I wonder how much CPU time and battery power the included apps that I can't seem to uninstall and which keep restarting themselves after a while when I kill them with a task manager.
The worst part about apps like that, especially on a phone, is that the fact that they keep on restarting themselves when you kill them means that the programmers knew they terminate unexpectedly. The fact that the programs restart like that means that you were sold software that they know is crashy, and which they've patched over by having it auto-restart.
The problem is that the evidence goes both ways, some studies show a correlation, others don't.
Good grief. You know what that means? It means that at best the effect is teeny tiny.
It's just a matter of statistics. If you run a thousand tests, at least some of them will show correlation, even if the correlation doesn't actually exist.
And guess which studies get published? That's right, the ones that show a positive result. Studies showing a negative result just sit in people's computers, because the effort of polishing that data up for publication just isn't worth it when you have an uncontroversial, negative result.
It's a cycle you see all the time: you get a bunch of small, slightly positive studies because all the small, negative studies don't get published. Then someone takes those small positive studies and gets funding for a large study - and suddenly the effect goes away. It happened with the medical effects of prayer, it'll happen with cell phones.
Actually, it looks like SSDs are currently less reliable than hard disks in practice (though of course that link is to Jeff Atwood saying he'll buy them anyway).
Boy, if you think doctors are inept now, wait until the bureaucracy takes over. Nothing spells incompetence like a bureaucrat. If you think medicine is a bad example, look at cars. Compare cars made by governments (Communist countries) to cars made by private citizens (capitalist countries) and tell me which one is more reliable, more efficient and safer?
Man, I want to live in your world, where everything is black and white, and all the answers are simple. It sounds a lot better than this world I'm living in right now, with all of its nuance and subtlety - after all, in my world, cars designed by companies on the capitalist side of things (e.g, American cars) are pretty shitty, while cars designed by companies on the communist side of things (e.g, everyone else but especially the Japanese and Germans) are significantly better.
You're not using all ten gigabytes of Portal 2 every time you play the game. An intelligent caching scheme would see that you're reading a lot of data from a contiguous section of disk, and copy more stuff from the area into your SSD cache than you actually ask for.
And anyway, double the size of the SSD - 60 GB, like these guys are saying - and even that complaint goes away.
I've never understood why they make those 200 - 300 GB SSD drives, when ~30 GB of SSD cache will hold your operating system and your most frequently used applications. It's not like everything on your hard drive needs to always be immediately available at SSD speeds, and yet recently that's been the only option.
Caching isn't some mysterious arcane technology, why has it taken so long for them to make a hybrid drive like this?
Here's what a rational, realistic analysis of tech progression would expect. GIVEN that life on earth can self replicate itself and use a huge range of molecules for fuel, it seems obvious that more sophisticated life is possible than already exists. Our star exhausts enormous amounts of free energy into space every second. Thus, one would expect that some day, perhaps next century or thousands of years from now, we will develop more sophisticated life that can use ALL of the matter in our solar system (rather than just a narrow range in the biosphere) and will use solar energy to rapidly convert all matter into parts of this life.
You are making the assumption that intelligent, tool-using creatures are inevitable. They are not. We do not know the prior probability of such creatures evolving; if such creatures do not evolve, it is incredibly unlikely that some biological mechanism will come about that can harvest a significant fraction of a star's total output (using the same logic you've already mentioned).
Given the fact that it took several billion years for us to evolve into something roughly resembling our current shape, and then a further several million years for us to actually start passing information along, it may very well be that creatures who can perform the abstract symbolic thought necessary for technological innovation are an absolute rarity in the universe; they are certainly utterly rare on Earth, where out of several billion species total since the beginning of time only one of them has been capable of such feats, and even then it's not something we all do.
Face it: intelligence is not necessarily adaptive, and as such is not an inevitable outcome of evolution. There may very well be billions of life-bearing planets out there, with nothing more intelligent than chimpanzees or dolphins on them. Hell, there may even be planets out there with intelligent, tool using creatures that have developed agriculture and stopped, like certain species of ant here on Earth.
Technology is not inevitable. If it were, the dinosaurs would have had skyscrapers.
If the natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen, how do you explain IBM? Have they found some type of middle ground of the IT landscape that makes them immune to bubbles and fluctuations in the market? They seem to be doing well for themselves, and have been for a long time.
Well - just off the top of your head, can you say who the current CEO of IBM is? Can you name its founders*?
IBM is kind of unique in that in a lot of ways it's really more like a country than a business; it has roots going back to 1889, and in order to survive since then it's had to develop bureaucracy and customs to the point where no one person can fuck up the company.
Microsoft, being a significantly younger company that was founded based on essentially one man's ego, does not have those protections; if the CEO is an idiot, he can still mess things up. Guess what Ballmer is?
*Trick question, it was created by a merger of four established companies.
I am kinda curious how anyone even tangentially involved in programming could not be aware that the problem with writing parallel programming was doing it for a gain in efficiency. Making a thread or process is generally just a couple lines of code, synchronization with data separation, mutex's and avoiding deadlocks and race conditions has been solved since almost the beginning of parallelism.
Actually, interestingly enough, parallelizing code not only results in computational efficiency gains, but it frequently results in energy efficiency gains as well.
Why? Because if instead of running one CPU at 2 GHz you can run two CPUs at 1 GHz for the same amount of time, you can cut the voltage used per CPU roughly in half (though it depends on the CPU, of course) - and if you ignore losses due to leakage, power consumption scales quadratically with respect to voltage. This means that if you cut the voltage used in the CPU in half you cut your total energy consumption by 1/4th.
This means that things like multicore smartphones aren't necessarily that bad of an idea - if you can parallelize your tasks well enough, you can keep both cores clocked low enough that you actually see energy efficiency gains.
Human rights are not an absolute thing, one right contradicts another, and you have to find a balance. He we have decided that the right to privacy and the right to protect your reputation against untrue statements is more important that the right to free speech.
Apparently, you've also decided that the right to protect your reputation against true statements is more important than the right to free speech - IIRC, in England truth is not an absolute defense against accusations of libel or slander.
This pretty much ensures that Business B will never expand service to that area, even if it would have been profitable otherwise.
And you know what? I'm totally okay with that. And if the people in the community are okay with that (as they apparently are, having voted for this), then why is the state enshrining the right of the telecom companies to profit in law? Why must it be mandated that some business B be able to make a profit?
I'm rather computer savvy, I'm aging, and looking at a display of an alarm clock, I would hesitate to press the "+" sign to "add an alarm". It's a generational thing, I would guess.
I agree that it's a generational thing, but I don't think it's one in the way you're describing; in fact, I think it has to do with the fact that you would hesitate.
See, the older generations grew up with computers as these big, fragile things; you couldn't fuck around too much, otherwise something might break and it would be all your fault. The generation before that grew up with industrial and farm equipment that was literally dangerous to touch; poke the wrong thing, and you might not have a finger afterwards.
People from those generations are afraid of exploring, because they might accidentally change something and break the computer or lose a finger.
That's not how we do things in modern interface design. The goal is, basically, to make exploration have zero cost; as long as you don't change some state that's visible to you in the program, you can touch buttons all you want and explore the menu structure without any cost.
So yeah, there is a difference - you would hesitate. Someone ten or twenty years younger wouldn't. That's pretty much all there is to it.
I read it a few years ago. Apart from being quite badly written, it was painfully dated and showed a distressing lack of understanding of basic computing concepts on the part of the author. I can imagine that someone who read it in the '80s would find it exciting and groundbreaking, but it just hasn't stood the test of time.
Yup. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter. He had never even touched a computer at the time.
If you're expecting anything even remotely resembling actual computery stuff, prepare for disappointment; nobody's going to be nmapping a target and then running sshnuke.
I would disagree that it's badly written; it's not. It's just not written clearly; it's somewhat experimental, so it often makes very little analytical sense. The idea was to convey the overwhelming feeling of constant future-shock, where as soon as you think you have a grip on some new technology a radically newer one comes out. It's kinda confusing if you try to force sense onto things; you're supposed to just absorb it and ride the wave, like the protagonist talks about early in the book IIRC.
On the other hand, it is a pretty cool story. I mean, Molly the cybernetic assassin has razor blade fingers and shades built in to her eye sockets (her tear ducts were re-routed to the roof of her mouth, so she spits instead of crying).
Basically, it's enjoyable as long as you follow the MST3K mantra. If you expect anything that even remotely resembles the realities of computing, you'll be disappointed; it's as factual The Hobbit, except set against a postmodern cybernetic background.
(It's actually kinda weird - geeks seem to have this strange idea that all science fiction should be extrapolation based on current trends, and there's no room at all for pure fantasy with a sciencey coating)
Some of us do and some of us do consider Childs to be guilty. He acted like a prick and suffered for it, but imho he was guilty of what he was found guilty of.
Okay; but was he "fuck your life over" guilty? After his trial turned into a media debacle, he's going to have a hard time getting a job anywhere in technology - which means that he's going to have to pay this 1.5 million dollar judgement with whatever remains of his life savings, and then with whatever he can make flipping burgers (if he's lucky).
Even if you consider him to be guilty, were his actions commensurate with this judgement?
No, it's completely impossible, unless you've created a nuclear reactor that'll last that long? Remember we'd need energy from the sun; life rots planets, and plants use solar energy to produce sugar from CO2 + H2O. Without that energy input, the entire earth would find itself in a CO2 atmosphere, with not enough oxygen to sustain life. Other life would flourish, mostly sulfur-consuming bacteria using a thermal process in volcanic vents; surface life would die, and eventually the core of the earth will cool.
And that's why we'll never colonize another star system unless FTL or some sort of super cheap suspended animation are invented. The technology you need to toss a bunch of living colonists from one star system to the next could also be used to just colonize space itself.
I mean, think about it: you're planning on isolating some people in the middle of interstellar space where there's pretty much nothing besides some stray space dust for over a hundred times longer than human civilization has existed! Why go out into those conditions, when the exact same technology can be used to just make a ton of orbital habitats?
He's nowhere near the best Republican: Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower all come out way ahead of him. And all of those guys would be branded as complete and utter loonies in current US politics, especially their views on class, corporations and taxes. Heck, there's a good argument that Ronald Reagan wouldn't be accepted within the current Republican Party, because he allowed for some tax increases in the 1980's.
Fun fact: in the 1950s or so, the crazy idiots in the Democratic party migrated over to the Republican party because they didn't like the fact that we were starting to treat black people like people. Oddly enough, that's about when the Republican descent into madness started.
This means that when people say "the Republican party is the party of Abe Lincoln!", what they really mean to say is "I have no understanding of history, and how political parties can change with time, and how the continuity of a name does not imply the continuity of ideals".
The cost of buying a second monitor for one developer is immaterial. The cost of buying second monitors for every developer isn't.
Huh. Are you the sort of manager who says "okay, back when we were a 25 person company, we could totally afford the ~$50/month needed to provide drinks and snacks for everyone; now that we're a 100 person company that brings in ten times as much revenue, it's gone up to $250/month. That's totally unacceptable, we're going to have to cut out the free sodas and chips"?
Because if so, I hate you. That sort of small-minded, penny wise pound foolish behavior is what makes working in a corporation such a grind. A second monitor costs something like 0.5% of the developer's salary, at the absolute low end; do you really think that the increase in performance is less than half a percent point per year?
Oh, really? Every time someone mentions libertarianism, you get some ass hat mentioning Somalia as a libertarian paradise, hardly what I would call pro libertarian. Anti-left? That hasn't been true since 2000. There's a reason this place is called Kosdot by long time readers.
What? I've never heard the term "Kosdot" before in my life, and I've been reading Slashdot since I found a link to it from the Stile Project website back in 1999ish.
Why, you get something like what happened at the Banqiao Dam, if you're unlucky. That single hydro failure killed more people than nuclear ever has, something like ten times as many people as died in Chernobyl - and yet nobody ever brings it up when we discuss hydroelectric power, but Chernobyl is on the tip of everyone's tongue as soon as the word "nuclear" comes up.
I once wanted a 6ft HDMI cable right away. I noted that they were available at a popular online cable store for $10, and set out to find one for $20 or so, considering that to be an acceptable mark up for the immediacy required. Couldn't find any for less than $30, most stores sold them for $50 or $60. They are either price fixing or just individually deciding to rip people off. Either way I just went home, paid $12 after shipping, and waited for them to show up.
It's really sad that these days, brick and mortar stores seem to be catering to the stupid and the desperate. The only reason to buy anything in person any more is because you either need it today (especially if you have Amazon Prime, since then you can get it tomorrow), or you're too stupid to get a better deal online.
Personally I don't get the drive to be dishonest for these places. Do the job you've been paid to do, do it well, and people will want to use you again and recommend you.
That's the problem right there - people can't actually tell the difference between good computer service and bad, so they rate you based on their opinion of you, not on what you did.
Do a half-assed job with a smile, and people will still recommend you to their friends; do an excellent job with a frown, and they won't come back.
So basically, assuming you have some nice, friendly college students who can do a passable job at sounding competent manning the front desk, the quality of the actual work you do simply does not matter - and thus, the crooked repair shops will out-compete the honest ones.
Bottom line is, faith and science/technology do NOT have to be mutually exclusive.
That is not an issue that anyone is debating, and yet for some reason people keep on bringing it up. Clearly, science and faith are not mutually exclusive in the human mind - just look at the current Director of the National Institutes of Health, for goodness sakes. He's an evangelical Christian, and also was one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project. There is absolutely no debate on this point; you simply cannot argue it when empirical evidence is staring you in the face.
The question is, therefore, not "is the human mind flexible enough to accommodate both religion and science"; the answer to that is yes, obviously, and millions of people can be cited as support for that position. The question is, are religion and science themselves compatible? The answer to that is far less clear, and very easily argued to be "no".
Just ask yourself: how did that nice Yamaha PM5D you use for your church services come to be? Would it have been created without science? Would it have been created without religion? If religion and science are compatible, why did it take until the Enlightenment and its general advancement of the secular worldview for the seeds of your Yamaha to be sown?
Why is it that, in the history of humanity, when religion and science conflict it is always religion that is wrong?
Between running for president, commenting on Fox News shows, and cheating on his wife, how does he have time to read so much?
Just FYI - Newt Gingrich is not running for president, and probably will never run for president. Doing so would require that he open up his campaign books to some federal oversight that would ruin the various money raising scams he likes to run.
Instead, you'll find that he's formed a committee to think about the possibility of maybe entertaining the idea of running for President at some unspecified point in the future or maybe not, which is enough to get people to donate money but not enough to bring his "campaign" under federal oversight.
Here's Rachel Maddow talking about it in more detail.
Slashdot Mirror
The worst part about apps like that, especially on a phone, is that the fact that they keep on restarting themselves when you kill them means that the programmers knew they terminate unexpectedly. The fact that the programs restart like that means that you were sold software that they know is crashy, and which they've patched over by having it auto-restart.
Good grief. You know what that means? It means that at best the effect is teeny tiny.
It's just a matter of statistics. If you run a thousand tests, at least some of them will show correlation, even if the correlation doesn't actually exist.
And guess which studies get published? That's right, the ones that show a positive result. Studies showing a negative result just sit in people's computers, because the effort of polishing that data up for publication just isn't worth it when you have an uncontroversial, negative result.
It's a cycle you see all the time: you get a bunch of small, slightly positive studies because all the small, negative studies don't get published. Then someone takes those small positive studies and gets funding for a large study - and suddenly the effect goes away. It happened with the medical effects of prayer, it'll happen with cell phones.
Actually, it looks like SSDs are currently less reliable than hard disks in practice (though of course that link is to Jeff Atwood saying he'll buy them anyway).
Man, I want to live in your world, where everything is black and white, and all the answers are simple. It sounds a lot better than this world I'm living in right now, with all of its nuance and subtlety - after all, in my world, cars designed by companies on the capitalist side of things (e.g, American cars) are pretty shitty, while cars designed by companies on the communist side of things (e.g, everyone else but especially the Japanese and Germans) are significantly better.
You're not using all ten gigabytes of Portal 2 every time you play the game. An intelligent caching scheme would see that you're reading a lot of data from a contiguous section of disk, and copy more stuff from the area into your SSD cache than you actually ask for.
And anyway, double the size of the SSD - 60 GB, like these guys are saying - and even that complaint goes away.
I've never understood why they make those 200 - 300 GB SSD drives, when ~30 GB of SSD cache will hold your operating system and your most frequently used applications. It's not like everything on your hard drive needs to always be immediately available at SSD speeds, and yet recently that's been the only option.
Caching isn't some mysterious arcane technology, why has it taken so long for them to make a hybrid drive like this?
You are making the assumption that intelligent, tool-using creatures are inevitable. They are not. We do not know the prior probability of such creatures evolving; if such creatures do not evolve, it is incredibly unlikely that some biological mechanism will come about that can harvest a significant fraction of a star's total output (using the same logic you've already mentioned).
Given the fact that it took several billion years for us to evolve into something roughly resembling our current shape, and then a further several million years for us to actually start passing information along, it may very well be that creatures who can perform the abstract symbolic thought necessary for technological innovation are an absolute rarity in the universe; they are certainly utterly rare on Earth, where out of several billion species total since the beginning of time only one of them has been capable of such feats, and even then it's not something we all do.
Face it: intelligence is not necessarily adaptive, and as such is not an inevitable outcome of evolution. There may very well be billions of life-bearing planets out there, with nothing more intelligent than chimpanzees or dolphins on them. Hell, there may even be planets out there with intelligent, tool using creatures that have developed agriculture and stopped, like certain species of ant here on Earth.
Technology is not inevitable. If it were, the dinosaurs would have had skyscrapers.
Well - just off the top of your head, can you say who the current CEO of IBM is? Can you name its founders*?
IBM is kind of unique in that in a lot of ways it's really more like a country than a business; it has roots going back to 1889, and in order to survive since then it's had to develop bureaucracy and customs to the point where no one person can fuck up the company.
Microsoft, being a significantly younger company that was founded based on essentially one man's ego, does not have those protections; if the CEO is an idiot, he can still mess things up. Guess what Ballmer is?
*Trick question, it was created by a merger of four established companies.
About ten seconds, unless you want the source code :)
Actually, interestingly enough, parallelizing code not only results in computational efficiency gains, but it frequently results in energy efficiency gains as well.
Why? Because if instead of running one CPU at 2 GHz you can run two CPUs at 1 GHz for the same amount of time, you can cut the voltage used per CPU roughly in half (though it depends on the CPU, of course) - and if you ignore losses due to leakage, power consumption scales quadratically with respect to voltage. This means that if you cut the voltage used in the CPU in half you cut your total energy consumption by 1/4th.
This means that things like multicore smartphones aren't necessarily that bad of an idea - if you can parallelize your tasks well enough, you can keep both cores clocked low enough that you actually see energy efficiency gains.
Apparently, you've also decided that the right to protect your reputation against true statements is more important than the right to free speech - IIRC, in England truth is not an absolute defense against accusations of libel or slander.
And you know what? I'm totally okay with that. And if the people in the community are okay with that (as they apparently are, having voted for this), then why is the state enshrining the right of the telecom companies to profit in law? Why must it be mandated that some business B be able to make a profit?
I agree that it's a generational thing, but I don't think it's one in the way you're describing; in fact, I think it has to do with the fact that you would hesitate.
See, the older generations grew up with computers as these big, fragile things; you couldn't fuck around too much, otherwise something might break and it would be all your fault. The generation before that grew up with industrial and farm equipment that was literally dangerous to touch; poke the wrong thing, and you might not have a finger afterwards.
People from those generations are afraid of exploring, because they might accidentally change something and break the computer or lose a finger.
That's not how we do things in modern interface design. The goal is, basically, to make exploration have zero cost; as long as you don't change some state that's visible to you in the program, you can touch buttons all you want and explore the menu structure without any cost.
So yeah, there is a difference - you would hesitate. Someone ten or twenty years younger wouldn't. That's pretty much all there is to it.
Yup. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter. He had never even touched a computer at the time.
If you're expecting anything even remotely resembling actual computery stuff, prepare for disappointment; nobody's going to be nmapping a target and then running sshnuke.
I would disagree that it's badly written; it's not. It's just not written clearly; it's somewhat experimental, so it often makes very little analytical sense. The idea was to convey the overwhelming feeling of constant future-shock, where as soon as you think you have a grip on some new technology a radically newer one comes out. It's kinda confusing if you try to force sense onto things; you're supposed to just absorb it and ride the wave, like the protagonist talks about early in the book IIRC.
On the other hand, it is a pretty cool story. I mean, Molly the cybernetic assassin has razor blade fingers and shades built in to her eye sockets (her tear ducts were re-routed to the roof of her mouth, so she spits instead of crying).
Basically, it's enjoyable as long as you follow the MST3K mantra. If you expect anything that even remotely resembles the realities of computing, you'll be disappointed; it's as factual The Hobbit, except set against a postmodern cybernetic background.
(It's actually kinda weird - geeks seem to have this strange idea that all science fiction should be extrapolation based on current trends, and there's no room at all for pure fantasy with a sciencey coating)
Okay; but was he "fuck your life over" guilty? After his trial turned into a media debacle, he's going to have a hard time getting a job anywhere in technology - which means that he's going to have to pay this 1.5 million dollar judgement with whatever remains of his life savings, and then with whatever he can make flipping burgers (if he's lucky).
Even if you consider him to be guilty, were his actions commensurate with this judgement?
And that's why we'll never colonize another star system unless FTL or some sort of super cheap suspended animation are invented. The technology you need to toss a bunch of living colonists from one star system to the next could also be used to just colonize space itself.
I mean, think about it: you're planning on isolating some people in the middle of interstellar space where there's pretty much nothing besides some stray space dust for over a hundred times longer than human civilization has existed! Why go out into those conditions, when the exact same technology can be used to just make a ton of orbital habitats?
Fun fact: in the 1950s or so, the crazy idiots in the Democratic party migrated over to the Republican party because they didn't like the fact that we were starting to treat black people like people. Oddly enough, that's about when the Republican descent into madness started.
This means that when people say "the Republican party is the party of Abe Lincoln!", what they really mean to say is "I have no understanding of history, and how political parties can change with time, and how the continuity of a name does not imply the continuity of ideals".
Huh. Are you the sort of manager who says "okay, back when we were a 25 person company, we could totally afford the ~$50/month needed to provide drinks and snacks for everyone; now that we're a 100 person company that brings in ten times as much revenue, it's gone up to $250/month. That's totally unacceptable, we're going to have to cut out the free sodas and chips"?
Because if so, I hate you. That sort of small-minded, penny wise pound foolish behavior is what makes working in a corporation such a grind. A second monitor costs something like 0.5% of the developer's salary, at the absolute low end; do you really think that the increase in performance is less than half a percent point per year?
Have you ever gone from two monitors to one, though? You don't make it clear in your post.
If you haven't, try it sometime (disconnect your second monitor or something). It's incredibly painful.
What? I've never heard the term "Kosdot" before in my life, and I've been reading Slashdot since I found a link to it from the Stile Project website back in 1999ish.
And what happens when the dam breaks?
Why, you get something like what happened at the Banqiao Dam, if you're unlucky. That single hydro failure killed more people than nuclear ever has, something like ten times as many people as died in Chernobyl - and yet nobody ever brings it up when we discuss hydroelectric power, but Chernobyl is on the tip of everyone's tongue as soon as the word "nuclear" comes up.
What the fuck?
It's really sad that these days, brick and mortar stores seem to be catering to the stupid and the desperate. The only reason to buy anything in person any more is because you either need it today (especially if you have Amazon Prime, since then you can get it tomorrow), or you're too stupid to get a better deal online.
That's the problem right there - people can't actually tell the difference between good computer service and bad, so they rate you based on their opinion of you, not on what you did.
Do a half-assed job with a smile, and people will still recommend you to their friends; do an excellent job with a frown, and they won't come back.
So basically, assuming you have some nice, friendly college students who can do a passable job at sounding competent manning the front desk, the quality of the actual work you do simply does not matter - and thus, the crooked repair shops will out-compete the honest ones.
That is not an issue that anyone is debating, and yet for some reason people keep on bringing it up. Clearly, science and faith are not mutually exclusive in the human mind - just look at the current Director of the National Institutes of Health, for goodness sakes. He's an evangelical Christian, and also was one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project. There is absolutely no debate on this point; you simply cannot argue it when empirical evidence is staring you in the face.
The question is, therefore, not "is the human mind flexible enough to accommodate both religion and science"; the answer to that is yes, obviously, and millions of people can be cited as support for that position. The question is, are religion and science themselves compatible? The answer to that is far less clear, and very easily argued to be "no".
Just ask yourself: how did that nice Yamaha PM5D you use for your church services come to be? Would it have been created without science? Would it have been created without religion? If religion and science are compatible, why did it take until the Enlightenment and its general advancement of the secular worldview for the seeds of your Yamaha to be sown?
Why is it that, in the history of humanity, when religion and science conflict it is always religion that is wrong?
Just FYI - Newt Gingrich is not running for president, and probably will never run for president. Doing so would require that he open up his campaign books to some federal oversight that would ruin the various money raising scams he likes to run.
Instead, you'll find that he's formed a committee to think about the possibility of maybe entertaining the idea of running for President at some unspecified point in the future or maybe not, which is enough to get people to donate money but not enough to bring his "campaign" under federal oversight.
Here's Rachel Maddow talking about it in more detail.