Allocator2008

Could somebody please tell me why the f2k we care how fast some random bird can fly? Why the swallow? Why not the bald eagle? Or the chickadee? Who gives a f2k.

Precisely. It is not the strongest nor the smartest often that survive, but the best adapted. Dawkins has made this point himself, in that the genes which survive are the "mediocre" genes, genes that tend to do well in the "average" of their environments. Evolution is more likely to produce spineless wonders like T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock than Superman, roughly speaking, because Prufrock, dipshit though he may be, is adapted to the meine of his environs.

Professor Dawkins is one of my all time heroes. Selfish gene theory stands at the center ultimately of all anthropology, sociology, biology, and psychology. He has transformed the world by giving us an understanding of our own existence, he has answered the age-old question of "Why are we here?". We are here, to preserve and copy the genes. They should build a statue of him next to Darwin. He is the apotheosis of human understanding. Like Prometheus, he has "given man a gift they had not conceived, and lifted darkness off the earth."

Yet another case of "I'm Microsoft, and I know better." Lovely.

This is racism, pure and simple, teaching young kids to torture and kill any non-Aryans in the vicinity. The anti-immigrant people are Aryan supremacists who want America to be an Aryan homeland. It is despicable that this neo-Nazi propaganda is being taught to young people. Children are not born hating, they are taught to hate through brain washing outfits like the homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi boy scouts. It is repulsive. We should be teaching our kids about programming and useful skills, instead, we are teaching them to use minorities for target practice a la Ralf Fiennes' character in 'Schindler's List'. It is enough to make the sane people like me want to move to Canada quite frankly.

The author is a fool. He is a fool who does not understand the free market. Users are cows. They should be treated as such. Cows do not know what they want. It is our job as programmers to give the cows what they need whether they like it or not. We the programmers know better than the cows who are the users. A programmer who does not understand that is a fool who should be weeded out of the free market. In a free market the cows can choose the software they want - if they don't like it, they are free to not buy it. But the programmer must do his best to save the cow (or the lemming) from himself. Users are fools who don't know what is best for them. Only we the programmers do. If they don't like our software they don't have to buy it. Such is the nature of the free market. Programmers should continue to write good software even if the user doesn't like it. Fools did not understand the buildings of Howard Roarke, nor do they understand the intricacies of software. So be it. The cows can go on mooing. The architects and programmers of the world will go on moving civilization forward.

Thanks for posting this. Always nice to get a healthy dose of "A $ A" with my morning coffee! :-)

I think the question to be asked, is the question of if it is in the self-interest of the American taxpayer to subsidize schools in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, this is hard to answer. On one hand, it is unclear how more schools in these countries serve our national interest. On the other hand, without education, young people are more privy to fall into the brainwashing of terrorists. So one could make the argument that if one spends on education, that enhances national security by having more educated people in these unstable countries and therefore fewer people who are possible recruits for terrorists. I guess it is all in the way one does it, if one builds schools with good oversight (i.e. overseen by the coalition and Iraqi/Afghan governments) then one could perhaps justify that. However, if there is no oversight, then who knows what kind of stuff might end up getting taught there. We obviously don't want to spend our tax dollars building schools only so that religious extremists can teach in them. The same is true incidentally in the United States. Government vouchers for private schools are wrong, because these private schools often teach nonsense like Intelligent Design, which to my mind is the Ultimate-747-In-The-Junkyard-As-Designer theory and merits no serious consideration, let alone our tax dollars. So if there is a self-interest in our national security in helping with education in Iraq and Afghanistan that may be justifiable, provided there is strict oversight, and if there is no oversight then it is a no go. Similar to how education here at home should not have tax dollars going to private religious agendas. Ideally of course I think states, and not the federal government, should handle education, since this is an issue of federalism, but that is another issue than the present discussion.

Just say, "Well, how would YOU approach this?" to gauge where she is at. So rather than solve it for her every time, have her give it a stab first. Let her be totally wrong, but at least have her try. Then correct her approach and set her on the right path. Then if she really is stuck after making an honest effort, then help out with the answer, but basically the more times questions like "What do you think?" are put to her, the more she will hopefully think on her own.

Generally I want to work for my rational self-interest. My goal is to attain a state of non-contradictory joy, i.e., happiness. I want to preserve my life, and my liberty, and my property. If I preserve my life, liberty, and property, I at least have a chance to be happy. This is what it is all about. The individual pursuing his own happiness.

So, if I am working towards my own rational self-interest, there is nothing I would rather be doing.

If however I working for the Collective, then I would rather be working for my own rational self-interest.

That is all there is to it. Work for your own rational self-interest. And if you are not, then I would suggest changing that, because you cannot exist for others. You can only exist for yourself. So if you are not working for yourself, for your own self-interest, then it is time to do a re-think. If you work for an employer, that is fine, so long as it is to your mutual benefit. Everything you do must be to your own benefit in the end, and as soon as it is not, then you should cease and desist.

In brief, I will work for me. If I cannot work for me, then I will go Galt, I will disappear, and I will stop the motor of the world (or at least my part of that motor).

I think this could raise some first amendment issues. Whereas it is a valid point that unfortunate consequences can sometimes arise when people get harassed in forums such as MySpace, legally, people have a right to be rude. It might be deplorable, but it is not illegal, per the first amendment.

This is really good. I like the idea of using statistically relevant answers in lieu of absolute answers. Like in this case, 75% of the time, Linux servers may be the best type of server, but there is always that other 25% of time where there are exceptions.

Reminds me of using the principle of mediocrity proposed by physicist Alex Vilkenkin to make cosmological predictions when dealing with things like inflationary theory. If there is a bell curve for some constant we are trying to establish, we predict this constant will be somewhere in the middle, chopping of the two extremes at both ends. Thus, say the theory is some version of Guth's inflationary theory, and it predicts a constant that varies over some spectrum. Thus we predict we will see that constant to lie somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Thus, if we observe or measure that constant to be somewhere around where we had predicted it, that lends weight to the theory we were working from. The idea being that we live in an average world, e.g. in an "average" inflationary bubble, hence the principle of mediocrity. The key point is that we CAN actually use statistics to make predictions about the world, and need not have to always make precise predictions, which, in some versions of string and/or inflationary theory, one cannot, simply because of the infinite number of bubbles in inflation or the near-infinite number of possible string theories (10^500 values for the false vacuum I think I read somewhere).

Anyway the idea that there is no one right answer to a question that works everywhere seems sound in some cases.

Wow. Great site.

"I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short, I was afraid."

Given the options listed above, provided option 1 is financially viable for you, I might suggest going with that. I know that may be disappointing, just going on to the final year of university, but that might be the safe bet.

Also, QA is a good "entry point" for aspiring developers. People transfer to and from QA from development all the time. I am in the automation side of QA, so I am kind of in that gray nether world between QA and development, since my job is to develop, but the deliverables I work on are test scripts, rather than the product deliverable. So if you are starting out, just getting a QA job is at least a foot in the door.

So I might say, that, to play it safe, given your current situation you might want to go ahead and plan on just continuing with university - if I am not mistaken I think this is still largely subsidized by Whitehall since in theory the subsidy is offset by the graduate tax - correct me if I am wrong there, but if I am right, this should be viable for you. But then, also, on the side, I'd keep my eye out still for gigs, even if just part-time, or looking towards when you graduate, and I would keep QA in mind as an option, since if you do well in that and demonstrate your technical competencies, often there is opportunity to segue to more technical stuff in QA (i.e., automation), and from there, often into development. Good luck.

That is just really cool. We need more parents like that who can spend the time to teach their kids about general relativity. Seriously. Too often parents either ignore their kids or brainwash them with their own narrow minded cultural take on the world. Very rarely do the actual facts about the actual world get passed along. Maybe parents just rely on schools to do it, but any kind of passing along of enthusiasm about the natural world is highly commendable. Bravo.

COMPTIA A+, Network+ certifications

LLD is a doctorate too (Doctor of Laws) - the next step up from the LLM (Master of Laws) - to be a solicitor or a barrister, one needs at least an LLB (Bachelor of Laws).

I (almost) decided to study law once which is how I know. I was so enamored with Cole Turner (Julian McMahon's character in 'Charmed') I very nearly decided to pursue an online law degree, since Cole was a lawyer. Who knows. Maybe I still will one of these days, but since all my experience is in SQA, it would not be the most logical thing in the world in the long run I don't think.

But anyway, LLD is also another kind of doctorate, along with Ph.D. MD, DDS, DVM, etc.

Regarding the discussion of "real" arrays in Fortran vs. "pointer arrays" in c, it seems in the real world often we need resizable arrays, which means the only way to do that is to have pointer arrays. A Fortran array cannot be resized. What if I want to read in a tab delimted file that has ints, and read that into a 2-D matrix, where the matrix rows correspond to the file rows, and the matrix columns correspond to the tab delimited columns in the file. And I have say no idea how big the file is. So the only way I can do this is to have a resizable array. I can "guess" that say my rows/columns won't be more than some arbitrarily large number, but then I likely end up wasting a lot of space. So out of curiousity how would I even do that with "real arrays"? Seems like if I ever need to resize an array, even in just as simple an example as reading in a file, then I need a pointer array, since "real" (fortran-like) arrays will not resize. Am I missing something here?

Interesting stuff. However it would be better if he had not talked about groups or cultures competing, which is ultimately incidental, and talked instead of genes and memes competing. Evolution could give a damn about the group. It cares only about genes. Similarly, cultural (memetic) evolution could give a damn about the culture (or society or whatever). It only is concerned with the meme.

Basically his thesis is that women are good at close-knit relationships, and me are good at broader networked relationships. So roughly, though women are protected and valued in society because of reproduction, men are valued in society for the culture they create with their penchant for wide social networking. Fair enough perhaps but this misses the point.

I think rather than say woman have a usefulness to the group for the creation of offspring, both in terms of having in offspring and having a higher chance of reproducing, and men have a usefulness to the group because of their cultural contributions, I think we need to look at usefulness with respect to what. The "what" is the gene and the meme.

Woman are good for the gene. If I am a selfish gene, I want to hitch a ride with a chick. Why? Because as much as 8 / 10 of women who ever lived reproduced. Only about 4 / 10 men who ever lived reproduced (according to the article). So if I want to become part of evolution's junk DNA (and 95% of our DNA is junk, true "selfish genes"), then I have a better chance hanging out in the junk DNA of a female than a male. Women are good for me as a selfish gene. Women are useful to the selfish gene. Men? Well, hell, we can always invent pathogenesis in a pinch as a certain kind of shark in a zoo has done. Men are a nice to have to broaden the genome which enhances fitness, but we can ultimately do without them if we need to ("we" referring to the genes).

On the other hand, if I am a selfish meme, if the author is right about men preferring wider social networks (like politics or religion) than I have a better shot infecting the brain of a man than a woman. Why? Because the dude I infect will know more dudes, and can pass me along to them before he gets eaten by a saber tooth cat.

So do the author's conclusions make sense? I think so. But he needs to understand what "usefulness" means. Usefulness with respect to WHOM.

If I am a selfish gene, women are more useful to me.

If I am a selfish meme, men are more useful to me.

However I would say though it is hard to put numbers on this, that the higher advantage chicks give the selfish gene versus dudes is greater than the higher advantage endowed by dudes to the memes versus the chicks. This is a guess, but it is my gut feeling. I think that tho genes find chicks more important and memes find dudes more important, a gene can live without the dudes more facily than a meme can live without the chicks. Since whereas women might not network quite with the same alacrity as men, still they network. Anyway. So I like this article. But better clarity could be had in my opinion by looking at the men vs. women thing from the perspective of genes and memes, which again, is all biological and cultural evolution respectively care about.

So yes, if you are a meme, you like men. But you kind of can go both ways. If you are a gene, you really prefer women, and are less inclined to go both ways. :-)

Forgot to mention Frank Rosenblatt of the Rosenblatt Perceptron - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Rosenblatt - killed in boating accident.

It should be easy to fund this.

Have a "sponsor a synapse" program.

At $1 / synapse / year you can be listed as the benefactor of a synapse!! Cool!! Since there are approx 10^14 synapses (or something like that), that should be plenty of money.

Hell it could be $1 / synapse / century.

So if My_Estate sponsors synapse _S, then I pay $1 for the maintenance and upkeep of synapse _S for a 100 years. That is 1 cent per year.With 100 trillion synapses, that is 100 trillion per century, or 1 trillion per year. Which comes to an average of $200 per person on the planet (with 5 billion people on the planet). So some people and governments would sponsor more synapses than other people and governments obviously.

But if we all came together like this, we could very well fund this, at 1 trillion per year (100 trillion per century) paying 1 cent per year per synapse (1 dollar per century per synapse). Small price to pay to create a new form of consciousness, and perhaps a new era of prosperity for humankind in my opinion.

This is a great story. I first recall when I first knew I was being misled by a teacher. I was in 9th grade earth science, and she had shown a documentary on the early history of the universe which had made reference to string theory. String theory posits perhaps 11 dimensions in some versions from what I gather. The teacher thought this was ridiculous and said something to the class to the effect of, well I can't even imagine having a fourth dimension, can you? Student Parrots: No! Teacher: Well then, of course string theory can't be right!

Now I was 14, and it would still be a few years before I first would read 'A Brief History of Time' and so I knew nothing of string theory, but, I somehow knew, on some basic instinctual level that I was being misled in that moment, that just because the teacher could not "imagine" higher dimensions did not in and of itself mean that there could not possibly be higher dimensions in theory. Looking back, that was the start of a distrust in me with regards to the academic "establishment" which has continued in varying degrees to this very day. It is one of those epistemological moments of clarity: once one realizes it is possible to be misled by a teacher, which one naturally is conditioned to trust, then really who else could possibly mislead one? What sources can after all be trusted? Once one realizes the inherent fallibility of everyone, including one's teachers, then things just are not quite the same ever again, there is a certain loss of innocence there which can never be gotten back.

I think that makes total sense, in terms of longevity not being broadly inherited. Why would it be? Once an organism has lived long enough to be able to reproduce and no longer is able to reproduce, there is no evolutionary purpose for that organism to stick around. Genetic drift could account for some people having more longevity than others, but I see no selective advantage for it, from the point of view of the gene. Thus it makes sense that not too many people would be genetically pre-disposed towards longevity.

Personally, I don't mind the James Dean ethos: "Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse behind!" :-)

In terms of a long-term solution to the DNS cache poisoning issue it seems deep packet inspection could be the only way to go. The work-around was to extend the encryption involved with DNS but that only makes it harder, but not impossible for DNS hacks to take place. Only if deep packet inspection happens would DNS hacks truly become a thing of the past, since if my ISP is inspecting all the packets, and it's stored IP for say cnn.com gets re-routed to a hacker's IP, an inspection of the packets coming across could flag a problem to the ISP. I am not an expert in this area but I just recall from reading a 'Wired' article on this issue that the only really good solution here is in fact deep packet inspection. So outlawing it would be a hacker's wet dream, and by hacker I mean "cracker" or "black hat" people obviously.

One can only hope that as the reductionist principles upon which our consciousness operates are made apparent by projects like these, that the masses will finally begin to be disabused of the ever-persistent and pernicious god delusion which has impeded human progress and welfare since the dawn of recorded history.

Why clone Neanderthals? It would be like winning the war in 'Starship Troopers', then cloning the bugs because it was so much fun fighting them the first time, we just had to have another go at it. That is just stupid. Our ancestors beat these guys 25,000 years ago. I say let the victory stand. There will plenty of other struggles to be had no doubt, maybe even the insects of 'Starship Troopers'! :-)

Whoever down voted this clearly does not recall Vice-President Quayle's faux paux to which this comment refers.

Try MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).

Had not thought about that. I suppose once one has all the quantum information one needs, one could "splice the signal" into an arbitrary amount of copies. Unless there was some entanglement going on. That is, if Origin Point and Destination Point where put into some kind of EPR entangled state to preclude both points having a "copy" at the same time.

I think to the best of my knowledge that in teleporatation when one grabs the quantum information from the original location one destroys the physical content from the original location, then transmits the information to the second location, and rebuilds the original physical content. In other words the original physical content is destroyed in the act of analyzing the content. So there is not a danger of leaving a "copy of oneself" at the original location. Necessarily to measure quantum spin and so on, the original physical material is destroyed, or more precisely, is re-arranged into indecipherable form.