Evolution?

In biologyevolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next – wikipedia

So I thought I would get back to my favorite subject apart weird jokes about people I know. Thats right some more Artilect goodness.

As part of my biology course we are ofcourse studying Darwinian Natural Selection (intelligent design people stop reading here) which is all well and good, but does it still hold true for our evolution now.

At its basic level Natural Selection states that:

Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.

So taking that definition we could quite easily state that the Human Population is no longer subject to the laws of natural selection, so then what are we subject to. Looking at technology we can see that the computers and electronics we are interacting with on a daily basis, are evolving in a very similar way to how we evolved. Starting with huge vacuum tubes in the 1940s to the miniscule transistors that are in everything today. The pace of the evolution is exponential growing but like most things including house prices at some point it has to stop, but its a long way off yet.

From this it could quite easily be argued that we are stagnant in our evolution and technology is not, we need to evolve to survive, so get them old transistors merged already.

 

Negroponte on the Classmate

It just made me laugh: http://blog.laptopmag.com/olpcs-negroponte-responds-to-intels-classmate-2-and-new-low-cost-laptops

Can’t take competition, I’d still take an ASUS eeePC anyday over either, and they never offered the buy-one-get one scheme in the UK (but it didn’t turn out too stellar in the USA)

O2: $15 per MB outside the UK

Well I was expecting the no easy way to upgrade to the 16gb iPhone from my 8gb. What I was not expecting is that you aren’t able to add the International Data Plan, to any iPhone tariff. So it costs a whopping £7.50 per mb thats a couple of cents shy of $15, whenever your outside the UK. The best they could come up with is leave your iPhone in Airplane mode for the duration of your trip.

Get a grip O2, even AT&T can offer Data plans for outside the US to iPhone customers.

Oops! What about Flickr

I have gone from thinking Microsoft buying Yahoo! might be a good idea to thinking its a truly terrible idea.One simple thing Flickr they will make a complete hash of Flickr, if they don’t sell it first.

Also alot of the features I like in Yahoo! mail which they aren’t gonna keep because it doesn’t use a Microsoft Product i.e ASP or whatever the backwards language is called.

Boo Microsoft! Leave Yahoo! be.

My New iPhone Tariff

O2 LogoO2 obviously isn’t making enough money or selling enough iPhone’s to make it worth there while and they have completed re-structured there tariff plans, basically more for less. I don’t make enough calls to make it any cheaper for me anyway :-(More Details here

Good God – Redmond makes offer for Yahoo!

Yahoo Logo2008 has just got a whole lot worse if the deal comes off.

Microsoft has offered $44.6billion to buy Yahoo! At least if Microsoft does by Yahoo!, Live! search becomes half decent and there are some real brains in the web division, it could also go the other way and Yahoo! becomes what Live! is now. 

Even with the combined forces of Microsoft & Yahoo there will still be a long way to go before, they can topple the impressive lead Google has over them both. Only time will tell. 

Virgin Galactic – Who cares?

Why is everybody bothered by Virgin Galactic all of a sudden. The normal man will not be able to afford it for a long time. Its just concord happening all over again. Except this time, you don’t actually end up anywhere.