Apparently you haven't seen this write up on Ars. It's about a study over a series of years, at the end of which a novel mutation developed that was beneficial to an E. coli population that started out from a single inoculum.
Over the course of 44,000 generations, they evolved the ability to metabolize citrate. They'd been incubated with citrate since 1988 and recently started using it as a substrate for metabolism. This study satisfies all 3 of the criteria you just indicated
I don't even believe that it's any particular sect of Christianity. I know members of various denominations, and the majority of any seems to believe that ID is simply a rebranding of creationism, and by definition isn't science. (Although, most of the people I know are either employed, or related to those employed in the life sciences).
The one group that seems to be more highly associated with ID in my personal experience (for what it's worth) is Born Again Christians. My grandmother is a firm believer in ID as something that should be taught in schools along side science, but then again she's also emails me religious spam half a dozen times a week
Perhaps. I resented the implication that any attempt to be greener must be a double-edged sword.
I was not trying to imply anything of the sort. I think that many people would agree that the reason we need to be concerned about the environment now is because as technology, society, production (both food and engineered products) advanced no one thought to check as to the implications of the changes they were making would have in advance.
EVERY time you make a change in the way things are done it is necessary to make sure that your change will not simply replace one problem with another. All I was saying is that I know that N can be a problem (it depends on the form as you've pointed out) and should be looked at before making a permanent change.
as the old saying goes "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I feel as though I've been attacked for saying "We should proceed with caution"
Despite my not doing a lot of genetics work myself, I did know that synthetic NA's had been developed and used, but I was under the impression that they were normally used as a substitution for a single NA for reasons of causing/preventing mutations. I got the impression from the article that these new NA pairs wouldn't work with normal DNA, but I may have misinterpreted what the article said.
The initial post made it sound as though they were talking about creating a normal DNA strand from scratch which has been done before. I'd imagine that finding the correct pairs for a synthetic DNA-like molecule would be a little more difficult than that.
The 3 posts I was referring to were the AC post you responded to (1 point at the time), the posts by rwATR & nathan.fulton which both had scores of 0 at the time. Apparently other's with mod points have come through and changed the scores in the intervening time.
It's obvious that you didn't read the article and that for some reason those with mod points haven't either (as evidenced by the 3 previous responses to your post being modded down despite attempting to correct your mistake).
They created a DNA like molecule with out using the four molecules cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. Now, I don't really see any immediately obvious applications for this new molecule, but it proves to me that it is possible for life to have evolved a similar information storing mechanism distinct from the one used by all life on earth and that is interesting.
The article is about pollution of water by fireworks. Nitrogen pollution is a legitimate concern. I'm not expecting it to be a problem, especially since most states have laws preventing the ownership of fireworks by ordinary citizens, and city/county/state governments tend to only set them off on the 4th and New Years. However, I do think it needs to be looked at before anyone goes passing legislation on the issue.
1. Just because their is a lot of N available, doesn't mean that it can't be limiting growth if all of the other nutrients needed are available in concentrations greater than required relative to the N requirement in that environment at that time.
2. I was not speaking to the form of the N in the water, only to it's presence. I'm not an explosives expert, or a chemist.
3. Many states have laws governing the amount of N that can be applied to fields by farmers precisely because of concerns over N levels in water.
4. I have a fair amount of chemistry under my belt, but it's all focused on animal biology, not the burning of nitrocellulose. However, you've pointed to acidification as being more probable than too much N. I do know that pH is also a major concern for water quality, so even if the concern I mentioned turns out to be unfounded, you've just highlighted another that ought to be investigated.
P.S. On a tangential point, you seem to be overly hostile about my post. I don't know that troll is appropriate. I wasn't trying to provoke a fight, calling anyone names, or belittling anyone else's opinion. I was pointing to a concern that I didn't see anyone else mentioning. If you thought that my concern was unfounded then I would have thought the appropriate mod would be overrated.
What about the negative impact of excess Nitrogen in water tables. Most people have heard about farms being a source of pollution, leading to eutrophication of ground water, algae blooms, fish kills, nasty smelling water, etc.
The 1st limiting nutrient in most aquatic environments is Nitrogen. It's the Nitrogen in animal waste that is the problem for surface water. I'd need to see the effect of Nitrogen based fireworks on Nitrogen levels in the water before I jump on this bandwagon.
You have a very valid point, but the initial comment is valid as well. The main reason we don't have wind farms on the Cape and around Martha's Vineyard in MA is due to so many rich individuals not wanting the view from their incredibly over-priced beach-front property to be anything less than spectacular
Plagiarism and Fudging data are two different, although related topics.
I have seen evidence of plagiarism. There was a grad-student in my lab that was struggling. I was a TA in a class he was taking and the Prof told me that an assignment he emailed in contained a link to the page where half of his answer came from verbatim. He has since been booted from the university for 2 consecutive semester of academic probation.
There was also an example of a student plagiarizing most of his literature review for his PhD thesis and then having the balls to publish it. It wasn't found out until later, but my Advisor uses it as an exercise every couple of years. He hands both articles out to his students and then tells us each to prepare a 10 min presentation on the two article. Not only was it an excellent example of plagiarism, it also lets him know who actually does the reading before lab meeting. Only 2 of the 5 students realized that it was plagiarism despite greater than 70% of the paragraphs being identical to the original, copied text.
the tricky thing about plagiarism is that different countries view it very differently. I've been told by Chinese grad-students that it's almost expected by their professors back home and many of them have a hard time breaking the habit when they come the US for education.
Their is also the fine line between citation and outright plagiarism. In the first draft of my Lit Review for my MS thesis I accidentally crossed that line too far and had to rewrite a section because my advisor felt that my comments were too close to those of the cited author. I didn't copy the text, but the arguments I used and the order they were made it was just too close for him to be comfortable. When I was writing that section I didn't think I was plagiarizing. Now however, I can see the point he was making and I'm being very careful in my current lit review not to make the same mistake.
That being said, None of that is evidence of someone altering the results of an experiment to make it say what they want. Either through selective exclusion of data, or outright fabrication which is the point I believe that I was trying to make in the original post.
But the notion that corruption is the norm in industry is a sign of maybe a bit of ignorance and paranoia?
You must be new here.
I got into a long conversation with another person on slashdot who eventually compared GM corn with Nuclear Holocaust and tried to make Nuclear Holocaust look like the better option.
1. As a TA in the Animal Sciences, I've never told a student to work backwards from the answer to show their work.
2.As someone with a decade of life sciences college work under my belt I've never been told to work backwards from the answer by a TA or professor.
3. As a researcher with over 20 unique research trials under my belt I've never seen evidence of "Fudging" data by any of the 30 or so other grad-students I've worked with over the past 6 years.
During the course of my own research I've had to repeat several studies because we couldn't make heads or tails of the results, but we've never faked the data or published data we knew to be false. I have to admit that we did have to argue with a company when submitting a manuscript containing research they'd paid for. We had submitted to them a preliminary report of the results. They published the results of that report as if definitive. Over the course of writing the manuscript we found some errors in our statistical analysis of the results and corrected them. This changed the results quantitatively, but the overall conclusions remained the same. They wanted us to go with the old results because they'd already published them and made suggestions to clients based on them. However, we simply indicated that if they didn't want us to publish the new number we'd simply refuse to put our names on the manuscript. Since the reason that companies perform their research at universities is to give the picture of being independent, and without mine or my Professors names the only remaining author would be a member of the company that sells the product we were testing, they were forced to back down and the manuscript was submitted with the most accurate results we had.
I don't think they were evil, just trying to save face after making the mistake of believing that the preliminary report was 100% accurate. That's the reason for Peer Review, Independent analysis by Universities on behalf of the obviously biased funding agencies. Remember, this is the only situation I've come across of this sort in 6 years of graduate research and it was a lot less dramatic than it sounds like written here.
I think it's more accurate to say that you'll be marked troll or flamebait if you're opinion diverges too widely from the mainstream of Slashdot poster. ie:
"Republican != Sata" - troll
"Obama != 2nd coming of christ" -flamebait
"Bush can't be an idiot and evil, so pick one" - troll
Show me evidence that Bush knowingly told a falsehood about Abu Ghraib. Not that he said something false because he was misinformed, but where he knowingly lied.
Show me the evidence that he knew what he said was wrong when he said it.
All I've seen is evidence that other's doubted the accuracy of the intel that was sent to the president, but not that he knew the intel to be false at the time he presented it.
But I thought the whole idea was that full powered, desktop level, apps on a mobile device.
I'm not trying to slander Java, but I've never used a Java app that doesn't take up a disproportionate amount of processor and memory when compared to the same type of program written in some flavor of C.
I want to reiterate that I'm not a programer and I'm not trying to be contrary. I'm just a little confused is all.
I'll admit I'm not a programer and I have a tendency toward reading pro-apple sites, but I was under the impression that objective C is just an extension of C, and that regular C code would compile and run fine without extensive modification.
I used the black guy fried chicken analysis because I found both to be broad generalizations that are offensive. I'm a republican and don't apologize for it, just like I enjoy fried chicken and don't apologize for it. You don't know my skin color. You're correct in that being black is genetic while party affiliation isn't but neither is a preference for fried chicken. I wasn't making a joke. Nothing about my post was intended to be racist or funny. You just don't like being painted with the same broad strokes usually reserved for racists. Well in my personal opinion, posts like the one I was replying to are about as helpful to the cause of political conversation, as racists stereotypes are to the cause of racial harmony.
Good job trying to turn my calling you out into an excuse to call me racist. It's a long tradition of knee-jerk liberal reactionary dialog to label those that disagree with you as racist, even when race was tangential to the point being made.
I think it's particularly ironic that the party that has always billed itself as the "Party of the People" is the one that developed a primary process where politically connected individuals are given such a disproportionately large say the nomination of a national presidential candidate.
I guess it's only fitting that it is now bitting them in the ass, as a lot of Democrats begin to feel disenfranchised within their own party. I guess you reap what you sow
This is almost as ignorant and inflammatory as saying all black people love fried chicken.
The Republicans will only vote for an R, unless their own candidate is so bad that they have to stay home.
Being a Republican from Massachusetts (currently living in Indiana for school), I've probably voted for more Democrats than Republicans over the years. The avowed members of political parties that you see on TV have a vested interest in their party coming out on top even if they don't agree with the candidate. The actual voting members of the party are a wide mix and usually joined the party because they agree with majority of the party's political planks (not the vocal minority of the talking heads on TV). No politician can be elected to the presidency without getting some members of the other party to vote for them.
Currently the Republican candidate is the only one of the two (Previously 3) presidential candidates with any significant history of voting against the wishes of his voting block. If that doesn't show that using broad generalizations is counter productive and tantamount to a FUD campaign, I don't know what is
When it comes to vulnerabilities, the vendors only care in so far as it causes a PR problem for them. However, I don't believe that these "Security Experts" are crusading for consumers either. They tell the company that there is a problem, but if the company doesn't decided that the flaw "They" found is the most important thing then the "Security Expert" throws a hissy fit and tells everyone about it in revenge. The "Security Expert" appears to me to be hoping someone will develop some malware that utilizes the flaw and gives the vendor a PR problem. Either way it's the consumer that looses because in the case of unfixed flaws there exists the possibility of a Malware author discovering the flaw, and in the event of full disclosure the consumers are the ones at risk if the malware authors act faster than the vendor. IMHO, It's a pissing contest between the vendors that write the software and the "Security Experts" that want bragging rights.
I'm a PhD in the life sciences (Animal Science) and I had to fight to get some programing onto my program of study. All I learned was a little Perl and MySQL but I used the Perl to write a script that asks for the necessary information and then generates randomized treatment list that saves me about 2-3 hours worth of dicking around in Excel when designing each experiment.
I think everyone in the sciences should learn the rudiments of a scripting language at least. If only to learn that automation is easier than many might think. There is this belief that grad school has to consist of a lot of boring, time-consuming work and I just don't agree. The point is to learn to work smart, not hard IMHO.
I pay $20/mo for 2 audiobook credits worth a book a piece. The prices for a monthly membership has gone up (Closer to 30 I believe), but it is still cheaper than buying books at the store. If time isn't what's keeping him from enjoying the books then he'll probably have plenty of time to listen to audiobooks.
but people have to take the initiative to figure it out and that's where linux fails. Not in technology or capability, but the laziness of potential users.
I have a theory (for what it's worth) that the current generation of "techie's" are to computers what the "Greatest Generation" was to automobiles. Both are capable of pulling things completely apart and re-building it better because of their knowledge of the underlying technology. However later generations lacked/will lack that ability because the technology had/will grow beyond was is easily learned on ones own by a large percentage of the population. People could learn fairly easily how to be surprisingly proficient with computer but the technology has matured to the point where people just expect it to work or to be able to pay someone else to make sure it works and not be bothered with it unless it is their bread and butter.
Linux will never catch on with the majority of users because it's too hard to keep every thing straight (HW and SW compatibilities). Ubuntu et al. have made a lot of progress in this but ultimately the personality of Linux fans gets in the way causing the inevitable forking of a distro and confusion among users that are just not interested in following the politics that inevitably swirl around collaborative, community-based projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you haven't seen this write up on Ars. It's about a study over a series of years, at the end of which a novel mutation developed that was beneficial to an E. coli population that started out from a single inoculum.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/06/04/tracking-adaptation-as-bacteria-evolve
Over the course of 44,000 generations, they evolved the ability to metabolize citrate. They'd been incubated with citrate since 1988 and recently started using it as a substrate for metabolism. This study satisfies all 3 of the criteria you just indicated
I don't even believe that it's any particular sect of Christianity. I know members of various denominations, and the majority of any seems to believe that ID is simply a rebranding of creationism, and by definition isn't science. (Although, most of the people I know are either employed, or related to those employed in the life sciences).
The one group that seems to be more highly associated with ID in my personal experience (for what it's worth) is Born Again Christians. My grandmother is a firm believer in ID as something that should be taught in schools along side science, but then again she's also emails me religious spam half a dozen times a week
I was not trying to imply anything of the sort. I think that many people would agree that the reason we need to be concerned about the environment now is because as technology, society, production (both food and engineered products) advanced no one thought to check as to the implications of the changes they were making would have in advance.
EVERY time you make a change in the way things are done it is necessary to make sure that your change will not simply replace one problem with another. All I was saying is that I know that N can be a problem (it depends on the form as you've pointed out) and should be looked at before making a permanent change.
as the old saying goes "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." I feel as though I've been attacked for saying "We should proceed with caution"
Despite my not doing a lot of genetics work myself, I did know that synthetic NA's had been developed and used, but I was under the impression that they were normally used as a substitution for a single NA for reasons of causing/preventing mutations. I got the impression from the article that these new NA pairs wouldn't work with normal DNA, but I may have misinterpreted what the article said.
The initial post made it sound as though they were talking about creating a normal DNA strand from scratch which has been done before. I'd imagine that finding the correct pairs for a synthetic DNA-like molecule would be a little more difficult than that.
The 3 posts I was referring to were the AC post you responded to (1 point at the time), the posts by rwATR & nathan.fulton which both had scores of 0 at the time. Apparently other's with mod points have come through and changed the scores in the intervening time.
It's obvious that you didn't read the article and that for some reason those with mod points haven't either (as evidenced by the 3 previous responses to your post being modded down despite attempting to correct your mistake).
They created a DNA like molecule with out using the four molecules cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. Now, I don't really see any immediately obvious applications for this new molecule, but it proves to me that it is possible for life to have evolved a similar information storing mechanism distinct from the one used by all life on earth and that is interesting.
The article is about pollution of water by fireworks. Nitrogen pollution is a legitimate concern. I'm not expecting it to be a problem, especially since most states have laws preventing the ownership of fireworks by ordinary citizens, and city/county/state governments tend to only set them off on the 4th and New Years. However, I do think it needs to be looked at before anyone goes passing legislation on the issue.
1. Just because their is a lot of N available, doesn't mean that it can't be limiting growth if all of the other nutrients needed are available in concentrations greater than required relative to the N requirement in that environment at that time.
2. I was not speaking to the form of the N in the water, only to it's presence. I'm not an explosives expert, or a chemist.
3. Many states have laws governing the amount of N that can be applied to fields by farmers precisely because of concerns over N levels in water.
4. I have a fair amount of chemistry under my belt, but it's all focused on animal biology, not the burning of nitrocellulose. However, you've pointed to acidification as being more probable than too much N. I do know that pH is also a major concern for water quality, so even if the concern I mentioned turns out to be unfounded, you've just highlighted another that ought to be investigated.
P.S. On a tangential point, you seem to be overly hostile about my post. I don't know that troll is appropriate. I wasn't trying to provoke a fight, calling anyone names, or belittling anyone else's opinion. I was pointing to a concern that I didn't see anyone else mentioning. If you thought that my concern was unfounded then I would have thought the appropriate mod would be overrated.
What about the negative impact of excess Nitrogen in water tables. Most people have heard about farms being a source of pollution, leading to eutrophication of ground water, algae blooms, fish kills, nasty smelling water, etc.
The 1st limiting nutrient in most aquatic environments is Nitrogen. It's the Nitrogen in animal waste that is the problem for surface water. I'd need to see the effect of Nitrogen based fireworks on Nitrogen levels in the water before I jump on this bandwagon.
You have a very valid point, but the initial comment is valid as well. The main reason we don't have wind farms on the Cape and around Martha's Vineyard in MA is due to so many rich individuals not wanting the view from their incredibly over-priced beach-front property to be anything less than spectacular
Plagiarism and Fudging data are two different, although related topics.
I have seen evidence of plagiarism. There was a grad-student in my lab that was struggling. I was a TA in a class he was taking and the Prof told me that an assignment he emailed in contained a link to the page where half of his answer came from verbatim. He has since been booted from the university for 2 consecutive semester of academic probation.
There was also an example of a student plagiarizing most of his literature review for his PhD thesis and then having the balls to publish it. It wasn't found out until later, but my Advisor uses it as an exercise every couple of years. He hands both articles out to his students and then tells us each to prepare a 10 min presentation on the two article. Not only was it an excellent example of plagiarism, it also lets him know who actually does the reading before lab meeting. Only 2 of the 5 students realized that it was plagiarism despite greater than 70% of the paragraphs being identical to the original, copied text.
the tricky thing about plagiarism is that different countries view it very differently. I've been told by Chinese grad-students that it's almost expected by their professors back home and many of them have a hard time breaking the habit when they come the US for education.
Their is also the fine line between citation and outright plagiarism. In the first draft of my Lit Review for my MS thesis I accidentally crossed that line too far and had to rewrite a section because my advisor felt that my comments were too close to those of the cited author. I didn't copy the text, but the arguments I used and the order they were made it was just too close for him to be comfortable. When I was writing that section I didn't think I was plagiarizing. Now however, I can see the point he was making and I'm being very careful in my current lit review not to make the same mistake.
That being said, None of that is evidence of someone altering the results of an experiment to make it say what they want. Either through selective exclusion of data, or outright fabrication which is the point I believe that I was trying to make in the original post.
I got into a long conversation with another person on slashdot who eventually compared GM corn with Nuclear Holocaust and tried to make Nuclear Holocaust look like the better option.
1. As a TA in the Animal Sciences, I've never told a student to work backwards from the answer to show their work.
2.As someone with a decade of life sciences college work under my belt I've never been told to work backwards from the answer by a TA or professor.
3. As a researcher with over 20 unique research trials under my belt I've never seen evidence of "Fudging" data by any of the 30 or so other grad-students I've worked with over the past 6 years.
During the course of my own research I've had to repeat several studies because we couldn't make heads or tails of the results, but we've never faked the data or published data we knew to be false. I have to admit that we did have to argue with a company when submitting a manuscript containing research they'd paid for. We had submitted to them a preliminary report of the results. They published the results of that report as if definitive. Over the course of writing the manuscript we found some errors in our statistical analysis of the results and corrected them. This changed the results quantitatively, but the overall conclusions remained the same. They wanted us to go with the old results because they'd already published them and made suggestions to clients based on them. However, we simply indicated that if they didn't want us to publish the new number we'd simply refuse to put our names on the manuscript. Since the reason that companies perform their research at universities is to give the picture of being independent, and without mine or my Professors names the only remaining author would be a member of the company that sells the product we were testing, they were forced to back down and the manuscript was submitted with the most accurate results we had.
I don't think they were evil, just trying to save face after making the mistake of believing that the preliminary report was 100% accurate. That's the reason for Peer Review, Independent analysis by Universities on behalf of the obviously biased funding agencies. Remember, this is the only situation I've come across of this sort in 6 years of graduate research and it was a lot less dramatic than it sounds like written here.
I don't know where you get the idea that all, or even most Mac's use Intel graphics chips.
MBP, MacPro, post '06 iMac's - All models use either ATI or NVIDIA
only the consumer Macbook, ultra portable MBA, and the svelt MacMini use Intel integrated graphics.
I think it's more accurate to say that you'll be marked troll or flamebait if you're opinion diverges too widely from the mainstream of Slashdot poster. ie:
"Republican != Sata" - troll
"Obama != 2nd coming of christ" -flamebait
"Bush can't be an idiot and evil, so pick one" - troll
Show me evidence that Bush knowingly told a falsehood about Abu Ghraib. Not that he said something false because he was misinformed, but where he knowingly lied.
Show me the evidence that he knew what he said was wrong when he said it.
All I've seen is evidence that other's doubted the accuracy of the intel that was sent to the president, but not that he knew the intel to be false at the time he presented it.
But I thought the whole idea was that full powered, desktop level, apps on a mobile device.
I'm not trying to slander Java, but I've never used a Java app that doesn't take up a disproportionate amount of processor and memory when compared to the same type of program written in some flavor of C.
I want to reiterate that I'm not a programer and I'm not trying to be contrary. I'm just a little confused is all.
Why?
I'll admit I'm not a programer and I have a tendency toward reading pro-apple sites, but I was under the impression that objective C is just an extension of C, and that regular C code would compile and run fine without extensive modification.
I used the black guy fried chicken analysis because I found both to be broad generalizations that are offensive. I'm a republican and don't apologize for it, just like I enjoy fried chicken and don't apologize for it. You don't know my skin color. You're correct in that being black is genetic while party affiliation isn't but neither is a preference for fried chicken. I wasn't making a joke. Nothing about my post was intended to be racist or funny. You just don't like being painted with the same broad strokes usually reserved for racists. Well in my personal opinion, posts like the one I was replying to are about as helpful to the cause of political conversation, as racists stereotypes are to the cause of racial harmony.
Good job trying to turn my calling you out into an excuse to call me racist. It's a long tradition of knee-jerk liberal reactionary dialog to label those that disagree with you as racist, even when race was tangential to the point being made.
I think it's particularly ironic that the party that has always billed itself as the "Party of the People" is the one that developed a primary process where politically connected individuals are given such a disproportionately large say the nomination of a national presidential candidate.
I guess it's only fitting that it is now bitting them in the ass, as a lot of Democrats begin to feel disenfranchised within their own party. I guess you reap what you sow
Currently the Republican candidate is the only one of the two (Previously 3) presidential candidates with any significant history of voting against the wishes of his voting block. If that doesn't show that using broad generalizations is counter productive and tantamount to a FUD campaign, I don't know what is
When it comes to vulnerabilities, the vendors only care in so far as it causes a PR problem for them. However, I don't believe that these "Security Experts" are crusading for consumers either. They tell the company that there is a problem, but if the company doesn't decided that the flaw "They" found is the most important thing then the "Security Expert" throws a hissy fit and tells everyone about it in revenge. The "Security Expert" appears to me to be hoping someone will develop some malware that utilizes the flaw and gives the vendor a PR problem. Either way it's the consumer that looses because in the case of unfixed flaws there exists the possibility of a Malware author discovering the flaw, and in the event of full disclosure the consumers are the ones at risk if the malware authors act faster than the vendor. IMHO, It's a pissing contest between the vendors that write the software and the "Security Experts" that want bragging rights.
I'm a PhD in the life sciences (Animal Science) and I had to fight to get some programing onto my program of study. All I learned was a little Perl and MySQL but I used the Perl to write a script that asks for the necessary information and then generates randomized treatment list that saves me about 2-3 hours worth of dicking around in Excel when designing each experiment.
I think everyone in the sciences should learn the rudiments of a scripting language at least. If only to learn that automation is easier than many might think. There is this belief that grad school has to consist of a lot of boring, time-consuming work and I just don't agree. The point is to learn to work smart, not hard IMHO.
I pay $20/mo for 2 audiobook credits worth a book a piece. The prices for a monthly membership has gone up (Closer to 30 I believe), but it is still cheaper than buying books at the store. If time isn't what's keeping him from enjoying the books then he'll probably have plenty of time to listen to audiobooks.
but people have to take the initiative to figure it out and that's where linux fails. Not in technology or capability, but the laziness of potential users.
I have a theory (for what it's worth) that the current generation of "techie's" are to computers what the "Greatest Generation" was to automobiles. Both are capable of pulling things completely apart and re-building it better because of their knowledge of the underlying technology. However later generations lacked/will lack that ability because the technology had/will grow beyond was is easily learned on ones own by a large percentage of the population. People could learn fairly easily how to be surprisingly proficient with computer but the technology has matured to the point where people just expect it to work or to be able to pay someone else to make sure it works and not be bothered with it unless it is their bread and butter.
Pipe Dream?
Linux will never catch on with the majority of users because it's too hard to keep every thing straight (HW and SW compatibilities). Ubuntu et al. have made a lot of progress in this but ultimately the personality of Linux fans gets in the way causing the inevitable forking of a distro and confusion among users that are just not interested in following the politics that inevitably swirl around collaborative, community-based projects.