You can't hide what you do and ask people to trust it. That's the problem with this kind of code. Even for the people that can understand the math, how do they know for sure that the system is not just taking all the shortcuts?

The best system is already in use, and that's the physical ballot, where the voter puts the ballot in a sleeve to hide it from the judges before it goes into the ballot box.

There are some specific details, but computers in any role other than counting physical ballots just get in the way.

You want to embed x86?

For real?

Seriously?

You're not just joking?

It was INTEL that insisted on this stupid approach with their version of UWB.

A $5.00 part does not raise the price by just $5.00.

FWIW.

But this is bad news all around, and will result in havoc.

In addition to my long tirade above, I'll point out what I've pointed it out elsewhere, the question is not where the genetic patterns came from. It's that we are moving from engineering through the interfaces that nature most commonly uses (breeding) to actually getting into the low-level code, and we still don't have a complete set of documents for any of the systems we are playing with.

It's kind of like script kiddies graduating from playing with VB to playing with the kernel and they have only a partial, reverse-engineered manual. And if the kernel panics, it's the system we are trying to live in that does something we probably didn't want it to.

We want to experiment if we want a good manual, but we want to do it carefully, not on a schedule determined arbitrarlily by some greedy board of directors.

Invoking evolutionary time doesn't help. Actually, it's similar to your Churchill anecdote in some respects.

Leaving aside the historicity, there are a lot of questions begged by your story, and I'm going to ask you to walk through some of them with me.

What is the intent of the story?

If it is not apocryphal, what was Churchill's intent?

How was the woman raised? What are her circumstances? I'm personally of the opinion that women should not sell themselves for any price, but I am not particularly anxious to insult a woman just because she sees a difference between a million pounds and five. And there is a difference in many contexts.

If you absolutely insist on getting laid, five pounds will get you laid in some neighborhoods, 500 pounds will get you laid in others, etc., and in some places it takes a marriage contract.

For example, clock a byte register through all it's possible values. That's fast. Now do it randomly. It will probably take a bit longer, true? But if you have a statistically random sequence generator, it will probably not take too much time. Probably, if the generator has true statistical randomness.

How many effective bits are there in a mosquito's genes?

That's that part that's similar to your anecdote. You are assuming, when you invoke random permutation as if there were no time limits and as if mutation were the same as permutation, that five is as good as a million.

With only 59 effective bits, even at a strictly linear count with one permutation a second, you exceed the expected life of the solar system.

Now, I know you're going to claim that this is not the same problem, that we are picking relatively small strings in the genetic sequence, and that the changes are neither sequential counting nor random. But you are not asserting nature mimicking us, you are asserting coincidence between the processes.

Now that you're thinking, remember that nature works in parallel, but remember also that there is a selection involved. Some of the random stuff gets suppressed before it actually goes live, so we are not talking full permutation. And we don't have docs to tell us which combinations will be suppressed. Well, we can calculate some of the suppressed stuff, but we really don't have enough evidence to be sure of the calcuations that we can do.

The assumption that all possible permutations of a gene sequence will occur eventually is not equivalent to the assumption that all possible mutations will occur, okay?

By the way, remember that nature lopped off the dinosaurs.

Are you realy okay with saying, effectively, that it ought to be okay with everyone if our genetic experiments end up lopping humans off the evolutionary tree a little early? Is a million years not too early for you? How about five years?

Not exactly.

A lot of the permutation paths are trimmed by natural selection, so, indeed, we could make mutations that would be impossible in nature, even given a steady state universe and suns that never go nova.

If you aren't convinced there are such things as trimmed selection paths, you still have to consider the limits of time. How many clocks does it run a single 128 bit counter through a full count? How fast is the counter going to have to run to complete the count during the amount of time a planet like our earth is in a mode conducive to our type of life?

The problem of evolving us as a species is dramatically helped by concurrency, because of natural selection.

The problem of evolving a specific genetic permutation is only made worse by the implications of concurrency.

The traditional techniques basically used the closest thing we have to a published API for the systems. And not all of the results there were exactly benign.

The new techniques are not even using "unpublished" APIs. They are basically digging into the code inside the modules and cutting and pasting, and the only documentation we have is very limited partial documentation gained by reverse-engineering.

I guess I should do some research before hazarding a guess, though.

Until there, I was wondering, now I'm wondering something different.

hmm?

Thanks for that.

Ask the students.

For an Apple zealot, you sure seem to know a lot more about MSWindXXX than about Macs.

Does it still come with the OS in the current Mac OS?