Mitochrondrial DNA tests indicate that Neanderthals were an entirely seperate species with no interbreeding.
Actually, this merely says that any Neanderthal ancestors we may have weren't through the pure-maternal line. It says nothing at all about the nuclear DNA, which is over 99% of our DNA.
I've been watching for reports on Neanderthal DNA, and I've been repeatedly disappointed by people making conclusions from mtDNA samples. This basically indicates cluelessness about how inheritance works. Your mtDNA is a rather special case, and it's inherited very differently from your nuclear DNA. It's only useful for tracing your purely-maternal line of ancestors. It carries no information about any male or any of his ancestors.
It's still entirely possible that a tiny part of the ancestry of Europeans is Neanderthal. This could mean a few hundred genes scattered through the nuclear DNA. It could mean just one gene. Until you convincingly show, for every single gene, that it's not of Neanderthal origin, you really haven't shown that there was no interbreeding at all.
This is significant because nobody suggests a significant Neanderthal contribution to the modern European gene pool. Even supporters of the conjecture would be surprised if 1% of our genes are of Neanderthal origin. The question is whether the number is exactly zero or something slightly higher.
My guess is that we'll never have good enough evidence of Neanderthal genes to show that there was no interbreeding at all. That requires study of the entire genome, and the fossil record doesn't have to have preserved it for us. Unless there's some very luck discovery, such as a deep-frozen Neanderthal in the permafrost (that's now rapidly melting, so we'd better hurry), it's unlikely that we'll ever have a complete sample of Neanderthal DNA. And even that wouldn't really be enough; the most it could prove is that that particular individual wasn't one of our ancestors.
In any case, arguments from mtDNA are supremely unconvincing. Interesting, yes, but unconvincing.
But that doesn't stop the media from publishing gee-whiz articles on the topic.
Y'know, you might be onto something there. I'd been thinking of God as the sort of Cosmic Engineer that Doug Adams wrote about (Slartibartfast). But the idea that he might just be the director of a team of engineers with varying degrees of competency.
Some time back, I collected and combined a number of discussions on the topic of Biblical Creation into a treatise summarizing the conclusions. Maybe I'll have to make a new revision that incorporates this new concept.
God: So did you set up that semi-intelligent herding and naming creature that I assigned you yesterday?
Assistant: Yes; take a look.
G: Hmmm... Looks good. But what's this? You gave it an appendix? That organ's only functional in leaf eaters; there's no sense in using it in a top-level omnivore like this.
A: Oh, sorry. I just used the general mammal model. Should I fix it?
G: Ah, don't bother; it won't bother them much. But wait - you used that inferior design for the eye that I'd just told the team to not try again.
A: Uh, I...
G: You'd think any intelligent designer would know to put the nerves and blood vessels on the back of the retina, not the front. Well, I guess it's done, and the critter probably won't ever notice. But today's the big day. I'm building the main creature that the planet was designed for. Here's the design. Make sure that you add a blind spot in your creation's brains so they won't bother it.
And God spent his seventh day of creation building a species that was to rule over the oceans that were 70% of the planet's surface, and could dive to great depths, fully using the oceans' volume. First He built a number of small versions as pilot studies. Then he made the crowning glory: the giant squid. It had a large, capable brain that was smart enough to engage in long intellectual and artistic discussions. It didn't have any of those silly mistakes like an appendix or an eye with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the retina. He'd show the bunglers on this team how to do a good job of designing a species.
He was amused when, a few millennia later, a human called Douglas Adams wrote a rather good book that mistakenly made dolphins the top intelligence in the oceans. At least he understood the mice, which were a later infestation. But they didn't interfere, because they couldn't survive in the oceans. Too bad really; they could have some interesting discussions with the squid, if they could just get together somehow. Just shows the real advantage of being a noncorporeal spirit being, I guess; a God can talk to anyone who's worth talking to.
The last country that pushed human experimentation, quit doing so in 1945.
Not quite. Google for "Tuskegee experiment". This one (not treating poor black men for syphilis in order to study the course of the disease) was funded by the US government from 1932 to 1972.
It's not an isolated case, either. And the US government is hardly the only government to support studies of this nature.
In another few decades, we'll probably be reading about human experiments that were going on in 2005.
So the simple, irrefutable answer is that it's God's will. We are still grappling with how to explain the appendix.
That's easy. It's part of the general pattern off fossil and biological evidence that implies evolution. All this evidence was planted by God to deceive us, and make us believe in evolution.
The only possible conclusion is that God seriously wants us to believe in evolution. If we don't believe, we are thwarting God's will.
... you know that any official/legal notice will be sent by US mail, certified mail, or delivered by hand.
Not true at all, at least not in Masachusetts.
There are a number of agencies that send out things like tax and license notices via email, if you've registered to receive them that way. If you don't pay, you will eventually get that registered-mail notice. But if you do pay, that email becomes your only notice. It's a real convenience for us computer-literate types, and saves the government a lot of money. It's been years since I've received a hand-delivered government notice. Some things still arrive via first-class mail, but very often the email/web approach has handled it already.
They can get away with it legally, because such "pre-notice" messages aren't the legal notices; they're just a convenience for the taxpayer.
But we've had problems with government web sites that are only tested, and only render sensibly, with IE. Some downloadable docs are only in MS-Word format. Again, this is legal, because you aren't forced to use them; you can always use the hard copy. You can take a day off work, drive downtown to the agency, and pick up the docs you need. Or you can buy a Windows machine and download the Word doc, saving yourself a day off work and lining Bill Gates' pockets by another (to him) small amount.
There are those who think that it's not quite right for the government to be in bed with a major manufacturer like this. It's not a new story, of course; that's why the Boston Tea Party is brought up. Look up the history of that event. It's not an exact parallel, but it's close enough for media reports.
... Microsoft Word Viewer. It's a free app put out by Microsoft for people to be able to view MS Word docs without having MS Word.
So where can I get a version that runs on my linux or OSX machine? That page just downloads a.exe file that only runs on Windows.
The whole point here is that government documents should be readable by citizens on whatever kind of computer they have. We shouldn't have to pay for a MS-Windows machine to read a government notice.
One thing that probably triggered this story is that here in Massachusetts, there has been a real push for putting much of the government online. We are now unsubtly encouraged to use the Net, via either email or the Web, by such things as cheaper license renewals if we do it electronically.
But the downside of this is a strong tendency to require that every citizen (or at least every household) pay for a MS-Windows machine in order to communicate with government agencies.
This is especially embarrassing in Massachusetts, which is of course one of the main centers of the computer industry. Why would our own state government require that we pay for machines that were designed and built somewhere else? Are they intentionally trying to undermine the local computer industry?
Not that there are many computer manufacturers here any more, but still...
Any bets that Microsoft will be there, trying to get this reversed?
Well, of course. They're presumably already hard at work.
But in the long run, this is a rather good idea for the state. Remember that state agencies send out a lot of things that are legal notices, and there are consequences to ignoring them.
Consider a scenario:
1. Citizen C gets notice N from state agency A. It's in a format that doesn't display properly on C's computer, or displays in a garbled form that is easily misunderstood.
2. C doesn't do what N requires, because C can't read N.
3. A files suit against C for noncompliance.
4. C demonstrates in court that he/she couldn't read N because it was in a proprietary format not readable on C's computer.
5. The court decides for C and orders A to pay court costs.
6. On appeal, the court orders A to also provide C with a Windows machine so that C can read future notices.
Microsoft is now in a good situation to sell a lot of machines in the state. However, every citizen is now filing for a state reimbursement on the price fo their computer. The courts uphold these reimbursements on the grounds that the machines are necessary to read state notices.
Wonderful for Microsoft. Not wonderful for the state.
Anyone with a grain of sense would want a law to the effect that state notices be readable by the recipient without purchasing any specialized equipment. Sensible government admins would already require this of their employees. This doesn't prevent computerized documents; it only requires that documents be in formats that all computers can display properly. Plain text, HTML and PDF all work fine.
I'm mildly amazed that Scientists Can Be Wrong is a subject of discussion. This is only a problem when people who don't have any idea how science works expect scientists to be some sort of infallible priesthood.
Well, I think it's because, despite how often scientists are wrong, during the past couple centuries of the scientific explosion, they've been right so much more than anyone else that it has given them this sort of undeserved reputation.
Thus, humankind suffered for millenia with scourges like smallpox. All the best efforts of the religious people had no effect at all. No matter how much they prayed, we kept catching the disease and ending up either dead, disabled or disfigured by its ravages. Then William Jenner came along, the disease was pushed back in first a small part of the world, then in more and more areas, until now it exists only as a few speciments frozen in liquid nitrogen. Unless someone does something really stupid, nobody will ever again have a smallpox-vaccination scar like the one on my upper arm.
Meanwhile, the same story has happened with lots of other diseases (though not all of them). We're looking at the eradication of measles and polio, which would have happened already if it weren't for the intercession of some of those religious people in several countries.
But the really annoying part is that scientists and medical people have long been warning of the dangers of indiscriminate uses of antibiotics. Disease organisms will evolve resistance to the drugs, they said, and we'll lose the ability to control the diseases. But the religious folks suppressed the teaching of evolution, and people like farmers and feedlot owners used antibiotics because they didn't know why it was a bad idea. Here in the US, there are large sales of "antibacterial" soaps, which people buy and use because they went to schools that weren't permitted to teach evolution, so they don't understand why this is a really bad idea.
And guess what? Lots of disease organisms are evolving resistance to those antibiotics. Now we have a number of diseases (e.g., malaria) reappearing that we thought were under control, and our controls no longer work.
But still, the religious people insist that God (or the Intelligent Designer) made those organisms susceptible to those antibiotics, and evolution doesn't happen, at least not on time scales that we can watch, so that can't possibly be why those diseases are spreading.
Intelligent people wouldn't let them get away with this. Evolution is happening right before our eyes. You can see it in hospitals around the world, where people are dying of diseases that we had under control not long ago. They're dying because disease organizations (and vectors such as mosquitos) have evolved resistance in only a few years. In some cases, there's a new antibiotic that will work, but it's patented, so the maker can keep the price too high for most of the world's people, and they die with the cure out of reach. But if the price were low, we'd just overuse it, the organisms would evolve resistance, and people would die anyway.
The really annoying thing is seeing people continually argue that evolution is some sort of esoteric, academic, intellectual topic. It's not. People dying from a disease that was once under control is not at all an intellectual issue.
And note that scientists do understand this process. The problem is getting people to listen, when their religious leaders are telling them a different story, and suppressing the teaching of biological reality.
TEST. TEST. TEST. REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. That is science.
Well, yes; that's part of science. But consider astronomy. It's widely considered one of the hardest of the "hard sciences". But astronomers do rather little testing or experimenting with their their objects of study. There are certain technical details that prevent this. Reproducible results are right out, for the most part, if you can't even do a single test during your lifetime (or the lifetime of your species).
Of course, astronomy is what we call an "observational science". It's not as fast as some others where experimentation is possible. You have to have lots of theories and hypotheses waiting in the wings. Then when an interesting observation comes along, you put it up against all those theories and hypotheses, hoping that it'll disprove some of them. Then you sit watching and waiting for the next interesting event.
Lots of astronomers would love to be able to experiment with their subject matter. Even more, they'd love to be able to repeat the experiments and get reproducible results. But they probably still have a bit of a wait until they can accomplish this.
This doesn't make them non-scientists, or slaves to inference. It just means that they spend a lot of their time in data-collection mode. Or, more and more, they figure out how to make machines do the data collection and basic analysis.
Astronomers aren't the only critters to use this approach, of course. The web-building spiders have a similar hunting strategy. Build a trap for the prey you're after, and sit by the trap waiting for it to be triggered. Dash over, grab what was captured, and devour it.
"The difference between an old scientific theory and a new scientific theory is that the new theory is wrong in more subtle ways."
Heh. This goes along with the old bit of advice to young scientists:
The most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that starts with "Further research is necessary...."
This is usually spoken with a big grin, and is often considered part of the fund-raising portion of any research project. But if you think about it, it's also an open admission by the author that they don't fully understand their own topic. If they did, no further research would be necessary.
I've also seen this proposed as a good criterion for weeding out the pseudo-scientists: If their theories are complete and not in need of testing, you know that they're not talking about science. Any real scientist would openly admit to incomplete knowledge about everything. And a willingness to accept more research funds.
Nobody's trying to use Evolution to prove that God doesn't exist.
Actually, there's an interesting historical parallel here with Einstein's work in optics (which was one of the threads that led to Quantum Mechanics, and which got him his Nobel Prize).
Before 1900, there was a lot of work on the properties of the "ether", the hypothetical substance that fills all space. It was assumed that there was such a substance, because light clearly behaved like a wave phenomenon, and how can you have a wave without a substrate to propagate the wave?
You sometimes read that Einstein showed that the ether didn't exist, and that there was nothing at all (except light;-) in empty space. But, strictly speaking, he did no such thing. Rather, his theory simply didn't assume anything at all about the ether. He found that he didn't need the ether to explain the behavior of light, so he ignored it. He didn't say it was wrong; it was just irrelevant.
This is very similar to the way in which Darwin handled the question of God. His theory didn't require an intelligent actor directing the world. But he didn't say there was no God. He just didn't mention the topic in his biological work, because his theory didn't need such an intelligence to produce the critters that we see around us.
Actually, there's another interesting parallel: Just as lots of scientists still believe in a God, we computer types still use the term "ether". We all use the Ethernet, after all. Most of us understand that the term is just a quaint historical relic, of course. And commercial Ethernet equipment is really just simulating the ether in a copper wire. But if someone were to claim belief in the ether, we probably wouldn't try to prove them wrong. We'd just consider them somewhat silly to bother claiming belief in something that is irrelevant to understanding how light and other signals propagate. (And why this is true of light but not electrons is a topic worth a college course or two.;-)
This is really the explanation of why most scientists don't bother fighting the creationists, IDers, or whatever the latest version of "God made us all" is called. Sure, you can believe such things, but it's really irrelevant to understanding how the world works. Not necessarily wrong; just irrelevant.
So you're asserting Evolution is more certain that Newtonian physics?
Actually, if you look at the evidence behind both, you'll find that both are based on rather large bodies of esoteric data that is still difficult for the average person to verify.
Newton's works depended in large part on analysis and understanding of a large body of astronomical data. This involves extremely careful measurement, over many years, of those tiny dots of light moving around up there in the night sky, plus two large things that are visible during the day. Just identifying the individual planets, which periodically disappear and then months later reappear in a different part of the sky, is not a casual undertaking. As Newton himself pointed out in his famous quote, he depended on centuries of observations and analysis by thousands of other people for the data behind his equations.
Similarly, Darwin's theory was in large part based on the massive geological records of several thousand people out digging in the hills, mapping the strata and extracting all those fossils. Each sample by itself is nearly meaningless. The data only leads to the conclusion that evolution has occurred by a long, tedious examination of the full body of geological and fossil data.
So, from the viewpoint of someone who wants a simple test that they can do in their backyard in a day or two, both Evolution and the Solar System are completely uncertain and unprovable. It takes a lot more work than most people are willing to do. Either that, or you have to accept that those thousands of people out there collecting data for you aren't just making it up. You have to trust that most of them have done their job honestly, and their data is accurate to within some error bar.
Similarly, Einstein's radical new theories were based on looking at several decades of anomalous and inexplicable observations by many other people. His approach was based on assuming that their observations were correct. For example, he assumed that light really does move at the same speed with respect to all observers, no matter how absurd that may seem. Starting with the assumption that this and other counter-intuitive observations were true, he derived a set of equations that reduced to Newton's at low speeds, but which diverged radically from Newton's equations at high speeds. Tests by others then showed that his equations seemed to predict the universe more accurately than Newton's equations did.
But to most people who read his papers, his assumptions were very uncertain. He was assuming things that most people knew couldn't be true, although experiments had said that they were true. Words like "absurd" were thrown around a lot at first. Then the results of tests started coming in.
Similarly, Darwin came up with a fairly simple, elegant explanation of all those fossils in the geological strata. But to verify his theories still takes a lot of work, which must be preceded by learning to understand the data that we have to work with. And there's far too much data there for one person; you have to have a certain amount of trust in other people's data and analyses if you're to take it all in.
In any case, it often takes a great deal of study, plus trust in your colleagues' data, to understand and accept the validity of a lot of scientific theories. We don't live long enough to do a thorough job of personally validating every scientific theory.
Of course, the main historical alternatives seem to be mostly theories that aren't founded on any observable data at all. I guess that is a lot simpler to understand, and you don't have to do any boring study to come up to speed.
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
This is, of course, a very traditional sort of utterly bogus metaphor.
The internet is, in fact, not capable of being used to beat up people. The IP protocol can't transport fists or baseball bats; it can only transport bits.
It's true that people often use such over-the-top metaphors to claim that they have been physically damaged by someone else's words. But they should just learn that old chant that I learned before first grade:
"Stick and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me."
Now, if the charge had been libel, the situation might be different. But claiming you've been "beat up" over the internet is merely laughable. The court should say just that, and charge the plaintant court costs.
... Galilean relativity, which was proven wrong by Einstein and friends.
Actually, strictly speaking, Einstein (and friends) didn't prove Galileo or anyone else wrong. That had already been done by others. Thus, precise measurements of the orbit of Mercury and turned up discrepancies with Newton's and others' laws of orbital mechanics. The Michaelson-Morley experiments produced the apparently-absurd result that light moved at the same speed relative to all observers, even if those observers were moving relative to each other or the light source. Etc.
What Einstein did was develop a new theoretic approach that could explain a number of these anomalies. It was then up to the scientific community to viciously attack Einstein's theories, and attempt to prove him wrong. They've been at this for a century now, and all of their tests so far have end up with results consistent with Einstein's theories, to within the error bounds of the measurements. In scientific circles, this constitutes "proof" that Einstein's theories are either correct, or are very close to correct.
Even then, the earlier theories hadn't really been proven wrong. Rather, they were shown to be merely good approximations. After all, if your instruments can measure something to 12 places, but Einstein's and Newton's equations predict a difference in the 20th place, you can't show either set of equations to be wrong. This is why those earlier "disproved" theories are still taught in science and engineering schools. Newton's equations are a lot simpler than Einstein's, and in situations where you can't measure the difference, you might as well use the simplest equations. You just have to be careful not to apply the simpler equations in situations where they aren't good enough.
But note that Einstein himself didn't disprove those earlier theories; that had been done by the others that found the anomalies. And Einstein didn't prove his own theories; that has been done by a century of tests by the entire scientific community. He did the really hard job: He came up with his wild new theories of a universe that behaved rather differently than anyone thought. But his theories were consistent with those strange observations. And his theories included equations that could be tested against the real universe. And his theories keep passing every test that anyone comes up with.
Now if we could get some other would-be scientists to present us with versions of their theories that can be tested against the real universe...
Opera uses a full MDI interface. This is so handy for a browser that people started complaining that the other browsers didn't have this.
Well, this was one of the major reasons that I ignored Opera at first. Its MDI approach was so klunky and so hostile to sharing the screen among multiple tasks that I just wrote it off as the worst design I'd ever seen. With other browsers, each site could have its own window if I liked, and there weren't all those unusable screen areas like you got with Opera. Also, on my multi-desktop linux machine, I can have mozilla and/or firefox windows on all the desktops; Opera would only allow one window on one desktop. That's a good way to rule your app out among people who work with multiple desktops.
I'm still trying to figure out why anyone would want the MDI approach. I haven't found any situation where it's better than putting each "document" in a separate window that's managed by the windows manager.
It's curious that the tabbed approach is actually more useful. It sure looks like a special case of MDI, and many people don't see why it's useful. You just have to learn to restrict it to closely-related pages that share a common window shape, typically pages from a single site. Otherwise you spend half your time resizing the window, because of the idiotic size forcing that most sites do.
Now if we could only persuade the browser makers to permit multiple copies of the same browser. The conventional approach, with all windows managed by a single process, is invariably prone to having all its windows hang because of something you did in one window. The threads packages all seem to produce this behavior, in which a single blocked thread causes the entire process to hang. This is, of course, why multi-tasking was invented decades ago, so that a task's unused cpu cycles (typically due to waiting for some hardware) can be used by other tasks. But browser writers haven't yet caught onto the radical new idea of multi-tasking. Or maybe thty think that threads are the same thing.
Oh, well; give them another decade or two. In the meantime, we can continue to install 6 or 8 browsers on each machine, so that we can actually time-share our web access.
Microsoft gives away free Windows licenses at our University here..../me thinks it's to make sure every student knows how to work with Windows software, and all Software Engineering students know how to write Windows software...
Well, that latter point doesn't always work too well.
Over the years, I've learned to write software that ran on various releases of first DOS, then Windows. In no two cases was what I learned very similar to any of the others, and the software very rarely survived a transition to a major new release. How you compiled programs was always radically different from before.
OTOH, when I look at the examples in my 1970's-era edition of the C bible, then all still run fine on current versions of unix (or linux). The same cc command suffices to compile them. The same Makefiles can be used. Granted, all of these things have had major extensions. But my code from back then still works.
And, unlike the experience of most MS users, I can still read all my files from 30 years ago. So can my software.
I guess, from a Windows user's viewpoint, this just shows that unix systems are old-fashioned and obsolete. Ya think? Or could they have had some good ideas back in the 70's that are still good ideas despite all the other things that have come along?
Hmmm... As before, I only see a checkbox to totally turn moderation on or off.
My complaint wasn't with being asked to moderate. It was with being asked 3 or 4 times per week. I wonder if there's a way to turn it down a bit? I also wonder what the normal frequency is. I don't seem to find these anywhere. But I haven't spent all that much time looking.
Well, maybe. But I've had a few fun experiences on projects where I took a big chunk of their legacy code and replaced it with something an order of magnitude smaller. Usually it ran about 10 times faster, too.
How do you think this was judged? Well, in effect I decreased the lines-of-code output of the team. This doesn't always make you a lot of friends. My person LOC output was effectively negative.
This doesn't necessarily look good on your record, to bosses who think that LOC is a useful measure of your accomplishments.
This is part of the explanation of why so much commercial software is such crap, of course.
And replacing LOC with a better measure of code size doesn't help. You really don't want to reward your programmers for maximizing the code used to accomplish a task. No matter how you measure the code, this is simply a recipe for big, slow software.
[I]f we argue TCO with Windows, we've already lost. Free Software is about FREEDOM, not price.
Indeed, and this is the aspect of free/open software that is getting attention in a lot of circles. In much of the world, you can make a convincing argument by simply asking "Do you want your data under the control of a giant American corporation?" This tends to get a lot of nervous looks, because so many people understand exactly what you're talking about.
I half-suspect that the whole Open Source movement is an attempt to get Linux people to forget about Free Software, too.
Well, maybe, for some of them. But othes use the acronym FOSS, Free and Open-Source Software, to emphasize that you really want both. If you are thinking about the above question, your first conclusion has to be that you follow the advice of any competent security adviser: Don't run software unless you have the source. This is the basic meaning of Open-Source Software. Without the source, that software could have anything hidden away inside, and you'd never know. It could be collecting your data and shipping it off to some obscure site (encrypted so you can't read the packets).
But being able to read the source isn't enough. You must be able to fix any problems you find. If there's spyware hidden inside, you must remove it. If it doesn't properly handle your language, you must fix that. If it can't handle some special conditions in your locale, you must fix that. If your organization has some special needs not known to the software's author, you must be able to implement features to support those needs. This is the meaning of Free Software: You are free to modify the software for your own needs.
If you really want your computers to be your computers, and not 0wned by some remote corporation, you need software that is both free and open-source. And you need people capable of studying the software, understanding it, and modifying it for your needs.
TCO is interesting, and helps get a foot in the door. But the real reason for Free/Open-Source Software is that it's the only way you can be sure that your computers will be working for you, and not for some unknown people somewhere else in the world. Both "Free" and "Open" are important; without both, each is worth little.
If you say anything bad about Google, you get 10 people bitching at you, and modded down, no matter how rational you are.
Oh, I dunno about that. Just a few days ago, in a discussion of the then-current google world-domination conspiracy theory, I posted a comment that made two points:
I hadn't seen any evidence of such activity on google's part, even though I run a web site that should be a primary target. Has anyone else running such a site seen any evidence of google's evil intents?
As others have pointed out, google is now a public company, so we can expect pressure from stockholders (or people who claim to represent them) to take steps to maximize their profits; public good be damned. So a rational person would keep a close watch on google, no matter how much they seem to be following their "Do no evil" mantra. Has anyone seen any evidence?
I got no replies to this. I did get one moderation: +1, Insightful. I've seen this repeatedly, for my comments and for others'.
So I'd say that slashdot's moderators are not all google fanboys. A lot of us like google, and wish them well against 800-pound gorillas like Microsoft (who is quite likely to "pull a Netscape" on them). But we still don't really trust them, any more than we trust any other big organization with its own interests and goals that we may not fully understand.
Now if I could just stop/. from making me a moderator several times per week. Y'know how that can give one pangs of responsibility...
22% of the code in a typical "Linux" distribution is written by the GNU,...
Well, I've worked for a number of companies that try to judge their programmers' output by lines of code. I've found that a very effective way to fight this is to just say "Hey, that's a contest that I know how to win!"
Somehow I've never had to explain this to even the densest PHB.
GNU may indeed be more important than linux. But somehow, I suspect that counting lines of code isn't the right way to measure this. If so, well, I know how to win that contest. I suspect that a lot of others here do, too.
When you lose a democratic election, you shouldn't whine that the voters were wrong in not agreeing with you. If you do, you're basically arguing that democracy doesn't work...
Well, this is a tech forum, "news for nerd", and tech questions are rarely decided democratically. If they are decided at all (and often they aren't), they are decided either by technical correctness, or by which company has the most marketing clout (or clout with the standards committee).
And, of course, democracies can and do vote for the wrong candidate or decide wrongly on a referendum. Any competent historian can list many elections that had the "wrong" outcome from our advantage of hindsight. The phrase "unintended consequences" is very familiar to anyone who looks at how governments (or any human organization) works. The democratic process is rarely perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Usually all you need is that you make the right decision most of the time. Our experience is that democratic processes tend to make the right decision more often than other systems that we humans have tried. I.e., it's merely the best of a bad lot.
One of my favorite democratic screwups (a very appropriate term in this case) was the news story a couple of years ago of a town in the US state of Oregon that outlawed sex. This wasn't the intention, of course; they were actually trying to outlaw exhibitionism. But the law was phrased so as to make it illegal to engage in sexual activity "within view of any place, public or private". This pretty much outlawed sex anywhere within the town's jurisdiction. Such stories of utter numbskullness on the part of democratic governments abound in the historical archives. When they realize what they've done, most people just laugh, report it to news agencies, and move on.
You people don't give RMS and GNU enough credit. Without GNU, GNU/Linux is just a kernel.
Well, I'm running KDE/GNU/Linux on my main box (though I'm typing this on Aqua/Darwin/OSX;-). Although most people interact primarily via their machine's GUI, and couldn't use their machine without it, neither Stallman nor anyone else seems to want to give any credit to the authors of this software.
Think of it: For the GUI you're using, how many of its authors can you name? Can you even find their names?
(Actually, I usually have half my screen taken up by text windows, terminals or editors or such, but that's another story.)
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Mitochrondrial DNA tests indicate that Neanderthals were an entirely seperate species with no interbreeding.
Actually, this merely says that any Neanderthal ancestors we may have weren't through the pure-maternal line. It says nothing at all about the nuclear DNA, which is over 99% of our DNA.
I've been watching for reports on Neanderthal DNA, and I've been repeatedly disappointed by people making conclusions from mtDNA samples. This basically indicates cluelessness about how inheritance works. Your mtDNA is a rather special case, and it's inherited very differently from your nuclear DNA. It's only useful for tracing your purely-maternal line of ancestors. It carries no information about any male or any of his ancestors.
It's still entirely possible that a tiny part of the ancestry of Europeans is Neanderthal. This could mean a few hundred genes scattered through the nuclear DNA. It could mean just one gene. Until you convincingly show, for every single gene, that it's not of Neanderthal origin, you really haven't shown that there was no interbreeding at all.
This is significant because nobody suggests a significant Neanderthal contribution to the modern European gene pool. Even supporters of the conjecture would be surprised if 1% of our genes are of Neanderthal origin. The question is whether the number is exactly zero or something slightly higher.
My guess is that we'll never have good enough evidence of Neanderthal genes to show that there was no interbreeding at all. That requires study of the entire genome, and the fossil record doesn't have to have preserved it for us. Unless there's some very luck discovery, such as a deep-frozen Neanderthal in the permafrost (that's now rapidly melting, so we'd better hurry), it's unlikely that we'll ever have a complete sample of Neanderthal DNA. And even that wouldn't really be enough; the most it could prove is that that particular individual wasn't one of our ancestors.
In any case, arguments from mtDNA are supremely unconvincing. Interesting, yes, but unconvincing.
But that doesn't stop the media from publishing gee-whiz articles on the topic.
Y'know, you might be onto something there. I'd been thinking of God as the sort of Cosmic Engineer that Doug Adams wrote about (Slartibartfast). But the idea that he might just be the director of a team of engineers with varying degrees of competency.
... Looks good. But what's this? You gave it an appendix? That organ's only functional in leaf eaters; there's no sense in using it in a top-level omnivore like this.
...
Some time back, I collected and combined a number of discussions on the topic of Biblical Creation into a treatise summarizing the conclusions. Maybe I'll have to make a new revision that incorporates this new concept.
God: So did you set up that semi-intelligent herding and naming creature that I assigned you yesterday?
Assistant: Yes; take a look.
G: Hmmm
A: Oh, sorry. I just used the general mammal model. Should I fix it?
G: Ah, don't bother; it won't bother them much. But wait - you used that inferior design for the eye that I'd just told the team to not try again.
A: Uh, I
G: You'd think any intelligent designer would know to put the nerves and blood vessels on the back of the retina, not the front. Well, I guess it's done, and the critter probably won't ever notice. But today's the big day. I'm building the main creature that the planet was designed for. Here's the design. Make sure that you add a blind spot in your creation's brains so they won't bother it.
And God spent his seventh day of creation building a species that was to rule over the oceans that were 70% of the planet's surface, and could dive to great depths, fully using the oceans' volume. First He built a number of small versions as pilot studies. Then he made the crowning glory: the giant squid. It had a large, capable brain that was smart enough to engage in long intellectual and artistic discussions. It didn't have any of those silly mistakes like an appendix or an eye with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the retina. He'd show the bunglers on this team how to do a good job of designing a species.
He was amused when, a few millennia later, a human called Douglas Adams wrote a rather good book that mistakenly made dolphins the top intelligence in the oceans. At least he understood the mice, which were a later infestation. But they didn't interfere, because they couldn't survive in the oceans. Too bad really; they could have some interesting discussions with the squid, if they could just get together somehow. Just shows the real advantage of being a noncorporeal spirit being, I guess; a God can talk to anyone who's worth talking to.
The last country that pushed human experimentation, quit doing so in 1945.
Not quite. Google for "Tuskegee experiment". This one (not treating poor black men for syphilis in order to study the course of the disease) was funded by the US government from 1932 to 1972.
It's not an isolated case, either. And the US government is hardly the only government to support studies of this nature.
In another few decades, we'll probably be reading about human experiments that were going on in 2005.
So the simple, irrefutable answer is that it's God's will. We are still grappling with how to explain the appendix.
;-)
That's easy. It's part of the general pattern off fossil and biological evidence that implies evolution. All this evidence was planted by God to deceive us, and make us believe in evolution.
The only possible conclusion is that God seriously wants us to believe in evolution. If we don't believe, we are thwarting God's will.
(See ya and raise ya!
But if they regenerate both hearts and brains, where would our next crop of politicians come from?
... you know that any official/legal notice will be sent by US mail, certified mail, or delivered by hand.
Not true at all, at least not in Masachusetts.
There are a number of agencies that send out things like tax and license notices via email, if you've registered to receive them that way. If you don't pay, you will eventually get that registered-mail notice. But if you do pay, that email becomes your only notice. It's a real convenience for us computer-literate types, and saves the government a lot of money. It's been years since I've received a hand-delivered government notice. Some things still arrive via first-class mail, but very often the email/web approach has handled it already.
They can get away with it legally, because such "pre-notice" messages aren't the legal notices; they're just a convenience for the taxpayer.
But we've had problems with government web sites that are only tested, and only render sensibly, with IE. Some downloadable docs are only in MS-Word format. Again, this is legal, because you aren't forced to use them; you can always use the hard copy. You can take a day off work, drive downtown to the agency, and pick up the docs you need. Or you can buy a Windows machine and download the Word doc, saving yourself a day off work and lining Bill Gates' pockets by another (to him) small amount.
There are those who think that it's not quite right for the government to be in bed with a major manufacturer like this. It's not a new story, of course; that's why the Boston Tea Party is brought up. Look up the history of that event. It's not an exact parallel, but it's close enough for media reports.
... Microsoft Word Viewer. It's a free app put out by Microsoft for people to be able to view MS Word docs without having MS Word.
.exe file that only runs on Windows.
...
So where can I get a version that runs on my linux or OSX machine? That page just downloads a
The whole point here is that government documents should be readable by citizens on whatever kind of computer they have. We shouldn't have to pay for a MS-Windows machine to read a government notice.
One thing that probably triggered this story is that here in Massachusetts, there has been a real push for putting much of the government online. We are now unsubtly encouraged to use the Net, via either email or the Web, by such things as cheaper license renewals if we do it electronically.
But the downside of this is a strong tendency to require that every citizen (or at least every household) pay for a MS-Windows machine in order to communicate with government agencies.
This is especially embarrassing in Massachusetts, which is of course one of the main centers of the computer industry. Why would our own state government require that we pay for machines that were designed and built somewhere else? Are they intentionally trying to undermine the local computer industry?
Not that there are many computer manufacturers here any more, but still
Any bets that Microsoft will be there, trying to get this reversed?
Well, of course. They're presumably already hard at work.
But in the long run, this is a rather good idea for the state. Remember that state agencies send out a lot of things that are legal notices, and there are consequences to ignoring them.
Consider a scenario:
1. Citizen C gets notice N from state agency A. It's in a format that doesn't display properly on C's computer, or displays in a garbled form that is easily misunderstood.
2. C doesn't do what N requires, because C can't read N.
3. A files suit against C for noncompliance.
4. C demonstrates in court that he/she couldn't read N because it was in a proprietary format not readable on C's computer.
5. The court decides for C and orders A to pay court costs.
6. On appeal, the court orders A to also provide C with a Windows machine so that C can read future notices.
Microsoft is now in a good situation to sell a lot of machines in the state. However, every citizen is now filing for a state reimbursement on the price fo their computer. The courts uphold these reimbursements on the grounds that the machines are necessary to read state notices.
Wonderful for Microsoft. Not wonderful for the state.
Anyone with a grain of sense would want a law to the effect that state notices be readable by the recipient without purchasing any specialized equipment. Sensible government admins would already require this of their employees. This doesn't prevent computerized documents; it only requires that documents be in formats that all computers can display properly. Plain text, HTML and PDF all work fine.
You need to insert the canonical punctuation:
My cow-orkers are college professors
I'm mildly amazed that Scientists Can Be Wrong is a subject of discussion. This is only a problem when people who don't have any idea how science works expect scientists to be some sort of infallible priesthood.
Well, I think it's because, despite how often scientists are wrong, during the past couple centuries of the scientific explosion, they've been right so much more than anyone else that it has given them this sort of undeserved reputation.
Thus, humankind suffered for millenia with scourges like smallpox. All the best efforts of the religious people had no effect at all. No matter how much they prayed, we kept catching the disease and ending up either dead, disabled or disfigured by its ravages. Then William Jenner came along, the disease was pushed back in first a small part of the world, then in more and more areas, until now it exists only as a few speciments frozen in liquid nitrogen. Unless someone does something really stupid, nobody will ever again have a smallpox-vaccination scar like the one on my upper arm.
Meanwhile, the same story has happened with lots of other diseases (though not all of them). We're looking at the eradication of measles and polio, which would have happened already if it weren't for the intercession of some of those religious people in several countries.
But the really annoying part is that scientists and medical people have long been warning of the dangers of indiscriminate uses of antibiotics. Disease organisms will evolve resistance to the drugs, they said, and we'll lose the ability to control the diseases. But the religious folks suppressed the teaching of evolution, and people like farmers and feedlot owners used antibiotics because they didn't know why it was a bad idea. Here in the US, there are large sales of "antibacterial" soaps, which people buy and use because they went to schools that weren't permitted to teach evolution, so they don't understand why this is a really bad idea.
And guess what? Lots of disease organisms are evolving resistance to those antibiotics. Now we have a number of diseases (e.g., malaria) reappearing that we thought were under control, and our controls no longer work.
But still, the religious people insist that God (or the Intelligent Designer) made those organisms susceptible to those antibiotics, and evolution doesn't happen, at least not on time scales that we can watch, so that can't possibly be why those diseases are spreading.
Intelligent people wouldn't let them get away with this. Evolution is happening right before our eyes. You can see it in hospitals around the world, where people are dying of diseases that we had under control not long ago. They're dying because disease organizations (and vectors such as mosquitos) have evolved resistance in only a few years. In some cases, there's a new antibiotic that will work, but it's patented, so the maker can keep the price too high for most of the world's people, and they die with the cure out of reach. But if the price were low, we'd just overuse it, the organisms would evolve resistance, and people would die anyway.
The really annoying thing is seeing people continually argue that evolution is some sort of esoteric, academic, intellectual topic. It's not. People dying from a disease that was once under control is not at all an intellectual issue.
And note that scientists do understand this process. The problem is getting people to listen, when their religious leaders are telling them a different story, and suppressing the teaching of biological reality.
TEST. TEST. TEST. REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. That is science.
Well, yes; that's part of science. But consider astronomy. It's widely considered one of the hardest of the "hard sciences". But astronomers do rather little testing or experimenting with their their objects of study. There are certain technical details that prevent this. Reproducible results are right out, for the most part, if you can't even do a single test during your lifetime (or the lifetime of your species).
Of course, astronomy is what we call an "observational science". It's not as fast as some others where experimentation is possible. You have to have lots of theories and hypotheses waiting in the wings. Then when an interesting observation comes along, you put it up against all those theories and hypotheses, hoping that it'll disprove some of them. Then you sit watching and waiting for the next interesting event.
Lots of astronomers would love to be able to experiment with their subject matter. Even more, they'd love to be able to repeat the experiments and get reproducible results. But they probably still have a bit of a wait until they can accomplish this.
This doesn't make them non-scientists, or slaves to inference. It just means that they spend a lot of their time in data-collection mode. Or, more and more, they figure out how to make machines do the data collection and basic analysis.
Astronomers aren't the only critters to use this approach, of course. The web-building spiders have a similar hunting strategy. Build a trap for the prey you're after, and sit by the trap waiting for it to be triggered. Dash over, grab what was captured, and devour it.
It's an adaptive strategy for some.
"The difference between an old scientific theory and a new scientific theory is that the new theory is wrong in more subtle ways."
...."
Heh. This goes along with the old bit of advice to young scientists:
The most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that starts with "Further research is necessary
This is usually spoken with a big grin, and is often considered part of the fund-raising portion of any research project. But if you think about it, it's also an open admission by the author that they don't fully understand their own topic. If they did, no further research would be necessary.
I've also seen this proposed as a good criterion for weeding out the pseudo-scientists: If their theories are complete and not in need of testing, you know that they're not talking about science. Any real scientist would openly admit to incomplete knowledge about everything. And a willingness to accept more research funds.
Nobody's trying to use Evolution to prove that God doesn't exist.
;-) in empty space. But, strictly speaking, he did no such thing. Rather, his theory simply didn't assume anything at all about the ether. He found that he didn't need the ether to explain the behavior of light, so he ignored it. He didn't say it was wrong; it was just irrelevant.
;-)
Actually, there's an interesting historical parallel here with Einstein's work in optics (which was one of the threads that led to Quantum Mechanics, and which got him his Nobel Prize).
Before 1900, there was a lot of work on the properties of the "ether", the hypothetical substance that fills all space. It was assumed that there was such a substance, because light clearly behaved like a wave phenomenon, and how can you have a wave without a substrate to propagate the wave?
You sometimes read that Einstein showed that the ether didn't exist, and that there was nothing at all (except light
This is very similar to the way in which Darwin handled the question of God. His theory didn't require an intelligent actor directing the world. But he didn't say there was no God. He just didn't mention the topic in his biological work, because his theory didn't need such an intelligence to produce the critters that we see around us.
Actually, there's another interesting parallel: Just as lots of scientists still believe in a God, we computer types still use the term "ether". We all use the Ethernet, after all. Most of us understand that the term is just a quaint historical relic, of course. And commercial Ethernet equipment is really just simulating the ether in a copper wire. But if someone were to claim belief in the ether, we probably wouldn't try to prove them wrong. We'd just consider them somewhat silly to bother claiming belief in something that is irrelevant to understanding how light and other signals propagate. (And why this is true of light but not electrons is a topic worth a college course or two.
This is really the explanation of why most scientists don't bother fighting the creationists, IDers, or whatever the latest version of "God made us all" is called. Sure, you can believe such things, but it's really irrelevant to understanding how the world works. Not necessarily wrong; just irrelevant.
So you're asserting Evolution is more certain that Newtonian physics?
Actually, if you look at the evidence behind both, you'll find that both are based on rather large bodies of esoteric data that is still difficult for the average person to verify.
Newton's works depended in large part on analysis and understanding of a large body of astronomical data. This involves extremely careful measurement, over many years, of those tiny dots of light moving around up there in the night sky, plus two large things that are visible during the day. Just identifying the individual planets, which periodically disappear and then months later reappear in a different part of the sky, is not a casual undertaking. As Newton himself pointed out in his famous quote, he depended on centuries of observations and analysis by thousands of other people for the data behind his equations.
Similarly, Darwin's theory was in large part based on the massive geological records of several thousand people out digging in the hills, mapping the strata and extracting all those fossils. Each sample by itself is nearly meaningless. The data only leads to the conclusion that evolution has occurred by a long, tedious examination of the full body of geological and fossil data.
So, from the viewpoint of someone who wants a simple test that they can do in their backyard in a day or two, both Evolution and the Solar System are completely uncertain and unprovable. It takes a lot more work than most people are willing to do. Either that, or you have to accept that those thousands of people out there collecting data for you aren't just making it up. You have to trust that most of them have done their job honestly, and their data is accurate to within some error bar.
Similarly, Einstein's radical new theories were based on looking at several decades of anomalous and inexplicable observations by many other people. His approach was based on assuming that their observations were correct. For example, he assumed that light really does move at the same speed with respect to all observers, no matter how absurd that may seem. Starting with the assumption that this and other counter-intuitive observations were true, he derived a set of equations that reduced to Newton's at low speeds, but which diverged radically from Newton's equations at high speeds. Tests by others then showed that his equations seemed to predict the universe more accurately than Newton's equations did.
But to most people who read his papers, his assumptions were very uncertain. He was assuming things that most people knew couldn't be true, although experiments had said that they were true. Words like "absurd" were thrown around a lot at first. Then the results of tests started coming in.
Similarly, Darwin came up with a fairly simple, elegant explanation of all those fossils in the geological strata. But to verify his theories still takes a lot of work, which must be preceded by learning to understand the data that we have to work with. And there's far too much data there for one person; you have to have a certain amount of trust in other people's data and analyses if you're to take it all in.
In any case, it often takes a great deal of study, plus trust in your colleagues' data, to understand and accept the validity of a lot of scientific theories. We don't live long enough to do a thorough job of personally validating every scientific theory.
Of course, the main historical alternatives seem to be mostly theories that aren't founded on any observable data at all. I guess that is a lot simpler to understand, and you don't have to do any boring study to come up to speed.
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
This is, of course, a very traditional sort of utterly bogus metaphor.
The internet is, in fact, not capable of being used to beat up people. The IP protocol can't transport fists or baseball bats; it can only transport bits.
It's true that people often use such over-the-top metaphors to claim that they have been physically damaged by someone else's words. But they should just learn that old chant that I learned before first grade:
"Stick and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me."
Now, if the charge had been libel, the situation might be different. But claiming you've been "beat up" over the internet is merely laughable. The court should say just that, and charge the plaintant court costs.
... Galilean relativity, which was proven wrong by Einstein and friends.
...
Actually, strictly speaking, Einstein (and friends) didn't prove Galileo or anyone else wrong. That had already been done by others. Thus, precise measurements of the orbit of Mercury and turned up discrepancies with Newton's and others' laws of orbital mechanics. The Michaelson-Morley experiments produced the apparently-absurd result that light moved at the same speed relative to all observers, even if those observers were moving relative to each other or the light source. Etc.
What Einstein did was develop a new theoretic approach that could explain a number of these anomalies. It was then up to the scientific community to viciously attack Einstein's theories, and attempt to prove him wrong. They've been at this for a century now, and all of their tests so far have end up with results consistent with Einstein's theories, to within the error bounds of the measurements. In scientific circles, this constitutes "proof" that Einstein's theories are either correct, or are very close to correct.
Even then, the earlier theories hadn't really been proven wrong. Rather, they were shown to be merely good approximations. After all, if your instruments can measure something to 12 places, but Einstein's and Newton's equations predict a difference in the 20th place, you can't show either set of equations to be wrong. This is why those earlier "disproved" theories are still taught in science and engineering schools. Newton's equations are a lot simpler than Einstein's, and in situations where you can't measure the difference, you might as well use the simplest equations. You just have to be careful not to apply the simpler equations in situations where they aren't good enough.
But note that Einstein himself didn't disprove those earlier theories; that had been done by the others that found the anomalies. And Einstein didn't prove his own theories; that has been done by a century of tests by the entire scientific community. He did the really hard job: He came up with his wild new theories of a universe that behaved rather differently than anyone thought. But his theories were consistent with those strange observations. And his theories included equations that could be tested against the real universe. And his theories keep passing every test that anyone comes up with.
Now if we could get some other would-be scientists to present us with versions of their theories that can be tested against the real universe
Opera uses a full MDI interface. This is so handy for a browser that people started complaining that the other browsers didn't have this.
Well, this was one of the major reasons that I ignored Opera at first. Its MDI approach was so klunky and so hostile to sharing the screen among multiple tasks that I just wrote it off as the worst design I'd ever seen. With other browsers, each site could have its own window if I liked, and there weren't all those unusable screen areas like you got with Opera. Also, on my multi-desktop linux machine, I can have mozilla and/or firefox windows on all the desktops; Opera would only allow one window on one desktop. That's a good way to rule your app out among people who work with multiple desktops.
I'm still trying to figure out why anyone would want the MDI approach. I haven't found any situation where it's better than putting each "document" in a separate window that's managed by the windows manager.
It's curious that the tabbed approach is actually more useful. It sure looks like a special case of MDI, and many people don't see why it's useful. You just have to learn to restrict it to closely-related pages that share a common window shape, typically pages from a single site. Otherwise you spend half your time resizing the window, because of the idiotic size forcing that most sites do.
Now if we could only persuade the browser makers to permit multiple copies of the same browser. The conventional approach, with all windows managed by a single process, is invariably prone to having all its windows hang because of something you did in one window. The threads packages all seem to produce this behavior, in which a single blocked thread causes the entire process to hang. This is, of course, why multi-tasking was invented decades ago, so that a task's unused cpu cycles (typically due to waiting for some hardware) can be used by other tasks. But browser writers haven't yet caught onto the radical new idea of multi-tasking. Or maybe thty think that threads are the same thing.
Oh, well; give them another decade or two. In the meantime, we can continue to install 6 or 8 browsers on each machine, so that we can actually time-share our web access.
Microsoft gives away free Windows licenses at our University here. ... /me thinks it's to make sure every student knows how to work with Windows software, and all Software Engineering students know how to write Windows software...
Well, that latter point doesn't always work too well.
Over the years, I've learned to write software that ran on various releases of first DOS, then Windows. In no two cases was what I learned very similar to any of the others, and the software very rarely survived a transition to a major new release. How you compiled programs was always radically different from before.
OTOH, when I look at the examples in my 1970's-era edition of the C bible, then all still run fine on current versions of unix (or linux). The same cc command suffices to compile them. The same Makefiles can be used. Granted, all of these things have had major extensions. But my code from back then still works.
And, unlike the experience of most MS users, I can still read all my files from 30 years ago. So can my software.
I guess, from a Windows user's viewpoint, this just shows that unix systems are old-fashioned and obsolete. Ya think? Or could they have had some good ideas back in the 70's that are still good ideas despite all the other things that have come along?
Hmmm ... As before, I only see a checkbox to totally turn moderation on or off.
My complaint wasn't with being asked to moderate. It was with being asked 3 or 4 times per week. I wonder if there's a way to turn it down a bit? I also wonder what the normal frequency is. I don't seem to find these anywhere. But I haven't spent all that much time looking.
Well, maybe. But I've had a few fun experiences on projects where I took a big chunk of their legacy code and replaced it with something an order of magnitude smaller. Usually it ran about 10 times faster, too.
How do you think this was judged? Well, in effect I decreased the lines-of-code output of the team. This doesn't always make you a lot of friends. My person LOC output was effectively negative.
This doesn't necessarily look good on your record, to bosses who think that LOC is a useful measure of your accomplishments.
This is part of the explanation of why so much commercial software is such crap, of course.
And replacing LOC with a better measure of code size doesn't help. You really don't want to reward your programmers for maximizing the code used to accomplish a task. No matter how you measure the code, this is simply a recipe for big, slow software.
[I]f we argue TCO with Windows, we've already lost. Free Software is about FREEDOM, not price.
Indeed, and this is the aspect of free/open software that is getting attention in a lot of circles. In much of the world, you can make a convincing argument by simply asking "Do you want your data under the control of a giant American corporation?" This tends to get a lot of nervous looks, because so many people understand exactly what you're talking about.
I half-suspect that the whole Open Source movement is an attempt to get Linux people to forget about Free Software, too.
Well, maybe, for some of them. But othes use the acronym FOSS, Free and Open-Source Software, to emphasize that you really want both. If you are thinking about the above question, your first conclusion has to be that you follow the advice of any competent security adviser: Don't run software unless you have the source. This is the basic meaning of Open-Source Software. Without the source, that software could have anything hidden away inside, and you'd never know. It could be collecting your data and shipping it off to some obscure site (encrypted so you can't read the packets).
But being able to read the source isn't enough. You must be able to fix any problems you find. If there's spyware hidden inside, you must remove it. If it doesn't properly handle your language, you must fix that. If it can't handle some special conditions in your locale, you must fix that. If your organization has some special needs not known to the software's author, you must be able to implement features to support those needs. This is the meaning of Free Software: You are free to modify the software for your own needs.
If you really want your computers to be your computers, and not 0wned by some remote corporation, you need software that is both free and open-source. And you need people capable of studying the software, understanding it, and modifying it for your needs.
TCO is interesting, and helps get a foot in the door. But the real reason for Free/Open-Source Software is that it's the only way you can be sure that your computers will be working for you, and not for some unknown people somewhere else in the world. Both "Free" and "Open" are important; without both, each is worth little.
Oh, I dunno about that. Just a few days ago, in a discussion of the then-current google world-domination conspiracy theory, I posted a comment that made two points:
I got no replies to this. I did get one moderation: +1, Insightful. I've seen this repeatedly, for my comments and for others'.
So I'd say that slashdot's moderators are not all google fanboys. A lot of us like google, and wish them well against 800-pound gorillas like Microsoft (who is quite likely to "pull a Netscape" on them). But we still don't really trust them, any more than we trust any other big organization with its own interests and goals that we may not fully understand.
Now if I could just stop
22% of the code in a typical "Linux" distribution is written by the GNU, ...
Well, I've worked for a number of companies that try to judge their programmers' output by lines of code. I've found that a very effective way to fight this is to just say "Hey, that's a contest that I know how to win!"
Somehow I've never had to explain this to even the densest PHB.
GNU may indeed be more important than linux. But somehow, I suspect that counting lines of code isn't the right way to measure this. If so, well, I know how to win that contest. I suspect that a lot of others here do, too.
When you lose a democratic election, you shouldn't whine that the voters were wrong in not agreeing with you. If you do, you're basically arguing that democracy doesn't work ...
Well, this is a tech forum, "news for nerd", and tech questions are rarely decided democratically. If they are decided at all (and often they aren't), they are decided either by technical correctness, or by which company has the most marketing clout (or clout with the standards committee).
And, of course, democracies can and do vote for the wrong candidate or decide wrongly on a referendum. Any competent historian can list many elections that had the "wrong" outcome from our advantage of hindsight. The phrase "unintended consequences" is very familiar to anyone who looks at how governments (or any human organization) works. The democratic process is rarely perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Usually all you need is that you make the right decision most of the time. Our experience is that democratic processes tend to make the right decision more often than other systems that we humans have tried. I.e., it's merely the best of a bad lot.
One of my favorite democratic screwups (a very appropriate term in this case) was the news story a couple of years ago of a town in the US state of Oregon that outlawed sex. This wasn't the intention, of course; they were actually trying to outlaw exhibitionism. But the law was phrased so as to make it illegal to engage in sexual activity "within view of any place, public or private". This pretty much outlawed sex anywhere within the town's jurisdiction. Such stories of utter numbskullness on the part of democratic governments abound in the historical archives. When they realize what they've done, most people just laugh, report it to news agencies, and move on.
You people don't give RMS and GNU enough credit. Without GNU, GNU/Linux is just a kernel.
;-). Although most people interact primarily via their machine's GUI, and couldn't use their machine without it, neither Stallman nor anyone else seems to want to give any credit to the authors of this software.
Well, I'm running KDE/GNU/Linux on my main box (though I'm typing this on Aqua/Darwin/OSX
Think of it: For the GUI you're using, how many of its authors can you name? Can you even find their names?
(Actually, I usually have half my screen taken up by text windows, terminals or editors or such, but that's another story.)