You don't understand what deflation is. A good or service whose price goes down is not deflation. When the prices of all goods and services go down in aggregate, then you have deflation. The immediate consequence is that less goods and services will be produced, causing a crisis.
Also, you seem to think that saving is good. This is silly: imagine that tomorrow, everybody decided to stop spending anything but what they required to live. Now for a tiny while, some money will accumulate in bank accounts -- and will not be lent because everyone saves. Then businesses go bankrupt, people get laid off, the economy collapses. And you money is worth nothing, because there is nothing left to buy.
People like you deserve to be paid millions a year, and forced to only eat the paper money they receive. Sorry, gold, as I guess you also are a goldbug.
Inflation is when you get less value for a nominal amount of money. The government (really, the central bank, usually an independent institution ) can try to affect it by "printing money", but there is no guarantee that this will work. This is because money is not just a big pile of coins, it is also -- and mostly -- bonds. Now usually, you prefer holding bonds rather than money, because they give you interest. The higher the interest, the lower the proportion of bonds you wish to hold.
But if the interest rates are close to zero, the government can emit arbitrarily large amounts of money in the form of bonds, and it will just stay there and do nothing. No inflation. This is what we have this days: the money supply trebled, and the inflation stayed tiny (according to you, it should have been 300%).
As an aside, inflation is good: it is not particularly desirable that money accumulates too easily: there should be an incentive to invest rather that hoard. Also, it diminishes the value of debt, which helps getting out of crises like the one we are in: if everyone tries to get rid of debt at the same time, what do you think happens?
Have you considered helping them debug your problem? *BSD is a pretty rare use case, but presumably, you are a competent user.
And you will have help not only yourself, but all the other users who could have been affected by your bug.
As an aside, wiping the configuration is hard, with files in.kde/ and.local/ and.config/. THAT I don't understand. I guess it is for the pretence of being a generic framework and not a KDE one. Bullshit.
Your bugs may well be real, but in all likelihood, it was just a botched configuration update (which is of course a real bug, it just has nothing to do about akonadi).
It has nothing to do with architecture changes (which are reasonable and correct and elegant), but because you got to see the plumbing, you decided it must be the culprit. But mispackaging is a more likely culprit...
The new architecture was necessary to make kmail's interface non-blocking. It was also good to allow support of many protocols. Were bugs introduced in the refactoring? Sure! but it changes nothing to the fact that the refactoring was necessary to support a number of desirable features.
Why do I think it was a configuration update bug? In my experience, starting from scratch always works flawlessly, whereas all sorts of corner cases cause the upgrade to fail/yield suboptimal results... I don't actually think it was possible to make a migrator work flawlessly, and they should have made the users reconfigure their accounts from scratch. An unpopular but safer move, IMHO.
This is Free Software. Developers believe in a open, transparent process, where everyone can see the progress, but also the fights and the disagreement.
Users are expected to be educated. Feedback should be constructive and technically apt. All this.
I think that the whole problem is that the year of linux on the desktop has actually happened, and the consequence was hordes of users thinking that they are customers. Well guess what, you did not pay for the product, and unlike facebook and google, you are not the product: your privacy is important. The price is that you are expected to be not ignorant.
you realise that akonadi is basically just a big cache, and that the fetching and sending of mails was largely factored directly out of kmail?
The only big difference is that it now supports IMAP PUSH, which means new mails appear instantly. It mystifies me that people freak out when they suddenly see the operations which were already performed in-process now performed in other processes.
When google does it with chrome, it is good, but when KDE does it with kmail it is bad?? If that is not the ultimate proof that the whole thing is entirely about perception, I don't know what is.
No, we need rationalism taught in schools. How truth is uncovered from the accumulation of evidence within the framework of models.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence! Think about it: if something is never, ever observed, this of course does not prove that it does not exist. However, the odds of it existing are greatly reduced. This is because we have an underlying model where the odds of something being true in general are a function of the amount of observed evidence.
If a journalist writes something which goes against your model of the world, you should:
- update your model of the world somewhat
- reject the information if it is clearly inconsistent with other bits of information you have
- update your model of the trustworthiness of the journalist
- rinse and repeat. It is important to be aware of that process and try to seriously evaluate the odds.
If all the information you get is consistent and goes against what you believe, you may be wrong. But check. Try to get information from as many sources as you can -- but not from sources you know are wrong. Study science/engineering/technology even if only through wikipedia.
He is paid way too much for anyone to tolerate the merest failing. Your salary reflects your abilities, importance and responsibilities. High salary means that I have a very high expectation of your morals.
The CEO picked his salary, so he deals with the backslash when it turns out he is a lying scumbag.
The first desktop was KDE in 1999, soon followed by GNOME. FVWM95 always was a joke which only served as a proof that RH did not get it at all.
They wanted to replace sun workstations and the like, but their odds were always very low. Also, the users of those workstations are a very particular breed and anything targeting them was bound to fail for the general public.
But yes, it is true, for a short while RH looked like it cared about the desktop.
I have to disagree. Of, course I am biased, but I think KDE is the best desktop, free or otherwise available now, bar none. Seriously, the software stack is largely top-notch. Some apps lack, sure. But this is a different issue.
But the job of the distros is underestimated: their job is to make the system feel integrated, not just package stuff from upstream. This requires large amount of user-testing and QA.
Ubuntu did that for its first 2-3 releases, and promptly became dominant. And then, it stopped: they thought that releasing on fixed dates was a good idea. It is not: they mistook their original success, which was due to outstanding original releases, for success due to their release process, which is rather crappy. in the SuSE days, before opensuse, the releases were extensively tested and the packages well-thought-out. But then you cannot go and bleed money forever (also, having gnomies sabotaging your setup after being bought by Novell is no help).
RedHat never tried to be desktop friendly. They went for the wrong tech (GNOME) for ideological reasons, and decided it couldn't be done. They still think that, although they think that sabotaging everybody else's efforts by randomly changing various parts of the system (systemd? whyyyyy?) just in case is a good plan.
So basically, I think it comes down to distros. I also think you should pick your distro based on the desktop you prefer. When will the situation improve? Well it actually improves all the time, at the cost of breaking stuff all the time, so I guess that when Red Hat will announce they are going for the desktop, which means they'll stop shifting the target, things will significantly improve. When will that be? No idea.
You mean there is a legal loophole in the GPL, and the hundred of proprietary vendors which would benefit have formed a secret cabal to kill linux in one fell swoop if it were to become too troublesome?
My. I'll go back to windows, then. The risk is too terrifying.
Sadly, we do, by looking at the wikipedia logs -- because wikipedia is pretty representative of the population at large.
I have been using linux on the desktop since 2001. But the big take-off will still take time, essentially because it is a social problem, and not a technical one.
This question is in fact a complicated question, because it is loaded with assumptions about how things work. There is no particular reason why a programme needs to be in a directory.
In fact, the unix tradition is to have executables in a directory, config files in another, log files in yet another. So the answer to your question is that it was a wrong question. A better question would have been, "how do I install a programme", or "how do I keep track of installed programmes".
In general, ask questions directed towards the effect you wish to produce, not about details on how you think the effect ought to be produced.
Bad distro? change distro! Are there too many? No: practically, you have ubuntu, fedora and opensuse. And lots of vocal advocates for tiny distros they and their three friends use. You mostly hear about them, but they don't amount to much (in fact, according to the WP logs, only ubuntu amounts to much).
Seriously, the GNU/Linux thing died years ago -- you can still tell the old farts by the fact they seem to care, but no one else does.
Pointing out problems is fine, and believe it or not, even appreciated. However, ranting that "your CPU went to 100% and never even loaded the desktop, requiring a reinstall from scratch" will not make people taking you seriously. Because to know your CPU went to 100%, without the desktop, you clearly know how to change the virtual console and launch top, and yet you were too ignorant to not do something as useless as "reinstalling from scratch".
So you either are lying outright or are taking rather large short-cuts in your retelling of the problem. Neither of which will get your bugs fixed.
As for the GPL and the four freedoms, WTF are you talking about ??!
"Moving so fast that you miss the earth" is a good description. In fact it fits better to the most "correct" explanation, which is that the satellite always follows a geodesic in curved space, and that in its particular case, this trajectory misses the Earth. Lies-to-children used to prepare them to understand the bigger truths later on are necessary, because you can't start kindergarten with tensor algebra. Also, if you know maths, you will find that writing the equations of motion in the right frameworks leads to various description of what is an orbit. One of which is the explanation you were given as a kid.
Because you misunderstand what a theory is, you decided that a perfectly acceptable description was wrong.
You are clearly a proponent of intelligent design. Now intelligent design is a huge intellectual fraud of a theory, in that it doesn't qualify as a theory: it has no predictive value. You apparently would like schools to teach children that we don't know things we in fact do, apparently on the grounds that there is intrinsic worth in keeping god-as-an-explanation. This is silly.
Science is a beautiful tapestry of interconnected pieces. Its goal is not merely to describe the world, but to be able to make predictions about it. Evolution, like Relativity, Quantum Electro/Chromo-Dynamics, explain things about the world in that they allow numbered predictions. If you think people ought to explain things with god instead... Well, go die. You are free to believe, not peddle ignorance.
Oh, experiments are very important. But science is really about building models and theories. If you just do experiments, you are a glorified technician, no a scientist. For example, so you want to figure out what parameter A has on process B. You can then vary A and perform a certain number of experiments. If you then simply report the results, without having explored the mechanism which relates A and B, I will reject your paper.
You must explain your results, explain how they relate to what we know, and put forth a reasonable model which tells me what will happen if I vary A further. Otherwise, unless the effect of A on B is amazingly interesting and non-obvious, and you did lots of (careful) measures, you are wasting everybody's time.
Somewhere in the realm of physical sciences, though I have contributed to biological research. This being the Internet, and me valuing privacy, I will not be more precise. But I am a bona fide researcher:)
Yes, I review -- quite a lot, and yes, I tend to reject papers with no models. I also work in a field were this is usually not excusable. I don't of course systematically reject papers on the ground that they have no models, but the threshold for acceptance of a purely experimental/descriptive paper is significantly higher: the experiment must be interesting, new and well described. They must also be sufficiently complete that they say something in themselves about what they purport to describe.
Because if the experiments are not attached to a model, and they won't likely be reproduced exactly by anyone, you better go the extra kilometre to convince me you were extra careful, reviewed the literature for similar or connected results, and really thought about being complete and correct.
Also curve fitting doesn't count as a model. And I care not one wit where you come from, or who you are -- I usually look at who wrote the paper after I read it. Just so you know: some of us reviewers really care about the quality of what is coming out.
I suspect you are a troll. But for the sake of the argument, here goes.
Evolution describes a mechanism by which we can explain the apparition and disappearance of species, how they are related, why they are spread the way they are around the Earth. It makes prediction about the sequence of fossils and genetic relatedness between species.
And yes, the understatement is that god is wholly unnecessary to explain all this. In the same way that they are unnecessary to explain why planets don't fall into another, or the balance of elements in the universe, or how electrical circuits are formed or the colour of the sky.
If you understand genetics, then it follows that evolution must occur: the imperfect transmission of information under the external pressure of reproduction causes evolution. Genetics is also wholly at odds with the biblical account of creation (basically, there seems indeed to be an Adam and an Eve, but they were separated by tens of thousands of years and thousands of kilometres, also, it is entirely unsurprising that everyone is somehow related: we share most of our genes!). The Genesis account is internally inconsistent, sexist and silly at the same time anyway -- it is even polytheist.
From your comment, I have to conclude that yes, Americans are undereducated in precisely the way I described.
Gahh. Pet peeve of mine: I have come to the conclusion that people on the American side of the Atlantic don't understand what a model or a theory is for.
Science is not a collection of facts: it is a collection of theories supported by facts. When someone tries to publish something without model or explanation, it is your duty as a reviewer to reject the article with great prejudice. Because it it the theories that advance science.
This is because although the experiments will not get repeated (sure, they might if we scientists had job security and enough funding -- won't happen), the theories and models will get tested with new experiments. And this is really how science advances. Real science is the formulation of theories and not testing randomly new drugs: this also has marginal utility, but can never be as solid as, say, the theory of gravitation. Therefore, don't be surprised when people publish results that turn out to be a fluke, when they are pressed for time: this is because the reviewers accepted papers which were not framed within theories. Models and theories based on first principles are the only thing one can be reasonably certain of...
I suspect that the reason climate science and evolution are misunderstood in America more than elsewhere is that the education system here does not emphasize systematic knowledge and the power of models. Evolution cannot be "experimentally proven". but it can be used to formulate a great number of hypotheses which can then be verified experimentally.
If you think in terms of relationships between the organisms, and how their populations fluctuates dynamically, then the cow is a predator to grass. If the cows eat too much grass, they die out.
This is not completely true, as the cow grazing does not kill the grass: it will regrow. So ok, the cow is not a real predator to grass. Not like foxes and rabbits.
This is different from the athletes foot: this is a parasitic relationship: the parasite takes some of the hosts resources for himself. If he takes too much, he dies with his host.
But the bigger point is that clearly the students are not taught to think in terms of models and theories. And this is what id deeply wrong -- never mind that the test's question be inane.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand what deflation is. A good or service whose price goes down is not deflation. When the prices of all goods and services go down in aggregate, then you have deflation. The immediate consequence is that less goods and services will be produced, causing a crisis.
Also, you seem to think that saving is good. This is silly: imagine that tomorrow, everybody decided to stop spending anything but what they required to live. Now for a tiny while, some money will accumulate in bank accounts -- and will not be lent because everyone saves. Then businesses go bankrupt, people get laid off, the economy collapses. And you money is worth nothing, because there is nothing left to buy.
People like you deserve to be paid millions a year, and forced to only eat the paper money they receive. Sorry, gold, as I guess you also are a goldbug.
Inflation is when you get less value for a nominal amount of money. The government (really, the central bank, usually an independent institution ) can try to affect it by "printing money", but there is no guarantee that this will work. This is because money is not just a big pile of coins, it is also -- and mostly -- bonds. Now usually, you prefer holding bonds rather than money, because they give you interest. The higher the interest, the lower the proportion of bonds you wish to hold.
But if the interest rates are close to zero, the government can emit arbitrarily large amounts of money in the form of bonds, and it will just stay there and do nothing. No inflation. This is what we have this days: the money supply trebled, and the inflation stayed tiny (according to you, it should have been 300%).
As an aside, inflation is good: it is not particularly desirable that money accumulates too easily: there should be an incentive to invest rather that hoard. Also, it diminishes the value of debt, which helps getting out of crises like the one we are in: if everyone tries to get rid of debt at the same time, what do you think happens?
The price of freedom is knowledge. I don't collect the price: everyone benefits from more informed humans.
Have you considered helping them debug your problem? *BSD is a pretty rare use case, but presumably, you are a competent user.
And you will have help not only yourself, but all the other users who could have been affected by your bug.
As an aside, wiping the configuration is hard, with files in .kde/ and .local/ and .config/. THAT I don't understand. I guess it is for the pretence of being a generic framework and not a KDE one. Bullshit.
Your bugs may well be real, but in all likelihood, it was just a botched configuration update (which is of course a real bug, it just has nothing to do about akonadi).
It has nothing to do with architecture changes (which are reasonable and correct and elegant), but because you got to see the plumbing, you decided it must be the culprit. But mispackaging is a more likely culprit...
The new architecture was necessary to make kmail's interface non-blocking. It was also good to allow support of many protocols. Were bugs introduced in the refactoring? Sure! but it changes nothing to the fact that the refactoring was necessary to support a number of desirable features.
Why do I think it was a configuration update bug? In my experience, starting from scratch always works flawlessly, whereas all sorts of corner cases cause the upgrade to fail/yield suboptimal results... I don't actually think it was possible to make a migrator work flawlessly, and they should have made the users reconfigure their accounts from scratch. An unpopular but safer move, IMHO.
This is Free Software. Developers believe in a open, transparent process, where everyone can see the progress, but also the fights and the disagreement.
Users are expected to be educated. Feedback should be constructive and technically apt. All this.
I think that the whole problem is that the year of linux on the desktop has actually happened, and the consequence was hordes of users thinking that they are customers. Well guess what, you did not pay for the product, and unlike facebook and google, you are not the product: your privacy is important. The price is that you are expected to be not ignorant.
you realise that akonadi is basically just a big cache, and that the fetching and sending of mails was largely factored directly out of kmail?
The only big difference is that it now supports IMAP PUSH, which means new mails appear instantly. It mystifies me that people freak out when they suddenly see the operations which were already performed in-process now performed in other processes.
When google does it with chrome, it is good, but when KDE does it with kmail it is bad?? If that is not the ultimate proof that the whole thing is entirely about perception, I don't know what is.
Why the downmod? The guy is right: even though /. is us-centric, such a boondongle of units makes the whole text unclear.
One day, the US will switch to metric. And that will be a good day.
No, we need rationalism taught in schools. How truth is uncovered from the accumulation of evidence within the framework of models.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence! Think about it: if something is never, ever observed, this of course does not prove that it does not exist. However, the odds of it existing are greatly reduced. This is because we have an underlying model where the odds of something being true in general are a function of the amount of observed evidence.
If a journalist writes something which goes against your model of the world, you should:
- update your model of the world somewhat
- reject the information if it is clearly inconsistent with other bits of information you have
- update your model of the trustworthiness of the journalist
- rinse and repeat.
It is important to be aware of that process and try to seriously evaluate the odds.
If all the information you get is consistent and goes against what you believe, you may be wrong. But check. Try to get information from as many sources as you can -- but not from sources you know are wrong. Study science/engineering/technology even if only through wikipedia.
Because this is what the world is made of.
He is paid way too much for anyone to tolerate the merest failing. Your salary reflects your abilities, importance and responsibilities. High salary means that I have a very high expectation of your morals.
The CEO picked his salary, so he deals with the backslash when it turns out he is a lying scumbag.
The first desktop was KDE in 1999, soon followed by GNOME. FVWM95 always was a joke which only served as a proof that RH did not get it at all.
They wanted to replace sun workstations and the like, but their odds were always very low. Also, the users of those workstations are a very particular breed and anything targeting them was bound to fail for the general public.
But yes, it is true, for a short while RH looked like it cared about the desktop.
I have to disagree. Of, course I am biased, but I think KDE is the best desktop, free or otherwise available now, bar none. Seriously, the software stack is largely top-notch. Some apps lack, sure. But this is a different issue.
But the job of the distros is underestimated: their job is to make the system feel integrated, not just package stuff from upstream. This requires large amount of user-testing and QA.
Ubuntu did that for its first 2-3 releases, and promptly became dominant. And then, it stopped: they thought that releasing on fixed dates was a good idea. It is not: they mistook their original success, which was due to outstanding original releases, for success due to their release process, which is rather crappy. in the SuSE days, before opensuse, the releases were extensively tested and the packages well-thought-out. But then you cannot go and bleed money forever (also, having gnomies sabotaging your setup after being bought by Novell is no help).
RedHat never tried to be desktop friendly. They went for the wrong tech (GNOME) for ideological reasons, and decided it couldn't be done. They still think that, although they think that sabotaging everybody else's efforts by randomly changing various parts of the system (systemd? whyyyyy?) just in case is a good plan.
So basically, I think it comes down to distros. I also think you should pick your distro based on the desktop you prefer. When will the situation improve? Well it actually improves all the time, at the cost of breaking stuff all the time, so I guess that when Red Hat will announce they are going for the desktop, which means they'll stop shifting the target, things will significantly improve. When will that be? No idea.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
This is probably a more reliable estimate of reality. And I must correct my comment: only ubuntu is significant.
You are confused. Please notice it.
You mean there is a legal loophole in the GPL, and the hundred of proprietary vendors which would benefit have formed a secret cabal to kill linux in one fell swoop if it were to become too troublesome?
My. I'll go back to windows, then. The risk is too terrifying.
Sadly, we do, by looking at the wikipedia logs -- because wikipedia is pretty representative of the population at large.
I have been using linux on the desktop since 2001. But the big take-off will still take time, essentially because it is a social problem, and not a technical one.
This question is in fact a complicated question, because it is loaded with assumptions about how things work. There is no particular reason why a programme needs to be in a directory.
In fact, the unix tradition is to have executables in a directory, config files in another, log files in yet another. So the answer to your question is that it was a wrong question. A better question would have been, "how do I install a programme", or "how do I keep track of installed programmes".
In general, ask questions directed towards the effect you wish to produce, not about details on how you think the effect ought to be produced.
Bad distro? change distro! Are there too many? No: practically, you have ubuntu, fedora and opensuse. And lots of vocal advocates for tiny distros they and their three friends use. You mostly hear about them, but they don't amount to much (in fact, according to the WP logs, only ubuntu amounts to much).
Seriously, the GNU/Linux thing died years ago -- you can still tell the old farts by the fact they seem to care, but no one else does.
Pointing out problems is fine, and believe it or not, even appreciated. However, ranting that "your CPU went to 100% and never even loaded the desktop, requiring a reinstall from scratch" will not make people taking you seriously. Because to know your CPU went to 100%, without the desktop, you clearly know how to change the virtual console and launch top, and yet you were too ignorant to not do something as useless as "reinstalling from scratch".
So you either are lying outright or are taking rather large short-cuts in your retelling of the problem. Neither of which will get your bugs fixed.
As for the GPL and the four freedoms, WTF are you talking about ??!
"Moving so fast that you miss the earth" is a good description. In fact it fits better to the most "correct" explanation, which is that the satellite always follows a geodesic in curved space, and that in its particular case, this trajectory misses the Earth. Lies-to-children used to prepare them to understand the bigger truths later on are necessary, because you can't start kindergarten with tensor algebra. Also, if you know maths, you will find that writing the equations of motion in the right frameworks leads to various description of what is an orbit. One of which is the explanation you were given as a kid.
Because you misunderstand what a theory is, you decided that a perfectly acceptable description was wrong.
You are clearly a proponent of intelligent design. Now intelligent design is a huge intellectual fraud of a theory, in that it doesn't qualify as a theory: it has no predictive value. You apparently would like schools to teach children that we don't know things we in fact do, apparently on the grounds that there is intrinsic worth in keeping god-as-an-explanation. This is silly.
Science is a beautiful tapestry of interconnected pieces. Its goal is not merely to describe the world, but to be able to make predictions about it. Evolution, like Relativity, Quantum Electro/Chromo-Dynamics, explain things about the world in that they allow numbered predictions. If you think people ought to explain things with god instead... Well, go die. You are free to believe, not peddle ignorance.
Oh, experiments are very important. But science is really about building models and theories. If you just do experiments, you are a glorified technician, no a scientist. For example, so you want to figure out what parameter A has on process B. You can then vary A and perform a certain number of experiments. If you then simply report the results, without having explored the mechanism which relates A and B, I will reject your paper.
You must explain your results, explain how they relate to what we know, and put forth a reasonable model which tells me what will happen if I vary A further. Otherwise, unless the effect of A on B is amazingly interesting and non-obvious, and you did lots of (careful) measures, you are wasting everybody's time.
Somewhere in the realm of physical sciences, though I have contributed to biological research. This being the Internet, and me valuing privacy, I will not be more precise. But I am a bona fide researcher :)
Yes, I review -- quite a lot, and yes, I tend to reject papers with no models. I also work in a field were this is usually not excusable. I don't of course systematically reject papers on the ground that they have no models, but the threshold for acceptance of a purely experimental/descriptive paper is significantly higher: the experiment must be interesting, new and well described. They must also be sufficiently complete that they say something in themselves about what they purport to describe.
Because if the experiments are not attached to a model, and they won't likely be reproduced exactly by anyone, you better go the extra kilometre to convince me you were extra careful, reviewed the literature for similar or connected results, and really thought about being complete and correct.
Also curve fitting doesn't count as a model. And I care not one wit where you come from, or who you are -- I usually look at who wrote the paper after I read it. Just so you know: some of us reviewers really care about the quality of what is coming out.
I suspect you are a troll. But for the sake of the argument, here goes.
Evolution describes a mechanism by which we can explain the apparition and disappearance of species, how they are related, why they are spread the way they are around the Earth. It makes prediction about the sequence of fossils and genetic relatedness between species.
And yes, the understatement is that god is wholly unnecessary to explain all this. In the same way that they are unnecessary to explain why planets don't fall into another, or the balance of elements in the universe, or how electrical circuits are formed or the colour of the sky.
If you understand genetics, then it follows that evolution must occur: the imperfect transmission of information under the external pressure of reproduction causes evolution. Genetics is also wholly at odds with the biblical account of creation (basically, there seems indeed to be an Adam and an Eve, but they were separated by tens of thousands of years and thousands of kilometres, also, it is entirely unsurprising that everyone is somehow related: we share most of our genes!). The Genesis account is internally inconsistent, sexist and silly at the same time anyway -- it is even polytheist.
From your comment, I have to conclude that yes, Americans are undereducated in precisely the way I described.
Gahh. Pet peeve of mine: I have come to the conclusion that people on the American side of the Atlantic don't understand what a model or a theory is for.
Science is not a collection of facts: it is a collection of theories supported by facts. When someone tries to publish something without model or explanation, it is your duty as a reviewer to reject the article with great prejudice. Because it it the theories that advance science.
This is because although the experiments will not get repeated (sure, they might if we scientists had job security and enough funding -- won't happen), the theories and models will get tested with new experiments. And this is really how science advances. Real science is the formulation of theories and not testing randomly new drugs: this also has marginal utility, but can never be as solid as, say, the theory of gravitation. Therefore, don't be surprised when people publish results that turn out to be a fluke, when they are pressed for time: this is because the reviewers accepted papers which were not framed within theories. Models and theories based on first principles are the only thing one can be reasonably certain of...
I suspect that the reason climate science and evolution are misunderstood in America more than elsewhere is that the education system here does not emphasize systematic knowledge and the power of models. Evolution cannot be "experimentally proven". but it can be used to formulate a great number of hypotheses which can then be verified experimentally.
You think wrong :)
If you think in terms of relationships between the organisms, and how their populations fluctuates dynamically, then the cow is a predator to grass. If the cows eat too much grass, they die out.
This is not completely true, as the cow grazing does not kill the grass: it will regrow. So ok, the cow is not a real predator to grass. Not like foxes and rabbits.
This is different from the athletes foot: this is a parasitic relationship: the parasite takes some of the hosts resources for himself. If he takes too much, he dies with his host.
But the bigger point is that clearly the students are not taught to think in terms of models and theories. And this is what id deeply wrong -- never mind that the test's question be inane.