Why stop at biology. I suggest an alternative to physics.
Not that hard to do, as long as you're using ID style reasoning: pick some holes, or currently poorly understood areas (which, let's face it, every field of science has), rattle on about them for a while, then leap across the false dichotomy and claim that, since the current theory fails to explain things therefore your alternative must be the truth! Gravity is a lie! Teach the Controversy! (complete with entirely valid references to peer reviewed physics articles).
Agreed. Its like the authors have never used windows. Within 10 minutes of sitting at my desk at work I have 20 or so application instances running from cmd and textpad to Eclipse. It renders the bottom of my screen useless. You might say "Ahh, but XP collates them into a single button!", thats worse!!! The only system I've found that manages 20+ windows effectively is Expose.
The only system you've found that manages 20+ windows effectively is Expose? Certainly it is one system that is effective. Personally I also find multiple desktops, with the taskbar set to "Show windows from current workspace", and a pager, works remarkably well. It's easy to group sets of windows onto desktops in a generally task oriented fashion, and with only a small collection of windows per desktop the taskbar never gets cluttered. Throw in a Window Selector applet (a single button that provides a drop down list, organised by desktop, of all your open windows) for completeness sake and you have a very effective system. Better yet the system scales remarkably well - if you need alot more than 20 windows just add more desktops.
The two big obstacles to getting better performance from parallelization are that (1) some problems aren't parallelizable, and (2) programmers, languages, and development tools are still stuck in the world of non-parallel programming. Programmers might be stuck in the world on non-parallel programming, but there are plenty of languages that aren't: Ada, AliceML, Concurrent Clean E, Eiffel + SCOOP, Erlang, Occam, Oz, and Pict all do concurrency remarkably well. Several of those, Ada, Eiffel, and Erlang in particlar, are certainly ready and capable for serious industrial programming.
Support for a.5 is in the works apparently, though it is the next major version of ESC/Java that will have it, so I don't know how soon that will come out. It is, at the least, in the works.
Static analysis becomes virtually unnecessary when you use a proper, statically-typed language like Haskell, Standard ML or OCaml. Furthermore, the use of garbage collection eliminates many of the buffer overruns that plague C and C++ software. Add in proper unit testing, and you're almost guaranteed to have a rock-solid system, developed very economically and often with extremely clean code.
As nice as that is it runs into the difficulty that there are already millions of lines of code in Java and rewriting them in ML or Haskell just isn't feasible. If you want a good intermediary position then using JML to specify the existing Java code and jmlunit and ESC/Java2 to do unit testing and static analysis based on the specification can get you a long way.
The problem with asking why 1+1=2 at the age of 11 is that any decent answer tends to quickly get mired in technicality. It is an insightful question, but it is beyond most school teachers at that level to answer it adequately. I've got Bertrand Russell (always one of the most lucid and readable of mathematical philosophers) description of why 1+1=2 here (scroll down and look for the quote). If you ask any questions about that description you rapidly get yourself into even deeper waters. This, of course, does not excuse the brush off from the school teacher - he should have said that it is actually a deep question and to answer it well you would have a to learn a lot more.
If you want a nice multi-platform concurrency system that's easy to use then check out SCOOP for Eiffel. It's as easy as a single extra keyword separate that you use to declare objects that you want to be able to run concurrently in separate processes/threads. The language, preprocessor (for SCOOPs current implementation, it will be moved to the compiler soon), and compiler handle all the rest and make it all work. Having the compiler do the work means it is concurrency system agnostic - it can use native threads,.NET threads, Java threads, or processes, or whatever the compiler allows for - all with the same codebase. Having the compiler do the work also makes it harder for the programmer to get things wrong.
I'm happy to agree that Microsoft's business models are deplorable, and the products they actually bring to market are often shabby imitations. That does not preclude, however, the reality that MS research does actually turn out good and interesting work - which they do. It simply means good work from MS research must not find its way to MS products very often. A quick perusal of MS research's good work and comparison to MS's latest products and you'll see that, indeed, there seems to be quite a gulf between research and development.
Bro, Concurrent programming? Are you joking? That's not research, that's history.
Well yeah, Tony Hoare came up with Monitors to handle concurrency way back in the 70s. The he realised it was a terrible way to do things, and came up with CSP in the 80s. For some reason, however, all the concurrent programming you see in mainstream languages uses monitors, or even mmre antiquated concurrency models. In the meantime research has moved on, and there are formalisms like CSP, CCS, and ACP to formally reason about concurrency - integrating those into languages and exiting language paradigms, however, is still a research problem. Check out SCOOP for Eiffel - it makes writing concurrent code trivial, and very hard to get wrong, but the people developing it (who are no fools) are still ironing out all the catches. If you think concurrency is history that just shows you're stuck with 70s thinking that is, compared to modern research concurrency systems, needlessly complicated, incredibly prone to error, and generally just broken.
Sorry, yes, I missed Erlang on my list, but it fits alongside Occam and AliceML (Occam is older than Erlang, btw, dating from 1983 10 years before Erlang). Just because some languages have good concurrency models doesn't mean developing better models and ways to integrate them effectively into existing popular languages is not research. Try actually reading some of the published papers on C-omega's concurrency system before you blithely ignore it.
Likewise Spec# borrows ideas (honestly, what development doesn't) such as DbC from Eiffel (which, in turn, was borrowing from Tony Hoare's ideas on software verification from the late 60's) and from ESC/Java (which was actually developed by Digital, not NASA, and has been reborn as ESC/Java2, and open source project) which in its turn was borrowing ideas from the Z specification language, and VDM. It of course extends on those ideas, and provides new approaches - again, try actually reading the published papers, there are some interesting ideas there in the field of formal verification of software. For all your claims that "it has been done" it should be noted that effective integrated automated formal software verification has never appeared in mainstream programming, so if "it has been done" then it has been done inadequately enough that it never gained widespread adoption. Spec# offers a chance to remedy that.
For christ's sake, if you're going to pay so much for "innovation", try to tackle some of the fundamental problems with modern computing, instead of gimmicky wireless sharing for MP3 players, new copy-protection schemes, and snazzy graphics for FreeCell.
Microsoft research does try to tackle such problems, the dilemma is that their work, as far as I can tell, seems to get ignored when it comes to product development and marketing. What fundamental problems in modern computing is Microsoft research trying to tackle? How about programming concurrent software. Traditionally this is hard, and error prone. What we need is a model of concurrency, and a programming language to support it, that makes programming concurrent systems easy, and make reasoning about it easy. Microsoft is working in that area with C-omega and extension of C# with a better concurrency system. See the tutorials to get an idea of how it works. It's not unique, there are other concurrency oriented languages out there like Occam, AliceML, Oz etc. that handle concurrency well, and other concurrency language extensions, like SCOOP for Eiffel, and JCSP for Java, that seek to add better concurrency models to existing languages. Still C-omea is its own tangent, and has interesting ideas (as do the other similar projects and other languages).
What about the issue of maintainability and quality assurance in software? Certainly that's at the heart of a deep problem, and there are no easy answers. There are things you can do to make better quality assurance easier however. Microsoft's effort on that front is Spec# which adds design by Contract to C# and provides extended static checking (using the Simplify theorem prover) to provide static verification of contracts where possible. This provides another layer of quality assurance, and (by integrating the static checking into Visual Studio) automates most of the work, meaning it requires little extra effort from programmers. Again this is not unique, there's Eiffel which has had DbC but no static verification for a very long time, and there's JML and ESC/Java2 which provides DbC (via annotations in comments) and extended static checking (again using the Simplify theorem prover) for Java - you can even get Eclipse plugins to integrate it into your IDE. Still Spec# is going it's own way (and has much better integration directly into the language than JML, which remains as comments) and has interesting ideas of its own.
The problem is not that Microsoft research isn't doing anything interesting, it's that projects like this tend to get buried, or ignored, or simply have a few ideas shifted into existing products. Things like Spec# offer sufficient gains that Microsoft's marketing department really ought to be crowing about it as a major upcoming feature, and serious effort to properly polish it as a product and get it into C# and VisualStudio should be underway. Instead it remains a page tucked away on MS research with little or nothing said about it.
I'd very much like a decent object-oriented statically typed language designed with Design by Contract methodology in mind. My hopes are that C# will get there eventually, since Anders Hejlsberg mentioned in one of his interviews that DbC, while not on the top of the list, might be there eventually.
It's probably worth your time to look at Spec# then, which is C# with DbC and extended static checking.
No benchmark is ever going to be a definitive measure, the best they can ever do is give you an idea or the general qualitative differences. I think you'll find, however, if you were to actually try Ada, Eiffel, D, or OCaml for an entire application, that they do, in fact, compare very well with C++ - it's not like there aren't any significant large applications written in those languages (well, possibly not D): they get plenty of use in various industries and are well known for their efficiency.
C++ is like a sharp scalpel. Yes you can hurt yourself if you're unskilled, inexperienced or sloppy. Java and C# are like those scissors with rounded ends for kids. Totally inefficent but safe for beginners.
So where does something like Eiffel fit in? It's all the usual bist to stop you shooting yourself in the foot (a strong static type, garbage collection, etc.) plus added extras to make your code even more maintainable, and even harder to shoot yourself in the foot (design by contract, SCOOP concurrency, etc.) yet when it comes down to it the compiler turns out code on par with C++ for efficiency, and way better then C# or Java. You can say much the same of O'Caml with a very powerful and robust type system (far safer than C++, Java, C#, or Eiffel) and plenty of performance. It's possible to make sharp tools without completely throwing away safety.
Comparing the cost of trying to adapt to a changing climate with the cost of trying to prevent climate change is certainly a worthwhile, especially as global warming based on past actions is already inevitable.
Of course Lomborg is not the only one to make such an analysis. The Stern report represents a study of exactly such a question from a world renowned economist. It comes to the opposite conclusion.
3000 years ago (give or take), humans discovered that the two-dimensional ground was curved in three dimensions. About 100 years ago, humans discovered that space is also curved. Perhaps someday we'll discover that time itself is curved, and there is no true beginning or end to the universe.
We already have discovered that: general relativity proposes curvature of spacetime, thus time itself is curved. Asking about what it before the big bang is like asking what is north of the north pole - at (almost) any point on the planet you can find a direction that is north and head that way. Similarly at (almost) any point in spacetime you can find a direction for time and consider "before". As you continue to head north on the planet, however, you find that the curve induces a single point, the north pole, where all directions are south - there is no more north. Similarly (in theory) in curved spacetime as you consider further back in time you find that the curve induces a single point, which we call The Big Bang, where all time directions are forward - the is no more "before".
OK. I'd settle for opt-out then. What really gets me is that money is forcibly taken from people for services which they do not use...Let people who want to send their kids to public school pay the taxes and let the people who want to send their kids to a private school (where they can do simple things like fire underperforming teachers) not pay the taxes to support the system they don't use.
The theory is that to have a decently functioning democratic society you require a reasonably educated and well informed populace. To ensure that the average citizen is at least reasonably educated and capable of getting him or herself suitably informed on any issues you need to have a basic minimum standard of education that everyone is guaranteed to recieve. Thus, in some senses, funding a public education system is about paying for a efficiently functioning democratic society. Even if you opt out of the basic minimum education and seek education at a private school or get home schooled (which, note, is still monitored to ensure it meets basic minimum standards), you are still taking part it, and gaining the benefit from, the democratic society - and it would therefore not be unreasonable to expect you to help pay for that. If you want to opt out of the society altogether you are welcome to do that - leave the country and (at least in theory, some countries will tax you even as a citizen permanently residing overseas) they won't expect you to pay any taxes. None of this precludes pointing out the fact that the particular implementation of the basic minimum level of education is inefficient, and ineffective, or quite simply broken. The question you should be asking is how to fix it - given that there are excellent public education systems in some countries it must be possible. And no, removing the minimum standard of education altogether doesn't fix it. As far as I can tell the US is already wavering perilously close to haing an insufficiently educated and informed populace: just look at the crap both major parties get away with before distracting the public with "wedge issues" and shiny toys just before the next election - do you really want to make it worse?
Public schools are a mess. Parents have no leverage. Abolish public schools, quit taxing property to pay for schools and let the parents be responsible for their children's educations.
I'm sorry that the US public school system is so appallingly broken. I would like to point out, however, that being public is not the reason it is broken. There are many publicly funded education systems around the world that are doing just fine. Take a look at Finland for example, who finished first in a study of math, science and reading skills of students in industrialised countries. You might also note the other countries that did well, such as South Korea, Canada, and the Netherlands all have public school systems. Public schooling need not be a recipe for poor quality - the fact that public schools are so poor in the US is clearly due to something else, possibly political, possibly cultural. If it is a cultural problem then abandoning public schools is not going to fix it. I would suggest you stop making excuses and start working out exactly why it is that the US school systems sucks so badly.
Looks like an average Wikipedia debate to me. For instance, did you know that Wikipedia is currently supressing the truth of the Time Cube? Shcoking I know, and clearly heavy handed government intervention.
Futhermore, let's consider what would have happened once web browsers were so ubiquitous that they'd be bundled with new computers anyway. Who would that web browser software have come from? Would it have been Microsoft and Apple, or would it have been third party competitors like Netscape, SpyGlass, and Opera? Would Microsoft and Apple have swallowed the cost of bundling third party software, or would the PC manufacturers have paid to bundle the software to improve sales?
In fact it is not inconceivable, given such a scenario, that there could have arisen software distributions that offered to gather together into a bundle a variety of different software from different vendors; Windows for a basic OS and GUI, Opera or Netscape for a browser, a media player from someone else again, etc. You would then have found competition between competing distributions as to who provided the best cohesive software collection and provided suitable installation and integration of all the components. Such a software ecosystem never did develop unfortunately, except in the Free software community.
This is what an annual 7 Billion Dollars of R&D money gets you? Sheesh.
$7 Billion in R&D money buys you things like Spec# and its verifier, C-omega for easy concurrent programming done right, and Singularity for a secure OS core, and... well a whole host of other things that are going to remain interesting research lab projects that MS will never get around to properly productizing and marketing.
I think we (collectively) need to reevaluate the risk factors here; such an organism in the wild could very well turn our planet into a dustbowl in such a shockingly short time we wouldn't even have time to lynch the scientists who created it (think: hours - the mathematics of unchecked reproduction are truly alarming).
Who said anything about reproduction, let alone unchecked reproduction? The article says it is a molecular complex, not a living organism capable of reproduction. I expect it is just an enzyme to catalyse the reaction, so I wouldn't worry about this any more than you would be inclined to worry about naturally occuring cellulase suddenly going rampant and destroying all plant life on earth in a matter of hours. Generally being somewhat informed is a prerequisite critical analysis of risks and any ensuing scaremongering (okay, that's not true, i just think it should be a prerequisite!).
True believers already know that 12pt Time New Roman is the only "TRUE" font.
That depends on what you truly believe in. I can think of many True Believers who will swear that the one TRUE font is, of course, Computer Modern Roman 11pt or 12pt.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that hard to do, as long as you're using ID style reasoning: pick some holes, or currently poorly understood areas (which, let's face it, every field of science has), rattle on about them for a while, then leap across the false dichotomy and claim that, since the current theory fails to explain things therefore your alternative must be the truth! Gravity is a lie! Teach the Controversy! (complete with entirely valid references to peer reviewed physics articles).
The only system you've found that manages 20+ windows effectively is Expose? Certainly it is one system that is effective. Personally I also find multiple desktops, with the taskbar set to "Show windows from current workspace", and a pager, works remarkably well. It's easy to group sets of windows onto desktops in a generally task oriented fashion, and with only a small collection of windows per desktop the taskbar never gets cluttered. Throw in a Window Selector applet (a single button that provides a drop down list, organised by desktop, of all your open windows) for completeness sake and you have a very effective system. Better yet the system scales remarkably well - if you need alot more than 20 windows just add more desktops.
Support for a.5 is in the works apparently, though it is the next major version of ESC/Java that will have it, so I don't know how soon that will come out. It is, at the least, in the works.
As nice as that is it runs into the difficulty that there are already millions of lines of code in Java and rewriting them in ML or Haskell just isn't feasible. If you want a good intermediary position then using JML to specify the existing Java code and jmlunit and ESC/Java2 to do unit testing and static analysis based on the specification can get you a long way.
The problem with asking why 1+1=2 at the age of 11 is that any decent answer tends to quickly get mired in technicality. It is an insightful question, but it is beyond most school teachers at that level to answer it adequately. I've got Bertrand Russell (always one of the most lucid and readable of mathematical philosophers) description of why 1+1=2 here (scroll down and look for the quote). If you ask any questions about that description you rapidly get yourself into even deeper waters. This, of course, does not excuse the brush off from the school teacher - he should have said that it is actually a deep question and to answer it well you would have a to learn a lot more.
If you want a nice multi-platform concurrency system that's easy to use then check out SCOOP for Eiffel. It's as easy as a single extra keyword separate that you use to declare objects that you want to be able to run concurrently in separate processes/threads. The language, preprocessor (for SCOOPs current implementation, it will be moved to the compiler soon), and compiler handle all the rest and make it all work. Having the compiler do the work means it is concurrency system agnostic - it can use native threads, .NET threads, Java threads, or processes, or whatever the compiler allows for - all with the same codebase. Having the compiler do the work also makes it harder for the programmer to get things wrong.
I'm happy to agree that Microsoft's business models are deplorable, and the products they actually bring to market are often shabby imitations. That does not preclude, however, the reality that MS research does actually turn out good and interesting work - which they do. It simply means good work from MS research must not find its way to MS products very often. A quick perusal of MS research's good work and comparison to MS's latest products and you'll see that, indeed, there seems to be quite a gulf between research and development.
Well yeah, Tony Hoare came up with Monitors to handle concurrency way back in the 70s. The he realised it was a terrible way to do things, and came up with CSP in the 80s. For some reason, however, all the concurrent programming you see in mainstream languages uses monitors, or even mmre antiquated concurrency models. In the meantime research has moved on, and there are formalisms like CSP, CCS, and ACP to formally reason about concurrency - integrating those into languages and exiting language paradigms, however, is still a research problem. Check out SCOOP for Eiffel - it makes writing concurrent code trivial, and very hard to get wrong, but the people developing it (who are no fools) are still ironing out all the catches. If you think concurrency is history that just shows you're stuck with 70s thinking that is, compared to modern research concurrency systems, needlessly complicated, incredibly prone to error, and generally just broken.
If you're a Python user then you may want to try candygram which provides Erlang concurrency primitives for Python.
Sorry, yes, I missed Erlang on my list, but it fits alongside Occam and AliceML (Occam is older than Erlang, btw, dating from 1983 10 years before Erlang). Just because some languages have good concurrency models doesn't mean developing better models and ways to integrate them effectively into existing popular languages is not research. Try actually reading some of the published papers on C-omega's concurrency system before you blithely ignore it.
Likewise Spec# borrows ideas (honestly, what development doesn't) such as DbC from Eiffel (which, in turn, was borrowing from Tony Hoare's ideas on software verification from the late 60's) and from ESC/Java (which was actually developed by Digital, not NASA, and has been reborn as ESC/Java2, and open source project) which in its turn was borrowing ideas from the Z specification language, and VDM. It of course extends on those ideas, and provides new approaches - again, try actually reading the published papers, there are some interesting ideas there in the field of formal verification of software. For all your claims that "it has been done" it should be noted that effective integrated automated formal software verification has never appeared in mainstream programming, so if "it has been done" then it has been done inadequately enough that it never gained widespread adoption. Spec# offers a chance to remedy that.
Microsoft research does try to tackle such problems, the dilemma is that their work, as far as I can tell, seems to get ignored when it comes to product development and marketing. What fundamental problems in modern computing is Microsoft research trying to tackle? How about programming concurrent software. Traditionally this is hard, and error prone. What we need is a model of concurrency, and a programming language to support it, that makes programming concurrent systems easy, and make reasoning about it easy. Microsoft is working in that area with C-omega and extension of C# with a better concurrency system. See the tutorials to get an idea of how it works. It's not unique, there are other concurrency oriented languages out there like Occam, AliceML, Oz etc. that handle concurrency well, and other concurrency language extensions, like SCOOP for Eiffel, and JCSP for Java, that seek to add better concurrency models to existing languages. Still C-omea is its own tangent, and has interesting ideas (as do the other similar projects and other languages).
What about the issue of maintainability and quality assurance in software? Certainly that's at the heart of a deep problem, and there are no easy answers. There are things you can do to make better quality assurance easier however. Microsoft's effort on that front is Spec# which adds design by Contract to C# and provides extended static checking (using the Simplify theorem prover) to provide static verification of contracts where possible. This provides another layer of quality assurance, and (by integrating the static checking into Visual Studio) automates most of the work, meaning it requires little extra effort from programmers. Again this is not unique, there's Eiffel which has had DbC but no static verification for a very long time, and there's JML and ESC/Java2 which provides DbC (via annotations in comments) and extended static checking (again using the Simplify theorem prover) for Java - you can even get Eclipse plugins to integrate it into your IDE. Still Spec# is going it's own way (and has much better integration directly into the language than JML, which remains as comments) and has interesting ideas of its own.
The problem is not that Microsoft research isn't doing anything interesting, it's that projects like this tend to get buried, or ignored, or simply have a few ideas shifted into existing products. Things like Spec# offer sufficient gains that Microsoft's marketing department really ought to be crowing about it as a major upcoming feature, and serious effort to properly polish it as a product and get it into C# and VisualStudio should be underway. Instead it remains a page tucked away on MS research with little or nothing said about it.
It's probably worth your time to look at Spec# then, which is C# with DbC and extended static checking.
No benchmark is ever going to be a definitive measure, the best they can ever do is give you an idea or the general qualitative differences. I think you'll find, however, if you were to actually try Ada, Eiffel, D, or OCaml for an entire application, that they do, in fact, compare very well with C++ - it's not like there aren't any significant large applications written in those languages (well, possibly not D): they get plenty of use in various industries and are well known for their efficiency.
It is possible to get similar speed and memory efficiency without giving up safety:
Ada vs. C++
D vs. C++
Eiffel vs. C++
OCaml vs. C++
(and just for comparison)
Java vs. C++
So where does something like Eiffel fit in? It's all the usual bist to stop you shooting yourself in the foot (a strong static type, garbage collection, etc.) plus added extras to make your code even more maintainable, and even harder to shoot yourself in the foot (design by contract, SCOOP concurrency, etc.) yet when it comes down to it the compiler turns out code on par with C++ for efficiency, and way better then C# or Java. You can say much the same of O'Caml with a very powerful and robust type system (far safer than C++, Java, C#, or Eiffel) and plenty of performance. It's possible to make sharp tools without completely throwing away safety.
Of course Lomborg is not the only one to make such an analysis. The Stern report represents a study of exactly such a question from a world renowned economist. It comes to the opposite conclusion.
We already have discovered that: general relativity proposes curvature of spacetime, thus time itself is curved. Asking about what it before the big bang is like asking what is north of the north pole - at (almost) any point on the planet you can find a direction that is north and head that way. Similarly at (almost) any point in spacetime you can find a direction for time and consider "before". As you continue to head north on the planet, however, you find that the curve induces a single point, the north pole, where all directions are south - there is no more north. Similarly (in theory) in curved spacetime as you consider further back in time you find that the curve induces a single point, which we call The Big Bang, where all time directions are forward - the is no more "before".
The theory is that to have a decently functioning democratic society you require a reasonably educated and well informed populace. To ensure that the average citizen is at least reasonably educated and capable of getting him or herself suitably informed on any issues you need to have a basic minimum standard of education that everyone is guaranteed to recieve. Thus, in some senses, funding a public education system is about paying for a efficiently functioning democratic society. Even if you opt out of the basic minimum education and seek education at a private school or get home schooled (which, note, is still monitored to ensure it meets basic minimum standards), you are still taking part it, and gaining the benefit from, the democratic society - and it would therefore not be unreasonable to expect you to help pay for that. If you want to opt out of the society altogether you are welcome to do that - leave the country and (at least in theory, some countries will tax you even as a citizen permanently residing overseas) they won't expect you to pay any taxes. None of this precludes pointing out the fact that the particular implementation of the basic minimum level of education is inefficient, and ineffective, or quite simply broken. The question you should be asking is how to fix it - given that there are excellent public education systems in some countries it must be possible. And no, removing the minimum standard of education altogether doesn't fix it. As far as I can tell the US is already wavering perilously close to haing an insufficiently educated and informed populace: just look at the crap both major parties get away with before distracting the public with "wedge issues" and shiny toys just before the next election - do you really want to make it worse?
I'm sorry that the US public school system is so appallingly broken. I would like to point out, however, that being public is not the reason it is broken. There are many publicly funded education systems around the world that are doing just fine. Take a look at Finland for example, who finished first in a study of math, science and reading skills of students in industrialised countries. You might also note the other countries that did well, such as South Korea, Canada, and the Netherlands all have public school systems. Public schooling need not be a recipe for poor quality - the fact that public schools are so poor in the US is clearly due to something else, possibly political, possibly cultural. If it is a cultural problem then abandoning public schools is not going to fix it. I would suggest you stop making excuses and start working out exactly why it is that the US school systems sucks so badly.
Looks like an average Wikipedia debate to me. For instance, did you know that Wikipedia is currently supressing the truth of the Time Cube? Shcoking I know, and clearly heavy handed government intervention.
In fact it is not inconceivable, given such a scenario, that there could have arisen software distributions that offered to gather together into a bundle a variety of different software from different vendors; Windows for a basic OS and GUI, Opera or Netscape for a browser, a media player from someone else again, etc. You would then have found competition between competing distributions as to who provided the best cohesive software collection and provided suitable installation and integration of all the components. Such a software ecosystem never did develop unfortunately, except in the Free software community.
$7 Billion in R&D money buys you things like Spec# and its verifier, C-omega for easy concurrent programming done right, and Singularity for a secure OS core, and... well a whole host of other things that are going to remain interesting research lab projects that MS will never get around to properly productizing and marketing.
Who said anything about reproduction, let alone unchecked reproduction? The article says it is a molecular complex, not a living organism capable of reproduction. I expect it is just an enzyme to catalyse the reaction, so I wouldn't worry about this any more than you would be inclined to worry about naturally occuring cellulase suddenly going rampant and destroying all plant life on earth in a matter of hours. Generally being somewhat informed is a prerequisite critical analysis of risks and any ensuing scaremongering (okay, that's not true, i just think it should be a prerequisite!).
That depends on what you truly believe in. I can think of many True Believers who will swear that the one TRUE font is, of course, Computer Modern Roman 11pt or 12pt.