There are apparently two barriers to entry for potential X.org contributors: the core team is small and overloaded, so casual contributions aren't handled smoothly or quickly; and the codebase is huge, idiosyncratically organized, and covers a wide range of areas of technical expertise, which requires a developer to be very skilled, widely experienced, and tolerant of a long, steep learning curve. Both factors shut out the sort of casual contributions that lead to deeper involvement.
It's a fair point to respond to a lot of whining with "get involved and make a difference", but failing to recognize high barriers to entry on the project means those who take the idea seriously never follow through, and the rejoinder looks like a cynical deflection of user concerns.
Successful OSS projects find a good middle ground between the importance of the software, the skill and requirements of the core team, and interaction with the community that results in progress. X.org is far from that middleground.
How many people on here have the capacity to actually make a useful contribution to X.org? Leave aside the organizational complaints about delays in getting patches accepted or commit bits set.
Your "provocative" posts are probably counterproductive if your intent is to get X.org some more community contribution. Legitimate complaints met with 'fix it yourself' are what push people to OSX.
Sailors knew the earth was spherical long before Jesus came along--it's obvious when you watch ships approaching over the horizon, since they're not only smaller but the bottom is hidden by the horizon.
You come in here spouting repeatedly debunked creationist talking points and accuse everyone else here of being dogmatic? Then claim that science is as faith driven as religion? Horseshit. Pure, unfiltered horseshit. You could bother to educate yourself on the difference if you gave a shit, but you plainly don't.
First, the guy's research does not show that every 31,500 generations we get a major shift, only that in this case a major shift occurred after 31,500 generations. The same shift could have occurred after 100 generations or a hundred thousand. One observed instance gives you no data to assume any sort of rate.
Second, there's no reason to assume a constant size of generations for the entire 3.5 billion years since the last universal ancestor, given how different we were 100 million years ago from 1 billion years ago. Your calculation is meaningless.
A lot of interesting work has been done in the field of evolution statistics, examining various models for rates of mutations and survival to obtain various levels of differentiation.
Short answer to your point: You're wrong, natural selection doesn't have to work consistently over a given sub-period to show overall advances over a larger period. Some species alive today are essentially unchanged from tens or hundred of millions of years ago; others go back no further than the last ice age or so.
Nope, try again. Someone mod off that 'insightful' tag, please.
There's no reason to assume that the rate of mutation in humans and their hominid forebears is the same as in e. coli, so your calculation is meaningless.
Hominids are much more complex creatures than bacterium, so we should see many more mutations in them than in bacterium.
Lastly, there's no meaning to the number 31,500 as the number of generations required for e. coli to mutate. The citrate metabolizing mutation could have occurred after twenty generations, or 1,000,000. Your reasoning is like saying that the 10,000th lottery ticket sold out of 100,000 was the winner, so you should buy 10,000 lottery tickets to guarantee a win.
First of all, evolution has been observed in the lab before this (c.f. Weinberg, J.R., V.R. Starczak, and D. Jorg, 1992, "Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory." Evolution 46: 1214-1220). It's also been directly observed in nature. Seeing it in nature does not preclude its validity as a scientific observation.
Second, evolution has been indirectly observed (i.e., rationally deduced from observation) long before, and the huge pile of indirect evidence was sufficient to make evolution the dominant theory because no other theory could explain all those observations as well.
You talk about it like there was a period before the proof, during which it was a theory, and now there's proof, so now it's... what? What does it become after being proven?
The theory of evolution has always and will always be a theory, just like gravity is a theory and a heliocentric solar system is a theory. Direct observation of speciation in a lab is strong evidence, but honestly this does little to add to the already strong scientific certainty (i.e., not based on faith) that the theory is correct, because there's already mountains of evidence in evolution's favour.
The human body is vastly more complex than a bacterium, so it can have vastly more minor and possibly not-so-minor mutations over the same number of generations.
The time frame in which something like our bodies evolved is not 630,000 years. It depends upon what point you're selecting at which we diverged from something else. For instance, if bipedalism is the starting point, then hominids 4,000,000 years ago showed evidence up walking upright; that would be approximately Australopithecus afarensis, which looked like this--hairy like an ape, but not requiring a lot of significant changes to make it look more human.
Because leniency is all they can offer him in exchange for 1) retrieving her body so that the family can bury it, 2) ending his appeals, and 3) having it enter the public record that he really is guilty, not just guilty at trial. That's worth a couple years off his sentence. Note that reducing the sentence doesn't alter the charge under which he was convicted--that's still first degree murder.
From Reiser's perspective, it's a good deal. He didn't have any good grounds for appeal, so it was very unlikely that he'd get a new trial or have the verdict overturned. This way, in ten years or so when he applies for parole, he can say that he admitted his guilt, was very sorry, and even helped them find the body. Convicts who don't admit they're guilty don't ever, ever get parole.
Why would you bother to prosecute him for perjury when he's already in jail for 25-to-life? Taxpayers didn't spend enough on him?
Besides, if convicts revealing information like the location of the victim's body led to increases in sentences, it would severely curtail the motivations of convicts to reveal such things after the fact when there's actually a benefit to be achieved, like giving the family something to bury.
This wasn't a crime a passion, it *was* a cold blooded murder. A crime of passion is when you walk in on your wife in bed with your best friend, grab your gun and kill them while the sheets are still wet. Reiser planned her murder over days at least and then went to some lengths to hide the body. Crucial to 'crime of passion' defense is *not* trying to cover it up--that speaks to being so enraged that you weren't thinking of the consequences.
It's possible that kidnapping was some bizarre effort on his part to talk her into reconciling, and things went wrong. If he'd tried that as a defense, he might have gotten a shorter sentence. But the fact of the matter is that he stalked her like prey and tried to get away with it. It was about as premeditated as it gets.
That's the theory, but what's happened is that McCain has had three uninterrupted, unobserved months of campaigning and building support. The result has been closing the gaps that existed three months ago. Depending on the polls, he's roughly tied with either one, where three months ago he was 10-15 points behind them. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton got beaten up by each other--a lot of the press was negative (Bosnia sniper fiasco, Reverend Wright, etc.). McCain's campaign has already started circulating videos of Clinton's comment that she and McCain had passed the Commander in Chief threshold, while Obama hadn't.
Everyone but Clinton is ready for the general to start.
The heat of this race is one of the things arguing in it being set in stone now. Everyone recognizes that the length of the contest has hurt the eventual nominee's chances because they're fighting each other instead of McCain. The mass break of superdels for Obama yesterday was the sign that everyone is ready for it to be really over. If Clinton weren't so stubborn it would have been over months ago. But at this point, it really would take a superscandal to trigger such a switch. Reopening wounds that everyone thought were closed, and alienating the millions who supported Obama *after* he's won the nomination, for all practical purposes... it would take a nuke to overturn what's now the fact on the ground.
Seriously, at this point, Clinton has nothing to argue in her favor except that, if her exit is ugly, she'll take her millions with her and sink Obama for the general. That's an argument for her to be paid off, not to try to further wrench the race in a different direction.
Since he's not unambiguously white, he's therefore black. That's the American way. And in a way, it makes it all the more impressive that he's the nominee, and has a real shot at winning the election.
Personally, I've always been cynical about issues-based campaigns because it's easy to stand up in the contest and say "I'll do X, Y, and Z if elected"; actually passing legislation is much more difficult, and the end result is rarely what was promised or launched. If you want to see Obama's policy papers, go to his website. He's got lots of them, and a lot of them are saner than Clinton's. The real test of Obama's plans is what happens when he actually goes to pass a law.
However, remember that Obama is the one who took the intelligent, principled position on a gas-tax holiday that was supported by economists. That should be a hopeful sign.
What happened in this election is that the Democrats on Obama's team looked at history and saw that the Democrats continually lose issues-based campaigns. You're right that elections are popularity contests, and the Dems finally figured out what the Republicans have understood for years. That doesn't mean any of the candidates aren't smart or have good positions. It just means that an election, like a job interview, is a pretty lousy way of vetting a candidate.
Clinton won't run third party because she can't win as a third party. If history and these primaries demonstrate one thing, it's that the Clintons are all about winning. The sanest explanation for why Clinton ran so hard this primary, long past the time when the spreadsheets said it was still possible to win, was that she recognized that this was her best opportunity. And now the landmine she's trying to avoid is being blamed if Obama loses in November, because that destroys any possibility of running again in 2012 as the Democrat.
At it's worst, each side's supporters showed about a 20-25% response rate of "I'm voting for McCain if the other one wins". That number is dropping, and will drop further now that there's a clear nominee. The vast majority of Clinton supporters will vote for Obama. The question of how she exits the race will determine how much of that last 10-20% fall in line with party wishes, and the point of Clinton's non-concession last night is a negotiating stance for being bought off to exit gracefully. Privately and semi-publicly (to donors and the press) she's already conceded that the race is over and Obama won. Now it's a question of whether she gets to reject the VP spot, or gets Senate majority leader, or what. Also who pays off her campaign's debts.
As for Obama picking up the middle, he's already beating McCain by eight points in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado. One thing the press continually got wrong was that, where Clinton was beating Obama, they assumed it was diehard support that wouldn't transfer (e.g., Pennsylvania). But overall polling showed that either Democrat beats McCain, indicating that Clinton's support was a preference, not a last stand. In a lot of states, the Dem voters simply liked Clinton better, but were happy with both.
You're arguing like an income tax resister. Yes, technically it's not over until convention when the votes are cast, and it could all go upside down. But what actually happens is that one candidate hits the magic number, and the other concedes. Clinton has already effectively conceded; her non-concession pose is about negotiating the price of her exit from the race. At this point, the practical possibility of delegates flipping doesn't exist unless Obama is caught on tape skullfucking a kitten to death while Michelle holds it down.
Presumably it's locked to an account. In theory you could set up infinite accounts, but in practice a few people will set up a few accounts to get a few extra free plays, while the vast majority (assuming that the userbase becomes vast) will listen and either pay or not pay. That's not the problem.
What I think is the hole in the scheme is that, if you can play it once, you can record it. You could even bot that so that over a period equal to the cumulative length of their catalog, you could download their entire catalog for free. The only way to prevent this is to degrade the quality of the free playback to uselessness, which would tend to undercut the entire scheme.
Wear-leveling algorithms distribute the write-erase load relatively evenly across the SSD. Individual NANDs have a MTBF of around a million write-erase cycles, IIRC, so good leveling algorithms have already pushed the MTBF for the SSD past the expected lifespan of mechanical HDs.
Seconding this. When I managed an IT department at a manufacturer, we had a choice between running a T1 to a warehouse that was literally across the road (and would have been back to the provider, then back to us), or using directional antennas. The latter worked perfectly, cost less than a month's T1 fees to set up (i.e., less than $500), and provided LAN bandwidth.
Why is it that a gaming company still thinks that we should shell out bucks to buy a game that we need to subscribe to?
From the game company's perspective, there's a neat division of costs that are nicely met by current way things are priced: Initial development goes on for 3-5 years, and its cost is recouped with the box cost, while subscription fees pay for maintenance and incremental development. From a business perspective, it's pretty crucial to recover the sunk costs of initial development, and if that can be done independently of ongoing subscriptions, so much the better for the investors.
I'm not saying that's the best situation for gamers--that's why I play Eve, for which I've never paid a box cost since initial development was recovered years ago, and it became a useful competitive move to drop it. But it makes a lot of business sense to try to recover initial costs up front, and probably helps the life of the game--if it's slow taking off but the cost of ongoing operations aren't saddled with a tax of paying off three years of dev work, an initially low number of subscribers can be supported, giving the game time to grow.
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that there's a lot more to what the author said than that. He says nothing about a relationship between the quality of programmers and the quality of code; he says nothing about the time taken to develop code, and makes no conclusions about its effect on code quality.
What he says is that a cluster of metrics that collectively say something general about code quality (e.g., better code tends to have smaller files with fewer LOC; worse code has more global functions and namespace pollution) show little difference between four kernels with diverse parentage.
He speculates (and says he is speculating) that obvious differences in process might account for small variances in where each kernel scores well or badly.
As you observed of me, you weren't on the jury either. They heard the whole case; they saw the participants and judged their credibility and weighed the evidence. And they found him guilty. That you, from a distance, find this difficult to accept is no knock against their verdict, just as my approval of their verdict is no benediction.
While credibility might be important, it does not constitute evidence by itself.
Lying on the stand does constitute evidence, both in legal terms and in common sense terms. In legal terms it indicates "consciousness of guilt". In common sense terms, it's not hard to infer that lying on the stand is done for a reason, namely to avoid revealing something else. When you're talking about a murder charge, it's difficult to imagine what one would be covering up, at risk of being found guilty of murder you didn't commit.
You have to concede yourself that it is at least POSSIBLE that his wife is still alive, as unlikely as many may judge that to be.
Yes, it's possible, but I have no reasonable doubts that she's dead. No one has heard from her in two years. Her passport was found in her apartment, so she couldn't (without great difficulty) have travelled abroad. Her bank account hasn't been touched in two years. She left behind children that everyone agrees she was devoted to and would never abandon. Her van was found miles from her house with recently purchased groceries and her cellphone inside.
Against that, you have the theory that she wanted to frame Hans for her death, or just wanted to walk away from everything in a way that implies her kidnapping or murder. It's possible, but like I said, I have no reasonable doubts she's dead.
Were I on a jury, I would be loathe to vote for conviction based on circumstantial evidence alone
Circumstantial evidence is indeed considered weaker than direct evidence, but you seem to be under the impression that circumstantial cases are necessarily weak--they're not, though they can be. Most evidence is circumstantial, and still strong enough collectively to convict.
His statement that his wife wanted to return (even "escape" if you prefer) to Russia was at least plausible.
Not when it's coming from the person accused of her murder, who's trying to explain away her very mysterious disappearance; and not in light of the testimony of her friends and family who say she would never abandon her children. If she wanted to return to Russia without the kids, she could have done so with all the drama. If she wanted to take the kids with her, she could have simply waited for the divorce to finalize.
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There are apparently two barriers to entry for potential X.org contributors: the core team is small and overloaded, so casual contributions aren't handled smoothly or quickly; and the codebase is huge, idiosyncratically organized, and covers a wide range of areas of technical expertise, which requires a developer to be very skilled, widely experienced, and tolerant of a long, steep learning curve. Both factors shut out the sort of casual contributions that lead to deeper involvement.
It's a fair point to respond to a lot of whining with "get involved and make a difference", but failing to recognize high barriers to entry on the project means those who take the idea seriously never follow through, and the rejoinder looks like a cynical deflection of user concerns.
Successful OSS projects find a good middle ground between the importance of the software, the skill and requirements of the core team, and interaction with the community that results in progress. X.org is far from that middleground.
How many people on here have the capacity to actually make a useful contribution to X.org? Leave aside the organizational complaints about delays in getting patches accepted or commit bits set.
Your "provocative" posts are probably counterproductive if your intent is to get X.org some more community contribution. Legitimate complaints met with 'fix it yourself' are what push people to OSX.
You're kidding, right?
Sailors knew the earth was spherical long before Jesus came along--it's obvious when you watch ships approaching over the horizon, since they're not only smaller but the bottom is hidden by the horizon.
Yeah, go fuck yourself, troll.
You come in here spouting repeatedly debunked creationist talking points and accuse everyone else here of being dogmatic? Then claim that science is as faith driven as religion? Horseshit. Pure, unfiltered horseshit. You could bother to educate yourself on the difference if you gave a shit, but you plainly don't.
Wrong.
First, the guy's research does not show that every 31,500 generations we get a major shift, only that in this case a major shift occurred after 31,500 generations. The same shift could have occurred after 100 generations or a hundred thousand. One observed instance gives you no data to assume any sort of rate.
Second, there's no reason to assume a constant size of generations for the entire 3.5 billion years since the last universal ancestor, given how different we were 100 million years ago from 1 billion years ago. Your calculation is meaningless.
A lot of interesting work has been done in the field of evolution statistics, examining various models for rates of mutations and survival to obtain various levels of differentiation.
Short answer to your point: You're wrong, natural selection doesn't have to work consistently over a given sub-period to show overall advances over a larger period. Some species alive today are essentially unchanged from tens or hundred of millions of years ago; others go back no further than the last ice age or so.
Nope, try again. Someone mod off that 'insightful' tag, please.
There's no reason to assume that the rate of mutation in humans and their hominid forebears is the same as in e. coli, so your calculation is meaningless.
Hominids are much more complex creatures than bacterium, so we should see many more mutations in them than in bacterium.
Lastly, there's no meaning to the number 31,500 as the number of generations required for e. coli to mutate. The citrate metabolizing mutation could have occurred after twenty generations, or 1,000,000. Your reasoning is like saying that the 10,000th lottery ticket sold out of 100,000 was the winner, so you should buy 10,000 lottery tickets to guarantee a win.
You're not really getting it.
First of all, evolution has been observed in the lab before this (c.f. Weinberg, J.R., V.R. Starczak, and D. Jorg, 1992, "Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory." Evolution 46: 1214-1220). It's also been directly observed in nature. Seeing it in nature does not preclude its validity as a scientific observation.
Second, evolution has been indirectly observed (i.e., rationally deduced from observation) long before, and the huge pile of indirect evidence was sufficient to make evolution the dominant theory because no other theory could explain all those observations as well.
You talk about it like there was a period before the proof, during which it was a theory, and now there's proof, so now it's... what? What does it become after being proven?
The theory of evolution has always and will always be a theory, just like gravity is a theory and a heliocentric solar system is a theory. Direct observation of speciation in a lab is strong evidence, but honestly this does little to add to the already strong scientific certainty (i.e., not based on faith) that the theory is correct, because there's already mountains of evidence in evolution's favour.
Because leniency is all they can offer him in exchange for 1) retrieving her body so that the family can bury it, 2) ending his appeals, and 3) having it enter the public record that he really is guilty, not just guilty at trial. That's worth a couple years off his sentence. Note that reducing the sentence doesn't alter the charge under which he was convicted--that's still first degree murder.
From Reiser's perspective, it's a good deal. He didn't have any good grounds for appeal, so it was very unlikely that he'd get a new trial or have the verdict overturned. This way, in ten years or so when he applies for parole, he can say that he admitted his guilt, was very sorry, and even helped them find the body. Convicts who don't admit they're guilty don't ever, ever get parole.
Why would you bother to prosecute him for perjury when he's already in jail for 25-to-life? Taxpayers didn't spend enough on him?
Besides, if convicts revealing information like the location of the victim's body led to increases in sentences, it would severely curtail the motivations of convicts to reveal such things after the fact when there's actually a benefit to be achieved, like giving the family something to bury.
This wasn't a crime a passion, it *was* a cold blooded murder. A crime of passion is when you walk in on your wife in bed with your best friend, grab your gun and kill them while the sheets are still wet. Reiser planned her murder over days at least and then went to some lengths to hide the body. Crucial to 'crime of passion' defense is *not* trying to cover it up--that speaks to being so enraged that you weren't thinking of the consequences.
It's possible that kidnapping was some bizarre effort on his part to talk her into reconciling, and things went wrong. If he'd tried that as a defense, he might have gotten a shorter sentence. But the fact of the matter is that he stalked her like prey and tried to get away with it. It was about as premeditated as it gets.
That's the theory, but what's happened is that McCain has had three uninterrupted, unobserved months of campaigning and building support. The result has been closing the gaps that existed three months ago. Depending on the polls, he's roughly tied with either one, where three months ago he was 10-15 points behind them. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton got beaten up by each other--a lot of the press was negative (Bosnia sniper fiasco, Reverend Wright, etc.). McCain's campaign has already started circulating videos of Clinton's comment that she and McCain had passed the Commander in Chief threshold, while Obama hadn't.
Everyone but Clinton is ready for the general to start.
The heat of this race is one of the things arguing in it being set in stone now. Everyone recognizes that the length of the contest has hurt the eventual nominee's chances because they're fighting each other instead of McCain. The mass break of superdels for Obama yesterday was the sign that everyone is ready for it to be really over. If Clinton weren't so stubborn it would have been over months ago. But at this point, it really would take a superscandal to trigger such a switch. Reopening wounds that everyone thought were closed, and alienating the millions who supported Obama *after* he's won the nomination, for all practical purposes... it would take a nuke to overturn what's now the fact on the ground.
Seriously, at this point, Clinton has nothing to argue in her favor except that, if her exit is ugly, she'll take her millions with her and sink Obama for the general. That's an argument for her to be paid off, not to try to further wrench the race in a different direction.
Since he's not unambiguously white, he's therefore black. That's the American way. And in a way, it makes it all the more impressive that he's the nominee, and has a real shot at winning the election.
Personally, I've always been cynical about issues-based campaigns because it's easy to stand up in the contest and say "I'll do X, Y, and Z if elected"; actually passing legislation is much more difficult, and the end result is rarely what was promised or launched. If you want to see Obama's policy papers, go to his website. He's got lots of them, and a lot of them are saner than Clinton's. The real test of Obama's plans is what happens when he actually goes to pass a law.
However, remember that Obama is the one who took the intelligent, principled position on a gas-tax holiday that was supported by economists. That should be a hopeful sign.
What happened in this election is that the Democrats on Obama's team looked at history and saw that the Democrats continually lose issues-based campaigns. You're right that elections are popularity contests, and the Dems finally figured out what the Republicans have understood for years. That doesn't mean any of the candidates aren't smart or have good positions. It just means that an election, like a job interview, is a pretty lousy way of vetting a candidate.
Clinton won't run third party because she can't win as a third party. If history and these primaries demonstrate one thing, it's that the Clintons are all about winning. The sanest explanation for why Clinton ran so hard this primary, long past the time when the spreadsheets said it was still possible to win, was that she recognized that this was her best opportunity. And now the landmine she's trying to avoid is being blamed if Obama loses in November, because that destroys any possibility of running again in 2012 as the Democrat.
At it's worst, each side's supporters showed about a 20-25% response rate of "I'm voting for McCain if the other one wins". That number is dropping, and will drop further now that there's a clear nominee. The vast majority of Clinton supporters will vote for Obama. The question of how she exits the race will determine how much of that last 10-20% fall in line with party wishes, and the point of Clinton's non-concession last night is a negotiating stance for being bought off to exit gracefully. Privately and semi-publicly (to donors and the press) she's already conceded that the race is over and Obama won. Now it's a question of whether she gets to reject the VP spot, or gets Senate majority leader, or what. Also who pays off her campaign's debts.
As for Obama picking up the middle, he's already beating McCain by eight points in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado. One thing the press continually got wrong was that, where Clinton was beating Obama, they assumed it was diehard support that wouldn't transfer (e.g., Pennsylvania). But overall polling showed that either Democrat beats McCain, indicating that Clinton's support was a preference, not a last stand. In a lot of states, the Dem voters simply liked Clinton better, but were happy with both.
You're arguing like an income tax resister. Yes, technically it's not over until convention when the votes are cast, and it could all go upside down. But what actually happens is that one candidate hits the magic number, and the other concedes. Clinton has already effectively conceded; her non-concession pose is about negotiating the price of her exit from the race. At this point, the practical possibility of delegates flipping doesn't exist unless Obama is caught on tape skullfucking a kitten to death while Michelle holds it down.
Presumably it's locked to an account. In theory you could set up infinite accounts, but in practice a few people will set up a few accounts to get a few extra free plays, while the vast majority (assuming that the userbase becomes vast) will listen and either pay or not pay. That's not the problem.
What I think is the hole in the scheme is that, if you can play it once, you can record it. You could even bot that so that over a period equal to the cumulative length of their catalog, you could download their entire catalog for free. The only way to prevent this is to degrade the quality of the free playback to uselessness, which would tend to undercut the entire scheme.
Wear-leveling algorithms distribute the write-erase load relatively evenly across the SSD. Individual NANDs have a MTBF of around a million write-erase cycles, IIRC, so good leveling algorithms have already pushed the MTBF for the SSD past the expected lifespan of mechanical HDs.
Seconding this. When I managed an IT department at a manufacturer, we had a choice between running a T1 to a warehouse that was literally across the road (and would have been back to the provider, then back to us), or using directional antennas. The latter worked perfectly, cost less than a month's T1 fees to set up (i.e., less than $500), and provided LAN bandwidth.
I'm not saying that's the best situation for gamers--that's why I play Eve, for which I've never paid a box cost since initial development was recovered years ago, and it became a useful competitive move to drop it. But it makes a lot of business sense to try to recover initial costs up front, and probably helps the life of the game--if it's slow taking off but the cost of ongoing operations aren't saddled with a tax of paying off three years of dev work, an initially low number of subscribers can be supported, giving the game time to grow.
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that there's a lot more to what the author said than that. He says nothing about a relationship between the quality of programmers and the quality of code; he says nothing about the time taken to develop code, and makes no conclusions about its effect on code quality.
What he says is that a cluster of metrics that collectively say something general about code quality (e.g., better code tends to have smaller files with fewer LOC; worse code has more global functions and namespace pollution) show little difference between four kernels with diverse parentage.
He speculates (and says he is speculating) that obvious differences in process might account for small variances in where each kernel scores well or badly.
Apparently they don't. Sturgeon hasn't even been arrested.
As you observed of me, you weren't on the jury either. They heard the whole case; they saw the participants and judged their credibility and weighed the evidence. And they found him guilty. That you, from a distance, find this difficult to accept is no knock against their verdict, just as my approval of their verdict is no benediction.
Lying on the stand does constitute evidence, both in legal terms and in common sense terms. In legal terms it indicates "consciousness of guilt". In common sense terms, it's not hard to infer that lying on the stand is done for a reason, namely to avoid revealing something else. When you're talking about a murder charge, it's difficult to imagine what one would be covering up, at risk of being found guilty of murder you didn't commit.
Yes, it's possible, but I have no reasonable doubts that she's dead. No one has heard from her in two years. Her passport was found in her apartment, so she couldn't (without great difficulty) have travelled abroad. Her bank account hasn't been touched in two years. She left behind children that everyone agrees she was devoted to and would never abandon. Her van was found miles from her house with recently purchased groceries and her cellphone inside.
Against that, you have the theory that she wanted to frame Hans for her death, or just wanted to walk away from everything in a way that implies her kidnapping or murder. It's possible, but like I said, I have no reasonable doubts she's dead.
Circumstantial evidence is indeed considered weaker than direct evidence, but you seem to be under the impression that circumstantial cases are necessarily weak--they're not, though they can be. Most evidence is circumstantial, and still strong enough collectively to convict.
Not when it's coming from the person accused of her murder, who's trying to explain away her very mysterious disappearance; and not in light of the testimony of her friends and family who say she would never abandon her children. If she wanted to return to Russia without the kids, she could have done so with all the drama. If she wanted to take the kids with her, she could have simply waited for the divorce to finalize.