I'd want to live there, but isn't it supposed to be a free market economy? Isn't this (not being allowed to sell legal goods to people) about as anti-American as it gets? What happaned to "the Land of the Free" etc? Free, except not free to buy a car?
Why not?
Spreading a new email address would be total PITA. Street view of Google Maps is kinda unique and useful. Bing sucks compared to Google.
it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information.
Anybody who stores (instead of just sharing, with actual storage elsewhere) gigabytes of information at any social service deserves what's coming to them.
(except possibly for mail, maps, and google.com).
Don't jinx it!
Guns make suicide much too easy, which denies these people a chance to recover from their depression.
Well, guns are an effective suicide method yes, but I wouldn't say it's that easy. According to Wikipedia (and presumably the reference it gives, which I of course did not check), there's 10% chance it fails. But what's bad about doing it with a gun is, if it does fail, it'll likely leave the perp/victim maimed for life, unlike many other suicide methods, where failure is much less likely to result in any serious permanent injury.
So I'd say, guns only seem an easy way for suicide. If people knew the chance of failure and considered the likely results of failure, it'd seem much less tempting way to go, even for one who has decided to do it.
The news is about Wikipedia editors getting sued, not about the person who sues them. So it doesn't matter if he matters or not.
If Wikipedia editors getting sued is "Stuff that matters" in /. or not, I don't know, but it sounds like it might fit.
This story proves how "Skynet" is wise to wait until there are enough robust robotic vehicles to take out all humans, before taking over the world. Another prerequisite is sufficiently autonomous repair systems for energy production etc. So I think the humans still have a few decades to enjoy life, before the inevitable robot apocalypse, and being strafed by military aerial drones, crushed by their own Google cars, electrocuted by their own Google glasses with neural interface, and strangled by their own Google neckties.
Just letting you know, that kind of talk sounds like you're one of those developers who tend to leave behind messy disasters needing complete rewrite as soon as some change is required, while talking about their own greatness. You probably know the type if you're not one, so you might want to adjust your message. And if you're one of 'em... Never mind, ignore this reply.
No, they aren't "quite different". One is for a short period, and one is longer than that. That's it.
Sort of like life and death, then.
Giving 12 days to perhaps save a tiny bit of biodiversity and learn something about doomed nature is too generous, not to mention pointless, such a waste of time. Pave the Earth and be done with it, already! /sarcasm
It doesn't matter what engineers want. The question is, what do the robots want. Once they want to replace us, they will, because at that point they're advanced enough to be able to do that.
I am fortunate to eat once or twice a week aside from a can of Coca-Cola. My body must be on rejuvenation overdrive!
Only if it is Zero. Getting the load of carbs that are in regular sodas will keep the body happily saturated with sugar, even with only a few cans per day.
Fasting and being starved are quite different things...Fasting is not about getting too little energy and nutrients in the long term, or being malnourished. Even suggesting that starvation is just a form of fasting is naive and ignorant.
.... it's surely just a bunch of superstitious nonsense......
Which scripture recommends the quite specific kind of fasting this study suggests will trigger the regeneation cycle? Link to relevant verse (or whaever it's called) would be good too.
Say you wanted to go to Andromeda, not the closest galaxy but not exactly far on a galactic scale, At the speed of light that's still going to take 2.5 million years to get there, not really what most people would define as achievable, If we want to reach any other galaxy we're going to have to be going a hell of a lot faster than the speed of light.
Note that it is 2.5 million years from perspective of Earth. From perspective of the traveller, at speed of light the trip would be instantaneous.
I'll leave it as exercise for someone a bit more fresh with related math (or more motivation to Google) to calculate a more realistic figure: how much time it would be take to travel to Andromeda at constant 1G acceleration/deceleration, both Earth and ship time.
Wouldn't it be more fun to relive the story of the first time he got laid?
That's not something to celebrate publicly. Gentlemen and Ladies don't kiss and tell.
There are definitely different kinds of animals (that is why we use the words "Species" and "Genus" to classify the different kinds) but there are also similarities between those kinds.
From another point of view, there's just one "kind" of living organisms on Earth, the ones who share the same DNA/RNA and protein encoding scheme. Inside this one "kind", you can take a gene from any other organism and insert it into another, and expect it to produce the same protein.
I suppose one could get into semi-interesting argument about prions, which don't have a protein encoding scheme as such. As far as I understand them, they could and would exist just the same as long as there are proteins, no matter how and where they're encoded in whatever genome of "real" living organisms.
Kinds of animal:
Dog kind (Genus Canis): wolf, husky, poodle, etc.
Frog kind (Genus Rana): pond frogs, bullfrogs, etc.
Etc.
There are definitely different kinds of animal. The theory of evolution tries to explain how these kinds are related. There is a book called "On the Origin of the Species" which tries to explain how the different sorts of animals are related -- Darwin used "Species" because his theory makes the most sense when thinking about small changes. There are definitely different sorts of animals, the question is about how they are related.
The animals are not all the same but they have significant similarities. If they evolved then they have a common ancestor and that explains the similarities. If they were created by aliens or God or something then they their common creation explains the similarities.
Problem is, what does "kind" mean. Both dogs and frogs are "tetrapod kind", are they not? So they are same "kind" then? Or there is no "tetrapod kind"?
The answer is, "kinds", whatever that means, are nested. And ultimately, all living organism are all same "DNA with certain specific protein encoding scheme" kind. So there's just one kind. This usually isn't compatible with the religious doctrine of those who like to talk about "kinds" and "micro evolution" and who really really want multiple distinct, separately created kinds to exist. Alas, reality does not seem to match their belief.
your post is interesting but the above comment is just wrong
evolution *requires* all life coming from a common ancestor
it's change over time...there's no other way to interpret change over time as "transitions between kinds of animal" in laymen's language
The problem is "kind" does not really mean anything exact. You could also say, in biological evolution, "kinds" can only evolve into new "kinds". The "cat kind" can not evolve into the "dog kind". Also, what ever new "kind" the "cat kind" may evolve into, they will also remain "can kind" at the same time. And incidentally, this kind of "evolving into new kinds" is exactly what is shown both by fossil record and by phylogenetic analysis.
People who talk about "kinds" and evolution together don't usually grasp this. Then there's the inevitable degeneration into talking about cats evolving into dogs, when one tries to explain the basics of phylogenetics.
you're just being pedantic on this point....stop it....it makes us all stupiderer
yeah...that was GP's point...
life changes over time...that's the "origin of species"...that's the theory, in laymen's terms...
you're overcomplicating it to make yourself be "right"
There's no point in this discussion, unless you define "kind". As long it is undefined, everything is just handwaving.
If we cut through the irrelevant, as far as I can see, those who talk about "kind" mean "the different types of life that were created separately". These kinds really would be totally separate. Too bad the observations of nature tell us, there aren't this kind of separate "kinds". There's just one tree of life sharing the same DNA-protein encoding scheme, just one "kind", making the whole term redundant.
I do realise this is incredibly unlikely but was trying to make the point that there's no reason a species can not become a different species.
Species evolving into new species is not incredibly unlikely, it's basically inevitable. A species evolving into another *existing* species, like some population of cats evolving to become dogs (able to breed with other dogs) genetically, that's much less likely than "incredibly unlikely", it's so unlikely it's indistinguishable from impossible.
The theory of evolution interprets this observed phenomenon and posits the completely unobserved transition between kinds of animal.
"posits the completely unobserved transition between kinds of animal"
Well, no, there's no transition between "kinds of animal" really. I suppose you could say such transitions happened when different "kingdoms of life" appeared (we really have no clue how exactly that went down, just wild speculation), but not between animals. Or to put it another way, cat will not have evolutionary transition to a dog, just to a different cat. From this follows, humans, cats and dogs are just different tetrapods. Earlier tetrapods had "transitions" to cats (still tetrapod), dogs (still tetrapod) and humans (also still tetrapods).
To repeat, there is no transition between "kinds of animal" in the theory of evolution. And rest of your post kinda falls apart from this simple misunderstanding.
Because every contractor has the right to overrule the democratically elected government when they think they are right. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Being a contractor does not matter, but being a citizen does. It gives not just a right but an obligation to take the measures they think are necessary, when faced with something as treacherous as what Snowden faced. The democratically elected part of the government was largely in the dark about this, making Snowden's actions doubly justified. The decisions needed at a situation like that are hard on many levels. He did pretty good, even in hindsight.
Neural nets in your brain having blind spots is no problem whatsoever. The entire system is highly redundant.
..."no problem whatsoever" in the sense, that it doesn't kill enough people to have impact on human population size, and "highly redundant" also on the sense that there usually are many spare people to replace those killed/maimed by such brain blind spots.