He doesn't make a testable statement? Neither did Darwin.
Actually, Darwin did - that, as we found more fossils, we would start to find the transition forms between species. That didn't happen. The fossils we found seem to fit into identifiable species, which is quite different from what Darwin predicted.
As to your other questions: None of them seem particularly relevant to the question of intelligent design, which is whether the available evidence indicates that we could have arisen from chance.
It doesn't matter if the dogma is religious dogma or scientific dogma. If you can't question it and get reasonable answers back, it's just dogma. And, unfortunately, too much of science is that way.
Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot, he knows his molecular biology, and he raises some valid points. Screaming, "He's just a creationist!" doesn't make the points go away. Talking about how the consensus of scientists agree with you doesn't make the points go away. (The consensus is only right until it's wrong - but it takes quite a while for the consensus to change after it's been shown to be wrong.)
Stem cell research? There are people who believe that a fertilized egg is a human being. That's not a scientific question. But until it's answered, there's a moral problem, at least for those people, and asking them to accept that there will be scientific advances just makes them think of Dr. Mengele. Now, you can argue that it's a dogma to those people, and you'd be right. But to them, it's not a scientific issue. And until you can persuade them that stem cell research isn't a moral issue, they're going to fight you. And some of them (certainly not all) can give you some intelligent reasons why they think what they do. If you can't respond with some intelligent reasons of your own, all you have is a dogma.
What he really meant (though he may not have known it):
"Among the people who actually design operating systems as an academic exercise or a teaching tool, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
The people who actually design operating systems that are actually used in the real world have a different view...
(Fairness? To Microsoft? On Slashdot? Hey, humor me here.)
I don't think he's saying that it wasn't on their radar screens, as in, "We've never heard of Open Document". Instead, he's saying, "It wasn't on our radar as a feature to implement right now." And, pre-Massachusetts, it probably wasn't.
And that gets really frightening. Say Microsoft manages to drive Symantec and McAfee out of the Windows security market. Then the Microsoft security product stagnates...
Yeah, I can see it happening that way. Thank God for Linux.
It is also true that the US is still the biggest piece of the net. That is, the US piece is bigger than the Chinese piece, or the EU piece, or the Latin American piece, or the African piece, or the Middle Eastern piece. This means that locking out the US is the single most painful thing you can do to the rest of the net. It's much worse than the US locking out China, say. (It's not worse morally - I'm not saying that. It's just worse in how it affects the part of the net that is neither the lock-er or the lock-ee.)
There are two issues here. One is that "who controls" amounts to "who maintains". Well, I trust ICANN to maintain the root servers a lot more than I trust the UN (or even the EU).
Second is that "who controls" means "who can lock out the other side's internet access". But if anyone did this to anyone else, it would rightly be viewed as an act of war. So, who's more likely to lock out somebody's internet access: ICANN or the UN/EU? I kind of think that the UN/EU combo is more likely (say, to "protest" some US action, or Israeli, or even Brazilian), but I'm not sure that's correct.
Did the US lean on ICANN to lock out Iraq during Gulf War II?
Well, I'd like to RTFA (the Forbes article, of course), but Forbes doesn't seem to be willing to talk to me. Did anyone grab a mirror before their site became a smoking hole?
Second, Google has been getting warning signs that Microsoft wants to "cut of their (Google's) air supply". Rather than sit there and say, "Oh, that could never happen to us", they are taking the fight to Microsoft and trying to cut of their air supply. I think this is wise. I don't know if it will work in the long run, but the other approach has been shown to not work, so what do they have to lose?
And anything that spreads alternatives to Microsoft is good with me...
He was born in 1900, so he turned 18 in 1918, just in time to get drafted and sent to Europe. I don't think he ever saw action - the war ended before he got there. So they put him on a ship to come back.
Then they wouldn't let him off the ship. They left the ship anchored in Philadelphia harbor, waiting out the influenza epidemic.
Now, the story as I recall it was that they wouldn't let the soldiers off the ship because they were afraid that the epidemic would kill them. But now I wonder if they wouldn't let them off because they were afraid that the soldiers might be carrying the disease. They would be very effective at infecting the population as they returned to their homes all over the country.
But if they really were worried about 18-year-olds in fighting condition getting infected and dying... wow. It was a very serious disease.
One is the commercial software vendors - Microsoft, for example (they're not the only one, but they will do nicely to illustrate the issues). They want to sell me stuff. They don't want to give me a warranty with it. They don't want to give me the source code for it. They want me to buy a binary, with no guarantee that it will work. That stinks. That's unprofessional. That leads to ideas like licensing software engineers as actual engineers who are held liable for their professional mistakes. Non-guarantees like Microsoft's should be illegal - in the commercial software world.
Then there's the open-source world. They say, in effect, "Here. Here's some software. I don't guarantee that it works. But, hey, here's the source. If you want a guarantee, go prove it to yourself." It is reasonable to say that providing the source makes it reasonable (or at least possible) to place the burden of proof-of-correctness on the class of users that care about such.
So there's a reasonable basis for saying that commercial software that makes no guarantees should be illegal, but open source that makes no guarantees should not.
... but aren't "Association for Competitive Technology" and "Citizens Against Government Waste" also Microsoft front organizations from the days of the antitrust trial?
So then we have an organization whose founding members include Microsoft, two Microsoft fronts, and at least two outfits that sell Microsoft software. Nice. And it proceeds to act like a Microsoft front itself. Real big surprise there...
And it's not just global warming. It's also the increased erosion, caused by greedy capitalist exploitation, supported by the Republican's business-first policies.
I tell ya, they just don't care about protecting the environment...
I think it goes like this. "If we're right, we really need to stop this process. If we're wrong, well, pollution is still a big issue that needs to be addressed, so no harm done. So lets act like we're really sure even though we're not."
Note well that it isn't necessarily the scientists who are doing this. Some of it may be, but it is likely that more of it is the media.
And I sure don't understand why. I mean, given the GUI test runner from JUnit 3, and the text test runner from JUnit 4, is it really that hard to produce a GUI test runner for JUnit 4?
This is annoying enough that somebody's going to just hack one out, unless there's some technical reason why it can't be done that's eluded me...
The real story here is that we are suddenly seeing stories painting non-MS software as evil, criminal, and terroristic. (I say "stories" because I seem to recall seeing another one in the last 24 hours or so, though what it was slips my mind at the moment.)
Is this just incompetent, crybaby police? Or is it really an orchestrated MS ploy aimed at, say, Massachusetts?
No, you'd see a population shift, which is not the same thing as evolution. You'd see a greater proportion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the resulting population.
You wouldn't see anything new there. That is, if there weren't antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the initial population, you wouldn't see them in 3 or 7 generations.
Slashdot Mirror
How much would you pay to go to a movie? How much would you pay for a concert?
For some reason, music is worth more than movies. I'm not saying that I understand why, I'm just saying that it's deeper than just replay value.
He doesn't make a testable statement? Neither did Darwin.
Actually, Darwin did - that, as we found more fossils, we would start to find the transition forms between species. That didn't happen. The fossils we found seem to fit into identifiable species, which is quite different from what Darwin predicted.
As to your other questions: None of them seem particularly relevant to the question of intelligent design, which is whether the available evidence indicates that we could have arisen from chance.
Intelligent design? As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe. The man is not an idiot, he knows his molecular biology, and he raises some valid points. Screaming, "He's just a creationist!" doesn't make the points go away. Talking about how the consensus of scientists agree with you doesn't make the points go away. (The consensus is only right until it's wrong - but it takes quite a while for the consensus to change after it's been shown to be wrong.)
Stem cell research? There are people who believe that a fertilized egg is a human being. That's not a scientific question. But until it's answered, there's a moral problem, at least for those people, and asking them to accept that there will be scientific advances just makes them think of Dr. Mengele. Now, you can argue that it's a dogma to those people, and you'd be right. But to them, it's not a scientific issue. And until you can persuade them that stem cell research isn't a moral issue, they're going to fight you. And some of them (certainly not all) can give you some intelligent reasons why they think what they do. If you can't respond with some intelligent reasons of your own, all you have is a dogma.
"Among the people who actually design operating systems as an academic exercise or a teaching tool, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
The people who actually design operating systems that are actually used in the real world have a different view...
[sarcasm off]
I don't think he's saying that it wasn't on their radar screens, as in, "We've never heard of Open Document". Instead, he's saying, "It wasn't on our radar as a feature to implement right now." And, pre-Massachusetts, it probably wasn't.
And that gets really frightening. Say Microsoft manages to drive Symantec and McAfee out of the Windows security market. Then the Microsoft security product stagnates...
Yeah, I can see it happening that way. Thank God for Linux.
The majority of the net is non-US. This is true.
It is also true that the US is still the biggest piece of the net. That is, the US piece is bigger than the Chinese piece, or the EU piece, or the Latin American piece, or the African piece, or the Middle Eastern piece. This means that locking out the US is the single most painful thing you can do to the rest of the net. It's much worse than the US locking out China, say. (It's not worse morally - I'm not saying that. It's just worse in how it affects the part of the net that is neither the lock-er or the lock-ee.)
Second is that "who controls" means "who can lock out the other side's internet access". But if anyone did this to anyone else, it would rightly be viewed as an act of war. So, who's more likely to lock out somebody's internet access: ICANN or the UN/EU? I kind of think that the UN/EU combo is more likely (say, to "protest" some US action, or Israeli, or even Brazilian), but I'm not sure that's correct.
Did the US lean on ICANN to lock out Iraq during Gulf War II?
Second, Google has been getting warning signs that Microsoft wants to "cut of their (Google's) air supply". Rather than sit there and say, "Oh, that could never happen to us", they are taking the fight to Microsoft and trying to cut of their air supply. I think this is wise. I don't know if it will work in the long run, but the other approach has been shown to not work, so what do they have to lose?
And anything that spreads alternatives to Microsoft is good with me...
He was born in 1900, so he turned 18 in 1918, just in time to get drafted and sent to Europe. I don't think he ever saw action - the war ended before he got there. So they put him on a ship to come back.
Then they wouldn't let him off the ship. They left the ship anchored in Philadelphia harbor, waiting out the influenza epidemic.
Now, the story as I recall it was that they wouldn't let the soldiers off the ship because they were afraid that the epidemic would kill them. But now I wonder if they wouldn't let them off because they were afraid that the soldiers might be carrying the disease. They would be very effective at infecting the population as they returned to their homes all over the country.
But if they really were worried about 18-year-olds in fighting condition getting infected and dying... wow. It was a very serious disease.
One is the commercial software vendors - Microsoft, for example (they're not the only one, but they will do nicely to illustrate the issues). They want to sell me stuff. They don't want to give me a warranty with it. They don't want to give me the source code for it. They want me to buy a binary, with no guarantee that it will work. That stinks. That's unprofessional. That leads to ideas like licensing software engineers as actual engineers who are held liable for their professional mistakes. Non-guarantees like Microsoft's should be illegal - in the commercial software world.
Then there's the open-source world. They say, in effect, "Here. Here's some software. I don't guarantee that it works. But, hey, here's the source. If you want a guarantee, go prove it to yourself." It is reasonable to say that providing the source makes it reasonable (or at least possible) to place the burden of proof-of-correctness on the class of users that care about such.
So there's a reasonable basis for saying that commercial software that makes no guarantees should be illegal, but open source that makes no guarantees should not.
Write one. Then we might...
So then we have an organization whose founding members include Microsoft, two Microsoft fronts, and at least two outfits that sell Microsoft software. Nice. And it proceeds to act like a Microsoft front itself. Real big surprise there...
This is an FCC ruling. That's bad enough. But at least it's not a court ruling.
That is, as we saw with the broadcast flag, the courts can put the smackdown on the FCC when it gets out of bounds.
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" mean anything to you?
What's wrong with adding proprietary stuff? Nothing.
What's wrong with adding proprietary stuff in violation of the requirements for using the name "Java", and yet still calling it "Java"? Plenty.
That's why Microsoft lost the lawsuit. They aren't quite the innocent victims of lawsuit-happy Sun that you are making them out to be.
... until I make that system my personal zombie!
And it's not just global warming. It's also the increased erosion, caused by greedy capitalist exploitation, supported by the Republican's business-first policies.
I tell ya, they just don't care about protecting the environment...
Put two of these in a room, and let them fight it out...
I think it goes like this. "If we're right, we really need to stop this process. If we're wrong, well, pollution is still a big issue that needs to be addressed, so no harm done. So lets act like we're really sure even though we're not."
Note well that it isn't necessarily the scientists who are doing this. Some of it may be, but it is likely that more of it is the media.
And I sure don't understand why. I mean, given the GUI test runner from JUnit 3, and the text test runner from JUnit 4, is it really that hard to produce a GUI test runner for JUnit 4?
This is annoying enough that somebody's going to just hack one out, unless there's some technical reason why it can't be done that's eluded me...
That's kind of like lying, isn't it?
Is this just incompetent, crybaby police? Or is it really an orchestrated MS ploy aimed at, say, Massachusetts?
You wouldn't see anything new there. That is, if there weren't antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the initial population, you wouldn't see them in 3 or 7 generations.