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Computers have *always* been used for "real engineering" as you call it. It's only recently that they've gotten cheap enough to use as toys.

WTF? It's like any other part of language, things have different meanings in different contexts. What does "cat" mean?

Ok, so do we rename cat-the-program or cat-the-heavy-machinery (and what about cat-the-animal)? Computers and heavy machinery are both used for "real engineering work", so we can't have any ambiguity in which we're talking about. That would be not acceptable .

No, it's a sign that too many people have sticks up their butts and can't accept that language can be context-dependent. The world is not binary, and failing to recognize this is likely one reason that software sucks so much.

Also, it's a sign that disks (as opposed to ram) are sized by cost, rather than efficient use of address lines. Ram is sold in power-of-2 sizes for technical reasons. Disks are different enough that those technical reasons aren't there, so marketing dictates that the prefixes used be chosen to give the largest numbers.

Actually http://technocrat.net/ not only lets you submit your own story, but it has a decent amount of traffic of very smart people, but not so much that they've ever NOT published a story.

I think really it all ties into OSTG's desire to be bought out for big $$$ by ZDNet or C|Net or even... Google? I mean come on! With so MANY of the stories here now coming from shills and whores like Roland, instead of from the MANY valid stories they get every day, well, doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out what the scam is here. Two words: Technocrat.net

You are living in a fairy land. When you can design a truck than can carry goods cross country that can plug into the grid or a ship that can carry goods across the oceans that you can plug into the grid I might start to agree with you.

Uh, we've had the first since 1912 and the second since 1920, the problem comes in with energy storage- and we're working on that one. If you don't mind driving only an hour or two in between plugging into the grid, the first two are fine. Heck, with the new wave generation bouy, all you need is a submerged towfish and an anchor line to continually supply your ship with wave energy.

State of Open Source

The use of bovine insulin by one of their executive officers readily springs to mind.

Source: Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t episode on PETA

Mod that parent post from a fellow Technocrat up. I was going to point that out too. Coins are inherently shielded. The only way I can envision one radiating is if you split the coin down the middle and inserted a non-conducting peice between the two halves. Even then, I doubt you could get it to radiate far.

I have heard of certain high value paper currency containing RFID. But that's for authentication of the currency, not for tracking. Frankly, I can't imagine why anyone would bother doing this with coins...

I put up a linked article about this just last saturday, you might be interested in it, they are producing biofuel with algae from a commercial power plant by using the CO2.

http://technocrat.net/d/2006/12/23/12545

It's not a case of "should", we all know the patent office thinks any patent with the word "computer" in it is novel and deserves the filing fee.

Remember, it's The Patent Office, not the Rejection Office.

He posted an update on this last night at Technocrat

http://technocrat.net/d/2006/12/15/12273

Yesterday on Technocrat there was an announcement about the upcoming NASA press conference. NASA has kept nerds in suspense for utterly minor announcements before, so I wasn't expecting much from the announcement. Indeed, anything as important as the discovery of life (or, rather, the discovery of fossils of life) would probably have leaked out before and be all over the news.

But this announcement is cool because it means that Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars , undoubtedly the most inspiring work of space colonization science fiction for many of us here, may still be timely. Much of Robinson's plot depends on the existence of subsurface aquifers. Even if there's no life, we can still dream of such an awesome concept as terraformation made possible through water still present underground.

Well, for all intents and purposes, to anyone that really believes in FOSS and is informed about the deal, Novell is now a pariah.
I've lost count of the number of people calling for a boycott, or reporting that they have switched away from, or are in the process of switching away from Novell products.
I think that it is essential that this is continued. The community is the strength of FOSS. If we cannot stand together against what in essence is a form of corporate blackmail Microsoft will continue to drive wedges into the community. It's classic divide and conquer tactics.

We need to continue to spread the truth about this deal so that people have the information they need to see it for what it is, and shun Novell for he traitor in our midst that they have become. Hopefully Novell will come to their senses and abandon the deal. If not, the boycott needs to be as absolute as we can make it. We cannot allow stabbing the entire community in the back to be profitable. Currently, Novell is the new SCO, and should be treated as such.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200611030 73628401
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/11/2/9945
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/20061109a.html
http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell /

Posting it on another project's developer mailing list is trolling.

Oh, like when Linus posted about Linux on the Minix list?

That'a an excellent example. When Linux first went trolling for Minix people, he carefully posted a very humble-sounding, polite message (the sort of thing you don't hear from him too often these days).

The Mark Shuttleworth message leads off with a heavy political jab at Novell that I would guess is of somewhat dubious factual accuracy -- at least I don't know quite what he's talking about:

Novell's decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community.

That sounds to me like the Bruce Perens take on Novell's announcements, it may even be the groklaw take, it's not clear to me that it's what Novell was really saying (at a guess, they didn't realize what they were getting into, as weird as that sounds -- maybe they've been reading slashdot, and they figured that TLAs like GPL/FSF/GNU were all just symptoms of silly "zealotry").

Anyway, all the posturing that everyone is doing about how Shuttleworth has violated some great unspoken covenant or some such, it all comes down to the tone of what he said. Imagine if he had made it short, made it seem folksy, and casual: then this great issue would just evaporate.

(My favorite quote from the Groklaw article: "As for Novell, if history means anything, it will end up Microsoft roadkill. It's so funny to me that nobody ever remembers what comes *after* the Embrace.".)

Posting it on another project's developer mailing list is trolling.

Oh, like when Linus posted about Linux on the Minix list?

That'a an excellent example. When Linux first went trolling for Minix people, he carefully posted a very humble-sounding, polite message (the sort of thing you don't hear from him too often these days).

The Mark Shuttleworth message leads off with a heavy political jab at Novell that I would guess is of somewhat dubious factual accuracy -- at least I don't know quite what he's talking about:

Novell's decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community.

That sounds to me like the Bruce Perens take on Novell's announcements, it may even be the groklaw take, it's not clear to me that it's what Novell was really saying (at a guess, they didn't realize what they were getting into, as weird as that sounds -- maybe they've been reading slashdot, and they figured that TLAs like GPL/FSF/GNU were all just symptoms of silly "zealotry").

Anyway, all the posturing that everyone is doing about how Shuttleworth has violated some great unspoken covenant or some such, it all comes down to the tone of what he said. Imagine if he had made it short, made it seem folksy, and casual: then this great issue would just evaporate.

(My favorite quote from the Groklaw article: "As for Novell, if history means anything, it will end up Microsoft roadkill. It's so funny to me that nobody ever remembers what comes *after* the Embrace.".)

If Microsoft wanted to sue Linux companies for patent usage, he could do it without injecting any "poison pill".

The point is that Microsoft doesn't want to sue at this time.

MS (like most of the big patent-pushers) does not want a Big Patent War before they get software patents passed in Europe - because the chances of getting software patents passed after a Big Patent War are slim-to-none.

European Patent Wars Heat up Again

Darn. I put the wrong URL above. This http://technocrat.net/d/2006/11/2/9945 is the right URL.

That jumbled mess the Inquirer put out even misattributes the source of the quotes, Bruce Perens. Get the real story and the real quotes here , from the horses mouth. Oh, and my rude subject line was just to get everyone's attention. sorry, won't ever happen again, much.

And I'm a bit annoyed at not being attributed in the FA.

Bruce

Several lines above are quotes of me and I'm not attributed. And my writing is coherent, unlike the article cited here. The real article is here.

Bruce

We've been over our carrying capacity since October 9.

And yes, we need to reduce population. The fairest way to do so would be to end international trade.

Seems to me that the article was written this way by design. It is (in somewhat silly fashion) regarded as the "upside down pyramid" style of composition. Via :

Write in an "inverted pyramid" style. That means that the most important fact goes in the first sentence, then the second most important fact, and so on followed by facts of progressively diminishing importance. This allows the reader to get the most from any story without necessarily reading the entire story. When the facts reach a level that isn't important for that particular reader, that reader will click the "next" button.

By this measure, it seems the style worked.

Another of our roots is a similar site called Slashdot.org . Slashdot played a formative role as the community voice of Open Source / Free Software during a time of tremendous growth in that community. Unfortunately, Slashdot has more recently abdicated that role to become, in the words of its editors, "a geek culture site". We recognise the lure of the mass-market. As we write this, Slashdot is within the top 300 sites on the web by readership, and we congratulate them. But the serious work is going to need to go on elsewhere. We're taking up that flag.

Another issue with Slashdot is immaturity. It's rife with trolls and other detriments to the signal-to-noise ratio. We start out on a path to improve the level of discussion over that in Slashdot by eschewing the "Anonymous Coward" who is rampant there. If you don't want to take responsibility for your words, they don't belong here. We encourage you to put your full name in your login, and participate in all discussion as a known individual. We will take other measures to maintain the highest possible quality of discussion as they become necessary.

As I said when this came up on Technocrat a month and a half ago -

Yes, this makes such a good weapon for combat. I have to run up to you, slather you with ultrasonic conducting gel, ram a probe against your skin, find a major artery, and then hit it with ultrasound.

And you are going to be standing there, like a dummy, holding your rifle with a stupid, slack-jawed look on your face, and let me do it.

READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE. THIS DOES NOT WORK AT A DISTANCE.

Moreover, the results of ultrasonic cautery are TRIVIALLY identifiable by any medical examiner.

Get over your "The military is doing this - they must want to use it to KILL PEOPLE." - the military also wants to save the lives of its own people, jackass. Most of modern trauma medicine - you know, all the procedures, equipment, and drugs they will use to save your sorry ass when you wrap it around a tree because your cellphone was more important than driving was - were developed by, GUESS WHAT - THE MILITARY.

Most importantly, Ashdown is one of us. What, you say? Well, another poster mentioned he owns XMission, an ISP (which is also the host of Maddox). He is also apparently a Technocrat reader. He sounds like a semi-sane person, at least when it comes to technology.

Submitted to my congressguy (who knows if he'll read it):

I've written to you before on the topic of patent reform. I asked you to seriously consider the complete destruction of software patents because they hurt innovation.

Your answer was that the patent system is needed to allow a lone inventor or a small company to make an invention and enjoy that invention while preventing others from stealing it.

I assure you that that is never the case anymore.

What is the patent system? It is an incentive-- a way of fostering innovation by providing to an inventor the promise that his invention will belong to him long enough to allow him to profit from it. At least, that's what it *was.*

Nowadays, anyone creating software must seriously consider developing a patent portfolio or at least hiring a patent lawyer to do research on patents that cover increasingly obvious inventions in their domain. Who must hire these lawyers? Your small company, your lone developer trying to make a dent in a larger market. Who holds these patents? Your large companies, the ones who can afford to draft and submit hundreds of patents a year, in hopes that most will be granted (and most are).

We knew the system would crash on us one day. With no help from Congress, which has seemingly turned a blind eye to a strong industry with a clear call for reform, many of the key patent-holders have tried to begin their own reform. They have tried to competely nullify the patent system with covenant agreements-- essentially, promises not to sue over patents unless sued first. The Free Software Foundation, dedicated to the freedom of people to create, use, and re-create software as they see fit, has placed a clause in their most popular license, the GPL, to do the same:

=============== QUOTE
11. Licensing of Patents.

When you distribute a covered work, you grant a patent license to the recipient, and to anyone that receives any version of the work, permitting, for any and all versions of the covered work, all activities allowed or contemplated by this License, such as installing, running and distributing versions of the work, and using their output. This patent license is nonexclusive, royalty-free and worldwide, and covers all patent claims you control or have the right to sublicense, at the time you distribute the covered work or in the future, that would be infringed or violated by the covered work or any reasonably contemplated use of the covered work.
=============== ENDQUOTE

We all see this as a good thing, and we should know. We know that the software industry cannot survive when innovation is stifled by a system that has completely failed in its task.

Where do we see those failures? I have given examples before, in the licensing of LZ compression and JPEG compression. Now we see a small company trying to assert a patent on RedHat, a leader in free (as in freedom) software development (see the articles above). A product that drives growth in the industry may be stopped for a proprietary solution that has not seen a release in three years, all over an idea that was old when it was filed.

You may not care about these individual instances. I daresay you don't, based on your responses in the past. Here is a scenario that may make it more "real" to you:

1. Software development in the United States has grown hazardous. The patent system has grown so monstrous, so useless, that it stops the very innovation it was designed to promote.

http://technocrat.net/d/2006/6/30/5032

"These two attacks are the tip of the iceberg, thousands more
are possible as software patent holders turn to enforcement as
an income producer and away from the patent cross-licensing
détente exercised by large companies until the mid-1990s."

Dear Senator/Representitive blah blah,
I'm pro-small business, pro-innovation, and pro-low taxes. Software patents are bad for all those stances.

Large companies which previously were all for broader and broader patents are beginning to realize the error of their earlier ways. As is seen in this case currently before the supreme court.

http://patentlaw.typepad.com/KSR%20MicrosoftCisco_ Amicus.pdf

Lawsuits which are now starting against OpenSource software developers and users will be a terrible drag on innovation and consequently our economy. Half the internet (or more) is power by such software, and that includes government networks. A high cost will be bore by the tax payer if OpenSource software is made illegal by software patents, and the government has to replace thousands of networks running on free software with commercial solutions. Not to mention the transitions costs.

I am not an OpenSource software developer, but by my business relies on software from companies such as RedHat, IBM, and MySQL which do. If they cannot deliver their OpenSource software, my business will not survive.

Software patents are stifling innovation and consequently our economy. Please take action to roll back or completely eliminate software patents.

Further information about software patents can be found here:
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/6/30/5032

...they are adopting a GPS based mileage tracker, precisely for this purpose. You not only get to pay a tax, they will know where your ride is all the time if they feel like it.

http://technocrat.net/d/2006/6/12/4359

Bruce Perens agrees with you.

Bruce Perens pulled the same story over at Technocrat because the author is "from a paid political PR agency." link

Read, but read with caution. The author is paid to have his opinion.

I know what you mean, these days for technical news I prefer:
http://technocrat.net/

But not enough commentry yet - hence the reason I stay around slashdot.

off the main topic I know, but what the hey! it's ontopic for a reply :-)

see also:
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/5/23/3693

bacteria + rotting biomass has long been able to produce energy.
I can see this is new because it produces hydrogen as opposed to other gasses, but is a hydrogen economy that much better than a methane economy if it is based on biomass?
Maybe in 50 years time?

Ok I'll mod myself Troll now...

For Linux news, LWN; for general tech/sci news, Technocrat.

Slashdot has a *lot* more users than either though. Although some times it can seem otherwise, the good comments can show though... you just need to browse at +4 and ignore anything posted = 25 minutes after a story is posted. :)

I put it on technocrat.

http://technocrat.net/d/2006/3/11/1281

Here's the URL to the actual product page, it's a fraunhoffer institute project, the "berlin brain computer interface"

http://www.bbci.de/

I'm sorry for the confusion. I took you to mean the guy is a jerk for being in a position to help but choosing to taunt you instead. That was my intended illustration anyway.

thereby making Ask Slashdot less useful for people like me.

For what it's worth, I think I understand you enough now to feel *your* frustration. Please understand that it seem initially like you blame asmor for your problems, as in: "The less experienced coders are taking your slashdot away from you. BAD NEWBIES!!" And that just seems selfish and arrogant. I don't know if it is any comfort to you that your "sacrifice" has made things more interesting for those of us who truly do find more basic information useful. If you truly support equal participation for all slashdot users, your patience may eventually see some of us becoming experienced enough to entertain you on your terms.

Do I need to end all my posts with XXOO?

Not at all. Like I said, I don't care if you personally like me or not. I'm more interested in the perceptive insights and interesting ideas you can offer to challange my own world view and further my own enlightenment. I hope the sentiment is mutual.

Why is it alarming that I should want to be a part of a community that's geared toward more advanced users?

Because you expect slashdot to be that community. /*grin*/ slashdot for crying out loud! Okay, on second thought, maybe that isn't so much alarming as...er...funny. For what it's worth, Bruce Perens of Debian fame became disillusioned with slashdot a long time ago. In response to the lousy signal to noise ratio at slashdot, he established http://technocrat.net/ as "a more mature forum than Slashdot". You might be much happier there. I'm guessing it is more likely they don't "deal with n00bs".

It's a judgement call, which is far different than an assumption.

I don't know if it will be of any use to pursue this particular tact. It's splitting hairs. Judgement call, assumption - what *is* the difference? Basically, I thought you called him lazy and I felt it was unjustified.

When I was a kid, I was really interested in the space program....

This is the second time you've involked the idea of of "if it is good enough for me it ought to be good enough for others". Which, I guess, is a reasonable perspective. But read that a certain way and it becomes a variation of "my way is the only good way - for everyone". Just because you happened not to have asked for help in pursuing something doesn't mean it is wrong for others to seek help. It is a matter of choice. You may pass judgement on the choice others make, but how and why would you expect that personal opinion of yours to be of any significance? If you're trying to inspire someone to be more self-sufficient, it would be far more productive to actually suggest some resources. you know? "teach a man how to fish.." and all that. Don't just brag about how good you are and taunt someone else for being a bad fisherman (for whatever reason).

Yep. Especially since any rational businessman would stay the hell away from China to begin with. Foreign trade in general is not profitable, at least for American businesses, and hasn't been for 30 years now. Why would anybody want to do business in China?!?!?!? They're just a bunch of con artists taking our natural resources to create crappy products and charge us a lot of money to ship the natural resources east and the finished products west.

I could have sworn CNN had a Reuters article on this very same thing over a year ago. Could anyone help prove me with a link? Maybe I'm just losing it...

At least we know CNN has someone reading Technocrat.net looking for story ideas.

Try Technocrat. Its's like slashdot for grownups.

from http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=06/01/03/0045 243&mode=thread Here is a loose translation of the Pirate Party's start page:

Phase 1: Gather signatures for the Election Authority

We need 1500 signatures before the end of February in order to enter the parliamentary elections for 2006. In order to have a small safety margin we shall gather 2000 before February 4th, that gives us time to finish the administrivia for the Election Authority (which is nearly guaranteed to dislike us, or what)

Just right now we are validating all the signatures. We have received over 4000 signatures in less than 24 hours. Right now we are going through the whole lot to verify that we can provide them to the Election Authority.

What is this about?

The Pirate Party aims to take up the roll of maintaining a balance of power after the 2006 election. There are between 800 000 and 1 100 000 active file swappers in Sweden, and they are all tired of being called criminals. We need to have 225 000 of them with us to cross the four percent threshold and land in the roll of power balance.

To get one fourth of a criminalized and angry mob with us is far from unachievable. It is that which we shall achieve in the coming nine months.

Are youse serious?

"You had better believe it. This is the real thing."

What is the Pirate Party's platform?

The Pirate Party's platform is the abolishment of immaterial property (copyright, patents, trademarks and patterns) and the derivative effects (extra fees on blank tapes) and is furthermore very strongly interested in protecting personal integrity (among other things that the data retention law shall not be implemented, and an expansion on the privacy of written correspondence to cover all communications, and a constitutional right to personal privacy.) We do not take a position in any other questions, especially not other politically divisive issues. (the point with that is that you should be able to vote for the Pirate Party without changing your position in the left-right scale of Swedish politics)

Furthermore we stand for that Thomas Bodström shall not accomplish new general tasks, as per his escapades with the data retention law

Which is the Pirate Party, Left or Right?

It is quaintly amusing that the Left accuses us of being for the Right while the Right accuses us of being for the Left. The Left reasons that culture is a generality, the Right that immaterial property create market damaging monopolies. Others simply don't care about Left-Right ideology and simply want to put an end to further hinderance of the advancement of technology and society for the sake of a short term profit.

You know you've got a jaundiced view on life when you read an interested researcher's real science comments, and instinctively feel disgusted by the blatant PR grab.

I hear you. I must say though that the link was included, because we really are enthusiastic about our work and the possibilities. Right now, we are totally funded through the NIH via taxpayer dollars and have been sharing any and all technologies gratis. I have even traveled to other labs to help them learn what it is that we do and will be giving another seminar about what we do at UCSB later this month.

On re-reading the parent comment, I almost feel obliged to visit the web site, to prove to myself that not everyone's just after the PR, but might actually have something relevant to say.

Please do. There is no advertising on our page and all associations are disclosed.

I will say however, that there may be more dollars available for this kind of research in the private domain and I am investigating those avenues. We have already met with VCs and state directors for economic development and are considering these approaches, but right now, it is open science.

It's been a tough few weeks for SlashDot readers, full of front-page advertorials. Now the editorial sloppiness is causing me to doubt even "Score: 5, Informative" comments.

Jeez, you should have seen some of the editorial censorship yesterday when ~Zonk used his unlimited mod points to mod down dozens of posts apparently because they were critical of him and the Slashdot system. I am very close to dumping Slashdot from my life completely because of stuff like this. Perhaps Technocrat will be a better place to spend some time provided the traffic could increase some.

Technocrat. Not a lot of users, though.

... please understand that their vision of the future of computing and the information age is very different from our vision of the future of computing and the information age. When they arrested those people for illegal copying and DMCA mod chip violations - hard prision time for simple copying is the rule of the game.

While I like video games as much as the next guy, I think it is very imporant for people to understand that online freedoms are more important than entertainment. And hard time is for people like mudders and thiefs who steal real property, not for those who make coppies of pretend properties such as "copyrights".

IMHO, people should really question the copyright system. If they take it to it's logical conclusion .... this is where it leads ... for everyone.

essay: Straight Talk About Copyrights http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=05/11/25/1329 258

Still the difference between the two is that in one case, they are losing sales to a competitor who has a superior product and in the other they are losing sales because someone wants to use their goods or services without paying for it.

One of these is a core principle of our capitalist society, and the other one isn't. Can you pick which one?

Yes actually I can, because one model centers arround using government to choke off the natural supply and demand of information for the sake of incentive while the other relies on natural supply and demand of services behind the information.

I think you better read this other essay I wrote ... http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=05/11/25/1329 258&mode=nocomment

In case the subject needs any more explanation, please see....

http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=05/11/25/1329 258&mode=nocomment
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=147420&cid =12354088

People intrigued/amused by this story should totally check out Technocrat, since it showed up there first. (Second, if you count Perens' journal...)

Technocrat posted this story too.

Check out http://www.technocrat.net/ . It's /. for adults.

They put the story up Friday (though with the caveat stated up front in the summary that it could be hokum).

Check out http://www.technocrat.net/ . It's /. for adults.

Could you rephrase it? ["rear circumstances"]

Something that don't happend were often.

To turn this into a scientific experiment, you'd first have to create heuristics to decide what "God calling on you" means

(as that is a subject were people hold different wievs, and I have not studyed it enough to be able to win a discussion against eather side on the subject, pleace don't take my attemt to explain it as accurate) My attemt: (A part of) You are truly (you know you can't fix it) sorry (not that type of regret that drives you to destruction like Judas regret) about your sins (what you have done against His commandments), you realise you are lost in the state you now are, and you care about it.

whether it's happening or not. You'd also need to be able to determine whether someone "genuinely accepts" him or not.

That would be harder to do. You have some objective criteria that proves it is not happening (like someone that does it to fit in, or to join the church, etc), but to have a more accurate posetive you would have to be able to test spirits/get a profecy conserning it. I think it would be hard to design a mashine that could detect it using current technology, if it is measureable at all. So for now, that experiment would have to be on a personal level. (but there are places there is a high probability for it to happend, like a place experiencing revival or more generally, where Gods Word is preached pure)

No, it would be impossible to do because you'd first have to be able to create demonic magic, and measure its effects and the effects that prayer might have on it.

You would not be able to create it when someone born again went against it. What you could do is to bring someone born again (and aware of the victory we have in Jesus, and prayer) to someone else's magic-experiment (after they had measured it's effect). (I hear it is happending today, that people bring inn someone psycic, medium or someone like that to measure magic)

Intelligent design has no scientific basis whatsoever (and I think we've agreed on this point)

I am suspecting you are mixing Inteligent design (from now ID) and creationisim. ID, at least as it is decribed from my sources is: "Nature is so complex that it must be designed. To assume it is created by chance would be like beleving a scaceship we find is created by chance. Many bodyparts are interdependent, in a way that if one part is missing it renders the other completly useless. Not to mention the genes needed to create those parts." (I don't remember exactly the definition) Note: it don't mention who/what the designer is. Creationalisim on the other hand do, as it claims that God is the creator.

whereas "humans evolving from apes" is an extrapolation from "microevolution,"

Well, you are adding benefittal mutations and lots of time to microevolution.

["humans evolving from apes"] has quite a lot of emperical evidence to back it up (fossils, etc.).

Well, we also have fosils of humans walking next to dinosaurs. And when many of those "missing links" are analysed, they turn out not to be "missing links". A (speacy off) fish until recently belived to be the missing link betwen sea and land were dicovered alive and well a wile ago. It was living on deep water, and died on its way to the surface. Also this article has some interesting points on human fosils.

Furthermore, the idea is still described as a theory, which means that it's subject to revision upon the finding of contradictory evidence.

Well, at least here in Norway, kids in public schools (pretty mutch every kid) teaches it as a fact. And the ne