The significance of the date "01/18/2008" (the eleventh question) is that the company is American and does not use ISO date formats. The particular date is unambiguous, but in general that is not true with their format, e.g. "02/03/2008" could mean either February 3rd (for American readers) or March 2nd (for European readers). ISO is the global standard, and the format removes ambiguity: 2008-01-18. A small additional benefit is that it makes sorting trivial.
If these people were really as committed to quality as they pretend to be, they would be promoting the ISO format, to facilitate less-ambiguous global communication.
The computer simulation is interesting, but the Tunguska event is unlikely to be an asteroid. There were strange events reported in the area for days prior to the explosion, there were odd lights, etc.
An alternative explanation was proposed by Wolfgang Kundt, a researcher at the Institut für Astrophysik, University of Bonn:
The basic proposal is that there was a natural gas leak, from the Earth. The gas rose to a certain height, then drifted downwind. After several days, a lightning strike ignited the airborne gas, and the flame then traveled along line (of drifted gas), to the ground source.
It is worth reading the article. An asteroid impact is sexy, but the alternative explanation fits with the data much better.
At present, the two main math software packages are Maple and Mathematica. Mathematica is entirely closed source. With Maple, most of the source code can be viewed (though it is copyrighted and cannot be copied). This means that you can check the algorithms used in Maple, but not in Mathematica.
There are some packages that are called by Maple that are closed source. For example, Maple calls the NAG Numerical Libraries for a substantial amount of its numeric computations; the NAG routines are closed source, but they are widely agreed to be the best on the planet, and Maple decided to rely on them.
Sage is interesting, but its functionality is very limited. In the (very?) long term, though, Sage might well pose a challenge to Maple and Mathematica. But in the meantime, I expect to continue to use Maple.
The hypothesis that the blast was due to a comet/asteroid/etc. has been around for a long time. The problem with this hypothesis is that it does not fit at all well with the observations (e.g. the strange sounds and lights that preceded the blast for days; and so on). An alternative hypothesis was proposed by Wolfgang Kundt, a researcher at the Institut für Astrophysik der Universität Bonn:
Kundt's paper explains the various problems with the comet/asteroid hypothesis. It also proposes an alternative hypothesis: that Tunguska was a natural gas leak (from the ground), that went on for days, building up, until ignited by a lightning strike.
This explanation seems to fit the observations well. Perhaps the main reason it has not gotten much attention is that it is not very exotic.
The story is certainly interesting, but it's off-topic (even though it is about Wikipedia). Also, the correct link for “this review” seems to be
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a6400.htm.
HotBits is a true quantum-based Random Number Generator. For details, see How HotBits Works. Hotbits would seem to be at least as good as the RNG discussed in the Slashdot story, and it too is free and online; the main drawback is that you can only get 2k bits at a time.
After World WarII, several Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not everyone wanted to do that. Winston Churchill, for example, just wanted to execute those Nazis. But the USA insisted on fair trials, saying that it was important to establish the principle of the rule of law.
Back then, the USA had leadership that demonstrated to the world how even the most heinous crimes (particularly the Holocaust)—in which many millions of people died—can and should be handled according to law and principle.
The reason to stop hunting whales isn't that there are few of them, but rather that they probably have legitimate claim at the second most intelligent life from on earth, and more importantly, probably above the threshold of intelligence where we shouldn't hunt them at all. Whales, dolphins, elephants, and primates -- they are all probably above that threshold.
This argument seems reasonable at first, but there is a complication: chimpanzees hunt and kill monkeys. I.e. some primates hunt other primates; so why shouldn't we? (I do not actually think that we should; I am just playing Devil's Advocate with your reasoning.)
Prior to "Global Warming" and its bogus Hockey Stick "study" it was Glaciation and/or Nuclear Winter
Why do you declare it to be bogus?
Because it was bogus. One of the things that came out of the investigation by the congressional committee was the evidence that Michael Mann knew, before submitting the paper, that the hockey stick was not correct. Specifically, Mann had calculated the r^2, which was zero (i.e. no statistical significance), and also had additional data that contradicted the hockey stick. There is also the heavy reliance on bristlecones—which were likely responding to CO2 rather than temperature—although that might have been just incompetence.
When the current administration came into power and were looking for a executive to head the CDC they replaced the Nobel laureate whom was the current director. And the interview where he was removed consisted of two questions....
1) Are you a republican
2) Did you vote for this president.
I can attest that my mother and her boss were repeatedly called before congressional inquires on spurious matters mainly focused around the fact that the government agency they worked for advocated condom use. (She worked at the center for disease control) Her boss was a nobel prize winner for medacine who eventually stepped down due to the constant interuptions of his work and the hassling of his family and friends.
Your two stories seem to be mutually inconsistent. What should we believe? I am reluctant to trust either story.
It was me who asked about the defintion of pixel. Perhaps I didn't phrase the question well enough. Consider that as screen resolutions improve, a CSS pixel will have to be mapped to two physical pixels on a screen. So simple phrases like "the image is 100 pixels wide" will have two different meanings (depending on "pixel" = physical pixel or "pixel" = CSS pixel). I think that this is needless confusion, and the answer given by Håkon appears to be flippant.
The word pixel meant "picture element", but CSS redefined it to mean something quite different (a particular subtended angle of view). This causes confusion: CSS pixels are not pixels. (Indeed, I have seen misinformed comments on Slashdot due to that confusion.)
My question is this: why call the subtended angle a "pixel", instead of something else (e.g. "subangle")? If CSS wanted to use the subtended angle for something, that is fine, but calling it a pixel seems to follow the approach of Humpty Dumpty—"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean".
The key to the good performance that you've experienced is your 128 MB video RAM. Aero needs that, at least if your are running several applications simultaneously. Vista runs slow if Aero is on and video RAM is insufficient. If the video RAM is large, then the GPU takes good care of Aero, the CPU has very much less to do, and things seem to run well.
What you say is incorrect, because mathematics is not science. Almost all science requires doing empirical work. And that work can be mind-numbingly tedious. Nowadays you have to be extremely careful in performing experiments; every tiny little detail has to be checked and rechecked with great care. You sometimes have to hand-examine thousands of samples in order to find one that is not contaminated, corrupted, or otherwise inappropriate.
There is even an argument that extremely intelligent people cannot be (empirical) scientists, because they would go insane from the boredom. (Obviously, some subjects are exceptions to this, e.g. theoretical physics.)
And to give you an example of this, look at Superconductivity. It was originally discovered by Onnes in 1911, but it took 46 years until the BCS Theory was adequately able to explain how Cooper Pairs form and how resistanceless supercurrent can flow quantum-mechanically.
Yup--and the reason that it took 46 years? In part because the researchers involved forgot their first year calculus: they assumed that any function that is infinitely differentiable can be represented by its Taylor series. The assumption is almost always okay in practice, but not, it turned out, in this case; so they wasted decades in unnecessary confusion.
There's a lesson there for budding young scientists....
Annual profits for MS Office increased from $10.653 billion to $11.013 billion, i.e. 3%. That's hardly a strong increase. (Moreover, almost all the increase is due to Japan. If Japan is excluded, revenue growth was virtually flat.)
Profits on MS Office increased by 7%, but that is because R&D expenses are down. This means MS Office isn't going to get substantially improved--which we already pretty much knew.
If MS Office is standing still, then it's going to be a lot easier for OpenOffice to catch up with it. Indeed, very soon, OpenOffice will release version 2.0, a major upgrade that has even better compatibility with MS Office.
All this suggests that in the medium term, MS Office revenues could be in for a hard time.
A method that I've used is to download true random bits from http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
--you can get 16384 bits at a time. Then I
use the Muddle-Square method (of Blum, Blum, and Shub: described by Knuth, Art of Computer Programming, ch. 3) to expand those bits.
For example, manually retrieve 10 Mbits from HotBits (takes a few hours), and then expand those by a factor of 50 via Muddle-Square. That's 500 Mbits that are essentially indistinguishable from true random.
It's free, and you get to learn a bit about random numbers from reading Knuth.
(Redmond, Wash.) In a surprise announcement today, Microsoft President Steve Ballmer revealed that the Redmond-based company will allow computer resellers and end-users to customize the appearance of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the screen that displays when the Windows operating system crashes. The move comes as the result of numerous focus groups and customer surveys done by Microsoft. Thousands of Microsoft customers were asked, "What do you spend the most time doing on your computer?" A surprising number of respondents said, "Staring at a Blue Screen of Death." At 54 percent, it was the top answer, beating the second place answer "Downloading XXXScans" by an easy 12 points.
"We immediately recognized this as a great opportunity for ourselves, our channel partners, and especially our customers," explained the excited Ballmer to a room full of reporters. Immense video displays were used to show images of the new customizable BSOD screen side-by-side with the older static version. Users can select from a collection of "BSOD Themes," allowing them to instead have a Mauve Screen of Death or even a Paisley Screen of Death. Graphics and multimedia content can now be incorporated into the screen, making the BSOD the perfect conduit for delivering product information and entertainment to Windows users.
The BSOD is by far the most recognized feature of the Windows operating system, and as a result, Microsoft has historically insisted on total control over its look and feel. This recent departure from that policy reflects Microsoft's recognition of the Windows desktop itself as the "ultimate information portal." By default, the new BSOD will be configured to show a random selection of Microsoft product information whenever the system crashes. Microsoft channel partners can negotiate with Microsoft for the right to customize the BSOD on systems they ship. Major computer resellers such as Compaq, Gateway, and Dell are already lining up for premier placement on the new and improved BSOD.
Ballmer concluded by getting a dig in against the Open Source community. "This just goes to show that Microsoft continues to innovate at a much faster pace than open source. I have yet to see any evidence that Linux even has a BSOD, let alone a customizable one."
Moderators: please note that I've provided links to back up what I say; the parent seems to be a troll or similar.
(Peiser's submission to Science is available on his web page. It's short and easy to read. If it's right, then the original Oreskes paper was fraudulent.)
In rough orders of magnitude, a human brain has 1e11 neurons, with 1e3 synapses each, doing 1e2 operations per second. Considering that a neuron can be emulated by a multiply-add operation, we would need 1e16 such operations per second to emulate a human brain.
A 3 GHz Pentium can do 1e10 floating point multiply-add operations per second, so a human brain is roughly equivalent to one million desktop computers. Therefore, Moore's law tells us that we still need 30 years of progress before we have a human-equivalent computer, but in 60 years a desktop computer will have the data processing power of a million human brains.
If this is right, then the 1e5 networked computers that are currently used by Google are a tenth of the way there. And 1e4 networked computers (available at some other institutions) are 1% of the way there.
So, if you're right (and I'm not saying you are or aren't), and we just need to work on software to take advantage of the hardware, then it is really pretty scary.
I tried viewing the WashingtonPost article in Firefox, and it did not render correctly. Then I tried viewing in IExplorer, and things were fine. (I'm running WinXP-SP2 with extra large fonts.) Did anyone else experience similarly?
The abstract from Fridrich et al. says "... we present a steganalytic method that can reliably detect messages... hidden in JPEG images using the steganographic algorithm F5".
So TFA article cites countermeasures from 2001, even though a method of defeating those countermeasures was published in 2002.
The above is just one example. Overall, TFA seems poor and out-of-date. This is a case where the F in "TFA" does not stand for "fine".
This isn't quite crime statistics, but perhaps it's relevant:
______________________________________
The Sunday Times
[28 November 2004] Andrew Sullivan: Where the Bible bashers are sinful and the liberals pure
. . .
Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways they were the two states competing in the last election. One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for John Kerry over George W Bush 62% to 37%; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61% to 38%.
Ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in fact Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas, which until recently made private gay sex a crime, has a divorce rate of 4.1.
A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Every one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate is roughly 50% higher than the national average.
Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt and many do not have the maturity to know what they are getting into. There is some correlation, too, between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging behind a highly educated state such as Massachusetts.
The irony still holds, however. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that socially troubled communities cling to absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.
Doesn't being born again help to bring down divorce rates? Jesus was clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not; 29% of Baptists have been divorced, compared with 21% of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23% of married born agains have been divorced twice or more.
Teenage births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state such as Texas where the religious right is strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, teen births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%. In liberal, secular Massachusetts they are 7.4%, less than half.
Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas the proportion of people unmarried is 32.4%; in Massachusetts it is 26.8%. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts has a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.
Take abortion. America is one of the few western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It is a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics.
Compare it with a country such as Holland, perhaps the epitome of social liberalism. Which country has the highest rate of abortion? It is not even close. America has a rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?
I totally agree. I have had several bad experiences with Firefox, for example. I've reported them on both Slashdot and Mozillazine (e.g. this Slashdot comment). And since then I've found other problems, such as repeatedly hanging when installing plug-ins.
Some of the responses are just stupid, such as claiming that I don't know how to press the "+" key, or calling me a troll. Hardly anyone--except Mac users--wants to acknowledge that my experience is real: Firefox is even more buggy than IE6 (my previous and still-current browser). The mindset seems to be "it's free and it's not from Microsoft; so it is better by definition".
The real thing that gets me is what amounts to a lack of honesty: it seems that many OSS advocates will refuse to accept how buggy some OSS is, no matter what. Yeah, OSS will conquer the world that way.
After the release of 1.0, I downloaded Firefox for the first time, and then did an install. The installation claimed to import my passwords and cookies from my previous browser (IE6), but didn't. Then I tried using File > Import; this also claimed to import my passwords and cookies, and also didn't. I have a lot of passwords and don't know them all; so I then naturally became reluctant to switch from IE6 to Firefox.
I played with Firefox anyway, to see what it was like. For me, Ctrl++ doesn't work (although View > Text Size > Increase works fine). Also, there are problems when switching between working offline and online. And on one occasion, Firefox crashed. After the crash, a small application started up and asked me what had gone wrong; I entered a brief description and pressed the Send button, to send the information to Mozilla.org; then the small application crashed.
I've reported problems like this before, both on Slashdot and on Mozillazine, but people seem reluctant to accept it. One slashdotter even claimed I was a troll. I was glad that at least one problem was reproduced by the Washington Post.
Here's my conclusion: switching is too problematic for me to switch without strong motivation, and Firefox is actually less reliable than IE6 on my system. So, I'm sticking with IE6. Yes, I know IE6 is supposed to be insecure, but I run without ActiveX controls, and have not encountered problems.
And to those who want to criticise me for posting this, consider that there are doubtless many others who had similar problems, and didn't report them as I have, and just walked away. And I loathe Microsoft and want free software to win.
Slashdot Mirror
The significance of the date "01/18/2008" (the eleventh question) is that the company is American and does not use ISO date formats. The particular date is unambiguous, but in general that is not true with their format, e.g. "02/03/2008" could mean either February 3rd (for American readers) or March 2nd (for European readers). ISO is the global standard, and the format removes ambiguity: 2008-01-18. A small additional benefit is that it makes sorting trivial.
If these people were really as committed to quality as they pretend to be, they would be promoting the ISO format, to facilitate less-ambiguous global communication.
The computer simulation is interesting, but the Tunguska event is unlikely to be an asteroid. There were strange events reported in the area for days prior to the explosion, there were odd lights, etc.
An alternative explanation was proposed by Wolfgang Kundt, a researcher at the Institut für Astrophysik, University of Bonn:
Kundt W. (2001),
“The 1908 Tunguska catastrophe: An alternative explanation”,
Current Science, 81: 399–407.
The basic proposal is that there was a natural gas leak, from the Earth. The gas rose to a certain height, then drifted downwind. After several days, a lightning strike ignited the airborne gas, and the flame then traveled along line (of drifted gas), to the ground source.
It is worth reading the article. An asteroid impact is sexy, but the alternative explanation fits with the data much better.
At present, the two main math software packages are Maple and Mathematica. Mathematica is entirely closed source. With Maple, most of the source code can be viewed (though it is copyrighted and cannot be copied). This means that you can check the algorithms used in Maple, but not in Mathematica.
There are some packages that are called by Maple that are closed source. For example, Maple calls the NAG Numerical Libraries for a substantial amount of its numeric computations; the NAG routines are closed source, but they are widely agreed to be the best on the planet, and Maple decided to rely on them.
Sage is interesting, but its functionality is very limited. In the (very?) long term, though, Sage might well pose a challenge to Maple and Mathematica. But in the meantime, I expect to continue to use Maple.
The hypothesis that the blast was due to a comet/asteroid/etc. has been around for a long time. The problem with this hypothesis is that it does not fit at all well with the observations (e.g. the strange sounds and lights that preceded the blast for days; and so on). An alternative hypothesis was proposed by Wolfgang Kundt, a researcher at the Institut für Astrophysik der Universität Bonn:
Kundt W. (2001),
“The 1908 Tunguska catastrophe: An alternative explanation”,
Current Science, 81: 399–407.
Kundt's paper explains the various problems with the comet/asteroid hypothesis. It also proposes an alternative hypothesis: that Tunguska was a natural gas leak (from the ground), that went on for days, building up, until ignited by a lightning strike.
This explanation seems to fit the observations well. Perhaps the main reason it has not gotten much attention is that it is not very exotic.
The story is certainly interesting, but it's off-topic (even though it is about Wikipedia). Also, the correct link for “this review” seems to be http://www.informath.org/apprise/a6400.htm.
HotBits is a true quantum-based Random Number Generator. For details, see How HotBits Works. Hotbits would seem to be at least as good as the RNG discussed in the Slashdot story, and it too is free and online; the main drawback is that you can only get 2k bits at a time.
After World WarII, several Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not everyone wanted to do that. Winston Churchill, for example, just wanted to execute those Nazis. But the USA insisted on fair trials, saying that it was important to establish the principle of the rule of law.
Back then, the USA had leadership that demonstrated to the world how even the most heinous crimes (particularly the Holocaust)—in which many millions of people died—can and should be handled according to law and principle.
Compare that with what George W. does today.
It was me who asked about the defintion of pixel. Perhaps I didn't phrase the question well enough. Consider that as screen resolutions improve, a CSS pixel will have to be mapped to two physical pixels on a screen. So simple phrases like "the image is 100 pixels wide" will have two different meanings (depending on "pixel" = physical pixel or "pixel" = CSS pixel). I think that this is needless confusion, and the answer given by Håkon appears to be flippant.
The word pixel meant "picture element", but CSS redefined it to mean something quite different (a particular subtended angle of view). This causes confusion: CSS pixels are not pixels. (Indeed, I have seen misinformed comments on Slashdot due to that confusion.)
My question is this: why call the subtended angle a "pixel", instead of something else (e.g. "subangle")? If CSS wanted to use the subtended angle for something, that is fine, but calling it a pixel seems to follow the approach of Humpty Dumpty—"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean".
The key to the good performance that you've experienced is your 128 MB video RAM. Aero needs that, at least if your are running several applications simultaneously. Vista runs slow if Aero is on and video RAM is insufficient. If the video RAM is large, then the GPU takes good care of Aero, the CPU has very much less to do, and things seem to run well.
There is even an argument that extremely intelligent people cannot be (empirical) scientists, because they would go insane from the boredom. (Obviously, some subjects are exceptions to this, e.g. theoretical physics.)
Yup--and the reason that it took 46 years? In part because the researchers involved forgot their first year calculus: they assumed that any function that is infinitely differentiable can be represented by its Taylor series. The assumption is almost always okay in practice, but not, it turned out, in this case; so they wasted decades in unnecessary confusion.
There's a lesson there for budding young scientists....
Profits on MS Office increased by 7%, but that is because R&D expenses are down. This means MS Office isn't going to get substantially improved--which we already pretty much knew.
If MS Office is standing still, then it's going to be a lot easier for OpenOffice to catch up with it. Indeed, very soon, OpenOffice will release version 2.0, a major upgrade that has even better compatibility with MS Office.
All this suggests that in the medium term, MS Office revenues could be in for a hard time.
Note: all data is from http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY05/earn_r el_q4_05.mspx.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
--you can get 16384 bits at a time. Then I use the Muddle-Square method (of Blum, Blum, and Shub: described by Knuth, Art of Computer Programming, ch. 3) to expand those bits.
For example, manually retrieve 10 Mbits from HotBits (takes a few hours), and then expand those by a factor of 50 via Muddle-Square. That's 500 Mbits that are essentially indistinguishable from true random.
It's free, and you get to learn a bit about random numbers from reading Knuth.
"We immediately recognized this as a great opportunity for ourselves, our channel partners, and especially our customers," explained the excited Ballmer to a room full of reporters. Immense video displays were used to show images of the new customizable BSOD screen side-by-side with the older static version. Users can select from a collection of "BSOD Themes," allowing them to instead have a Mauve Screen of Death or even a Paisley Screen of Death. Graphics and multimedia content can now be incorporated into the screen, making the BSOD the perfect conduit for delivering product information and entertainment to Windows users.
The BSOD is by far the most recognized feature of the Windows operating system, and as a result, Microsoft has historically insisted on total control over its look and feel. This recent departure from that policy reflects Microsoft's recognition of the Windows desktop itself as the "ultimate information portal." By default, the new BSOD will be configured to show a random selection of Microsoft product information whenever the system crashes. Microsoft channel partners can negotiate with Microsoft for the right to customize the BSOD on systems they ship. Major computer resellers such as Compaq, Gateway, and Dell are already lining up for premier placement on the new and improved BSOD.
Ballmer concluded by getting a dig in against the Open Source community. "This just goes to show that Microsoft continues to innovate at a much faster pace than open source. I have yet to see any evidence that Linux even has a BSOD, let alone a customizable one."
(Copied from here.
Peiser's work was not previously disseminated. Science just made that up. See Peiser's web page about this.
And Nature has always allowed--indeed, supported--preprint archives.
Moderators: please note that I've provided links to back up what I say; the parent seems to be a troll or similar.
(Peiser's submission to Science is available on his web page. It's short and easy to read. If it's right, then the original Oreskes paper was fraudulent.)
If this is right, then the 1e5 networked computers that are currently used by Google are a tenth of the way there. And 1e4 networked computers (available at some other institutions) are 1% of the way there.
So, if you're right (and I'm not saying you are or aren't), and we just need to work on software to take advantage of the hardware, then it is really pretty scary.
I tried viewing the WashingtonPost article in Firefox, and it did not render correctly. Then I tried viewing in IExplorer, and things were fine. (I'm running WinXP-SP2 with extra large fonts.) Did anyone else experience similarly?
Reference [11] is for the F5 algorithm: Yet consider this paper: The abstract from Fridrich et al. says "... we present a steganalytic method that can reliably detect messages
So TFA article cites countermeasures from 2001, even though a method of defeating those countermeasures was published in 2002.
The above is just one example. Overall, TFA seems poor and out-of-date. This is a case where the F in "TFA" does not stand for "fine".
______________________________________
The Sunday Times [28 November 2004]
Andrew Sullivan: Where the Bible bashers are sinful and the liberals pure
. . .
Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways they were the two states competing in the last election. One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for John Kerry over George W Bush 62% to 37%; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61% to 38%.
Ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in fact Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas, which until recently made private gay sex a crime, has a divorce rate of 4.1.
A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. Every one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate is roughly 50% higher than the national average.
Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt and many do not have the maturity to know what they are getting into. There is some correlation, too, between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging behind a highly educated state such as Massachusetts.
The irony still holds, however. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that socially troubled communities cling to absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.
Doesn't being born again help to bring down divorce rates? Jesus was clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not; 29% of Baptists have been divorced, compared with 21% of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23% of married born agains have been divorced twice or more.
Teenage births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state such as Texas where the religious right is strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, teen births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%. In liberal, secular Massachusetts they are 7.4%, less than half. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas the proportion of people unmarried is 32.4%; in Massachusetts it is 26.8%. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts has a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.
Take abortion. America is one of the few western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It is a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics. Compare it with a country such as Holland, perhaps the epitome of social liberalism. Which country has the highest rate of abortion? It is not even close. America has a rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?
. . .
More at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-13782 27,00.html
Some of the responses are just stupid, such as claiming that I don't know how to press the "+" key, or calling me a troll. Hardly anyone--except Mac users--wants to acknowledge that my experience is real: Firefox is even more buggy than IE6 (my previous and still-current browser). The mindset seems to be "it's free and it's not from Microsoft; so it is better by definition".
The real thing that gets me is what amounts to a lack of honesty: it seems that many OSS advocates will refuse to accept how buggy some OSS is, no matter what. Yeah, OSS will conquer the world that way.
I'm running Windows 98SE, and I thought that might be the problem. This now seems unlikely, however, because the reviewer at the Washington Post had the same problem--and I doubt he's running Win98Se.
I played with Firefox anyway, to see what it was like. For me, Ctrl++ doesn't work (although View > Text Size > Increase works fine). Also, there are problems when switching between working offline and online. And on one occasion, Firefox crashed. After the crash, a small application started up and asked me what had gone wrong; I entered a brief description and pressed the Send button, to send the information to Mozilla.org; then the small application crashed.
I've reported problems like this before, both on Slashdot and on Mozillazine, but people seem reluctant to accept it. One slashdotter even claimed I was a troll. I was glad that at least one problem was reproduced by the Washington Post.
Here's my conclusion: switching is too problematic for me to switch without strong motivation, and Firefox is actually less reliable than IE6 on my system. So, I'm sticking with IE6. Yes, I know IE6 is supposed to be insecure, but I run without ActiveX controls, and have not encountered problems.
And to those who want to criticise me for posting this, consider that there are doubtless many others who had similar problems, and didn't report them as I have, and just walked away. And I loathe Microsoft and want free software to win.