They way "science" trickles down to the medical practitioner is not through his/her interest in the scientific method: it's through guidelines for treatment compiled by specialists in their respective fields.
The article posted on Slashdot does have a point. Some doctors do not like guidelines, and they'll probably say something like "every patient is an individual", which is a truism that basically betrays a diminutive understanding of how statistics works and how the evidence is gathered.
Guidelines as afforded by the specialist societies demand a minimum standard of clinicians and make them stay up to date. And some don't like to work so hard. It's much easier to have Big Pharma give you free samples and their bogus literature (really, advertising disguised as scientific research).
Some physiologist might have developed a better formula to measure glomerular filtration rate or something, but if it's too complicated, practitioners will ignore it, because of their mathematical handicap. They'll also ignore computer aid on the basis of pure prejudice.
I agree that the profession is one of the ones where science is taken seriously, however. My point is that this "love" of science might not be really related to you surgeon, or clinical doctor, but rather be felt by the "behind the scenes" MDs.
Other professions are much worse: computer science is one where everybody's got an opinion and almost no evidence in support for stuff (like, "such and such programming language is much more productive", "sigils in Perl are bad and ugly", "OOP rules", etc.). Psychology also sucks. Etc.
Doctors will not accept expert systems. Doctors are nurtured in a culture in which they are brought to believe they are very special people. In a way, that is true, because in every country on earth, it's always the best and the brightest students who pass admission exams for medical schools.
However, the literature reveals, again and again that: 1) too many mistakes are made - either because one is ignorant, too tired or too careless; 2) expert systems can achieve quicker and more accurate results.
But clinical doctors will simply not accept what the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (3rd, ed, this is a paraphrase) defines as "the clinical art": simply the clinician searching in his database of cases in his mind for similar patterns. It hurts to admit a computer is better at diagnosing a case of acute abdominal pain than you are. It hurts to know that, maybe, you're not such a genius after all.
However, my guess is that, as electronic health records are increasingly used, computers will creep in the profession sooner or later. The future will also see a huge growth in telemedicine, not to speak of the role computerized genome screening will play in many specialities (e.g., cardiology)
A GP is qualified to screen and treat around 80% of diseases. So, in a nutshell: it's a very hard job to be a competent GP. GPs don't get the love - or the money - they deserve.
However, general practice is not where the money is at. The money is in complex procedures, in which the patient has no choice but too pay: complex orthopedic procedures (e.g. involving the spinal cord), heart disease, etc.
This is because the medical systems rewards high complexity.
Doctors get many kickbacks in the profession. They just come in many shapes and forms. Let me tell you about some stories I've witnessed first-hand:
I don't know about the USA, but in my country some pathology clinics will give a surgeon a certain monthly pay so all his patients' biopsies are sent to a certain clinic. Some of the most successful pathology clinics play this game. This I've heard from the owner of a successful clinic (you know, Sunday barbecues...) In fact, it's possible that all successful clinics play this game in a certain town.
Or how about that money-loaded orthopedic surgeon, known to his colleagues as "Dr. Screw", because his always so very keen on using special orthopedic screws in each and every patient - for which he gets a little side money from the company making them - which makes him run around town in a very cool car. Way cooler than Dr. Honesty's.
Or how about Mr. Bigshot Cardiologist, who gets a nice vacation in a 5-star hotel in the Bahamas or some such place for their nice job in multicentric clinical trials, etc., courtesy of Big Pharma? Do you think that's a kickback? I think so. For sure.
Also, you'd might like to know: some physicians do own clinics with their CT scans. When you own a clinic, you got bills to pay: city taxes, staff salaries, etc. It's a business. What do you do when your clinic needs money? To be fair, some clinics are so well-established they probably don't resort to dirty tricks. Or maybe, they do, I don't know. Or maybe they became well-established in a competitive environment because they weren't fair with the competition? All I know is that some doctors are well off, but not exactly rich. And some doctors run their practice like it's a business.
Academia, OTOH, pays horribly. But at least it's an honest job...
The unfortunate fact is medicine is a profession in which most people are in it for the money, not because the are fascinated with the human animal or are full of compassion. TV has epitomized such characters, as in Nip/Tuck, etc.
From what I see and hear in the news, I don't think US physicians are a bunch of holy saints either.
The characterization of BSD, Apache, etc. as "gift" licenses just display Perens' bias.
These are licenses that allow you to work both in proprietary projects and open source projects at the same time.
The word "gift" implies the person does not have a job and is doing it for free when, in reality, the developer might be working for a company that would only use business-friendly licenses.
The real distinctions are: are you going to work for a project else who will demand that you give away your copyright and who will keep their right to fork it into a proprietary project. If the answer is yes, then, please do it. Just don't complain when you see your work being bundled into a proprietary fork while you have to keep convincing everyone that they must use GPL/viral licenses (which is easy to do if you're into the business of selling servers, like IBM, and you want to bundle Linux "for free" - which, simply put, is IBM's strategy against Sun Microsystems, obviously).
The GPL license, due to copyright laws, allows this dual-licensing, which basically means unequal rights for developers (those who hold the copyright and, thus, can fork it into a proprietary license, while demanding that everyone else stick to the GPL version).
If you want developers to have equal rights, i.e., they can do *whatever* I want (i.e., "freedom"), then don't chose the GPL, chose a license such as the BSD license.
Open source code is not a material resource; it is an information resource and cannot be "stolen" (as GPL zealots with faulty logic would have it) but only "copied."
Is anyone keeping tabs on internet censorship legislation?
Is there a site?
It seems, like "terrorism" was an excuse for anything and everything under Bush and his bitch (Blair), "child porn" seems likewise an excuse for internet censorship.
The whole point of the GPL is to strengthen those who are materially sharing your ideals while diminishing those who are materially acting against them.
What kind of flawed logic is this? This isn't a game-of-life board, you know. There's nothing "the GPL" can do to "diminish those" who don't adopt it.
How bizarre that the same ontological mistake is made again and again: code is confused with living, thinking, entities (i.e., humans).
The GPL is an abstract entity that doesn't do anything, that has no power over anyone except for those who chose to throw that yoke on their shoulders. This isn't an algorithm that "starves" a cell.
People who don't want to use the GPL will just turn their backs on it and they have done so. The fact that there's no ecosystem for third-party vendors on Linux shows this. The fact the Qt was licensed under the LGPL reinforces this POV.
In fact, you look at the statistics for open source software and you see they are flawed. The majority of software is under the GPL - but they are little projects, short-lived. In fact, it's amazing how people who manage SourceForge and the likes are completely clueless it terms of making the site machine-readable and ready for information-gathering. See, for instance:
The bigger projects, Apache, GWT, the web development stuff, languages, etc, all are under business-friendly non-GPL licenses. Why is that? Think about it.
You wanna contribute to a project in which someone can just take you code, dual-license it, sell it for businesses under a proprietary license while you must open up all your secrets, algorithms, etc, so the competition can crush you? Be my guest.
Where you GPL zealots get it all wrong is that what matters is not code. What matters are humans. They are the ones who need to harness resources, be productive, and contribute to the general well-being of others and their families.
"Code" is an abstract entity. It's a stupid concept to talk about "the freedom of the code." The real concept is "freedom of the human to use code."
The willingness to contribute code to a common repository must come about out of a rational choice. Because it's advantageous for me and for you. That's how cooperation comes about - when mutual interests are served. not because some moralists of the Church of Stallman would have you follow his religious view that all proprietary software is "evil."
As to the claims of licenses such as BSD allowing people to steal code, that is simply bad logic. Code is not a material thing. It's an information thing and can simply be copied. The claims that someone who doesn't contribute to an open source project with a business-friendly license would have done so under the GPL are not provable. It's sort of like attempting to prove logically whether God exists or not.
Stallman doesn't care about any of this because, like religious leaders, he lives from donations of a non-profit and carries his life as single man with no family.
Linux PR (quite a few people, with a budget too) would have you believe the GPL is the best model. That's because the GPL as used in Linux regards the production of software by firms that sell per-seat licenses (Red Hat), or, in fact, hardware manufacturers that use Linux for their own reasons, such as competing with other Unices (e.g., putting Sun Microsystems out of business).
I sort of lost count of the number of special "gestures" I would have to remember.
Apparently, there'll be a new wave of UI with "gestures". They're getting it all wrong. I do not want a computer for which I must extend my arm to flick through 2,000 photos! That's stupid! "Gestures" do not necessarily make for a simple UI.
Apple competitors don't seem to understand the fundamental concept Apple advanced: user want to do certain things with their computers. There's an ecosystem around the iPhone that, at the very least, would be hard to replicate. Besides, there's the whole issue of brand recognition and brand loyalty. Apple just makes good products. Period.
In that scenario (GPLing BSD code) that would be a copyright violation and other issues. This was discussed extensively on/. and the lawyers of the FSF Church issued a clarification basically saying Theo and the BSD devs were right. The BSD license does allow proprietary forks, yes. Look up the issue and inform yourself.
Re:Man pages are not a quality control technique!
on
FreeBSD 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
If it only were a matter of nroff, groff, GNU Info or whatever...
The fact is, if Unix people weren't so hung up in the 70s, we'd have some smart documentation well-integrated with the system using AI.
In fact, I would expect something like this to come up in the proprietary Unices, not from the open source world.
BTW, kinda in the same area, one thing I like about FreeBSD is their open-mindedness about programming languages in the system as opposed, say, to OpenBSD, where everything is C and C only (or almost).
I'm not sure why this happened. FreeBSD developers have complained about the desktop guys only caring about Linux and creating linuxisms that made things hard. So much for "open source", UNIX, and "portability". Then again, most of the Linux/GPL game today is putting Sun out of business, not the freedom.
What a fucking idiot you are. Is that what you learn at the American public school system? No wonder you elected Georgie twice.
Let me give you a few reading tips: go out and search for literature on models of colonization and examine why "America" (or more correctly, the United States, since America is a continent) was founded versus, for instance, what was the aim of the Spanish conquistadores from the Spanish kingdom; next, search for colonialism; read Democracy in America, by De Tocqueville; learn about your civil war and how even in America, those that wanted to keep the yoke of a backwards slave-based economy gave a lot of trouble. Next: imagine that in a country where Her Majesty threw the full weight of Her Empire into crushing the spine of the people - and consider the country had a very different culture than that of the American Revolution - to the point their major resistance leader was one Mahatma Gandhi.
You are so stupid you need to get off/. and get some reading done. Quit with home-grown apple-pie yankee-doodle-dee bottom-line thinking and try to understand the world in more hues than black or white.
I've never read the Quran, so I can't comment, but here's a little fact about the Bible that I feel is too often misunderstood both by atheists and the American evangelical; and, BTW, therein lies some different views on Christianity between its branches, because the Vatican, for one, does not hold the Bible to be "perfect", but a product of its time:
The video, BTW, is with vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno and he tells his tale of attending to a request for a "Bible study group" for astronauts. It's hilarious...
So, to come back to my main point. Christianity is about the New Testament. Supposedly, Christ brought the world the Evangelion, i.e., "the good message", the "good announcement."
That basically means you can just about forget the Old Testament or, rather, keep only "the good parts" (Thou shall not steal, etc.). In fact, Jesus is quoted as saying something along those lines.
That's not quite how it works. A politician gets elected gets elected because of his/her platform. He/she comes from a specific constituency and represents those people and certain world views. The constituency might be geographical, in which case it may be more like you're saying, but voting is not necessarily by district (this varies from country to country).
Anyways, that's how you get the "radical green" politician, the "Christian right-winger homophobic" and the "die-hard communist."
It's not in his/her interest to turn away from those people, for instance, evangelical supporting women's right legislation.
The reasons India is such a poor place are manifold. But a minimal amount of reading and just a little bit more of effort into turning yourself into a well-read individual (instead of a Western prick) would have resulted in you knowing that the most probable cause is that India was a colony of the British Empire and has basically been plundered for centuries, you dickhead.
So, please, stick your "Christian European/American" sensibility and upbringing and go read some History.
Seems every time a company chooses to support FreeBSD, Linux fanboys come to/. to diss it. Linux fanboys are usually freeloaders, academics, or religious zealots of the Church of Stallman.
It's very good that there are companies developing for FreeBSD.
We need to have a software ecosystem from small software houses and I feel this will never happen with linux due to the GPL.
Go inform yourself better. Breastfeeding is recommended by the World Health Organization (oh, wait, the globalizers! LOL) for a variety of health benefits. Bottlefeeding is the last option.
I just feel you're lazier than I am so I am not giving you any pointers. I hope you exercise your brain and do a little internet searching.
It seems to me we will kill all our non-human primate cousins before we glean sufficient information. When I see so many people equating breastfeeding with pornography (not that I think pornography is a such a big deal to begin with), I can't imagine a huge ammount of research money coming from American taxpayers to learn about the origins of primate sexual behavior or comparative sexaul behavior. Not when a huge part of that population has decided their dicks are for pissing-only purposes.
The current human Western animal is such that he will dispend a huge ammount of money for cats and dogs but simply does not give a shit about whether there are 300 or so gorillas alive.
This is how bright we are.
Gene pool reduction will be a huge problem if not outright extermination.
Let's all pray for Ted Haggard, Satan has tempted him.
Slashdot Mirror
They way "science" trickles down to the medical practitioner is not through his/her interest in the scientific method: it's through guidelines for treatment compiled by specialists in their respective fields.
The article posted on Slashdot does have a point. Some doctors do not like guidelines, and they'll probably say something like "every patient is an individual", which is a truism that basically betrays a diminutive understanding of how statistics works and how the evidence is gathered.
Guidelines as afforded by the specialist societies demand a minimum standard of clinicians and make them stay up to date. And some don't like to work so hard. It's much easier to have Big Pharma give you free samples and their bogus literature (really, advertising disguised as scientific research).
Some physiologist might have developed a better formula to measure glomerular filtration rate or something, but if it's too complicated, practitioners will ignore it, because of their mathematical handicap. They'll also ignore computer aid on the basis of pure prejudice.
I agree that the profession is one of the ones where science is taken seriously, however. My point is that this "love" of science might not be really related to you surgeon, or clinical doctor, but rather be felt by the "behind the scenes" MDs.
Other professions are much worse: computer science is one where everybody's got an opinion and almost no evidence in support for stuff (like, "such and such programming language is much more productive", "sigils in Perl are bad and ugly", "OOP rules", etc.). Psychology also sucks. Etc.
Doctors will not accept expert systems. Doctors are nurtured in a culture in which they are brought to believe they are very special people. In a way, that is true, because in every country on earth, it's always the best and the brightest students who pass admission exams for medical schools.
However, the literature reveals, again and again that: 1) too many mistakes are made - either because one is ignorant, too tired or too careless; 2) expert systems can achieve quicker and more accurate results.
But clinical doctors will simply not accept what the Oxford Textbook of Medicine (3rd, ed, this is a paraphrase) defines as "the clinical art": simply the clinician searching in his database of cases in his mind for similar patterns. It hurts to admit a computer is better at diagnosing a case of acute abdominal pain than you are. It hurts to know that, maybe, you're not such a genius after all.
However, my guess is that, as electronic health records are increasingly used, computers will creep in the profession sooner or later. The future will also see a huge growth in telemedicine, not to speak of the role computerized genome screening will play in many specialities (e.g., cardiology)
A GP is qualified to screen and treat around 80% of diseases. So, in a nutshell: it's a very hard job to be a competent GP. GPs don't get the love - or the money - they deserve.
However, general practice is not where the money is at. The money is in complex procedures, in which the patient has no choice but too pay: complex orthopedic procedures (e.g. involving the spinal cord), heart disease, etc.
This is because the medical systems rewards high complexity.
Doctors get many kickbacks in the profession. They just come in many shapes and forms. Let me tell you about some stories I've witnessed first-hand:
I don't know about the USA, but in my country some pathology clinics will give a surgeon a certain monthly pay so all his patients' biopsies are sent to a certain clinic. Some of the most successful pathology clinics play this game. This I've heard from the owner of a successful clinic (you know, Sunday barbecues...) In fact, it's possible that all successful clinics play this game in a certain town.
Or how about that money-loaded orthopedic surgeon, known to his colleagues as "Dr. Screw", because his always so very keen on using special orthopedic screws in each and every patient - for which he gets a little side money from the company making them - which makes him run around town in a very cool car. Way cooler than Dr. Honesty's.
Or how about Mr. Bigshot Cardiologist, who gets a nice vacation in a 5-star hotel in the Bahamas or some such place for their nice job in multicentric clinical trials, etc., courtesy of Big Pharma? Do you think that's a kickback? I think so. For sure.
Also, you'd might like to know: some physicians do own clinics with their CT scans. When you own a clinic, you got bills to pay: city taxes, staff salaries, etc. It's a business. What do you do when your clinic needs money? To be fair, some clinics are so well-established they probably don't resort to dirty tricks. Or maybe, they do, I don't know. Or maybe they became well-established in a competitive environment because they weren't fair with the competition? All I know is that some doctors are well off, but not exactly rich. And some doctors run their practice like it's a business.
Academia, OTOH, pays horribly. But at least it's an honest job...
The unfortunate fact is medicine is a profession in which most people are in it for the money, not because the are fascinated with the human animal or are full of compassion. TV has epitomized such characters, as in Nip/Tuck, etc.
From what I see and hear in the news, I don't think US physicians are a bunch of holy saints either.
And his doctor received how much for the surgery?
The characterization of BSD, Apache, etc. as "gift" licenses just display Perens' bias.
These are licenses that allow you to work both in proprietary projects and open source projects at the same time.
The word "gift" implies the person does not have a job and is doing it for free when, in reality, the developer might be working for a company that would only use business-friendly licenses.
The real distinctions are: are you going to work for a project else who will demand that you give away your copyright and who will keep their right to fork it into a proprietary project. If the answer is yes, then, please do it. Just don't complain when you see your work being bundled into a proprietary fork while you have to keep convincing everyone that they must use GPL/viral licenses (which is easy to do if you're into the business of selling servers, like IBM, and you want to bundle Linux "for free" - which, simply put, is IBM's strategy against Sun Microsystems, obviously).
The GPL license, due to copyright laws, allows this dual-licensing, which basically means unequal rights for developers (those who hold the copyright and, thus, can fork it into a proprietary license, while demanding that everyone else stick to the GPL version).
If you want developers to have equal rights, i.e., they can do *whatever* I want (i.e., "freedom"), then don't chose the GPL, chose a license such as the BSD license.
Open source code is not a material resource; it is an information resource and cannot be "stolen" (as GPL zealots with faulty logic would have it) but only "copied."
Learn to recognize Linux PR when you see it.
Is anyone keeping tabs on internet censorship legislation?
Is there a site?
It seems, like "terrorism" was an excuse for anything and everything under Bush and his bitch (Blair), "child porn" seems likewise an excuse for internet censorship.
The whole point of the GPL is to strengthen those who are materially sharing your ideals while diminishing those who are materially acting against them.
What kind of flawed logic is this? This isn't a game-of-life board, you know. There's nothing "the GPL" can do to "diminish those" who don't adopt it.
How bizarre that the same ontological mistake is made again and again: code is confused with living, thinking, entities (i.e., humans).
The GPL is an abstract entity that doesn't do anything, that has no power over anyone except for those who chose to throw that yoke on their shoulders. This isn't an algorithm that "starves" a cell.
People who don't want to use the GPL will just turn their backs on it and they have done so. The fact that there's no ecosystem for third-party vendors on Linux shows this. The fact the Qt was licensed under the LGPL reinforces this POV.
In fact, you look at the statistics for open source software and you see they are flawed. The majority of software is under the GPL - but they are little projects, short-lived. In fact, it's amazing how people who manage SourceForge and the likes are completely clueless it terms of making the site machine-readable and ready for information-gathering. See, for instance:
The perils and pitfalls of mining SourceForge
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.2.1175
The bigger projects, Apache, GWT, the web development stuff, languages, etc, all are under business-friendly non-GPL licenses. Why is that? Think about it.
You wanna contribute to a project in which someone can just take you code, dual-license it, sell it for businesses under a proprietary license while you must open up all your secrets, algorithms, etc, so the competition can crush you? Be my guest.
Where you GPL zealots get it all wrong is that what matters is not code. What matters are humans. They are the ones who need to harness resources, be productive, and contribute to the general well-being of others and their families.
"Code" is an abstract entity. It's a stupid concept to talk about "the freedom of the code." The real concept is "freedom of the human to use code."
The willingness to contribute code to a common repository must come about out of a rational choice. Because it's advantageous for me and for you. That's how cooperation comes about - when mutual interests are served. not because some moralists of the Church of Stallman would have you follow his religious view that all proprietary software is "evil."
As to the claims of licenses such as BSD allowing people to steal code, that is simply bad logic. Code is not a material thing. It's an information thing and can simply be copied. The claims that someone who doesn't contribute to an open source project with a business-friendly license would have done so under the GPL are not provable. It's sort of like attempting to prove logically whether God exists or not.
Stallman doesn't care about any of this because, like religious leaders, he lives from donations of a non-profit and carries his life as single man with no family.
Linux PR (quite a few people, with a budget too) would have you believe the GPL is the best model. That's because the GPL as used in Linux regards the production of software by firms that sell per-seat licenses (Red Hat), or, in fact, hardware manufacturers that use Linux for their own reasons, such as competing with other Unices (e.g., putting Sun Microsystems out of business).
What a pathetic attempt.
I sort of lost count of the number of special "gestures" I would have to remember.
Apparently, there'll be a new wave of UI with "gestures". They're getting it all wrong. I do not want a computer for which I must extend my arm to flick through 2,000 photos! That's stupid! "Gestures" do not necessarily make for a simple UI.
Apple competitors don't seem to understand the fundamental concept Apple advanced: user want to do certain things with their computers. There's an ecosystem around the iPhone that, at the very least, would be hard to replicate. Besides, there's the whole issue of brand recognition and brand loyalty. Apple just makes good products. Period.
Keyboards. Definitely to blame. Ban keyboards!
In that scenario (GPLing BSD code) that would be a copyright violation and other issues. This was discussed extensively on /. and the lawyers of the FSF Church issued a clarification basically saying Theo and the BSD devs were right. The BSD license does allow proprietary forks, yes.
Look up the issue and inform yourself.
If it only were a matter of nroff, groff, GNU Info or whatever...
The fact is, if Unix people weren't so hung up in the 70s, we'd have some smart documentation well-integrated with the system using AI.
In fact, I would expect something like this to come up in the proprietary Unices, not from the open source world.
BTW, kinda in the same area, one thing I like about FreeBSD is their open-mindedness about programming languages in the system as opposed, say, to OpenBSD, where everything is C and C only (or almost).
Can anyone be more involved in Linuxlalaland than Debian developers? Yet, were they able to deliver every 6 months? Nope. So, you were saying?
Also, there's commercial software out there for FreeBSD. I'm talking about compilers, and other such tools. Not as much as for Linux, though.
I'm not sure why this happened. FreeBSD developers have complained about the desktop guys only caring about Linux and creating linuxisms that made things hard.
So much for "open source", UNIX, and "portability".
Then again, most of the Linux/GPL game today is putting Sun out of business, not the freedom.
What a fucking idiot you are. Is that what you learn at the American public school system? No wonder you elected Georgie twice.
Let me give you a few reading tips: go out and search for literature on models of colonization and examine why "America" (or more correctly, the United States, since America is a continent) was founded versus, for instance, what was the aim of the Spanish conquistadores from the Spanish kingdom; next, search for colonialism; read Democracy in America, by De Tocqueville; learn about your civil war and how even in America, those that wanted to keep the yoke of a backwards slave-based economy gave a lot of trouble. Next: imagine that in a country where Her Majesty threw the full weight of Her Empire into crushing the spine of the people - and consider the country had a very different culture than that of the American Revolution - to the point their major resistance leader was one Mahatma Gandhi.
You are so stupid you need to get off /. and get some reading done. Quit with home-grown apple-pie yankee-doodle-dee bottom-line thinking and try to understand the world in more hues than black or white.
I've never read the Quran, so I can't comment, but here's a little fact about the Bible that I feel is too often misunderstood both by atheists and the American evangelical; and, BTW, therein lies some different views on Christianity between its branches, because the Vatican, for one, does not hold the Bible to be "perfect", but a product of its time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUyiQufyiK0
The video, BTW, is with vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno and he tells his tale of attending to a request for a "Bible study group" for astronauts. It's hilarious...
So, to come back to my main point. Christianity is about the New Testament. Supposedly, Christ brought the world the Evangelion, i.e., "the good message", the "good announcement."
That basically means you can just about forget the Old Testament or, rather, keep only "the good parts" (Thou shall not steal, etc.). In fact, Jesus is quoted as saying something along those lines.
That's not quite how it works. A politician gets elected gets elected because of his/her platform. He/she comes from a specific constituency and represents those people and certain world views. The constituency might be geographical, in which case it may be more like you're saying, but voting is not necessarily by district (this varies from country to country).
Anyways, that's how you get the "radical green" politician, the "Christian right-winger homophobic" and the "die-hard communist."
It's not in his/her interest to turn away from those people, for instance, evangelical supporting women's right legislation.
How is "Terrorism" the topic here on this /. thread?
I believe you were correctly labeled a troll.
The reasons India is such a poor place are manifold. But a minimal amount of reading and just a little bit more of effort into turning yourself into a well-read individual (instead of a Western prick) would have resulted in you knowing that the most probable cause is that India was a colony of the British Empire and has basically been plundered for centuries, you dickhead.
So, please, stick your "Christian European/American" sensibility and upbringing and go read some History.
Seems every time a company chooses to support FreeBSD, Linux fanboys come to /. to diss it. Linux fanboys are usually freeloaders, academics, or religious zealots of the Church of Stallman.
It's very good that there are companies developing for FreeBSD.
We need to have a software ecosystem from small software houses and I feel this will never happen with linux due to the GPL.
Go inform yourself better. Breastfeeding is recommended by the World Health Organization (oh, wait, the globalizers! LOL) for a variety of health benefits. Bottlefeeding is the last option.
I just feel you're lazier than I am so I am not giving you any pointers. I hope you exercise your brain and do a little internet searching.
It seems to me we will kill all our non-human primate cousins before we glean sufficient information. When I see so many people equating breastfeeding with pornography (not that I think pornography is a such a big deal to begin with), I can't imagine a huge ammount of research money coming from American taxpayers to learn about the origins of primate sexual behavior or comparative sexaul behavior. Not when a huge part of that population has decided their dicks are for pissing-only purposes.
The current human Western animal is such that he will dispend a huge ammount of money for cats and dogs but simply does not give a shit about whether there are 300 or so gorillas alive.
This is how bright we are.
Gene pool reduction will be a huge problem if not outright extermination.
Let's all pray for Ted Haggard, Satan has tempted him.
The arguments you used are derived from "pop evolutionary psychology." You assum too much about what we know about our ancestors.