gnome/gtk developers have been ignoring this for quite some time, in spite of it coming up several times. To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui (so, for example, you can add menu options to the current vocabulary, or read them to blind users). accessibility has to be built in from the ground up -- not tacked on as some separate project.
Some personal experiences: I've programmed most of my life, as a hobby, in industry, and in academia. I went to one of the best technical schools in the world. And when I looked for a job in this industry? I couldn't even get interviews. After some time, I eventually got a position that paid about half the going rate.
Eventually someone I'd worked with the last time I was in industry (about 4 years before) got me a job with a more typical salary. I didn't come remotely close to being "qualified" on paper, because the "job requirements" were preposterous. They've been very happy with my work.
I personally know about half a dozen people who have had similar experiences. I also know that in industry resume's from people who have be in academia are routinely tossed out without a glance.
The IT "shortage" of "qualified" workers is based on 1) inflating job requirements (as another poster said "required: 15 years experince with a 2 year old technology"), 2) ignoring anyone who's been in academia.
If U.S. companies really need better workers, let them invest in training the people who are here and need better jobs, rather than looking for ways to flood the job market.
> If you do useful work, your employer (unless he's stupid) will continue to keep you on.
Doh! Well, no. It's the pension. Companies talk employees out of most of their lives by promising that they will be taken care of in their old age -- by a pension. Then they fire older employees to avoid making good on the deal. Canning your older employees can do wonders for funding those 6 martini lunches. It also lets you give millions to politicians to pass tax incentives for companies that slash their workers' salaries (let's hear it for the CEO write-off! woo-hoo!); and from that windfall, they can give millions to politicians to arrange for more H1-B visas to kick the bottom out of the IT market; etc. etc. etc.
You'd best spend more time studying the history of labor in America.
... that's why it's stable (according to Metcalfe). Just one of the many brilliant things said on the show. I also liked the bit where Chris brought up the $0 marginal cost issue -- how one person can improve free software and everyone benefits, unlike the brick and mortar world, where improving your own car doesn't improve everyone else's. Metcalfe was either too dense to understand, or purposely avoided the question. It's hard to tell which, as he babbled about "you can have your neighbor work on your car". Doh!
This is perhaps the most fantastically ignorant commentary I've heard re: free software.
The problem with moving businesses out of high-tax states is low-tax states suck rocks. Lower life expectancy, higher pollution, few libraries or museums, etc. People flock to high-tax areas because they're really nice places to live.
If you move a business to some backwater, you not only have to live there yourself, you have to somehow come up with a bunch of employees who want to take a huge cut in standard of living.
(he says, looking out the window at the beautiful coastline of Santa Cruz)
"only those who actually care about the outcome will bother, and those will tend to be more informed than others"
pffft. yeah, right. I know plenty of people who are quite consistent about voting and are also completely partisan and completely uninformed. The most consistent voters are the True Believers who would vote for their party if they nominated a slime mold.
... there's also the "regressivity" problem that consumption taxes hit the young and the elderly more than the middle aged, since they buy more stuff (the young are buying clothes, houses, appliances, etc. the old travel more, have more medical expenses, etc.). The AARP always opposes these taxes & they're one of the most powerful lobbies in the country.
So even if a sales tax or VAT were a good idea (I'm dubious), it would likely be killed by our increasingly aged voters.
I have the misfortune of having to work with Word on occasion, and my wife uses it in her consulting business. Formatting problems crop up constantly when trading files with other Word users. Wasted time, wasted paper are just part of using Word. If m$ can't make two versions of Word that format the same document the same way, or even one version of Word that runs on two platforms (MacOS and Windows) and formats the same document the same way, why is anyone surprised that no one else can get it to work? It should be nuked from space and forgotten.
Guess I'll have to read Zodiac. But re: Cryptonomicon, and authors vs. characters, I considered it quite a bit while reading the book. All the "killing Nips" stuff was obviously war-time mental training & perhaps a reflection of the era -- not actually expressing any biggotry toward Nipponese. But through the rest of the book it just doesn't fly. Having Randy do his Angry White Male rant is just characterization, up to the point where he's ranting to these cardboard academics who have no brain. Then it's not characterization -- if it were there'd be a real character for him to talk to -- rather, it's a Message.
Similarly, we get the Message that feminists just want to be man-handled. That the Puritans were good, the 60's were bad, that the main villian was made evil by a 60's commune, etc., etc.
The defense of Manifest Destiny shows up during the modern-day story (not characterizing the 40's) from one of the great thinkers in the book. And the conversion of the Nipponese character is a plot element, not just characterization.
In short, if the plot conforms to the biases of the characters it's not just characterization anymore -- it a statement about the nature of things.
I'm very impressed with Stephenson's grasp of technology -- he's clearly someone who uses technology, who's been up to his elbows in it.
But good lord, the man is practically Rush Limbaugh's towel boy. His treatment of women is beyond pathetic. In Cryptonomicon he attempts a defense of Manifest Destiny (you remember -- the idea that it's ok for white Christians to commit genocide, because North America was given to them by God), presenting it as the only alternative to a straw-man mindless cultural relativism that holds that all cultures are equivalent. WTF? As if to underline this point, the only Nipponese characters in the book that aren't murderers and rapists have to reject their own culture and convert to Christianity.
I haven't read a more polemic book, or a book with more unrealistic and one-dimensional villains since Atlas Shrugged.
He can tell a good story, and his treatment of technology is great, but Stephenson also requires that his readers have a frontal lobotomy.
Aren't they talking about phase velocity? Which has been known from the begining to travel faster than light, but it doesn't matter because it doesn't actually carry anything (energy, information, etc.). In particular, it's not the quantity that is limited by C.
It seems like they begin a tortured description of phase velocity, but then don't go anywhere with it.
I'm sure there's news here, but the article doesn't make clear what it is.
shameless plug: xvoice can voice control your linux box today, using IBM's ViaVoice. http://xvoice.sourceforge.net. It's a non-integrated solution. It converts voice commands (defined by BNF grammars) into X events using Xtest. I write code by voice regularly, to avoid wrist and elbow pain.
Regarding ViaVoice, I've been hacking on XVoice recently, since the maintainer is currently tied up on other things. I have it running well enough to use XVoice for working on XVoice.;) So it can be used for coding. I'm hoping to release another patch this week, which allows complex commands like "go to line 234", "delete 5 lines", etc.
I'm finding two things important when working on code. First, it helps a *lot* to take advantage of scripting and completion capabilities of your editor, so you can say "copy this function", "move to the next function", "delete this switch block", or when entering variable names you only have to say the first couple letters & then use completion.
And second, when you need to send character commands (e.g. for spelling variable names, or sending commands you haven't mapped to phrases), it helps a *lot* to use a phonetic alphabet. ViaVoice (and people, for that matter) have trouble with "b" "p" "c" "t" "d", etc., all those "eeee" sounds are hard to distinguish. But if you map them to "alpha" "bravo" "charlie" "delta", etc., it works well, and as an added bonus you get to sound like an extra in Dr. Strangelove when you're writing code.
Pretty cool.
Anyone interested in XVoice can find info on freshmeat. I've posted some patches against the development version (0.7) on http://thecraftstudio.com/bcboy/xvoice. More to come, soon.
>When a patent is filed it usually means that if it were not, that knowledge would simply not exist at all.
That was certainly one of the ideas behind patents, along with the idea of disclosure so the knowledge ends up in the public domain after a bit.
These days, however, with more & more obvious things being patented, as well as found things like DNA, patents have become a way for any bozo to keep knowledge *out* of the public domain -- to hold an entire industry hostage.
Re:Any evidence of stories being squelched?
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
I wonder what could be considered "evidence" here. The media treatment of the WTO protests? CNN's deep-sixing the data in the Tailwind investigation? Their gag order on their own journalists? The wildly inaccurate reporting on the accuracy of our weapons in recent wars, and their overlooking of the Pentagon's reports on the same? There are hundreds of similar situations. It's hard to tell if there's anything to them, in part because there's been so little public discussion about them.
NPR is hardly independent these days, getting much of their funding from corporations (and so having to avoid stories that might run against corporate interest). About the only independent news sources left are the Pacifica stations, where it's frequently difficult to tell if the information is well supported, or being divined from the bottom of a crack pipe.
Wow, what a thoughtful reply. Is this slashdot, or am I lost?;) Someone should moderate it up. It's good to see people genuinely looking at this subject.
I'm familiar with the TIMSS results. Unfortunately, the results have been very misleadingly presented. The claims in boldface about how the sampling was strictly controlled should not be believed.
There were sampling and participation criteria for the test, but only 5 nations met them for the math tests, and only 6 nations met them for the physics tests. Other nations were included in the data, even though their sample sets were not valid.
Age was not controlled for in the tests. Indeed, you can control for years of schooling, or age, but not both, because of differences in educational systems. As it turns out, age correlates strongly with the results. So.... everyone write to your congressman to complain about when we start kindergarten.;) Really the age/years of schooling issue is very hard to resolve because they vary wildly between nations.
Some percentage of test items were matched to the curriculum of the nation being tested, on the theory that it makes no sense to test material which isn't being taught. However this wasn't done for the U.S. (not sure why).
Some countries tested only students in math and science track programs.
There are still more problems with the data. The point is not that the study was sloppily done -- it's extremely difficult to construct meaningful cross-cultural metrics of this sort. However, the data was presented in a highly misleading way, and was grossly misinterpreted by most people in the U.S. You largely won't find critiques of the data in the popular press, however there are some reviews in _Kappan_, Sep 98, and Oct 98, and there's an article in _Science_, 15 May 98.
> In America we seem to take education for > granted and are very far behind other countries > in regard to the quality of the education that > our children receive.
The emperor wears no data. It's amazing to me that no one else has commented on this part of the question. There have been no assessments of quality of education which have ranked U.S. schools as "far behind" other countries, much less "very far behind". This is just false.
The only assessments which have ranked U.S. schools near the bottom are ones that have suffered from systemic errors, such as uncontrolled sample sets.
The failure of our schools is a matter of faith these days. It seems no one is interested in looking at data.
> (I'm going to get labeled "Troll" or "Flamebait" for this!)
Or perhaps more accurately, "clueless", or "out to lunch". As others have pointed out, your working model of Darwinian evolution is wrong. Find a library.
Something that doesn't seem to have been pointed out yet is ALS is not conventionally a "disease". It's a "syndrome" -- meaning you are diagnosed with ALS when they eliminate all diseases which can be accurately diagnosed. As such, "ALS" could be one disease, or many.
It difficult, or impossible, to say whether Hawkings disease is genetic. There is a minority of people with ALS who seem to come to it genetically, but in the majority of people there's no evidence for a genetic cause.
Even in the genetic case, environment affects gene expression, so you could easily have a genetic "disease" which is only expressed in certain unusual settings (e.g. exposure to some synthetic chemical).
So in the majority of cases, even if your interpretation of Darwin weren't wrong, Darwin would be irrelevant -- the disease could appear in anyone as a matter of circumstance (like, say, falling off a building), not as a matter of gene selection (like, say, anemia)
I like how dozens of people are jumping in to complain about how evil osha is, how regulations are absurd, etc.
I was looking at some osha standards just a week or two ago, regarding chemical exposure. The osha standard is actually above the level at which you can see medical problems due to exposure. I.e. the standard is rougly "not enough to keep you healthy, but enough to keep you from being too sick to do your job."
This is over regulation? This is pathetic. You shouldn't have to trade your health for a job. Osha doesn't have half the bite people are claiming it does. America is quite lax about protecting the health of workers.
There are certainly quite long and specific regulations, but what everyone overlooks is They were put there for a reason: an employer somewhere found a way make money by sacrificing the health of their employees (probably without their knowledge or consent), and Osha had to add more regulation to close the loop-hole.
In other words, if industry were mature enough to behave responsibly, these regulations wouldn't exist. They aren't, so regulations are put in place, and industry has to live with the paper work.
this understates it just a bit, if disk space is an issue. emacs is one of the largest packages on any linux dist -- nearly as big as X. Here are some stats from redhat rpms:
... on small systems, emacs is the first thing to go.
There's also the issue that you have to know vi, anyway, if you do much system work: fitting emacs on a recovery disk is not fun. vim gives you advanced features w/o having to use a completely different editor during system recovery, or on space constrained systems.
In industry it is a matter of policy that investing in job training is a good move. Why isn't the same true of our school systems? Teachers typically get *no* training once they're hired.
Most remarkably, they get no training even after changes in the curriculum. Most curriculum documents are functionally paper weights, because the states that develop them never train their teachers.
Keeping abreast of new results in science is a similar problem. If you want teachers to know the latest science, to know the lastest studies of effective teaching methods, and to know how to implement a curriculum document, you have to train them.
Half the comments on the article start with "the sad state of public education", or some such drivel, and go on to promote their favorite solution. Another large number talk about how public education is "bureaucratized" and bloated -- government waste, blah, blah, blah.
The trouble is, neither of these ideas are remotely grounded in reality. The failure of our public schools is widely regarded as fact these days, when every measure we have (standardized tests) reports that they're doing a better job than they ever have from when we started recording this information.
The only time this isn't the case is in some international comparisons which failed to use valid sample sets: many other countries allowed students to self-select who would take the tests, rather than picking at random as the U.S. did. So it comes down to whether or not you know how to construct a valid random sample.
This data is very widely available & can be found in any library. There is NO data that our schools are failing, except in the minds of some extremists who would prefer to have education only for the rich.
And regarding the "bureaucracy", please go look up the budgets! In particular, California school districts have their budgets on-line. Public education administrations run on a fraction of what private school administrations run on, and a *tiny* fraction of what private businesses run on. Overwhelmingly, the money is making it to the classrooms. There just isn't much money. Comparing to other countries, the U.S. not spending a significantly different amount (it's near the bottom or top depending on whether you're using flat comparisons or cost of living comparisons), though the states with the most problems, like California, are also the states spending the least.
And, by the way, one of the largest expenses in public schools is taking care of special needs students -- something no private school is required to do. Our public schools could be run on much less money if they had the liberty of always chosing the best students, and rejecting those with learning problems. Private schools are already more bloated (discounting "workbook" schools, where they don't bother hiring teachers). If private schools were held to the same standards, their costs would soar through roof.
It's a bit surreal hearing people say the existance of a free code project means m$ doesn't have a monopoly. "Hey! As long as you're not actually, you know, in business or something, you can make a competing product! Where's the monopoly?" gee, idunno.;)
Slashdot Mirror
They don't know how you voted, but they do know IF you voted.
Try again?
gnome/gtk developers have been ignoring this for quite some time, in spite of it coming up several times. To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui (so, for example, you can add menu options to the current vocabulary, or read them to blind users). accessibility has to be built in from the ground up -- not tacked on as some separate project.
Some personal experiences: I've programmed most of my life, as a hobby, in industry, and in academia. I went to one of the best technical schools in the world. And when I looked for a job in this industry? I couldn't even get interviews. After some time, I eventually got a position that paid about half the going rate.
Eventually someone I'd worked with the last time I was in industry (about 4 years before) got me a job with a more typical salary. I didn't come remotely close to being "qualified" on paper, because the "job requirements" were preposterous. They've been very happy with my work.
I personally know about half a dozen people who have had similar experiences. I also know that in industry resume's from people who have be in academia are routinely tossed out without a glance.
The IT "shortage" of "qualified" workers is based on 1) inflating job requirements (as another poster said "required: 15 years experince with a 2 year old technology"), 2) ignoring anyone who's been in academia.
If U.S. companies really need better workers, let them invest in training the people who are here and need better jobs, rather than looking for ways to flood the job market.
> If you do useful work, your employer (unless he's stupid) will continue to keep you on.
Doh! Well, no. It's the pension. Companies talk employees out of most of their lives by promising that they will be taken care of in their old age -- by a pension. Then they fire older employees to avoid making good on the deal. Canning your older employees can do wonders for funding those 6 martini lunches. It also lets you give millions to politicians to pass tax incentives for companies that slash their workers' salaries (let's hear it for the CEO write-off! woo-hoo!); and from that windfall, they can give millions to politicians to arrange for more H1-B visas to kick the bottom out of the IT market; etc. etc. etc.
You'd best spend more time studying the history of labor in America.
... that's why it's stable (according to Metcalfe). Just one of the many brilliant things said on the show. I also liked the bit where Chris brought up the $0 marginal cost issue -- how one person can improve free software and everyone benefits, unlike the brick and mortar world, where improving your own car doesn't improve everyone else's. Metcalfe was either too dense to understand, or purposely avoided the question. It's hard to tell which, as he babbled about "you can have your neighbor work on your car". Doh!
This is perhaps the most fantastically ignorant commentary I've heard re: free software.
The problem with moving businesses out of high-tax states is low-tax states suck rocks. Lower life expectancy, higher pollution, few libraries or museums, etc. People flock to high-tax areas because they're really nice places to live.
If you move a business to some backwater, you not only have to live there yourself, you have to somehow come up with a bunch of employees who want to take a huge cut in standard of living.
(he says, looking out the window at the beautiful coastline of Santa Cruz)
"only those who actually care about the outcome will bother, and those will tend to be more informed than others"
pffft. yeah, right. I know plenty of people who are quite consistent about voting and are also completely partisan and completely uninformed. The most consistent voters are the True Believers who would vote for their party if they nominated a slime mold.
... there's also the "regressivity" problem that consumption taxes hit the young and the elderly more than the middle aged, since they buy more stuff (the young are buying clothes, houses, appliances, etc. the old travel more, have more medical expenses, etc.). The AARP always opposes these taxes & they're one of the most powerful lobbies in the country.
So even if a sales tax or VAT were a good idea (I'm dubious), it would likely be killed by our increasingly aged voters.
I have the misfortune of having to work with Word on occasion, and my wife uses it in her consulting business. Formatting problems crop up constantly when trading files with other Word users. Wasted time, wasted paper are just part of using Word. If m$ can't make two versions of Word that format the same document the same way, or even one version of Word that runs on two platforms (MacOS and Windows) and formats the same document the same way, why is anyone surprised that no one else can get it to work? It should be nuked from space and forgotten.
Guess I'll have to read Zodiac. But re: Cryptonomicon, and authors vs. characters, I considered it quite a bit while reading the book. All the "killing Nips" stuff was obviously war-time mental training & perhaps a reflection of the era -- not actually expressing any biggotry toward Nipponese. But through the rest of the book it just doesn't fly. Having Randy do his Angry White Male rant is just characterization, up to the point where he's ranting to these cardboard academics who have no brain. Then it's not characterization -- if it were there'd be a real character for him to talk to -- rather, it's a Message.
Similarly, we get the Message that feminists just want to be man-handled. That the Puritans were good, the 60's were bad, that the main villian was made evil by a 60's commune, etc., etc.
The defense of Manifest Destiny shows up during the modern-day story (not characterizing the 40's) from one of the great thinkers in the book. And the conversion of the Nipponese character is a plot element, not just characterization.
In short, if the plot conforms to the biases of the characters it's not just characterization anymore -- it a statement about the nature of things.
Thanks for the tip on Zodiac. I'll check it out.
I'm very impressed with Stephenson's grasp of technology -- he's clearly someone who uses technology, who's been up to his elbows in it.
But good lord, the man is practically Rush Limbaugh's towel boy. His treatment of women is beyond pathetic. In Cryptonomicon he attempts a defense of Manifest Destiny (you remember -- the idea that it's ok for white Christians to commit genocide, because North America was given to them by God), presenting it as the only alternative to a straw-man mindless cultural relativism that holds that all cultures are equivalent. WTF? As if to underline this point, the only Nipponese characters in the book that aren't murderers and rapists have to reject their own culture and convert to Christianity.
I haven't read a more polemic book, or a book with more unrealistic and one-dimensional villains since Atlas Shrugged.
He can tell a good story, and his treatment of technology is great, but Stephenson also requires that his readers have a frontal lobotomy.
Aren't they talking about phase velocity? Which has been known from the begining to travel faster than light, but it doesn't matter because it doesn't actually carry anything (energy, information, etc.). In particular, it's not the quantity that is limited by C.
It seems like they begin a tortured description of phase velocity, but then don't go anywhere with it.
I'm sure there's news here, but the article doesn't make clear what it is.
shameless plug: xvoice can voice control your linux box today, using IBM's ViaVoice. http://xvoice.sourceforge.net. It's a non-integrated solution. It converts voice commands (defined by BNF grammars) into X events using Xtest. I write code by voice regularly, to avoid wrist and elbow pain.
Regarding ViaVoice, I've been hacking on XVoice recently, since the maintainer is currently tied up on other things. I have it running well enough to use XVoice for working on XVoice. ;) So it can be used for coding. I'm hoping to release another patch this week, which allows complex commands like "go to line 234", "delete 5 lines", etc.
I'm finding two things important when working on code. First, it helps a *lot* to take advantage of scripting and completion capabilities of your editor, so you can say "copy this function", "move to the next function", "delete this switch block", or when entering variable names you only have to say the first couple letters & then use completion.
And second, when you need to send character commands (e.g. for spelling variable names, or sending commands you haven't mapped to phrases), it helps a *lot* to use a phonetic alphabet. ViaVoice (and people, for that matter) have trouble with "b" "p" "c" "t" "d", etc., all those "eeee" sounds are hard to distinguish. But if you map them to "alpha" "bravo" "charlie" "delta", etc., it works well, and as an added bonus you get to sound like an extra in Dr. Strangelove when you're writing code.
Pretty cool.
Anyone interested in XVoice can find info on freshmeat. I've posted some patches against the development version (0.7) on http://thecraftstudio.com/bcboy/xvoice. More to come, soon.
>When a patent is filed it usually means that if it were not, that knowledge would simply not exist at all.
That was certainly one of the ideas behind patents, along with the idea of disclosure so the knowledge ends up in the public domain after a bit.
These days, however, with more & more obvious things being patented, as well as found things like DNA, patents have become a way for any bozo to keep knowledge *out* of the public domain -- to hold an entire industry hostage.
I wonder what could be considered "evidence" here. The media treatment of the WTO protests? CNN's deep-sixing the data in the Tailwind investigation? Their gag order on their own journalists? The wildly inaccurate reporting on the accuracy of our weapons in recent wars, and their overlooking of the Pentagon's reports on the same?
There are hundreds of similar situations. It's hard to tell if there's anything to them, in part because there's been so little public discussion about them.
NPR is hardly independent these days, getting much of their funding from corporations (and so having to avoid stories that might run against corporate interest). About the only independent news sources left are the Pacifica stations, where it's frequently difficult to tell if the information is well supported, or being divined from the bottom of a crack pipe.
Wow, what a thoughtful reply. Is this slashdot, or am I lost? ;) Someone should moderate it up. It's good to see people genuinely looking at this subject.
;) Really the age/years of schooling issue is very hard to resolve because they vary wildly between nations.
I'm familiar with the TIMSS results. Unfortunately, the results have been very misleadingly presented. The claims in boldface about how the sampling was strictly controlled should not be believed.
There were sampling and participation criteria for the test, but only 5 nations met them for the math tests, and only 6 nations met them for the physics tests. Other nations were included in the data, even though their sample sets were not valid.
Age was not controlled for in the tests. Indeed, you can control for years of schooling, or age, but not both, because of differences in educational systems. As it turns out, age correlates strongly with the results. So.... everyone write to your congressman to complain about when we start kindergarten.
Some percentage of test items were matched to the curriculum of the nation being tested, on the theory that it makes no sense to test material which isn't being taught. However this wasn't done for the U.S. (not sure why).
Some countries tested only students in math and science track programs.
There are still more problems with the data. The point is not that the study was sloppily done -- it's extremely difficult to construct meaningful cross-cultural metrics of this sort. However, the data was presented in a highly misleading way, and was grossly misinterpreted by most people in the U.S. You largely won't find critiques of the data in the popular press, however there are some reviews in _Kappan_, Sep 98, and Oct 98, and there's an article in _Science_, 15 May 98.
Once again, no data, and many insults to boot. Surprise, surprise.
Anecdotes about Germany won't change the assessment results, even if they declared majors when they were in kindergarten. It's irrelevant.
The data says you're wrong.
> In America we seem to take education for
> granted and are very far behind other countries
> in regard to the quality of the education that
> our children receive.
The emperor wears no data. It's amazing to me that no one else has commented on this part of the question. There have been no assessments of quality of education which have ranked U.S. schools as "far behind" other countries, much less "very far behind". This is just false.
The only assessments which have ranked U.S. schools near the bottom are ones that have suffered from systemic errors, such as uncontrolled sample sets.
The failure of our schools is a matter of faith these days. It seems no one is interested in looking at data.
> (I'm going to get labeled "Troll" or "Flamebait" for this!)
Or perhaps more accurately, "clueless", or "out to lunch". As others have pointed out, your working model of Darwinian evolution is wrong. Find a library.
Something that doesn't seem to have been pointed out yet is ALS is not conventionally a "disease". It's a "syndrome" -- meaning you are diagnosed with ALS when they eliminate all diseases which can be accurately diagnosed. As such, "ALS" could be one disease, or many.
It difficult, or impossible, to say whether Hawkings disease is genetic. There is a minority of people with ALS who seem to come to it genetically, but in the majority of people there's no evidence for a genetic cause.
Even in the genetic case, environment affects gene expression, so you could easily have a genetic "disease" which is only expressed in certain unusual settings (e.g. exposure to some synthetic chemical).
So in the majority of cases, even if your interpretation of Darwin weren't wrong, Darwin would be irrelevant -- the disease could appear in anyone as a matter of circumstance (like, say, falling off a building), not as a matter of gene selection (like, say, anemia)
I like how dozens of people are jumping in to complain about how evil osha is, how regulations are absurd, etc.
I was looking at some osha standards just a week or two ago, regarding chemical exposure. The osha standard is actually above the level at which you can see medical problems due to exposure. I.e. the standard is rougly "not enough to keep you healthy, but enough to keep you from being too sick to do your job."
This is over regulation? This is pathetic. You shouldn't have to trade your health for a job. Osha doesn't have half the bite people are claiming it does. America is quite lax about protecting the health of workers.
There are certainly quite long and specific regulations, but what everyone overlooks is They were put there for a reason: an employer somewhere found a way make money by sacrificing the health of their employees (probably without their knowledge or consent), and Osha had to add more regulation to close the loop-hole.
In other words, if industry were mature enough to behave responsibly, these regulations wouldn't exist. They aren't, so regulations are put in place, and industry has to live with the paper work.
this understates it just a bit, if disk space is an issue. emacs is one of the largest packages on any linux dist -- nearly as big as X. Here are some stats from redhat rpms:
...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c `rpm -qa | grep XFree | perl -ne 'chop; print "$_.i386.rpm\n"'`
...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c emac* ...bcboy/redhat/RedHat/RPMS> du -c vim*
bcboy-linux 238
906 XFree86-Xnest-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
317 XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1294 XFree86-SVGA-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1108 XFree86-Xvfb-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
851 XFree86-libs-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
237 XFree86-xfs-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
7087 XFree86-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1255 XFree86-100dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1084 XFree86-75dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
1917 XFree86-devel-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
16056 total
bcboy-linux 239
6250 emacs-20.3-15.i386.rpm
1021 emacs-X11-20.3-15.i386.rpm
5700 emacs-el-20.3-15.i386.rpm
1386 emacs-leim-20.3-15.i386.rpm
914 emacs-nox-20.3-15.i386.rpm
15271 total
bcboy-linux 240
689 vim-X11-5.3-7.i386.rpm
1382 vim-common-5.3-7.i386.rpm
641 vim-enhanced-5.3-7.i386.rpm
249 vim-minimal-5.3-7.i386.rpm
2961 total
... on small systems, emacs is the first thing to go.
There's also the issue that you have to know vi, anyway, if you do much system work: fitting emacs on a recovery disk is not fun. vim gives you advanced features w/o having to use a completely different editor during system recovery, or on space constrained systems.
In industry it is a matter of policy that investing in job training is a good move. Why isn't the same true of our school systems? Teachers typically get *no* training once they're hired.
Most remarkably, they get no training even after changes in the curriculum. Most curriculum documents are functionally paper weights, because the states that develop them never train their teachers.
Keeping abreast of new results in science is a similar problem. If you want teachers to know the latest science, to know the lastest studies of effective teaching methods, and to know how to implement a curriculum document, you have to train them.
... which, of course, takes money.
Half the comments on the article start with "the sad state of public education", or some such drivel, and go on to promote their favorite solution. Another large number talk about how public education is "bureaucratized" and bloated -- government waste, blah, blah, blah.
The trouble is, neither of these ideas are remotely grounded in reality. The failure of our public schools is widely regarded as fact these days, when every measure we have (standardized tests) reports that they're doing a better job than they ever have from when we started recording this information.
The only time this isn't the case is in some international comparisons which failed to use valid sample sets: many other countries allowed students to self-select who would take the tests, rather than picking at random as the U.S. did. So it comes down to whether or not you know how to construct a valid random sample.
This data is very widely available & can be found in any library. There is NO data that our schools are failing, except in the minds of some extremists who would prefer to have education only for the rich.
And regarding the "bureaucracy", please go look up the budgets! In particular, California school districts have their budgets on-line. Public education administrations run on a fraction of what private school administrations run on, and a *tiny* fraction of what private businesses run on. Overwhelmingly, the money is making it to the classrooms. There just isn't much money. Comparing to other countries, the U.S. not spending a significantly different amount (it's near the bottom or top depending on whether you're using flat comparisons or cost of living comparisons), though the states with the most problems, like California, are also the states spending the least.
And, by the way, one of the largest expenses in public schools is taking care of special needs students -- something no private school is required to do. Our public schools could be run on much less money if they had the liberty of always chosing the best students, and rejecting those with learning problems. Private schools are already more bloated (discounting "workbook" schools, where they don't bother hiring teachers). If private schools were held to the same standards, their costs would soar through roof.
It's a bit surreal hearing people say the existance of a free code project means m$ doesn't have a monopoly. "Hey! As long as you're not actually, you know, in business or something, you can make a competing product! Where's the monopoly?" gee, idunno. ;)