This was my understanding of the relationship, at least as of the beginning of this year. Things may have changed a bit since then. At least at the time, the bottom line was that Ubuntu was based off of a snapshot Debian unstable that was then bug fixed and a few packages were changed or tweaked. So it would be based off of Debian, but some of the packages were altered; thus, it wasn't necessarily fully Debian compatible.
BBC's current death toll for the bombing is 37. England has a population of 49 million, according to Wikipedia. At the homocide rate you quoted, that would imply 686 homocides per year in the country. It would seem, then, that the bombing doesn't even come close. Now, perhaps you meant something else, but even London's population is about 7 million, so that'd be about 99, which is still more than the bombing.
In addition, I think that the gradparent's point stands even better if you don't consider homocide (a relatively unlikely way to go in the UK) and consider all other possible ways one could die. The point is that statistically, terrorism (even at this level) is likely a very small contributor to your mortality rate. I don't think that's really something to think too much about today, as these events are tragic and horrible either way, but it is something to consider rationally in the future when deciding how to deal with the issue.
The most amazing part is that Bush himself has said this. In an interview on the Today show last summer, when asked about the "war on terror" Bush said, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way." To be quite honest, when I heard that quotation I thought that was hands down the most intelligent thing I'd ever hear him say. He was absolutely right; however, he backpeddled the next day and everyone (including John Edwards and other democrats) were saying, "He's wrong. We can so win!" It seems the whole country is in a state of denial on the issue.
Now, lest I seem to praise Bush too much, while I think he was right (before he recanted, anyway), I think his idea of the means to make terrorism "less acceptable" is completely wrong, and those means are making matters worse, not better. The problem is that in the end he is talking about winning "hearts and minds", and dropping bombs on people is not a very good way to do that.
What makes Plasma Cosmology a fringe theory is not that I say it's useless, but that almost every expert in the field feels that way. Certainly, a theory can be a fringe theory and later turn out to be useful, but the vast majority of them do not. My purpose was to inform people of how the scientific community views this idea.
Standard cosmology and Plasma Cosmology are certainly not "just as good" as you suggest. The former has proven extremely useful, which is why it is used by scientists across the world to understand phenomena in our universe. It has both predicted phenomena that were later measured and it has allowed us to understand other information we previously could not. Plasma Cosmology, by contrast has not done any of that. It has offered no new predictions that have been verified, and it has only been able to match existing measurements by explanations involving things like scattering processes that have never actually been observed in plasma. In short, Plasma Cosmology has not been useful, which is why it has been relegated to the fringe.
Standard cosmology certainly has made predictions, not only retrodictions. I'll take the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) as an example. You can look at the time line here to see that Gamow and colleagues predicted the existence and approximate temperature of the cosmic microwave background years before it was detected by Penzias and Wilson. I might point out that in addition to the existence and temperature of the radiation, the fact that it is nearly isotropic except for a dipole component (due to the motion of the earth) is also a non-trivial prediction that has turned out to be true. Not to mention subsequent predictions of ansitropy due to the presence of galaxies and other processes. I'm sure that there have been some results that were not correctly predicted due to details that were only realized later; however, in all big bang cosmology has been extraordinarily successful with respect to it's predictions about the CMBR.
In other cases like elemental abundances and cosmological redshift, big bang cosmology allowed us to understand how our measurements arose as a consequence of things we already knew about nuclear physics and general relativity.
I should also point out that the "Electric Universe" is a variant of Plasma Cosmology which doesn't even deserve the label "fringe theory", since it claims many things that are just manifestly false. I think even proponants of Plasma Cosmology wouldn't put any stock in the Electric Universe theories. See other replies to the parent for links debunking of Electric Universe claims.
From what little I know, the so-called "Electric Universe" theory (or theories) is a variant on Plasma Cosmology [wikipedia.org]. Plasma Cosmology is a fringe scientific theory that asserts that plasma physics should play a more prominent role in cosmology and that the electromagnetic force should be considered more important than gravity in the evolution of the universe. This idea apparently originated with Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén.
Of course, even Nobel Prize winners make mistakes (or at least the one I know does:-) ). Plasma Cosmology is almost uniformly viewed as incorrect and irrelevant by physicists and astronomers. The reasons, as far as I can tell, are that standard cosmology has been quite successful in predicting things like the cosmic microwave background and elemental abundances, not to mention things like cosmological redshift. Plasma cosmology cannot reproduce these things without adding on a lot of convoluted features that rely on some unproven (and seemingly outlandish) new plasma physics that has never been seen on Earth. In short, Plasma Cosmology doesn't explain a lot observations correctly in a simple way. It hasn't proven itself useful, which in the end is the measure of a good scientific theory.
So the short answer is, "Yes, it's BS". Now cue the die hard supporters claiming there's some sort of conspiracy to cover-up their theory, which is pretty silly if you know how science really works.
Oh, it's true, you can often get buy without learning Spanish even in places with a large latino population. I guess my point is that if it becomes an issue, it's far more rational to just learn Spanish than to bitch and moan and try to declare an official language.
There's some logic to what you've said. Someone visiting an English speaking country should have no expectation that the people there will speak any other language. Second, if you were to feel compelled to speak a second language, it would make sense that you would speak "the international language". That used to be French, but these day's it's English. This is, in large part, why even very educated people often only speak English.
You said, "Americans are not stealing jobs through offshoring companies," but in fact it's mostly that Americans are giving away those jobs to off-shore companies. The Americans in question are the in management of those corporations, and they are the ones who rationally deserve the blame.
Finally, I will point out that Spanish is now spoken quite widely in the USA, especially in the southern portion of the country. If one is rational, it makes sense to learn that language, because it will make everyone's lives easier. However, if one is a subborn jackass, then it may be more natural to bitch and moan and try to declare an official language than to make the rational choice.
It's hard to precisely define terrorism in a satisfactory way, but definitely one component must be that the point of the attack is to inspire terror rather than to directly kill or incapacitate an adversary. So, it wouldn't be terrorism to go directly after the people who harmed you (though it might be illegal and/or unethical), but it would be to attack a third party "as a warning to the rest". To use your example, the closest analog would be if the person began killing random customers with the idea that it would keep customers away and ruin the store. The point is that the customers are not directly involved.
I'll admit my knowledge of American history is somewhat limited, but I didn't think Washington went around slaughtering large groups of defenseless civilians for effect. I thought he mainly fought engangements against British soldiers (though he may have use guerrilla tactics). Let me suggest that there is a big moral difference there.
The point is that Washington and other revolutionaries are rebels, whereas Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist. Had he been attacking a legitimate military target as part of an actual revolution, that would be different.
I do agree, however, that the terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" are overused. In the sense of the term I just offered, there's a good argument that the bombing of the USS Cole was not a terrorist attack. There's also a tendancy to only apply it to people we don't agree with. For example, ask yourself whether my description of killing defenseless people for effect would describe the bombings of Dresden or Hiroshima by the US during WWII.
Their qubits actually *are* entangled, as the various magnetic fields interact --- that's the whole point.
Not necessarily. It really all depends on how the decoherence time scale for this system relates to the strength of the interactions. It would still find the global minimum even if decoherence was very fast, because each dipole individually will still tunnel to a lower energy state.
It sounds like what they're describing is actually a set of Josephson junctions. People think those might be able to be used a viable qubits; however, the trick is having and maintaining coherence. This is what allows quantum computation. From the description they give of this system, it sound like they're not concerned with long term coherence, only with using tunneling to perform a sort of "annealing" algorithm to find the lowest energy state. So I think the grandparent it right, this is not a quantum computer in the ordinary sense.
Why? i want the freedom to murder as much as possible unhindered. are you trying to limit my freedom to do so? seriously the thing with freedom is that open-ended overarcing freedom will always anger someone. you say i shouldnt have the freedom to murder in foreign countries. So right there you are advocating restrictions based on your personal views.
Every civil society limits some freedoms, when those freedoms encroach upon the rights of others (e.g. the "freedom" to murder others). Those who believe in liberty hold freedom of speech as the most essential freedom that underlies all others, and we believe in the right of individuals to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when it doesn't violate those liberties for others. You're suggesting your "freedom" is to make proffit off of the oppression of others, but that's exactly the sort of thing that is antithetical to true liberty.
The oddest thing that I can think of is that we live on a planet TEEMING with life and there is evidence of only ONE (1) species that has attained the level of intelligence posessed by humans.
Well, Neanderthals are another species (Homo neanderthalensis) that reached at least the level of using stone tools. I don't know if that's "the level of intelligence posessed by humans", but it seems pretty close.
Except that space isn't infinitely large, and doesn't actually have an infinite amount of matter in it.
In fact, recent data from the WMAP mission argue that the Universe is flat, and, so, infinite in extenent. It's not clear to me if we can rule out the possibility that the universe is actually finite but just very large, however. Either way, it's fair to say that current data suggest the universe is possibly (or even likely) infinite in extent.
Now, of course, the speed of light is finite, so even if the Universe IS infinite you can only ever see a finite extent of it (though that amount grows in time). People still sometimes talk of the "radius" of the Universe, but they're generally talking about the size of the observable portion.
(There was a brief disscussion of the possibility of a "soccer-ball shaped" Universe right after WMAP data came out, but that has since been largely dismissed. It seems the analysis that led to that conclusion was flawed.)
I would agree that in my experience Opera and Firefox are pretty competitive with one another, but one big difference that didn't seem to get much discussion was the price. Unless things have recently changed, you have to either pay for Opera or have it show you banner ads. If the browsers are otherwise comparable, that difference would seem to tip the balance in the direction of Firefox. I know it did for me.
I used to use Opera 6. I even paid for the ad-free version I liked it so much. The interface was good, and most of all it was fast, even on my slow machine. Eventually I switched to Mozilla/Firefox when it became more stable and seemed to work better with the websites I frequented. I really did like Opera quite a bit, but now that I'm back in grad school and every dollar counts, I can't see going back to paying for a browser if I can get a roughly equivalent one for free. I don't mind banner ads that much and used the ad supported one for a while, but I just found I couldn't give up the screen space that the ads took up.
Actually, I'd expect that each version of a piece of software has some finite number of vulnerabilities V, and I'd think that with a user base U that after an amount of time t you'd have found a number of exploits something like E = V(1 - exp(-a*U*t)), where "a" is some constant for that particular piece of software. Yes, I just pulled that out of my ass, but the point is that I'd expect diminishing returns with more users and time, since eventually you will have found all the easy to find vulnerabilities and it will take longer and longer to find the really obscure ones.
You seem to be suggesting a linear relationship E = a*V*U*t. Notice, that will be a good description of my model at very early times (t much less than 1/(a*V*U) ) or at all times in the limit a -> 0 and V -> infinity while V*a stays finite. Now it seems unlikely that we can think of IE being in the early time stage of behavior, but, admittedly, maybe an infinite number of vulnerabilities is a good model for IE; however, I wouldn't expect a linear model to work very well for most software.
I don't recall that from the Bible, but if it's true here's a guess: Eratosthenes not only knew the earth was a sphere but measured its circumference 240 years before the birth of Christ.
You're operating under the misconception that evolution is fundamentally different than any other scientific theory. I think it's understable from an outsiders viewpoint, so let me try to illustrate why it's a misconception.
Evolution matches with much of what we know about the world. We can now study genetics in detail, and we can see natural selection at work directly in organisms with short reproductive cycles. Examination of fossil records have born out its predictions about the progression of species and common ancestors. The ideas upon which evolution is based, then, are strongly supported by our observations, which is why the scientific community has little significant debate about whether evolution is the correct explanation for, as Darwin put it, the origin of species.
As with practically any scientific theory, however, not all phenomena are understood and we are constantly revising our understanding of the details of evolution, though the general picture remains the same. Scientists certainly do disagree about some of the details of evolutionary mechanisms, and they are doing their best to figure out these puzzles. The vast majority are agreed that that solution clearly lies in an evolutionary theory, because of all the correct explanations it has given us so far.
Now, I've said this is no different than any other scientific theory. Let me choose something from my field of expertise, physics, to make the comparison. Electromagnetism is a theory, the one according to which all your electrical devices, including the computer you're using to read this, operate. Like evolution, it has had many predictive successes, and like evolution it has had many revisions as we learned more.
Physicists first thought that electricity was some sort of a fluid. This allowed them to explain much of how static charge behaves and electric circuits function, but there were some things they couldn't explain. Later, they revised the theory, because they learned that electricity was the movement of individual particles (usually electrons), not a perfect, continuous fluid. They thought they had things pretty well nailed down until they realized that with their understanding of electromagnetism and mechanics, atoms could not exist. More discoveries led to quantum mechanics and finally the formulation of another revision of electromagnetism, called Quantum Electrodynamics (QED for short). This is often claimed to make more accurate predictions than any other scientific theory, yet there are still phenomena involving electromagnetism like sonoluminescense that we don't understand, and we're fairly sure that something new happens at very high energies (e.g. grand unification).
The point here is that like evolution, scientists have revised electromagnetism many times, still debate some of the details (again, for example, GUTs), and there are still phenomena involving it we can't explain. But when we teach children electromagnetism in high school, we don't say "it's just a theory" or "electromagnetism is not fully proven fact". We hopefully teach them how the scientific method works, so that they know that science is an ever-growing understanding of the world and no theory is the final word. They should also know that just because electromagnetism is a theory doesn't mean they should doubt that their TV will still turn on tomorrow.
By singling out evolution and casting doubt on it, we would be deceiving children by pretending that it's different than any other scientific theory and even more so if we invite pseudoscience under the name of "Intelligent Design" into the classroom to masquerade as science. If I were a high school teacher, I would not debate alternative theories of electromagnetism in the classroom, because students don't have sufficient time or expertise for that, so they wouldn't really profit of it. I would teach the scientific consensus view point (even independant of my personal views) that experts agree upon. In a Biology class, the same logic holds for evo
really, why not lay out an experiment for me that can disprove the numerous theories put forth by evolutionists that try to explain what happened before the big bang (you know, I mean here we have essentially nothing or a tiny super-singularity but what was before. I've heard a half dozen theories but I don't see a discernable test for any of them.
The theory of natural selection and Darwinian evolution doesn't have anything to do with the big bang. They're independant theories based upon mostly independant evidence. One could be true while the other is false. In any case, for the moment both seem to explain our observations pretty well. The question of what happened in the very early universe (strictly speaking this is not before the big bang, actually slightly after) is still open, but trying to figure out possible explanations and test them is what many many scientists are up to. For any scientist studying these issues, obtaining testable ideas is the ultimate goal. Reading some accounts of what's going on in Physics may not give you that impression, but's it's the truth.
WMAP is probably one of the most recent and most successful attempts to directly measure evidence from the early universe, but experiments at RHIC and elsewhere are also probing the physics that would have been important at that point in time. These experiements are constantly giving us new data to help us understand the early universe and rule out many candidate theories about what might have been going on then. This is precisely the sort of thing that differentiates legitimate science from pseudoscience like intelligent design.
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I meant profit off of a closed-source derivative of your code. Yes, of course you can profit using open source software. The point is that the GPL ensures you give back (in code) to people who helped create the software.
How is this news to anyone? I must be missing something. Yes, an open source project can be acquired if every contributor agrees (licensing the their contributions to the company under a different license). And even then, the last free version is still around to be used and improved. I don't think this is some big "threat" to open source, given that it would only be feasible in a project where there weren't any major contributors to the project devoted to keeping it open. Sure it's possible, and it may happen now and again, but it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me.
I guess I thought the point of GPL and similar licenses was that no one would be able to profit off your code without your consent. This article doesn't seem to really challenge that. I guess you could make a small contribution to a project, and then it could be privatized without your portion (with replacement code written by someone else). But that doesn't seem like a very significant loss, given that you'd still have access to the last free version, and they'd have to redo your work. Not to mention that I'd think this would be risky ground for a company due to possible copyright infringement suits over the replacement code.
Not sure I qualify as the poor, but maybe the "not affluent". My view is that I don't really need to be able to watch "Everybody Loves Reaming", "American Idol", or whatever other god-forsaken crap they have on with more pixels. Most things on TV don't benefit much from higher resolution, especially if you don't have a huge TV. What about DVDs? Well, I admit that watching the MPEG encoding artifacts can be amusing, but it's also not worth paying for. If they were the same price, sure I might choose HDTV, but it doesn't offer significant benefits, so I'm not willing to pay a lot extra for it. Then you throw in buying all new DVDs and all this broadcast flag nonsense. No thank you! I'll stick with what I've got.
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This was my understanding of the relationship, at least as of the beginning of this year. Things may have changed a bit since then. At least at the time, the bottom line was that Ubuntu was based off of a snapshot Debian unstable that was then bug fixed and a few packages were changed or tweaked. So it would be based off of Debian, but some of the packages were altered; thus, it wasn't necessarily fully Debian compatible.
BBC's current death toll for the bombing is 37. England has a population of 49 million, according to Wikipedia. At the homocide rate you quoted, that would imply 686 homocides per year in the country. It would seem, then, that the bombing doesn't even come close. Now, perhaps you meant something else, but even London's population is about 7 million, so that'd be about 99, which is still more than the bombing.
In addition, I think that the gradparent's point stands even better if you don't consider homocide (a relatively unlikely way to go in the UK) and consider all other possible ways one could die. The point is that statistically, terrorism (even at this level) is likely a very small contributor to your mortality rate. I don't think that's really something to think too much about today, as these events are tragic and horrible either way, but it is something to consider rationally in the future when deciding how to deal with the issue.
The most amazing part is that Bush himself has said this. In an interview on the Today show last summer, when asked about the "war on terror" Bush said, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world. Let's put it that way." To be quite honest, when I heard that quotation I thought that was hands down the most intelligent thing I'd ever hear him say. He was absolutely right; however, he backpeddled the next day and everyone (including John Edwards and other democrats) were saying, "He's wrong. We can so win!" It seems the whole country is in a state of denial on the issue.
Now, lest I seem to praise Bush too much, while I think he was right (before he recanted, anyway), I think his idea of the means to make terrorism "less acceptable" is completely wrong, and those means are making matters worse, not better. The problem is that in the end he is talking about winning "hearts and minds", and dropping bombs on people is not a very good way to do that.
What makes Plasma Cosmology a fringe theory is not that I say it's useless, but that almost every expert in the field feels that way. Certainly, a theory can be a fringe theory and later turn out to be useful, but the vast majority of them do not. My purpose was to inform people of how the scientific community views this idea.
Standard cosmology and Plasma Cosmology are certainly not "just as good" as you suggest. The former has proven extremely useful, which is why it is used by scientists across the world to understand phenomena in our universe. It has both predicted phenomena that were later measured and it has allowed us to understand other information we previously could not. Plasma Cosmology, by contrast has not done any of that. It has offered no new predictions that have been verified, and it has only been able to match existing measurements by explanations involving things like scattering processes that have never actually been observed in plasma. In short, Plasma Cosmology has not been useful, which is why it has been relegated to the fringe.
Standard cosmology certainly has made predictions, not only retrodictions. I'll take the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) as an example. You can look at the time line here to see that Gamow and colleagues predicted the existence and approximate temperature of the cosmic microwave background years before it was detected by Penzias and Wilson. I might point out that in addition to the existence and temperature of the radiation, the fact that it is nearly isotropic except for a dipole component (due to the motion of the earth) is also a non-trivial prediction that has turned out to be true. Not to mention subsequent predictions of ansitropy due to the presence of galaxies and other processes. I'm sure that there have been some results that were not correctly predicted due to details that were only realized later; however, in all big bang cosmology has been extraordinarily successful with respect to it's predictions about the CMBR.
In other cases like elemental abundances and cosmological redshift, big bang cosmology allowed us to understand how our measurements arose as a consequence of things we already knew about nuclear physics and general relativity.
I should also point out that the "Electric Universe" is a variant of Plasma Cosmology which doesn't even deserve the label "fringe theory", since it claims many things that are just manifestly false. I think even proponants of Plasma Cosmology wouldn't put any stock in the Electric Universe theories. See other replies to the parent for links debunking of Electric Universe claims.
Doh, botched the link. Wikipedia article on Plasma Cosmology that mentions "The Electric Universe.
From what little I know, the so-called "Electric Universe" theory (or theories) is a variant on Plasma Cosmology [wikipedia.org]. Plasma Cosmology is a fringe scientific theory that asserts that plasma physics should play a more prominent role in cosmology and that the electromagnetic force should be considered more important than gravity in the evolution of the universe. This idea apparently originated with Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén.
Of course, even Nobel Prize winners make mistakes (or at least the one I know does :-) ). Plasma Cosmology is almost uniformly viewed as incorrect and irrelevant by physicists and astronomers. The reasons, as far as I can tell, are that standard cosmology has been quite successful in predicting things like the cosmic microwave background and elemental abundances, not to mention things like cosmological redshift. Plasma cosmology cannot reproduce these things without adding on a lot of convoluted features that rely on some unproven (and seemingly outlandish) new plasma physics that has never been seen on Earth. In short, Plasma Cosmology doesn't explain a lot observations correctly in a simple way. It hasn't proven itself useful, which in the end is the measure of a good scientific theory.
So the short answer is, "Yes, it's BS". Now cue the die hard supporters claiming there's some sort of conspiracy to cover-up their theory, which is pretty silly if you know how science really works.
Oh, it's true, you can often get buy without learning Spanish even in places with a large latino population. I guess my point is that if it becomes an issue, it's far more rational to just learn Spanish than to bitch and moan and try to declare an official language.
There's some logic to what you've said. Someone visiting an English speaking country should have no expectation that the people there will speak any other language. Second, if you were to feel compelled to speak a second language, it would make sense that you would speak "the international language". That used to be French, but these day's it's English. This is, in large part, why even very educated people often only speak English.
You said, "Americans are not stealing jobs through offshoring companies," but in fact it's mostly that Americans are giving away those jobs to off-shore companies. The Americans in question are the in management of those corporations, and they are the ones who rationally deserve the blame.
Finally, I will point out that Spanish is now spoken quite widely in the USA, especially in the southern portion of the country. If one is rational, it makes sense to learn that language, because it will make everyone's lives easier. However, if one is a subborn jackass, then it may be more natural to bitch and moan and try to declare an official language than to make the rational choice.
It's hard to precisely define terrorism in a satisfactory way, but definitely one component must be that the point of the attack is to inspire terror rather than to directly kill or incapacitate an adversary. So, it wouldn't be terrorism to go directly after the people who harmed you (though it might be illegal and/or unethical), but it would be to attack a third party "as a warning to the rest". To use your example, the closest analog would be if the person began killing random customers with the idea that it would keep customers away and ruin the store. The point is that the customers are not directly involved.
I'll admit my knowledge of American history is somewhat limited, but I didn't think Washington went around slaughtering large groups of defenseless civilians for effect. I thought he mainly fought engangements against British soldiers (though he may have use guerrilla tactics). Let me suggest that there is a big moral difference there.
The point is that Washington and other revolutionaries are rebels, whereas Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist. Had he been attacking a legitimate military target as part of an actual revolution, that would be different.
I do agree, however, that the terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" are overused. In the sense of the term I just offered, there's a good argument that the bombing of the USS Cole was not a terrorist attack. There's also a tendancy to only apply it to people we don't agree with. For example, ask yourself whether my description of killing defenseless people for effect would describe the bombings of Dresden or Hiroshima by the US during WWII.
Not necessarily. It really all depends on how the decoherence time scale for this system relates to the strength of the interactions. It would still find the global minimum even if decoherence was very fast, because each dipole individually will still tunnel to a lower energy state.
It sounds like what they're describing is actually a set of Josephson junctions. People think those might be able to be used a viable qubits; however, the trick is having and maintaining coherence. This is what allows quantum computation. From the description they give of this system, it sound like they're not concerned with long term coherence, only with using tunneling to perform a sort of "annealing" algorithm to find the lowest energy state. So I think the grandparent it right, this is not a quantum computer in the ordinary sense.
Right, because getting a computer to match up names from visa applications to a list of "offenders" would be way too difficult.
Why? i want the freedom to murder as much as possible unhindered. are you trying to limit my freedom to do so? seriously the thing with freedom is that open-ended overarcing freedom will always anger someone. you say i shouldnt have the freedom to murder in foreign countries. So right there you are advocating restrictions based on your personal views.
Every civil society limits some freedoms, when those freedoms encroach upon the rights of others (e.g. the "freedom" to murder others). Those who believe in liberty hold freedom of speech as the most essential freedom that underlies all others, and we believe in the right of individuals to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when it doesn't violate those liberties for others. You're suggesting your "freedom" is to make proffit off of the oppression of others, but that's exactly the sort of thing that is antithetical to true liberty.
Well, Neanderthals are another species (Homo neanderthalensis) that reached at least the level of using stone tools. I don't know if that's "the level of intelligence posessed by humans", but it seems pretty close.
In fact, recent data from the WMAP mission argue that the Universe is flat, and, so, infinite in extenent. It's not clear to me if we can rule out the possibility that the universe is actually finite but just very large, however. Either way, it's fair to say that current data suggest the universe is possibly (or even likely) infinite in extent.
Now, of course, the speed of light is finite, so even if the Universe IS infinite you can only ever see a finite extent of it (though that amount grows in time). People still sometimes talk of the "radius" of the Universe, but they're generally talking about the size of the observable portion.
(There was a brief disscussion of the possibility of a "soccer-ball shaped" Universe right after WMAP data came out, but that has since been largely dismissed. It seems the analysis that led to that conclusion was flawed.)
I would agree that in my experience Opera and Firefox are pretty competitive with one another, but one big difference that didn't seem to get much discussion was the price. Unless things have recently changed, you have to either pay for Opera or have it show you banner ads. If the browsers are otherwise comparable, that difference would seem to tip the balance in the direction of Firefox. I know it did for me.
I used to use Opera 6. I even paid for the ad-free version I liked it so much. The interface was good, and most of all it was fast, even on my slow machine. Eventually I switched to Mozilla/Firefox when it became more stable and seemed to work better with the websites I frequented. I really did like Opera quite a bit, but now that I'm back in grad school and every dollar counts, I can't see going back to paying for a browser if I can get a roughly equivalent one for free. I don't mind banner ads that much and used the ad supported one for a while, but I just found I couldn't give up the screen space that the ads took up.
Actually, I'd expect that each version of a piece of software has some finite number of vulnerabilities V, and I'd think that with a user base U that after an amount of time t you'd have found a number of exploits something like E = V(1 - exp(-a*U*t)), where "a" is some constant for that particular piece of software. Yes, I just pulled that out of my ass, but the point is that I'd expect diminishing returns with more users and time, since eventually you will have found all the easy to find vulnerabilities and it will take longer and longer to find the really obscure ones.
You seem to be suggesting a linear relationship E = a*V*U*t. Notice, that will be a good description of my model at very early times (t much less than 1/(a*V*U) ) or at all times in the limit a -> 0 and V -> infinity while V*a stays finite. Now it seems unlikely that we can think of IE being in the early time stage of behavior, but, admittedly, maybe an infinite number of vulnerabilities is a good model for IE; however, I wouldn't expect a linear model to work very well for most software.
I don't recall that from the Bible, but if it's true here's a guess: Eratosthenes not only knew the earth was a sphere but measured its circumference 240 years before the birth of Christ.
You're operating under the misconception that evolution is fundamentally different than any other scientific theory. I think it's understable from an outsiders viewpoint, so let me try to illustrate why it's a misconception.
Evolution matches with much of what we know about the world. We can now study genetics in detail, and we can see natural selection at work directly in organisms with short reproductive cycles. Examination of fossil records have born out its predictions about the progression of species and common ancestors. The ideas upon which evolution is based, then, are strongly supported by our observations, which is why the scientific community has little significant debate about whether evolution is the correct explanation for, as Darwin put it, the origin of species.
As with practically any scientific theory, however, not all phenomena are understood and we are constantly revising our understanding of the details of evolution, though the general picture remains the same. Scientists certainly do disagree about some of the details of evolutionary mechanisms, and they are doing their best to figure out these puzzles. The vast majority are agreed that that solution clearly lies in an evolutionary theory, because of all the correct explanations it has given us so far.
Now, I've said this is no different than any other scientific theory. Let me choose something from my field of expertise, physics, to make the comparison. Electromagnetism is a theory, the one according to which all your electrical devices, including the computer you're using to read this, operate. Like evolution, it has had many predictive successes, and like evolution it has had many revisions as we learned more.
Physicists first thought that electricity was some sort of a fluid. This allowed them to explain much of how static charge behaves and electric circuits function, but there were some things they couldn't explain. Later, they revised the theory, because they learned that electricity was the movement of individual particles (usually electrons), not a perfect, continuous fluid. They thought they had things pretty well nailed down until they realized that with their understanding of electromagnetism and mechanics, atoms could not exist. More discoveries led to quantum mechanics and finally the formulation of another revision of electromagnetism, called Quantum Electrodynamics (QED for short). This is often claimed to make more accurate predictions than any other scientific theory, yet there are still phenomena involving electromagnetism like sonoluminescense that we don't understand, and we're fairly sure that something new happens at very high energies (e.g. grand unification).
The point here is that like evolution, scientists have revised electromagnetism many times, still debate some of the details (again, for example, GUTs), and there are still phenomena involving it we can't explain. But when we teach children electromagnetism in high school, we don't say "it's just a theory" or "electromagnetism is not fully proven fact". We hopefully teach them how the scientific method works, so that they know that science is an ever-growing understanding of the world and no theory is the final word. They should also know that just because electromagnetism is a theory doesn't mean they should doubt that their TV will still turn on tomorrow.
By singling out evolution and casting doubt on it, we would be deceiving children by pretending that it's different than any other scientific theory and even more so if we invite pseudoscience under the name of "Intelligent Design" into the classroom to masquerade as science. If I were a high school teacher, I would not debate alternative theories of electromagnetism in the classroom, because students don't have sufficient time or expertise for that, so they wouldn't really profit of it. I would teach the scientific consensus view point (even independant of my personal views) that experts agree upon. In a Biology class, the same logic holds for evo
The theory of natural selection and Darwinian evolution doesn't have anything to do with the big bang. They're independant theories based upon mostly independant evidence. One could be true while the other is false. In any case, for the moment both seem to explain our observations pretty well. The question of what happened in the very early universe (strictly speaking this is not before the big bang, actually slightly after) is still open, but trying to figure out possible explanations and test them is what many many scientists are up to. For any scientist studying these issues, obtaining testable ideas is the ultimate goal. Reading some accounts of what's going on in Physics may not give you that impression, but's it's the truth.
WMAP is probably one of the most recent and most successful attempts to directly measure evidence from the early universe, but experiments at RHIC and elsewhere are also probing the physics that would have been important at that point in time. These experiements are constantly giving us new data to help us understand the early universe and rule out many candidate theories about what might have been going on then. This is precisely the sort of thing that differentiates legitimate science from pseudoscience like intelligent design.
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I meant profit off of a closed-source derivative of your code. Yes, of course you can profit using open source software. The point is that the GPL ensures you give back (in code) to people who helped create the software.
Yes, you've suffered oh so greatly! Perhaps there should also be a moderation "Whiney", so that I can set the appropriate modifier.
How is this news to anyone? I must be missing something. Yes, an open source project can be acquired if every contributor agrees (licensing the their contributions to the company under a different license). And even then, the last free version is still around to be used and improved. I don't think this is some big "threat" to open source, given that it would only be feasible in a project where there weren't any major contributors to the project devoted to keeping it open. Sure it's possible, and it may happen now and again, but it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me.
I guess I thought the point of GPL and similar licenses was that no one would be able to profit off your code without your consent. This article doesn't seem to really challenge that. I guess you could make a small contribution to a project, and then it could be privatized without your portion (with replacement code written by someone else). But that doesn't seem like a very significant loss, given that you'd still have access to the last free version, and they'd have to redo your work. Not to mention that I'd think this would be risky ground for a company due to possible copyright infringement suits over the replacement code.
Not sure I qualify as the poor, but maybe the "not affluent". My view is that I don't really need to be able to watch "Everybody Loves Reaming", "American Idol", or whatever other god-forsaken crap they have on with more pixels. Most things on TV don't benefit much from higher resolution, especially if you don't have a huge TV. What about DVDs? Well, I admit that watching the MPEG encoding artifacts can be amusing, but it's also not worth paying for. If they were the same price, sure I might choose HDTV, but it doesn't offer significant benefits, so I'm not willing to pay a lot extra for it. Then you throw in buying all new DVDs and all this broadcast flag nonsense. No thank you! I'll stick with what I've got.