Well, I think that you have insanely high standards for what counts as innovative, then. To suggest that the genome was just applied engineering ignores the tremendous developments in informatics that were necessary to make it possible. More importantly, the way that genomic data is used is qualitatively different from the way that genetic data was used before the concept of genomics. Furthermore, the genome is really only the leading edge of future biology; proteomics didn't even exist 10 years ago, and it depends absolutely on genomic data.
There are a lot of exciting steps forward in biology, but and there are a lot of things that are changing the way we look at the world.
but they aren't (I don't think) HUGE ideas. it is more on the order of little ideas changing little ideas. Granted, when you get enough of
them together, that is big news, and may fundamentally change the way you view the world as a whole.
And, fundamentally, I think that this is one of two really critically important things to realize. Most of the change that takes place in the world is incremental and evolutionary, rather than earthshattering and revolutionary. The other important thing to understand is that often innovations have a long lead time. The web took the better part of a decade to turn from a curiosity to a passtime to a lynchpin of the economy- and that's fast as these things go. Most really innovative concepts take decades to really change the world, and it's only with a long historical view that we realize how critically they impact our lives. Just because the innovations of the past ten years haven't turned the world upside down yet doesn't mean that they won't, and in many cases it won't be until after that happens that we'll be able to identify them.
but most would agree that
a city like LA looks more like a fast growing cell culture than anything else.
It may look that way to you (and I'll point out that many people who don't live here have a very inaccurate picture of what LA is actually like) but it's not true. The LA metropolitan area was actually planned in much greater detail than most cities. Starting in the 1920's, well before the really explosive growth in the area, the regional planners were designing what the city was supposed to be like. The designed the city as a central downtown hub connected by a series of major traffic corridors to outlying bedroom communities. As traffic engineering advanced they incorporated new ideas, chiefly freeways, into their design, and the majority of the LA freeway system was actually planned in the 1930's and 1940's.
And ultimately, that's the problem. LA was planned, but it was planned before people had a clear idea of the consequences of their design or how large the city would eventually get. The design of a vital central core and surrounding bedroom communities has been followed fairly well, and is actually the cause of a lot of the problems. In particular, it means that everyone depends on cars for transportation (because the city was designed with them in mind) so poor people without cars are in trouble. It also means that a lot of the region's traffic comes crunching into the central city every rush hour, creating a traffic nightmare. So LA's problems are a result of bad planning, not of no planning.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Only a handful of highschool kids are interested in shooting up their schools. Many, many more of them are interested in showing off their good fortune to their friends, romancing members of the appropriate sex, and generally living as independant adults without constant parental supervision. Those are all fantasies that one can live out in the Sims.
Or for the example given (printing the evens from 0 to 8) you could use:
map { print $_*2 } (0..4);
and just ignore the returned list. One advantage of Perl that I haven't seen anyone here mention is that it lets you do a lot of things using implicit loops by operating in list context. Things like:
look really nasty to somebody who's not familiar with the idiom, but trying to do the same thing using explicit loops would not make the code any simpler or more maintainable.
Thinking about it, I guess that the ineffectiveness of high bandwidth/high latency memory should be obvious (at least in retrospect). If high latency is acceptible, that suggests that the task is probably suited to being processed in parallel and needed bandwidth can be handled by using more processor busses. If the process is really best suited to a single processor, it can't handle high latency because it's operating at very high clockspeed. That leaves only problems where the task could be run in parallel but isn't for some artificial reason, like lack of coding effort or per-processor licensing.
Sadly, sometimes price per performance does justify that kind of expense. An example is for servers running software with very high per-processor license fees. If I'm paying a $25,000 per processor license fee, it makes sense to spend $1000 on faster RAM to get a 10% increase in per-processor performance. Of course it might make more sense to plow that money into a different processor (or software without insane licensing fees) but the point is still there.
You certainly are talking out of your ass. Productivity did go up some during the 72-95 period, but at a much lower rate than it did during 45-72. In the post-war period, productivity was increasing at something like 2.5% per year vs. 1% per year in the 72-95 period. There was much hand wringing about why productivity wasn't increasing as rapidly as it had before, and how Japan et. al. were going to catch us productivitywise. Of course this ignored a number of factors, like a big expansion of the labor pool and the fact that Japan had a big edge in productivity gain because they had started out from so much lower than the US to start out with.
For 6,000 years people have been using accupuncture without a double blind stury or scientific peer review, or a
statistical tested studies. Only thing they had was anecdotal evidence.
Yep, and for a long time they also believed that bleeding patients was a great general cure all. They even had elaborate theories explaining why you should bleed a patient under some circumstances, give him purgatives under other situations, and the whole nine yards. They had tons of anecdotal evidence to support their beliefs. Do you recommend that we re-establish bleeding as a therapy because people earnestly believed that it was valuable?
The point is that (placebo effects aside) believing earnestly in a therapy doesn't make it effective. Having an actual biomedical mechanism of action makes it effective. It's true that people have to have theories about what treatments will be effective before they can study them, but it's also important to do the study before making great claims of effectiveness. In the case of accupuncture, there was an actual underlying mechanism there to be discovered when people looked for it, and in discovering it they've been able to make significant refinements over the traditional practice. But that was only possible because the practitioners worked with scientists rather than saying, "Oh you're just trying to debunk us." It's also interesting to note that a lot of the improvements have not been adopted by "alternative medicine" practitioners in the US, who appear actively opposed to scientific confirmation and adaptation of their system. I honestly think that they're just as afraid of being confirmed and co-opted by the medical establishment as they are of being debunked. Instead the advances are being used in China, where accupuncture is considered part of conventional medicine.
Actually, IIRC, body temperature was originally supposed to be 96 degrees, not 100. This was convenient because it meant that you had temperature differences of 32 and 64 degrees, so you could make a scale for your thermometer by bisecting the distances 5 or 6 times in succession. So Farenheit makes sense because it's defined in binary!
It's been a while since I read the paper, but IIRC the experiment was very simple. The practitioners claim to be able to sense the electric fields (and in fact not just their existence but enough detail about them to figure out what's wrong with the patient and correct it) through clothing and without touching the patient. To test this, she had a box covered with dark cloth into which she could put her hands. The practitioners were then supposed to sense her hands through the cover. I can't remember if it was that she stuck one hand or the other into a box with two regions and they were supposed to tell which box had a hand in it, or whether her hand was sometimes in the box and sometimes not.
In either case, the test was of a much simpler ability than the practitioners claimed, and something that they could have gotten right by chance half the time. They were just about exactly as good as you'd get if they were just plain guessing. IIRC, they actually got it less just less than half the time, but not statistically significantly different from a random guess. It's not absolutely conclusive, but it is pretty damning; the practitioners showed no obvious signs of an ability that they claim is crucial to their practice.
I've often suspected that this is why productivity stagnated during that period. When the labor pool is expanding rapidly it makes more sense to hire more workers instead of enhancing the productivity of the existing ones. Real wages didn't increase because they depend critically on productivity. I also wonder if the return to increasing real wages recently is a sign that the labor pool is close to saturated again; if so it's a good sign for wages over the long term.
It seems very odd to me that I've never heard a professional economist say pretty much the same thing. It seems so obvious to me that a large increase in the labor pool coinciding with a stagnation in productivity is no coincidence. I wonder if it's something that they all actually know but are afraid to state publically for fear of being branded male oppressor pigs or something.
The reason
why the US has such a high standard of living is the union activity we had that forced higher wages.
It is true that unions have played an important role in making sure that workers get their fair share, but they are not primarily responsible for our high standard of living. The absolute restriction on standard of living is not distribution of wealth (which unions address) but productivity; per capita consumption can't exceed per capita production over the long haul. The reason that industrialized nations have such high standards of living is because they are industrialized. Industrialization increases productivity and ensures that there are goods and services available to consume. That's certainly not to say that unions are valueless- one can easily imagine a situation in which that increased productivity went primarily to enhance the lives of a priviledged few instead of the whole population- but that unions alone are not enough to ensure a high standard of living.
I wish Rob would add "year" to the posting date of stories... I think the above post was from 1998.
Actually, the year is included in the URL of archived stories. The story you posted, for instance has URL:
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/30/0920220.shtm l
The 98/11/30 is the date on which it was posted, and I assume that the 092022 was the actual minute and second (and maybe the last 0 is the tenth of a second). Is that a precise enough posting time for you?
Well, first and foremost, Mexico isn't a North American country...
Yes, Mexico is in North America, geographically and geologically. The majority of the land in Mexico is on the North American plate, and as a geographical distinction Central America is generally considered to start about at Mexico's southern border. There's certainly no sharp divide between North and Central America along the Rio Grande.
One question that springs to mind is what distro they're planning on using. Connectiva seems likely becuase of it's
internationalization for Spanish-speaking countries, but hey, maybe the head techie dude likes Slack...:-)
IIRC, Connectiva is actually a Brasilian distro, though there are both Portugese and Spanish versions. My bet is on Red Escolar Linux, a distribution aimed at the Mexican schools and government. It's much easier for governments to pick a distribution that's based in their country so that the economic benefits stay at home. It also has the potential advantage that since it's being used in the schools there will be people who are already familiar with it as users and administrators.
I guess I'm saying that rather than bitch about how someone doesn't really understand medical science, why not make a difference instead? So yeah, therapeutic touch folks definitly can't isolate a problematic area of the electrical field. The whole point of the study was to say, "Nyah, nyah, you're just a bunch of crazy flakey people!"
I guess I disagree on this point. Debunking quackery is a valid and valuable scientific service. It might not be as great as developing a new treatment, but it's important for people to know whether or not the treatment they're seeking is actually likely to help them. After all, if somebody decides to go to a quack, they may not seek help from somebody who can actually do them some good.
I honestly believe that most of these therapeutic touch therapists are interested in helping people, even if their science is a bit wacky. If that's true, they're far better human beings than Emily and her parents, who are more interested in wholesale discreditation of theories than separating the truth from the lies.
I think that you're really wrong here. The problem is that the advocates of theraputic touch have no science. There's no credible scientific evidence that theraputic touch has any positive health benefit. There are no peer reviewed, placebo controlled, statistically tested, double blind studies to determine the efficacy of theraputic touch. AFAIK there aren't even any lousy, uncontrolled studies, just a bunch of anecdotes. That's not science, it's just a bunch of pseudoscientific garbage with about as much scientific credibility as faith healing.
Now compare that to the tests that this girl and her parents carried out. You are quite correct in claiming that they set out with the single goal of debunking theraputic touch. What you miss is that any study that has a reasonable chance to debunk the theory also has a chance of turning up a reall effect. If the practitioners had actually been able to do what they claimed and detect the girl's energy field, they would have been able to produce a positive result and the study would have produced evidence in their favor- which is exactly what they need if they really want to get anywhere scientifically and medically. An interesting counterpoint is acupuncture; skeptics tried very hard to debunk it but couldn't. Eventually they became convinced that there was a real effect, figured out what caused it, and have helped to develop it as a theraputic technique. That's what science is about.
I'm not sure if quite everything in math has practical applications, it's just that it's generally very difficult to predict in advance whether any particular mathematical development will or won't be useful. There are many, many branches of mathematics that were viewed as being too esoteric to have any practical use when they were developed, only to have applications spring up later. Noneuclidean geometry is a good example; it seemed useless until it turned out that it was critical for General Relativity. The same thing with a lot of linear algebra for quantum physics and number theory for computer science.
Actually I am familiar with the work. Ms. Rosa is from my home town, and actually my mother was at the time (and still is) the chairman of the local board of education, so I heard a lot about the incident. Ms. Rosa did a very good double blind study that did not directly refute the theraputic claims of theraputic touch but rather refuted the underlying claim that practitioners could sense the energy fields of their subjects. Actually, from what my mother has said it sounds as though she did the actual experiments but that the study was really designed by her parents who are well known skeptics of this kind of thing. Her parents also apparently helped out with the statistics. Her study wound up being published in the Journal of the AMA, again with her parents as co-authors.
Actually, the National Enquirer is a better example of people's ability to sort out the good from the bad than you realize. Your mistake is in conflating standards of integrity and newsworthiness. The Enquirer may focus primarily on topics that you consider trashy and unworthy of a serious paper, but they do a better job of applying conventional standards of journalistic ethics than many other media outlets. They insist on confirming information before publication and all that other good stuff that's supposed to protect the integrity of the information that they're publishing. IOW their topics may be trash, but their information isn't. People notice that and buy the tabloid with the high quality information about trashy subjects rather than the ones that will print any old rumor they find.
he price of a product should not be based on the cost to manufacture, but rather, should be based on what the market
can bear.
Of course in a perfect marketplace, the price that the market will bear tends to drop quickly to not much more than the price to make and deliver the product. You can only charge substantially more than cost if there aren't a bunch of competitors with essentially identical products who can undercut you. As a product becomes a commodity good instead of a unique one, price becomes the biggest single selling point and will tend to drop to a level that will only justify a small profit. If an online merchant can really cut their overhead cost to less than your local store, they should be able to undercut them and run them out of business unless the local store can offer enough value in the form of service to differentiate their product.
The problems you describe are likely to be less of an issue for a big business. They're likely to standardize on a comparatively small number of packages- just the ones that they really need- and stick with them for a good long while. They're not going to be trying to upgrade the version of their CD-ripping software every time it comes out with a new bugfix. They're also capable of doing neat tricks like compiling their own to solve some of the dependancy problems that you mention. (Actually, the next time that sort of problem happens, you might consider downloading the source RPM and running rpm --rebuild to see if it can be compiled with the software you already have. One major flaw of compiled RPMs is that they often require much more specific versions of packages than is strictly necessary.)
Of course you can also solve this problem by using a more advanced package management system. Debian users are constantly (and correctly, IMO) bragging about the ease of using apt-get for package management; it deals with all those annoying dependency details for you. The still-under-development Ximian RedCarpet is also quite nice about resolving RPM dependencies and downloading any updated packages you may need. Both systems do depend on having a blessed source of guaranteed compatible packages, though.
I'm not sure if micropayments can work very well, but asking for donations can work. For a lot of smallish sites, it only takes a few decent sized donations to keep them afloat. I've donated money to one of my personal favorites because I want to see it stay around. It's not only a very useful site in its area of interest, but IMO also one of the best designed sites I've ever seen and one that I recommend as an example of good use of linking. If everyone would just give a $10 donation to a single site once in a while (instead of $0.10 to a bunch of sites), it would work just fine.
Unless Susie the secretary installs a distro from '96 then she will probably never have to use the command line. Do you need to know how the Windows kernel works to use Word 2000. Also if Susie has problems with her machine she calls tech support who logon remotely and fix it for her.
Actually, if Suzie the secretary is working in a typical business environment, she won't be doing the install, anyway. Instead, the system will be installed and configured by professional sysadmins who will set up/home/suzie so that she'll have access to all of the programs she needs from her GNOME/KDE desktop. I know the admins at my workplace would be right pissed if our secretaries tried doing any serious adminstrative tasks for their own computers.
As an aside, I actually wonder why people view secretaries as the perfect example of computer incompetents. My experience has been that they're using their computers for most of the day and eventually become quite adept at doing all of the computer related tasks that are required as part of their everyday job- much more so than the rest of the people around who only use computers occasionally. In fact, I suspect that they're exactly the kind of people who might appreciate the customizability and flexibility of Linux the most. All of the secretaries at my workplace have their desktops customized on Windows (while just about nobody else does), and I strongly suspect that they'd be the people who would have the most fun fiddling with getting just the right window manager and theme.
4. A couple of dozen "botique" distributions aimed at specialized purposes. There will long be a need for distributions that are optimized for specific applications. These might include single floppy versions for rescue disks, versions for single purpose devices like routers and firewalls, versions for embedded devices that have to boot off a ROM, CD-ROM only versions for internet appliances, etc. There might even be versions that are aimed at markets that we don't think of as being separate right now but that would take off when available. I'll bet, for instance, that blind people would appreciate a distribution that had an audio based install and included lots of packages aimed at making it more accessible. These special purpose distros may be originally based as a derivative of one of the general purpose distributions, but they'll probably wind up taking on a life of their own and being maintained separately.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think that you have insanely high standards for what counts as innovative, then. To suggest that the genome was just applied engineering ignores the tremendous developments in informatics that were necessary to make it possible. More importantly, the way that genomic data is used is qualitatively different from the way that genetic data was used before the concept of genomics. Furthermore, the genome is really only the leading edge of future biology; proteomics didn't even exist 10 years ago, and it depends absolutely on genomic data.
And, fundamentally, I think that this is one of two really critically important things to realize. Most of the change that takes place in the world is incremental and evolutionary, rather than earthshattering and revolutionary. The other important thing to understand is that often innovations have a long lead time. The web took the better part of a decade to turn from a curiosity to a passtime to a lynchpin of the economy- and that's fast as these things go. Most really innovative concepts take decades to really change the world, and it's only with a long historical view that we realize how critically they impact our lives. Just because the innovations of the past ten years haven't turned the world upside down yet doesn't mean that they won't, and in many cases it won't be until after that happens that we'll be able to identify them.
It may look that way to you (and I'll point out that many people who don't live here have a very inaccurate picture of what LA is actually like) but it's not true. The LA metropolitan area was actually planned in much greater detail than most cities. Starting in the 1920's, well before the really explosive growth in the area, the regional planners were designing what the city was supposed to be like. The designed the city as a central downtown hub connected by a series of major traffic corridors to outlying bedroom communities. As traffic engineering advanced they incorporated new ideas, chiefly freeways, into their design, and the majority of the LA freeway system was actually planned in the 1930's and 1940's.
And ultimately, that's the problem. LA was planned, but it was planned before people had a clear idea of the consequences of their design or how large the city would eventually get. The design of a vital central core and surrounding bedroom communities has been followed fairly well, and is actually the cause of a lot of the problems. In particular, it means that everyone depends on cars for transportation (because the city was designed with them in mind) so poor people without cars are in trouble. It also means that a lot of the region's traffic comes crunching into the central city every rush hour, creating a traffic nightmare. So LA's problems are a result of bad planning, not of no planning.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Only a handful of highschool kids are interested in shooting up their schools. Many, many more of them are interested in showing off their good fortune to their friends, romancing members of the appropriate sex, and generally living as independant adults without constant parental supervision. Those are all fantasies that one can live out in the Sims.
Or for the example given (printing the evens from 0 to 8) you could use:
map { print $_*2 } (0..4);
and just ignore the returned list. One advantage of Perl that I haven't seen anyone here mention is that it lets you do a lot of things using implicit loops by operating in list context. Things like:
print join("\n", reverse sort grep {/man$/i} values %names);
look really nasty to somebody who's not familiar with the idiom, but trying to do the same thing using explicit loops would not make the code any simpler or more maintainable.
Thinking about it, I guess that the ineffectiveness of high bandwidth/high latency memory should be obvious (at least in retrospect). If high latency is acceptible, that suggests that the task is probably suited to being processed in parallel and needed bandwidth can be handled by using more processor busses. If the process is really best suited to a single processor, it can't handle high latency because it's operating at very high clockspeed. That leaves only problems where the task could be run in parallel but isn't for some artificial reason, like lack of coding effort or per-processor licensing.
Sadly, sometimes price per performance does justify that kind of expense. An example is for servers running software with very high per-processor license fees. If I'm paying a $25,000 per processor license fee, it makes sense to spend $1000 on faster RAM to get a 10% increase in per-processor performance. Of course it might make more sense to plow that money into a different processor (or software without insane licensing fees) but the point is still there.
You certainly are talking out of your ass. Productivity did go up some during the 72-95 period, but at a much lower rate than it did during 45-72. In the post-war period, productivity was increasing at something like 2.5% per year vs. 1% per year in the 72-95 period. There was much hand wringing about why productivity wasn't increasing as rapidly as it had before, and how Japan et. al. were going to catch us productivitywise. Of course this ignored a number of factors, like a big expansion of the labor pool and the fact that Japan had a big edge in productivity gain because they had started out from so much lower than the US to start out with.
Yep, and for a long time they also believed that bleeding patients was a great general cure all. They even had elaborate theories explaining why you should bleed a patient under some circumstances, give him purgatives under other situations, and the whole nine yards. They had tons of anecdotal evidence to support their beliefs. Do you recommend that we re-establish bleeding as a therapy because people earnestly believed that it was valuable?
The point is that (placebo effects aside) believing earnestly in a therapy doesn't make it effective. Having an actual biomedical mechanism of action makes it effective. It's true that people have to have theories about what treatments will be effective before they can study them, but it's also important to do the study before making great claims of effectiveness. In the case of accupuncture, there was an actual underlying mechanism there to be discovered when people looked for it, and in discovering it they've been able to make significant refinements over the traditional practice. But that was only possible because the practitioners worked with scientists rather than saying, "Oh you're just trying to debunk us." It's also interesting to note that a lot of the improvements have not been adopted by "alternative medicine" practitioners in the US, who appear actively opposed to scientific confirmation and adaptation of their system. I honestly think that they're just as afraid of being confirmed and co-opted by the medical establishment as they are of being debunked. Instead the advances are being used in China, where accupuncture is considered part of conventional medicine.
Actually, IIRC, body temperature was originally supposed to be 96 degrees, not 100. This was convenient because it meant that you had temperature differences of 32 and 64 degrees, so you could make a scale for your thermometer by bisecting the distances 5 or 6 times in succession. So Farenheit makes sense because it's defined in binary!
It's been a while since I read the paper, but IIRC the experiment was very simple. The practitioners claim to be able to sense the electric fields (and in fact not just their existence but enough detail about them to figure out what's wrong with the patient and correct it) through clothing and without touching the patient. To test this, she had a box covered with dark cloth into which she could put her hands. The practitioners were then supposed to sense her hands through the cover. I can't remember if it was that she stuck one hand or the other into a box with two regions and they were supposed to tell which box had a hand in it, or whether her hand was sometimes in the box and sometimes not.
In either case, the test was of a much simpler ability than the practitioners claimed, and something that they could have gotten right by chance half the time. They were just about exactly as good as you'd get if they were just plain guessing. IIRC, they actually got it less just less than half the time, but not statistically significantly different from a random guess. It's not absolutely conclusive, but it is pretty damning; the practitioners showed no obvious signs of an ability that they claim is crucial to their practice.
Provided, of course, that the soldering iron and miscellaneous components weren't produced by sweatshop labor...
I've often suspected that this is why productivity stagnated during that period. When the labor pool is expanding rapidly it makes more sense to hire more workers instead of enhancing the productivity of the existing ones. Real wages didn't increase because they depend critically on productivity. I also wonder if the return to increasing real wages recently is a sign that the labor pool is close to saturated again; if so it's a good sign for wages over the long term.
It seems very odd to me that I've never heard a professional economist say pretty much the same thing. It seems so obvious to me that a large increase in the labor pool coinciding with a stagnation in productivity is no coincidence. I wonder if it's something that they all actually know but are afraid to state publically for fear of being branded male oppressor pigs or something.
It is true that unions have played an important role in making sure that workers get their fair share, but they are not primarily responsible for our high standard of living. The absolute restriction on standard of living is not distribution of wealth (which unions address) but productivity; per capita consumption can't exceed per capita production over the long haul. The reason that industrialized nations have such high standards of living is because they are industrialized. Industrialization increases productivity and ensures that there are goods and services available to consume. That's certainly not to say that unions are valueless- one can easily imagine a situation in which that increased productivity went primarily to enhance the lives of a priviledged few instead of the whole population- but that unions alone are not enough to ensure a high standard of living.
Actually, the year is included in the URL of archived stories. The story you posted, for instance has URL:
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/30/0920220.shtm l
The 98/11/30 is the date on which it was posted, and I assume that the 092022 was the actual minute and second (and maybe the last 0 is the tenth of a second). Is that a precise enough posting time for you?
Yes, Mexico is in North America, geographically and geologically. The majority of the land in Mexico is on the North American plate, and as a geographical distinction Central America is generally considered to start about at Mexico's southern border. There's certainly no sharp divide between North and Central America along the Rio Grande.
IIRC, Connectiva is actually a Brasilian distro, though there are both Portugese and Spanish versions. My bet is on Red Escolar Linux, a distribution aimed at the Mexican schools and government. It's much easier for governments to pick a distribution that's based in their country so that the economic benefits stay at home. It also has the potential advantage that since it's being used in the schools there will be people who are already familiar with it as users and administrators.
I guess I disagree on this point. Debunking quackery is a valid and valuable scientific service. It might not be as great as developing a new treatment, but it's important for people to know whether or not the treatment they're seeking is actually likely to help them. After all, if somebody decides to go to a quack, they may not seek help from somebody who can actually do them some good.
I think that you're really wrong here. The problem is that the advocates of theraputic touch have no science. There's no credible scientific evidence that theraputic touch has any positive health benefit. There are no peer reviewed, placebo controlled, statistically tested, double blind studies to determine the efficacy of theraputic touch. AFAIK there aren't even any lousy, uncontrolled studies, just a bunch of anecdotes. That's not science, it's just a bunch of pseudoscientific garbage with about as much scientific credibility as faith healing.
Now compare that to the tests that this girl and her parents carried out. You are quite correct in claiming that they set out with the single goal of debunking theraputic touch. What you miss is that any study that has a reasonable chance to debunk the theory also has a chance of turning up a reall effect. If the practitioners had actually been able to do what they claimed and detect the girl's energy field, they would have been able to produce a positive result and the study would have produced evidence in their favor- which is exactly what they need if they really want to get anywhere scientifically and medically. An interesting counterpoint is acupuncture; skeptics tried very hard to debunk it but couldn't. Eventually they became convinced that there was a real effect, figured out what caused it, and have helped to develop it as a theraputic technique. That's what science is about.
I'm not sure if quite everything in math has practical applications, it's just that it's generally very difficult to predict in advance whether any particular mathematical development will or won't be useful. There are many, many branches of mathematics that were viewed as being too esoteric to have any practical use when they were developed, only to have applications spring up later. Noneuclidean geometry is a good example; it seemed useless until it turned out that it was critical for General Relativity. The same thing with a lot of linear algebra for quantum physics and number theory for computer science.
Actually I am familiar with the work. Ms. Rosa is from my home town, and actually my mother was at the time (and still is) the chairman of the local board of education, so I heard a lot about the incident. Ms. Rosa did a very good double blind study that did not directly refute the theraputic claims of theraputic touch but rather refuted the underlying claim that practitioners could sense the energy fields of their subjects. Actually, from what my mother has said it sounds as though she did the actual experiments but that the study was really designed by her parents who are well known skeptics of this kind of thing. Her parents also apparently helped out with the statistics. Her study wound up being published in the Journal of the AMA, again with her parents as co-authors.
Actually, the National Enquirer is a better example of people's ability to sort out the good from the bad than you realize. Your mistake is in conflating standards of integrity and newsworthiness. The Enquirer may focus primarily on topics that you consider trashy and unworthy of a serious paper, but they do a better job of applying conventional standards of journalistic ethics than many other media outlets. They insist on confirming information before publication and all that other good stuff that's supposed to protect the integrity of the information that they're publishing. IOW their topics may be trash, but their information isn't. People notice that and buy the tabloid with the high quality information about trashy subjects rather than the ones that will print any old rumor they find.
Of course in a perfect marketplace, the price that the market will bear tends to drop quickly to not much more than the price to make and deliver the product. You can only charge substantially more than cost if there aren't a bunch of competitors with essentially identical products who can undercut you. As a product becomes a commodity good instead of a unique one, price becomes the biggest single selling point and will tend to drop to a level that will only justify a small profit. If an online merchant can really cut their overhead cost to less than your local store, they should be able to undercut them and run them out of business unless the local store can offer enough value in the form of service to differentiate their product.
The problems you describe are likely to be less of an issue for a big business. They're likely to standardize on a comparatively small number of packages- just the ones that they really need- and stick with them for a good long while. They're not going to be trying to upgrade the version of their CD-ripping software every time it comes out with a new bugfix. They're also capable of doing neat tricks like compiling their own to solve some of the dependancy problems that you mention. (Actually, the next time that sort of problem happens, you might consider downloading the source RPM and running rpm --rebuild to see if it can be compiled with the software you already have. One major flaw of compiled RPMs is that they often require much more specific versions of packages than is strictly necessary.)
Of course you can also solve this problem by using a more advanced package management system. Debian users are constantly (and correctly, IMO) bragging about the ease of using apt-get for package management; it deals with all those annoying dependency details for you. The still-under-development Ximian RedCarpet is also quite nice about resolving RPM dependencies and downloading any updated packages you may need. Both systems do depend on having a blessed source of guaranteed compatible packages, though.
I'm not sure if micropayments can work very well, but asking for donations can work. For a lot of smallish sites, it only takes a few decent sized donations to keep them afloat. I've donated money to one of my personal favorites because I want to see it stay around. It's not only a very useful site in its area of interest, but IMO also one of the best designed sites I've ever seen and one that I recommend as an example of good use of linking. If everyone would just give a $10 donation to a single site once in a while (instead of $0.10 to a bunch of sites), it would work just fine.
Actually, if Suzie the secretary is working in a typical business environment, she won't be doing the install, anyway. Instead, the system will be installed and configured by professional sysadmins who will set up /home/suzie so that she'll have access to all of the programs she needs from her GNOME/KDE desktop. I know the admins at my workplace would be right pissed if our secretaries tried doing any serious adminstrative tasks for their own computers.
As an aside, I actually wonder why people view secretaries as the perfect example of computer incompetents. My experience has been that they're using their computers for most of the day and eventually become quite adept at doing all of the computer related tasks that are required as part of their everyday job- much more so than the rest of the people around who only use computers occasionally. In fact, I suspect that they're exactly the kind of people who might appreciate the customizability and flexibility of Linux the most. All of the secretaries at my workplace have their desktops customized on Windows (while just about nobody else does), and I strongly suspect that they'd be the people who would have the most fun fiddling with getting just the right window manager and theme.
Don't forget:
4. A couple of dozen "botique" distributions aimed at specialized purposes. There will long be a need for distributions that are optimized for specific applications. These might include single floppy versions for rescue disks, versions for single purpose devices like routers and firewalls, versions for embedded devices that have to boot off a ROM, CD-ROM only versions for internet appliances, etc. There might even be versions that are aimed at markets that we don't think of as being separate right now but that would take off when available. I'll bet, for instance, that blind people would appreciate a distribution that had an audio based install and included lots of packages aimed at making it more accessible. These special purpose distros may be originally based as a derivative of one of the general purpose distributions, but they'll probably wind up taking on a life of their own and being maintained separately.