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I've never read the books but they were written be exactly that: a Christian story, about Christ. Lewis was no "fundamentalist" by any means however.

You mention Tolkien and Lewis being contemporaries of each other, but what I find more interesting is the relationship and debate that Lewis and Freud had:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/
http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9801/nicholi.html

It was weird to see their two viewpoints because I honestly sided with both at different times. I'm not a Christian, but a follower of Judaism, so it was easy to side with Lewis at times and even easier to side with Freud. Combined, their insights actually make a nice, complete worldview. You've just got to take what you believe and leave the rest.

Robert Cringely did just that; see the following link:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020207. html

The whistleblower statues that somehow still result in people being told to release conclusions contrary to their evidence for drugs that later prove to be fatal, or people masking their identity because they know they'll likely lose their job to someone who will remain quiet about shutting down gas refineries and tightening the supply of gas, or being demoted and taken out of the supervisory position that allowed her to see potential fraud and abuse in no-bid contracts worth billions?

A citizen's duty is not to obey the law, so much as it is to do what's ethically defensible. The FSF has some sage advice for you here: "The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.".

The whistleblower statues that somehow still result in people being told to release conclusions contrary to their evidence for drugs that later prove to be fatal, or people masking their identity because they know they'll likely lose their job to someone who will remain quiet about shutting down gas refineries and tightening the supply of gas, or being demoted and taken out of the supervisory position that allowed her to see potential fraud and abuse in no-bid contracts worth billions?

A citizen's duty is not to obey the law, so much as it is to do what's ethically defensible. The FSF has some sage advice for you here: "The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.".

The whistleblower statues that somehow still result in people being told to release conclusions contrary to their evidence for drugs that later prove to be fatal, or people masking their identity because they know they'll likely lose their job to someone who will remain quiet about shutting down gas refineries and tightening the supply of gas, or being demoted and taken out of the supervisory position that allowed her to see potential fraud and abuse in no-bid contracts worth billions?

A citizen's duty is not to obey the law, so much as it is to do what's ethically defensible. The FSF has some sage advice for you here: "The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.".

Interesting comments. I too tend to believe that there's more to life than simple biomechanics, but IMO the fuss isn't about Evolution vs Intelligent Design or Science vs Religion.

Many (and I'd hope most) of the scientists, teachers and professors who object to including Intelligent Design in science classes aren't objecting because they think Evolution is 100% correct, or because they think Intelligent Design is wrong. They object because Intelligent Design isn't science, by definition of the term "science".

There are two purposes to any science class, in my opinion: one is to teach students what are currently believed to be the most accurate scientific theories, but the other (and perhaps more important) purpose is to teach the scientific method: the method by which those theories are developed.

The main components of the scientific method are observation and experimentation. That is, you observe something, formulate a hypothesis, develop experiments that you can run to test the hypothesis, run the experiment and then see how well your hypothesis holds up. Typically, you'd find that something wasn't exactly the way you thought it would be, so you'd tweak your hypothesis, develop new experiments, and repeat the process ad infinitum. Through this process, you'd inch closer and closer to "the truth".

With Intelligent Design, however, there aren't any experiments that you can run to reliably test the hypothesis. If God is omnipotent, God can alter the outcome of any experiment. Thus, you can never prove or disprove the theory (which, is the whole point of Faith, as I understand it). While that doesn't mean Intelligent Design is wrong, it means it doesn't fit the definition of Science.

Now, many people (including Senator John McCain) wonder why teachers and scientists are so opposed to including Intelligent Design in the curriculum. The problem is that doing so would be an inherent contradition and, as a result, teachers would not be teaching the scientific method, which is the whole point of the class. It would be like teaching that beef is a vegetable in a botany class.

That's not to say that the current scientific theories are all correct. In fact, we know that they're not. One hope of teaching science is to develop the next generation of scientists who can test and refine or change the current theories (or develop new ones) and bring us closer to "the truth". If we teach students that it's acceptible to ignore the results of scientific method in favor of theories that are untestable, then we are crippling our own progress and will slip further and further behind Germany and Japan (for example) in fields like Engineering. Would you want to fly in an airplane whose design was based on theories that are not testable and which contradict what we believe to be the laws of physics? Or, more succinctly, would you fly in an airplane whose design was based on faith?

This is not to say that we should never discuss Intelligent Design at all. I've heard many scientists say that it is a valid topic, just not for a science class (or, at least, not a high-school level science class, in my opinion).

Interestingly, many scientists feel the same way about String Theory as well (which is why this isn't about Science vs Religion). String theory is an attempt to rectify some of the inconsistencies between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The problem is that there's no observable tests for String Theory. So, while it might be true, there's no way we could test it to find out.

At one point (and it may still be the case) there were five versions of string theory, all of which seemed equally valid. But some of those theories contradicted the others. Since none of them could be tested, how would you know which one is correct? Similarly

There's a really cool Nova show on the topic of reversal. They've even been able to roughly model the chaotic nature of the reversal, which happens very quickly. They've even found lava that showed the magnetic field moving tens of degrees during the time it took to harden. But it also describes how there are localized reversals that fluctuate. Check out the cool graphics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/

But... a weakened field for a few decades will not send us all to early graves. The biggest impact of a changing magnetic field would be to:

I wish I could find the source this, but it was an episode on Nova I saw a while ago about the magnetic fields and pole reversal, but it has been known that when the poles flip it tends to last longer than just a few decades. One is known to last over 3,000 years.

But in general, it won't be too bad because obviously life survived through that. Increased cancer rates will most likely be noticiable.

Our electronics industry might have some issues though.

I found the link on the show on PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/

It's all a russian plot to take over the world

Actually, if it recall correctly, predictions are that, if a pole shift were to happened, it would created a period of turbulent/chaotic magnetic field configurations. You would get lots of transient and shifting polarities across the entire planet. Scientists believe that the process would take hundreds of years. Even so, this could really screw up animals like migratory birds, etc. It also would effect cancer and mutation rates.

Heck, NOVA even had a showon it.

This is old news... Nova ran a special on this back in 2001! But that's what you get for paying attention to mainstream media (msnbc, in this case), instead of PBS, NPR, and scientific journals.

Radio died long before the advancement of XM and Sirius.

Taken from The Myth of Media Piracy: [jmcardle.com]
It died when in 1996, the US Federal Communication Commission changed the laws on radio station ownership, removing the limits on how many stations a single company could own. As a consequence, Clear Channel was able to take over station after station. Within a matter of years, it owned 1,200 stations across the United-States; including 247 of the 250 largest radio markets.[1] This severely limited the amount and variety of new music being played on the airwaves. As Touré, a contributing editor to the Rolling Stones put it, "So now if you can't get through Clear Channel, or you can't get through MTV, how does anybody know your record is out?"[2] The fact is, no one can. Furthermore, polls indicated that youths were being turned off by the lack of fresh music on the air.[3]

Radio seemingly play the same 10 songs over and over. It doesn't help that labels like Sony BMG illegally bribed stations to play the tunes they wanted.[4]

These new technologies represent what radio should be: music. Not the worst crap of the 80s/90s repeated every hour. Unfortunately, these technologies either cost money (Sirius), or have to pay such insane royalty fees that they have no choice but to fall in the realm of illegality (Internet Radio). Did you know that an Internet Radio station has to pay $25,000 in royalties every day if it has 10,000 listeners? [5] Traditional radio on the other hand don't have to pay any royalties.

Sources:
1. http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/04/30/clear_ channel/
2. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/musi c/interviews/toure.html
3. http://www.radiodiversity.com/faceofradio.html
4. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050725/music_probe.html?.v =11
5. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2002- 07-21-radio_x.htm

This is an oft-stated but ill-supported definition of "species". It's more problematic in botany than in zoology -- i.e., it seems to be far easier to create hybrids across species lines when interbreeding plants (think tangelos) than when interbreeding animals. But even in zoology it's not a firm rule. For example, donkeys and horses are considered separate species, but they produce viable offspring, and sometimes (rarely) those offspring are fertile.

At the other end of the species definition problem you have things like ring species. Are the individuals at either end of the ring different species, because they can't interbreed with individuals at the other end? Or are they the same species, because they can each interbreed with individuals from the intermediate areas?

Granted, these are rare phenomena. But they serve to illustrate that the definition of "species" is much hazier than the "can breed" sound byte suggests.

There is a good 14min broadcast of whats involved with hydrogen as a viable fuel source.
I believe the question of where to get the hydrogen from is discussed and microbes come up.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/01.ht ml

The corruption and bureaucracy in India was legendary before the reforms of the early 1990s...just ask any adult Indian living in India today about the "permit raj" and you will know exactly what I am talking about. I once saw a picture of an Indian government permit office, you used to need a permit to do practicaly anything business related in India, where there were three lines stretching from three windows out to eternity with overworked clerks sorting through stacks of paper that reached from the floor to the ceiling in large bundles. In fact, it was so bad that practically every permit was procured by a bribe because it was impossible to work with the system and people had to work around it. Things have gotten better by all acounts since Mahmoud Singh turned things around. There is corruption here in the US to be sure, but compared to many other places in the world we have a remarkably well run and honest government bureaucracy. So the long answer to your question is that it can stop India if they let it get out of control again.

Chapter 4: India's Permit Raj 3:04

It's a real problem with dams and the enormous weight of water in their reservoirs

This reminds me of this NOVA episode, about ice dams in North America that repeatedly burst during the last Ice Age -- they caused much of Eastern Washington State to be covered in HUGE ripples ("several hundred feet between crests"), canyons, and stray boulders.

Off topic, I know, but a great program.

Google is planning to build their own internet and bypass the telecom industy's pipes.

Now if only some decent wireless technology would be rolled out that would allow me to connect to my non-Bell ISP without going over the Bell copper (or fiber) to my house.

Google is planning to build their own internet and bypass the telecom industy's pipes.

Now if only some decent wireless technology would be rolled out that would allow me to connect to my non-Bell ISP without going over the Bell copper (or fiber) to my house.

In the real world, if you create a good product or provide good information, you have the opportunity to make lots of money.

If the Internet was similar to the real world, all Internet Providers would be paying content producers money for the information the Internet Provider's customers use.

Unfortuately, with the Internet - it is opposite. Say you have a really good site and you gather quite a bit of traffic, unfortunately you pay your Internet provider by the megabytes of traffic your visitors use. A good slashdotting could bankrupt you - all because your providing good information.

If you want to listen to an excellent interview of how the Internet came to be how it is today, Nerd TV's interview with Brester Kahle (Internet Archive Founder) is definately worth a listen.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/player/?show=00 4&ext=mp3

Thanks. He died in 1997 "after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance."

Did I just start an urban legend? :)

What is so difficult about a face but we can grow other parts.

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1107/features/body.htm

Or that the tube is the baby-sitter of choice for most of the country's pre-schoolers? Or that it's the #1 thing kids do as soon as they get home from school?

Here are the facts, courtesy of PBS (ironic, ain't it :-)

1. The average American watches 3,000 ads per day on TV
2. Kids watch 28 hours of TV each week
3. The #1 after-school activity for kids 6-17 is ... watching TV
4. The AMA says that the average teenager will have seen 18,000 murders and 200,000 violent acts on TV by the time they turn 18. (but no responsible sex - showing kids that people should use a condom to help prevent the spread of diseases and unwanted pregnancies is harmful to their little minds)
5. The more TV your kids watch, the more likely they are to be obese, into drugs, and sexually active.
6. Planned Parenthood - these same kids get to see over 14,000 references to sex every year, but less than 175 where the people are behaving responsibly. The message kids are getting - it's okay to have sex, as long as it wasn't "planned" - and you don't need to protect yourself, because adults don't.

If you think all this isn't having a negative effect on people, you're the one who's fucked up. Or brainwashed. Probably from watching too much TV. Bet you didn't even notice they've gone to 10-second commercials, cramming 12 of them into a 2-minute break, and that they've "sped up" the shows by dropping frames, so as to grab another 3 minutes of commercial time to sell. You can now sit through up to 100 full-screen ads per hour, plus hundreds more "product placements", and "encrustations", "split-screens" while the credits are rolling, voice-over ads, crawlers, etc. 500 ads per fucking hour! And I'll bet you didn't even notice it was anywhere near that high. Why? Because you've grown used to it, and accept it as "normal." You're a good little consumer. So when the next version of DRM'd TV comes out, and you can't skip the commercials, and they run for 2 minutes, then 2 minutes of TV (framed by ads), then another 2 minutes of commercials, you'll happily bend over and take it like a man, because that's what you've been trained to do. You welcome your commercial-sponsoring overlords.

Here, take the test (now that you've gotten some of the answers) http://www.pbs.org/kcet/senioryear/reachout/quiz.h tml

TV - the big open cesspool. As they said - you'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Could this be related at some future point in time and space to the subject of Cringley's latest Pulpit?

On a side note, did this give anyone else a bad feeling for a moment before the fact that Google was doing this inexplicably won you over?

Congrats Slashdot, you've been socially-engineered by some PR firm promoting Microsoft. There's no way the numbers are legitimate.

As many here have pointed out, the highly-speculative costs of the XBox360 are only slightly more competitive than what a smart consumer might expect, and this doesn't take into account Microsoft's tremendous buying power. Anyone with any amount of knowledge of the market knows the numbers are completely phony, and likely a PR plant to encourage consumers to snap up this console as if it were a "bargain."

To illustrate what I mean, everyone should watch The PBS Frontline special on Wal-Mart. Microsoft, like Wal-Mart is a pseudo-monopolist in its industry. As such, it doesn't have to play by the rules normal manufacturers, distributors or retailers play by. PBS has documented cases where Wal-Mart tells manufacturers what price they will pay, and in some cases, manufacturers are threatened with going out of business if they don't comply. Microsoft has done this same thing in the past with its suppliers and you can bet they play this game with XBox components. What they're paying is likely a fraction of what this article states. They have the power to tell manufacturers what to charge.

In fact, Darwin himself made predictions based on his theories that were proven true. Here is a quick overview of one example - he saw a particular flower and predicted that a particular shape of insect must exist to pollinate it, even though he knew of no such insect at the time. Such an insect was found many years later.

Evolution is called a theory because it does meet the scientific criteria for a theory - it has been thoroughly tested (come on, it's been around for over a century, do you HONESTLY believe no one has thought to test it??) and, yes, mathematically modelled even. Many times.

The problem with Intelligent Design is that it does NOT meet the criteria (that you yourself give) for a theory, but its supporters try to present it as one on equal footing with evolution. ID is a hypothesis or a conjecture, evolution is a theory. You seem to understand the difference - most people's problem is that they don't, and they think that since evolution is a theory that means we have no clue if it's really right.

6009 years, 1 month, 1 day, and (checks watch) about 14 hours; and those skeletons are a joke of God's that the palentologists haven't gotten yet. You'd think examining the duckbill platypus would give folk a hint about Her sense of humor, but the fundamentalists don't seem to understand that either.

While agree with you on the knowledge and information front, I think De Beers would disagree with you that your theorem holds true for all "inherently abundant resources" as they make a killing (literally according to some reports) in selling the world diamonds, which are found in "plentiful supply"

Parent is correct, go look up Richard Steele, who heads something called Open Source Solutions (oss.net), and basically advocates that the U.S. spend a lot more time monitoring 'open source' info, instead of spending billions to get spy satellite imagery that tells us nothing about intent.

Interestingly, he has given some speeches at hacker conventions, such as at H2k2 and the Fifth HOPE. You can download his speeches if you follow the links.

I believe the press also uses the term "open source" to refer to a public statement.

It's pretty funny to see Slashdot types get upset over people "stealing" their terms, when those terms are actually older than their use of them... Do they realize that outside of Slashdot, terms like "developer" or "editor" mean totally different things from how we use them?

that thing must need some serious amount of power ... they have to think about security

They already have. That's why they bought 30 acres next to a power plant.

This is the man who brought us the mathematically impossible 6.5 mile 802.11 link with a passive repeater. The repeater that he never showed to anybody. He also shows us an idealistic world of a community cable and telephone company that nobody's ever seemed to find evidence of.

Saying that, when it comes to technology at least, he is speculative is something of an understatement. Take what he says with an extremely large grain of salt.

This is the man who brought us the mathematically impossible 6.5 mile 802.11 link with a passive repeater. The repeater that he never showed to anybody. He also shows us an idealistic world of a community cable and telephone company that nobody's ever seemed to find evidence of.

Saying that, when it comes to technology at least, he is speculative is something of an understatement. Take what he says with an extremely large grain of salt.

For more than a decade the United States has been seriously delinquent in paying its 25 percent share of dues to the United Nations. It currently owes more than $1 billion. While most of the world body's 185 member states are current, Congress has held up U.S. dues

Since the United States has given up official control of Okinawa, U.S. military personnel have committed 22 murders, 354 robberies and 110 rapes on the island

I agree with PBS's Robert X Cringely: the leak's just a distraction. It's only there to make Wall St. think Microsoft is still relevant and on the edge of the wave.

No bubble, it's just Microsoft trying to figure out how they can use their monopoly to outleveredge Google. Gates will try the stupidest things under pressure, and he know he has the money to gamble... I just wonder if he will gamble the whole business before it's over.

The Merchants of Cool.

Kids today (get off my lawn, etc.) have more and more expensive toys than we (I'm 43) ever did. This is because we *didn't have* the expensive toy option.

Marketers know that they can target kids and pressure parents because, well, kids haven't developed the bullshit detector gene yet.

For children, it is all want, want, want and parents cave into the whining and the "no child left behind" phenomenon of keeping up with the Jonses' PS3.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcriptNOW145 _full.html

With the rigging by the oil industry, one can certainly understand.

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/gasprices05.html

Of course some good may come of all this if it forces the american consumer to be more efficient. Shame it has to be at the sharp edge of a crook.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcriptNOW145 _full.html

With the rigging by the oil industry, one can certainly understand.

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/gasprices05.html

Of course some good may come of all this if it forces the american consumer to be more efficient. Shame it has to be at the sharp edge of a crook.

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas ehm and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product ehm and you say why is that important - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and ehm so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.

Watch more television:

There a know mutation that apparently protects against HIV, and it perhaps not coincidentally protects against bubonic plague

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/

I saw an interesting special on PBS once about HIV, AIDS, and the Black Death. Apparently, there was a village in Britain called Eyam where it was common for residents to have a genetic mutation that made them either completely immune to Black Death, or able to fight it off. Many years later, during the 1980s, there was a gay man who's partners were all dying of AIDS, but he never became ill. After quite a bit of testing and geneology research, they found that his ancestors went back to Eyam and that the genetic mutation which had protected the villagers from Black Death was protecting him from HIV and AIDS.

Check it out: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/

The epidemic (pandemic, actually) you're postulating may very well have been the Bubonic Plague (Black Death).

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/interv iew.html
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf119/sf119p05.ht m

Here is an excerpt from a previous post of mine, maybe this will help:

For some examples of living transitional species, look at dogs and wolves (which can be interbred), modern agriculture, and a few species of squirrels( On different sides of the Grand Canyon you'll find nearly identical squirrels, the difference being that on the side of the canyon that is higher, it is colder and you see that over time they've developed traits suited more for the climate and eventually became an individual species. Also if you take certain species of squirrels from say Pennsylvania and mate them with that same species from Ohio, they can mate fine, but try to mate it with a squirrel of the same species from California and it will most likely fail or be extremely hard to get to work because this species is on the verge of speciation where they form into two separate species that can no longer breed together.)

Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of transistional fossils or species is just plain and simple repeating non-sense, but no matter how much you say, it isn't true. Here is the known cladogram for just dinosauria, look at all transitions, and these are just the ones that have been found and proven, there are still large parts of the earth left to search, not to mention under the thousands of miles of ice at the poles which are currently unreachable but in the age of the dinosaurs were most liklely prolific with life. You kind find similar diagrams for *every* single species. When combined, it is huge, one of the biggest and best documented diagrams in all of man's history.

Hereis a very truncated version of the cladogram for modern killer whales, the full cladogram contains significantly more detail. The things I present here are just the beginning, actually look at the science in depth and realize what a well founded and proven theory evolution is.

The "Godzilla" croc doesn't go against evolution. Read this for one example of convergent evolution, which is what happened with this croc (having fish like and carnivorous features due to the niche it lived in). I have a feeling that certain aspects of the findings are being sensationalized by the media for headlines, i.e. the "Godzilla" nickname implies certain things about the croc that just aren't true, and the media is paying too much attention to the nickname. The species btw did not appear out of nowhere :) It was similar enough to previous species that it already was in a Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, and Sub-Family. It only was given a genus and species, implying that it has more similarities than differences with already found fossils. Keep in mind though that paleontology is under 200 years old, so there still is alot to be uncovered... finding a brand new never before seen animal isn't that far fetched, further research and explanation usually fills in the holes if there are any.
Regards,
Steve

Natural immunization could be a factor. Have a look at Secret of the Dead....

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050922. html Wow! That should definitely get /.ed if it hasn't yet.

hydrogen is not really considered an eco-friendly fuel, because the exhaust is carbon dioxide, which (shock) is a greenhouse gas. it's a non-oil fuel, and cheaply available, which is why it's being researched (although the government is actually pushing for the use of hydrogen from non-renewable sources, which is insane to me).

I flat out don't agree that there is no way out of their situation. As for the US blacks of the 1960s, the 1960s was several decades after the Great Migration which saw blacks under much harsher conditions migrate in large numbers hundreds and thousands of miles.

Oh, the poor arabs and blacks! They can't make it on their own without having their hands held.

Bull.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/02.ht ml The researchers at one of the Universities used rockets to cause lightning to strike an area repeatedly during cloudy weather.

There were a few. Here is a brief timeline of the great depression. You can see that there were food riots in several cities, and people killed in marches on employers.

Yes, a trade embargo against food and medicine are GOOD, let those stinkin' socialists and their kids starve, be ill and die, because the USA *must* always be right: This excerpt is from a 2002 Oxfam report entitled Cuba: Social Policy at the Crossroads: Maintaining Priorities, Transforming Practice ""Cuba's achievements in social development are impressive given the size of its gross domestic product per capita. As the human development index of the United Nations makes clear year after year, Cuba should be the envy of many other nations, ostensibly far richer. [Cuba] demonstrates how much nations can do with the resources they have if they focus on the right priorities - health, education, and literacy."" -- the United Nations, April 11, 2000 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/castro/sfeature/sf_vi ews_uriarte.html

If you read the section of the Cringley article on VC funds ending their lifespan and the payback required by the fund managers if the money is not invested, the flurry of investment in the latest "fad" seems to make sense.

I do not think that open source is a fad by any stretch, but if the fund managers can sell it to their clients as valid VC investment option, they will.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050210. html/

Bubble... Probably not...

Fund managers trying to prevent paying back money alrady spent... Likely.

Unfortunately, sufficient fossil records do not exist to support major speciation.

Yes, they do.