Well that's a relief. Sorry if I took your example literally.

I take your point about keyboards, but on the other hand they do rather take up valuable device real-estate. I'll take the big screen over the keyboard personally, but typing on it is more or less impossible.

Please don't drive and fiddle with your cellphone.

But that's the thing with advertising. The more targeted it is, the less you actually need it. Because if you really want the things in the advert, then you would have already researched the options, and probably decided what you were going to buy. Advertising is, more or less, completely useless. How many things have you ever bought because you saw them in an advert?

Advertising works by creating demand. The most effective advertising campaigns in history have always worked by making people think that they need things that they didn't really need. Engagement rings, for example, were the product of an advertising campaign. In my not especially humble opinion, the world would be a better place without advertising of any kind.

Oyster Cards

This is what they use in London. They work on trains and buses, and work reliably and efficiently. They seem to work in exactly the way you suggest, as not 100% bulletproof security but only good enough.

I think the balance is stored on the card, but all transactions are sent through to a central authority, which would certainly be able to detect any fraud and disable cards found to be behaving suspiciously. Or, more likely, have the ubiquitous CCTC cameras in London identify those using fraudulent cards and presumably punish them appropriately.

Really? They can hold you? Wouldn't that be unlawful imprisonment, or something equally illegal. I'm pretty sure they can't even take your camera off you, or compel you to delete the photos. They can certainly chuck you out, but I'm almost certain that's all

Of course for most works of art, photos are available online. So all you have to do is a web search.

For instance

By the way, as an aside, I was in the Chicago Art Institute last year and everyone was taking photos. In my opinion this harmed the quality of the experience of looking at the art (which was to the photos as a man is to his shadow).

I seem to remember, sometime around the original iPhone rumours were flying around, that the notion of a phone with only one button was pretty much unheard of.

At the time, no-one could imagine how one might unlock such a phone, since every single phone (bar none) required a two-button sequence within a short period of time to unlock.

When the iphone came out, and people saw the swipe-to-unlock feature, people were pretty impressed. "That's clever", they said. And they were right, it was clever.

Now I'm not saying that it should be patanteble necessarily, although if I'd patented it I'd be pretty pissed off if Apple (or anyone) pinched the idea from me, but I really don't think you can argue that it wasn't an innovation.

Yes. Because work consists only of either coding or writing.

Oh. Wait.

Now I don't necessarily know about that.

OK, it's got a stupid name. But they seem to refer to themselves as D* in blog posts etc, which I suppose might work.

In any case I don't think there's any doubt now that Facebook will implode at some point. Maybe Anonymous will break into their datacenters somehow and obliterate all their data - imagine that! So given that at some point people will be looking for something new, is there any reason why a few Diaspora nodes might pop up and start to be used. I've not used it myself, since I personally have to give social networks a miss for the same reasons that reformed alcoholics should never drink again, but if it's online somewhere why wouldn't they?

I mean this site looks perfectly fine. Does it matter that it's decentralised, as long as the experience of it is fairly seamless? Especially given that I don't remember facebook being all that reliable anyway. As someone else has pointed out, email started out as closely guarded proprietary systems, and evolved into the distributed system we have today. It has its problems, spam being chief amongst them, but these I'm sure could have been engineered out when true email was designed. Of course, it's far too late for that now, but that doesn't mean that a distributed social network is nothing more than a nerd fantasy.

From a more idealistic point of view - and as a wise man once said to me, 'what's wrong with having ideals?' - isn't a free distributed social network that no-one actually owns just generally a better thing?

Yes that's true. One can't blame apple for creating the broken system. One can, however, condemn apple for participating aggressively in patent wars and - for instance - attempting to remove Samsung from the market by force.

Apple could, for instance, publicly state that they are no longer going to start patent wars, and are instead going to allow their products to live or die based on their merits. They were certainly doing perfectly well before they decided to sue Samsung, and would probably have continued to do well. Perhaps they're worried that they're run out of ideas?

There are two theories that I know of that fit the historical record. These are evolution, and intelligent design. Given that intelligent design would fit any historical record, I'm rather disinclined to entertain it. If there is a third, I'd love to hear about it.

Your objection to evolution is more or less the statement that "information cannot be created". This is a false statement, and there is no evidence for it. There is plenty of evidence that information is created all the time, from genetic algorithms to the spontaneous appearance of complex carbohydrates in interstellar clouds.

There is no point arguing that the information that appears in genetic algorithms is somehow not information, or that the information wasn't created but was already present in the selection criteria. Neither of these objections hold water. Before the genetic algorithm was run, there was no information on the final working solution, afterwards there is. Information is created.

Further the distinction between 'information' and 'noise' in purely in the eye of the beholder. In the context of genetic change, both the genetic 'information' and the mutations (noise), are information. The outcome is new information, which is then selected for if it turns out to be advantageous.

Before I sign off this argument, because I do have other things to be getting on with, I'd like to address this throw-away point:

No, it is not absurd. If we had billions of years, and trillions of little reproducing computer components, and didn't much care what the resulting computer did, as long as it did something - then no. It's not absurd. It's just not very efficient.

You are mistaken if you believe that scientists are not following the evidence with respect to evolution. Of course they are, and in their thousands. It seems to only be in the US that the belief that evolution comprises a semi-religious stance is prevalent. I wonder how many evolutionary biologists you've actually encountered, and of them how many demand your 'belief' in evolution. You may have run into 'proponents', amongst whom I presume you would count me, who argue for the theory. But proponents are not scientists. And I don't demand your belief, I just think you're wrong about the nature of information.

Your main objection has been answered, both inexpertly by me, and much more expertly by much smarter people than I. Since you are very interested in the topic, I presume you have already thoroughly read the talkorigins website (http://www.talkorigins.org/), and in particular the extensive article on information theoretic objections to evolution. I hope you find answers to your objections there.

It's because the money isn't being given to teachers. Pay all the teachers twice as much, and stop filling schools with iPads and massive swimming pools and ultrafast broadband and all that crap. Pay the teachers.

I don't think that there's any evidence for this statement. And it would be dangerous to extrapolate from it to any theories about how much change is required from a DNA point of view to effect change from an organism point of view.

In any case, maybe we should remember that knowledge about the structure and function of DNA is relatively recent compared to the history of the theory of evolution.

You don't have to look far into, say, the fossil record, to observe that life has increased in complexity over time. Darwin's theory was that this was driven by creatures attempting to out-compete each other, and this led him to the theory of natural selection.

Genetics showed us how this is possible, from a biochemical standpoint. So that how an organism's characteristics might be passed on from one generation to the next is no longer complete mystery.

However a great deal of mystery remains. Scientists are often identifying such-and-such a 'gene', and how it relates to such-and-such a characteristic of the final organism. But I suspect that this may be misleading, in the sense that we actually know very little about how a full complement of DNA leads to the final creature. It's probably also worth remembering that DNA isn't enough to create a creature, you also need a functioning developmental environment (such as a womb, or an egg) before you can get a creature at all. The complexity of a life-form's developmental pathway is mind-boggling. Suggesting that the code contained in DNA is analogous to computer source code is probably a huge over-simplification.

An enormous amount of evidence clearly points to life evolving over billions of years from single-celled organisms to the diversity we see today. Is your point then that what little we understand about genetics is insufficient to support the notion that this development came about through natural means? Do you concede that this development took place?

I'd be perfectly astonished if your objects weren't very well known. What I understand about the theory of evolution has completely satisfied me, in the sense that it seems believable and rational and plausible. You obviously feel differently, and I'd encourage you to ask these questions somewhere other than slashdot - which is mostly frequented by IT professionals - perhaps you could even take an undergrad course in developmental biology (if such a thing exists - the course that is, not the subject).

I wonder too if you entertain similar scepticism about other branches of scientific endeavour. There's plenty of out-there theories about all sorts of matters. Take particle physics, the evidence for the existence of things like quarks and such is far harder to grasp than the evidence for evolution. And the notion that the entire universe is made up of things with properties as peculiar as spin, and entanglement, and wave-particle-duality, and true randomness, and so-on - well, these notions seem far less likely to me than natural selection. What about that experiment where the photons appear to be in some sense aware of being observed? I'm not trying to get off-topic, I'm just asking why it is that evolution seems to get all the flack, when there's far weirder stuff out there.

DNA is not computer code. It is not analogous to computer code. There isn't enough information to encode the human brain in DNA, so clearly small changes to DNA can have large effects.

It really seems to me, with all this arguing over information theory and so-on, that you just don't understand what the theory of evolution posits. Your basic argument seems to be that evolution is obviously wrong for all these obvious reasons, and those scientists just aren't smart enough to see what seems to obvious to you.

In my rather contrived melody example, you suggest that the method is equivalent to brute-forcing the entire solution space. This is false for numerous reasons. First, the solution space is infinite, as modifications to the melody may add notes as well as change them and/or remove them - so it is theoretically impossible to brute-force, and therefore I can't be brute-forcing it. Secondly, you suggest that because in my example I have human ears choosing the 'best' melody, that I am actually running an experiment in 'intelligent prediction'. This is also false, since in the example the only way of choosing the 'best' melody is via some-ones ears. In real evolution your objection falls away, since the 'filter' through which only the 'better' mutations - or recombinations, or viral insertions, etc - is the environment itself. Thirdly, and this is the most important point, at no point do we try every possibility in the solution space. We create random changes, and only allow those that are in some sense better to survive and thus go-on to reproduce. We don't just create billions of random tunes and choose the best, for that would be absurd. We take the melody, and make - say - ten thousand ever-so-slightly different variations. We the enlist the efforts of humans to determine which is the best - and yes I know that humans are intelligent agents, but please understand that this is an objection to the analogy, not to evolution itself. From our ten-thousands of modified tunes we choose a few hundred of the best, and repeat the process with those.

This is more or less exactly how evolution works for populations of bacteria. There are limited resources, and so only a smaller number of the thousands of slightly modified individuals survive.

In the early days of life, something - and we don't know what, but probably not DNA as we know it today - was busy reproducing in those ancient oceans for literally billions of years. During each one of those billions of years, trillions of individual reproductive units - whatever they might have been - were busy reproducing and changing uncountable numbers of times. So we have billions multiplied by trillions multiplied by maybe hundreds of thousands. This seems like quite a large number to me.

I just don't think you understand how the process is supposed to work. It isn't remotely like brute-forcing. Because there's this environmental filter that weeds out things that don't work. So the things that do work, need only happen *once* and then they spread. It's a feedback loop, wherein only the 'better' outputs are fed back in.

Anyway, look - it's exhausting arguing with you. I just think you don't get it. Let's try to narrow this down to a single question - can a theoretical feedback loop with (very very slight and quite rate) mutations, that selects only outputs that are as least as good as its inputs were and then feeds those output back in, over time produce better individuals? I believe it can, and that it's perfectly obvious that it can. You, as far as I can make out, do not. Or at least you believe that such a process would take too long. Despite all the evidence of far simpler ancient creatures - see the Cambrian Explosion for instance - that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. How did they turn into us, if not via evolution?

And please, can we leave abiogenesis out of it? You must know, as well as I know, that evolution as a theory starts with single-celled organisms and explains how they turned into the flora and fauna we see today - or at least describes the process if not all the so-called intermediate 'steps'. Where those individual cells came from, we do not know - although I've heard some pretty interesting theories.

....ooookay...

Except that I don't think that's its majority use. I rather think it's used more for image editing, which is impossible on the command line.

Point is, the command line is demonstrably not more powerful than GUIs. The command line is more or less a programming language, which fulfills a rather different need to graphical interfaces. We do have a fairly large part of our brains devoted to interpreting images, and it seems a shame to waste it.

Perhaps this is why devotees of the command-line interface often prefer graphic novels?

;-)

Photoshop isn't so useful on the command line though.