Fundamentally they're getting away with it (and the last government got away with just as much) because nobody cares about their freedom - Britain has been a broadly stable and safe state (at least if you're from the right class) for the last 300 years. Its hard to get people worked up about protecting their rights. Its not helped by the fact that noone understands how the British state has worked for most of those 300 years - we can only really guess.
You hit the nail on the head in saying that with no effective opposition we're little better than a one party state. Unfortunately with effective opposition parliament is paralysed and the government doesn't work at all.
One of the good things that can be said about the current government is that their constitutional changes might make constructive opposition both more common and more popular.
The European Convention on Human Rights is already law in Scotland and will soon be in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (presumably in the course of the current parliament, along with the long promised and water down more than a supermarket prawn freedom of information act).
This legislation will not stand up to judicial scrutiny if the system for handling human rights cases actually works properly. Given the slightly flakey nature of the British legal system outside of Scotland it may not. The Court of Session in Edinburgh has recently upheld two complaints on human rights grounds, one of which has forced the Scottish Government to stop employing temporary sherriffs. There will be more such cases, and probably a lot of ensuing chaos - getting the crypto stuff heard might be hard.
A system very like a modern network of PCs was demonstrated in the mid-70s, before Xerox PARC was even founded by some Stanford researchers (one of whom is very famous, but whose name I have forgotten). They had a number of technologies in that system that were forgotten and have only recently reemerged - such as videoconferencing (at least in prototype).
Similarly many of the elements of the modern GUI originated only with the Macintosh. For instance the event-based system for repainting (rather than keeping backing storage, or deactivating background apps as the Star did) was a Macintosh invention. Similarly the Star GUI was not very usable by modern standards - there was a considerable lack of graphical images. ParcPlace producst such as ObjectWorks still had this "look" until only a few years ago.
Immense sociological impact, and about as subversive as you can get. Who would of thought a small thing like moveable type would make such an impression.
Off the top of my head, I'd say this is rather like the question of firearms, and I'd say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is even more applicable for software than for guns.
Naively making it illegal to produce software capable of being used to break the law would make a lot of vital activity - for instance producing exploits for security flaws - against the law, which would be hugely to everyone's detriment. If that was done, the inabilility of honest law abiding people to effectively investigate security issues was be a massive boost to crackers everywhere.
As far as I can see liability for breaking the law lies with the person whose intent it was to break it. If the that is the author of some software (eg, a program deliberately designed to spread a virus) then so be it, but if the author produces a tool with multiple functions (eg. BO2K) then he's no more guilty than a man who makes a knife.
There are of course some tricky cases. For instance a friend of mine once wrote a virus as an exercise and gave it a slightly nasty payload. He never intended to release it, but unfortunately a copy got loose on his hard drive and infected several other machine before it was wiped out. If that had well and truly escaped, and done serious damage, where would the liability lie for that ? or is it a natural hazard ? Possibly there is no criminal liability in that case, but merely civil negligence by failing to contain the virus ?
I think in fact they already do this as a check for hacked clients - or maybe its distributed.net that do it.
Nonetheless it does raise an interesting option , which would be to open source the client, and make sure that every user's client had, say, every tenth result duplicated to another based on a differently patched source tree. This would act as some kind of assurance, I suppose. However, it might be hard to tell which source tree the client was built from in a way not open to hacking.
The SETI people, like the distributed.net people, want to make it hard to report that you have searched a particular block without really doing so. That is why they haven't released the source.
Unlike the distributed.net people, the client is running on real data of which there is a limited supply. They don't want it to be any faster, because they'd start to run out of data blocks. They don't care how many points your team gets - they want to do science, and from that perspective they want everyone using the same algorithms - they don't want them "optimised" by individuals *at all*. The risk of false negatives or bugs introduced by stupid programming is too great.
Possibly you should work out what people are trying to acheive before being rude about their cluefulness.
It is interesting that Project Gutenberg have chosen to put things on line only in ASCII text.
I wonder if they might benefit from keeping their master copies in some kind of basic plain text markup language based on XML or SGML. Having things like the chapter structure, or more importantly the scripting information for plays, in the document in a machine readable format would seem to make it easer to search the collection, and also easier to reintroduce formatting to allow prettier looking hard copy. I don't know about anyone else, but I find reading on paper much easier than on screen, and nice formatting in that context is important.
I don't mean to belittle what they are doing - I think it is excellent work - and I emphatically don't want them to keep the master copies in HTML or some equally labile format, or to start to introduce physical markup, but it would be nice to have some idea of the structure written more clearly into the text.
The question is, was Microsoft using monopoly OS power to stifle competition in other areas
On the face of it: clearly the answer is yes. As someone else has pointed out, the different pricing of identical products (even if disguised) is an example of price differentiation. The ability to do this is clear evidence of market power.
Similarly, obviously the purpose of the move was to force anyone who wanted to run another web server to buy an OS that included a copy of IIS, encouraging them to run that instead. The only other possible reason is the one MS gave: that NT Workstation is unsuitable for use as a server. This has been established to be a lie.
This fulfills the two criteria for being a violation of anti-trust legislation. Whether the licensing agreement has any legal standing, or whether MS' actions where fair is irrelevant in this case.
The same applies to software, through and through - license or no license. You own the media, and the use of that media - you hold no rights to the information itself, unless it is EXPLICITLY given to you, in writing. Copyright law makes this automatic, by the way.
You do have some rights to the information, granted by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, and the *implicit* contract you entered into when buying the product which was offered for sale (which is emphatically not the same as the shrinkwrap nonsense that has no legal standing). That implicit contract is based on the agreed functionality and uses of the product at the time when you hand over the cash.
As I understand it, these principles have never been tested in a US court, since the software makers have no interest in acknowledging that shrinkwrap licenses have not standing, and to my knowledge noone has ever been charged with violating shrinkwrap provisions (other than not copying, which is covered by copyright law).
As someone else has already said: creating a cross platform GUI framework is hard.
Sun's decision to go with a pure Java GUI in Swing is not based on "arrogance", but on their failure to find a way to extend the AWT (which used native components) and keep it cross platform. As to what approach is best: well, noone knows. Attempts have been made to extend the native widget approach or mix the two, but none has been very successful. A remote GUI, running in another app, or on another machine, is also an option, but increases the amount of code that must be maintained.
And yes, Swing looks nothing like a Mac, even when running on one. Deal with it. It looks nothing like Windows or Motif either.
I think blaming journalists for poor science reporting is a bit like blaming them for personality based issue-free politics. Its only half the story. The other actors in both fields - politicians and scientists must take their share of the blame.
Politicians need (especially in the US) to raise funds and (most places) to win elections. You do that by trying to appeal to everyone and the best way to do that is convince them you're a nicer guy than your competitor. Raising the issues confuses the voters and runs the risk of alienating them.
Scientists have a similar problem. Science is based on doubt. Sucessful ideas are those that are least in doubt, but nothing is ever cast in stone. However the public wants to here of giant breakthroughs, the next new gizmo and what horrible poisons are likely to turn up in their food. Scientists who push their work out into the mainstream media (or let it get pulled) have to pander to this by making it seem more sensational.
Well you're right that an incomplete implementation of the platform is pretty useless to most Java people.
However, its not the VM thats the issue. The VM spec hasn't changed since 1.0 (though thankfully the performance has) and the language hasn't changed since 1.1. There's no sense in which a 1.2 compatible compiler differs from a 1.1 compatible one.
The difference is the class libraries. Java's collection framework is no small peice of work. Neither is Java2D (which contains code from around 10 difference comapanies).
Actually its not even true that rich people need to get rich off someone. They can do - it is possible to get rich just by ripping people off. But they can also get rich by selling people something they want. This is called "economic growth".
Who said that ? You can say what you like until you start to make threats. Once you do that, you have caused someone to fear for their life, and that is not permissible. Singer, and his critics can both say what they like, but its the fact that he has to teach in secret that is a problem.
The closest this article gets to criticising any of Eric Raymond's studies of Open Source is saying that the gift culture analogy is simplistic - a point which most people would probably accept.
The points at the top of the article do represent a "vulgar" (the author seems fond of that word) view of open source which is quite common on/., but I think its underestimating ESR to attribute this view to him. Noone says the Bazaar model is universal (indeed RMS is very cathedral person). Very few people seriously think we can destroy MS and I personally don't even very much want to. There is no way anyone thinks the gift economy can be universal, and you only need to look at the interactions of ESR, RMS and Bruce Perens to see a lack of "ideal cooperative people".
The author goes on to tout a model of the open source community as a scientific one, which is quite a good analogy I think, but in no way contradicts the CatB view. The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder about "vulgar Marxism", something I suspect ESR would disown. However, if "vulgar Marxism" is a belief that labour creates value, then frankly count me in (actually all socialists, including Benjamin Tucker, believe(d) this, it predates Marx by quite a long way).
Finally, the author goes on to endlessly list every kind of problem ever seen in an OSS project. Surely this is only criticism if you were some kind of loony optimist to begin with. None of the problems listed applies only to open source.
The whole thing seems to be an attempt to create a straw-man argument of the CatB thesis and throw mud at it.
How is what Janes asked the Slashdot readership to do censorship ? Surely censorship is when an powerful organisation stops something from being published, not a publisher asking for "expert" advise on whether the technical content of an article is correct to decide whether it is of value.
Its frankly embarassing how long this stuff has taken to pan out. It must have been three or four years ago - when SDRAM was just going into production, and not long after Intel had started trumpeting RAMBUS - that many systems houses came out and set "there is no way this can be manufactured".
Its a testment to Intel's unprecedented power and the weakness of engineering arguments in this kind of decision making that this thing has lived as long as it has.
Linus is also pretty strict about what he lets into the codebase. Anyone hoping to run a successful project has to be. It seems to me that the main difference in models is that the BSDers have a "core team" which communicates mostly only within itself about major design decisions, whereas most Linux discussions happen publicly. On that count Mozilla is more like Linux, as they make a point of making everything public, warts and all.
The cathedral vs bazaar thing was never about having strict control over additions to the code base. Rather it was about getting the code out there in order to generate the changes that you then have the option of using. In fact one of ESR's essays "Homesteading the Noosphere" pretty much says that only OSS projects with firm central control over the codebase and good motivation every really work.
Re:Good, but too derivative of Mars
on
Antarctica
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· Score: 1
The Mars trilogy gets happier as it goes on, although it gets worse before it gets better.
The problem with the Turing Test is that it tries to make a computer human and that's not really what AI is all about - it's more about trying to solve problems using various techniques in order to make programs useful.
Is that what they tell you these days ? How is that distinct from any other kind of programming ? The real fact of the matter is that AI is based on an incorrect (but intuitively very attractive) idea that humans minds and computers are similar. Since its become increasingly obvious that this is not the case, the people who staff the AI departments of universities have backed off further and further from this. By the time I was there, they had realised the brain's "hardware" was radically different from a computers and had backed off into a kind of dualism based on the C-T hypothesis, claiming that conciousness (as if we had any idea what that is) is a program that can run on widely differing hardware platforms. Obviously they've backed off even further now.
If what they say about having faster performance with x86 code that Merced is true, then this is a good strategy. From what I hear its very unlikely Microsoft will have an un-kludged 64-bit version of Windows NT ready by the time Merced (or even McKinley) ships. That means we're likely to see people running 32 bit Windows code on 64 bit Intel processors, and seeing only trivial performance inprovements relative to what is possible, for some time to come. Remind you of anything ?
If take-up on the IA-64 instruction set on Windows is slow, and I strongly suspect it will be because of lack of (a certain) OS support and lack of software usage, this definitely gives AMD an opening for a new (or recycled) instruction set on a processor that will run 32 bit software faster than Merced. Maybe they can even pull it off.
Thats fine. If you feel you can filter comp.os.linix.advocacy, or alt.politics.libertarian, or rec.arts.sf.written for interesting and useful content using only your brain, I'd like to know how you do it.
Personally, even checking what each thread started off being about would take me the best part of a day.
I think this whole science versus religion debate is mistaken really. The problem is that religious texts from the past tend to provide both an account of history, much of which is mythological, but some of which is almost certainly correct, and a system of ethics. Both of these are general wrapped up in a concept of "revelation", that they are the Word of God and therefore beyond any challenge.
The problem seems to emerge when the account of history is challenged, either by science showing it is impossible, or by historical research showing that they cannot have happened as detailed. To anyone who is knowledgable and honest with themselves, this means either some parts of some sacred texts are false and either are not the Word of God, or science is somehow unreliable. I have trouble relating to the latter view, so I won't even attempt to account for it.
The former is much more interesting. The very possibility the bible might be false (or even only false in parts, or essentially correct but corrupted) seems to arouse anxiety in many religious persons. This is understandable I guess, but it results in what seem to be less than honest attempts to ignore the evidence by claiming it is "just a theory" (as if any human idea could ever be anything else).
What I think is missed in this is that the veracity of particular 2000 year old writings has no real baring on the validity of a system of ethics. "Love the Lord your God, and Love your neighbour" seems to be a pretty good way to live regardless of whether man evolved from apes or a particular man was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change.
To summarise a little: Science has no take on ethics. There is no scientific way to live your life. Similarly religious views of the physical world should give way to scientific ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Fundamentally they're getting away with it (and the last government got away with just as much) because nobody cares about their freedom - Britain has been a broadly stable and safe state (at least if you're from the right class) for the last 300 years. Its hard to get people worked up about protecting their rights. Its not helped by the fact that noone understands how the British state has worked for most of those 300 years - we can only really guess.
You hit the nail on the head in saying that with no effective opposition we're little better than a one party state. Unfortunately with effective opposition parliament is paralysed and the government doesn't work at all.
One of the good things that can be said about the current government is that their constitutional changes might make constructive opposition both more common and more popular.
The European Convention on Human Rights is already law in Scotland and will soon be in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (presumably in the course of the current parliament, along with the long promised and water down more than a supermarket prawn freedom of information act).
This legislation will not stand up to judicial scrutiny if the system for handling human rights cases actually works properly. Given the slightly flakey nature of the British legal system outside of Scotland it may not. The Court of Session in Edinburgh has recently upheld two complaints on human rights grounds, one of which has forced the Scottish Government to stop employing temporary sherriffs. There will be more such cases, and probably a lot of ensuing chaos - getting the crypto stuff heard might be hard.
This common story is not entirely true.
A system very like a modern network of PCs was demonstrated in the mid-70s, before Xerox PARC was even founded by some Stanford researchers (one of whom is very famous, but whose name I have forgotten). They had a number of technologies in that system that were forgotten and have only recently reemerged - such as videoconferencing (at least in prototype).
Similarly many of the elements of the modern GUI originated only with the Macintosh. For instance the event-based system for repainting (rather than keeping backing storage, or deactivating background apps as the Star did) was a Macintosh invention. Similarly the Star GUI was not very usable by modern standards - there was a considerable lack of graphical images. ParcPlace producst such as ObjectWorks still had this "look" until only a few years ago.
Immense sociological impact, and about as subversive as you can get. Who would of thought a small thing like moveable type would make such an impression.
Off the top of my head, I'd say this is rather like the question of firearms, and I'd say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is even more applicable for software than for guns.
Naively making it illegal to produce software capable of being used to break the law would make a lot of vital activity - for instance producing exploits for security flaws - against the law, which would be hugely to everyone's detriment. If that was done, the inabilility of honest law abiding people to effectively investigate security issues was be a massive boost to crackers everywhere.
As far as I can see liability for breaking the law lies with the person whose intent it was to break it. If the that is the author of some software (eg, a program deliberately designed to spread a virus) then so be it, but if the author produces a tool with multiple functions (eg. BO2K) then he's no more guilty than a man who makes a knife.
There are of course some tricky cases. For instance a friend of mine once wrote a virus as an exercise and gave it a slightly nasty payload. He never intended to release it, but unfortunately a copy got loose on his hard drive and infected several other machine before it was wiped out. If that had well and truly escaped, and done serious damage, where would the liability lie for that ? or is it a natural hazard ? Possibly there is no criminal liability in that case, but merely civil negligence by failing to contain the virus ?
IANAL
I think in fact they already do this as a check for hacked clients - or maybe its distributed.net that do it.
Nonetheless it does raise an interesting option , which would be to open source the client, and make sure that every user's client had, say, every tenth result duplicated to another based on a differently patched source tree. This would act as some kind of assurance, I suppose. However, it might be hard to tell which source tree the client was built from in a way not open to hacking.
The SETI people, like the distributed.net people, want to make it hard to report that you have searched a particular block without really doing so. That is why they haven't released the source.
Unlike the distributed.net people, the client is running on real data of which there is a limited supply. They don't want it to be any faster, because they'd start to run out of data blocks. They don't care how many points your team gets - they want to do science, and from that perspective they want everyone using the same algorithms - they don't want them "optimised" by individuals *at all*. The risk of false negatives or bugs introduced by stupid programming is too great.
Possibly you should work out what people are trying to acheive before being rude about their cluefulness.
It is interesting that Project Gutenberg have chosen to put things on line only in ASCII text.
I wonder if they might benefit from keeping their master copies in some kind of basic plain text markup language based on XML or SGML. Having things like the chapter structure, or more importantly the scripting information for plays, in the document in a machine readable format would seem to make it easer to search the collection, and also easier to reintroduce formatting to allow prettier looking hard copy. I don't know about anyone else, but I find reading on paper much easier than on screen, and nice formatting in that context is important.
I don't mean to belittle what they are doing - I think it is excellent work - and I emphatically don't want them to keep the master copies in HTML or some equally labile format, or to start to introduce physical markup, but it would be nice to have some idea of the structure written more clearly into the text.
The question is, was Microsoft using monopoly OS power to stifle competition in other areas
On the face of it: clearly the answer is yes. As someone else has pointed out, the different pricing of identical products (even if disguised) is an example of price differentiation. The ability to do this is clear evidence of market power.
Similarly, obviously the purpose of the move was to force anyone who wanted to run another web server to buy an OS that included a copy of IIS, encouraging them to run that instead. The only other possible reason is the one MS gave: that NT Workstation is unsuitable for use as a server. This has been established to be a lie.
This fulfills the two criteria for being a violation of anti-trust legislation. Whether the licensing agreement has any legal standing, or whether MS' actions where fair is irrelevant in this case.
The same applies to software, through and through - license or no license. You own the media, and the use of that media - you hold no rights to the information itself, unless it is EXPLICITLY given to you, in writing. Copyright law makes this automatic, by the way.
You do have some rights to the information, granted by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, and the *implicit* contract you entered into when buying the product which was offered for sale (which is emphatically not the same as the shrinkwrap nonsense that has no legal standing). That implicit contract is based on the agreed functionality and uses of the product at the time when you hand over the cash.
As I understand it, these principles have never been tested in a US court, since the software makers have no interest in acknowledging that shrinkwrap licenses have not standing, and to my knowledge noone has ever been charged with violating shrinkwrap provisions (other than not copying, which is covered by copyright law).
As someone else has already said: creating a cross platform GUI framework is hard.
Sun's decision to go with a pure Java GUI in Swing is not based on "arrogance", but on their failure to find a way to extend the AWT (which used native components) and keep it cross platform. As to what approach is best: well, noone knows. Attempts have been made to extend the native widget approach or mix the two, but none has been very successful. A remote GUI, running in another app, or on another machine, is also an option, but increases the amount of code that must be maintained.
And yes, Swing looks nothing like a Mac, even when running on one. Deal with it. It looks nothing like Windows or Motif either.
I think blaming journalists for poor science reporting is a bit like blaming them for personality based issue-free politics. Its only half the story. The other actors in both fields - politicians and scientists must take their share of the blame.
Politicians need (especially in the US) to raise funds and (most places) to win elections. You do that by trying to appeal to everyone and the best way to do that is convince them you're a nicer guy than your competitor. Raising the issues confuses the voters and runs the risk of alienating them.
Scientists have a similar problem. Science is based on doubt. Sucessful ideas are those that are least in doubt, but nothing is ever cast in stone. However the public wants to here of giant breakthroughs, the next new gizmo and what horrible poisons are likely to turn up in their food. Scientists who push their work out into the mainstream media (or let it get pulled) have to pander to this by making it seem more sensational.
Well you're right that an incomplete implementation of the platform is pretty useless to most Java people.
However, its not the VM thats the issue. The VM spec hasn't changed since 1.0 (though thankfully the performance has) and the language hasn't changed since 1.1. There's no sense in which a 1.2 compatible compiler differs from a 1.1 compatible one.
The difference is the class libraries. Java's collection framework is no small peice of work. Neither is Java2D (which contains code from around 10 difference comapanies).
Actually its not even true that rich people need to get rich off someone. They can do - it is possible to get rich just by ripping people off. But they can also get rich by selling people something they want. This is called "economic growth".
Who said that ? You can say what you like until you start to make threats. Once you do that, you have caused someone to fear for their life, and that is not permissible. Singer, and his critics can both say what they like, but its the fact that he has to teach in secret that is a problem.
The closest this article gets to criticising any of Eric Raymond's studies of Open Source is saying that the gift culture analogy is simplistic - a point which most people would probably accept.
/., but I think its underestimating ESR to attribute this view to him. Noone says the Bazaar model is universal (indeed RMS is very cathedral person). Very few people seriously think we can destroy MS and I personally don't even very much want to. There is no way anyone thinks the gift economy can be universal, and you only need to look at the interactions of ESR, RMS and Bruce Perens to see a lack of "ideal cooperative people".
The points at the top of the article do represent a "vulgar" (the author seems fond of that word) view of open source which is quite common on
The author goes on to tout a model of the open source community as a scientific one, which is quite a good analogy I think, but in no way contradicts the CatB view. The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder about "vulgar Marxism", something I suspect ESR would disown. However, if "vulgar Marxism" is a belief that labour creates value, then frankly count me in (actually all socialists, including Benjamin Tucker, believe(d) this, it predates Marx by quite a long way).
Finally, the author goes on to endlessly list every kind of problem ever seen in an OSS project. Surely this is only criticism if you were some kind of loony optimist to begin with. None of the problems listed applies only to open source.
The whole thing seems to be an attempt to create a straw-man argument of the CatB thesis and throw mud at it.
How is what Janes asked the Slashdot readership to do censorship ? Surely censorship is when an powerful organisation stops something from being published, not a publisher asking for "expert" advise on whether the technical content of an article is correct to decide whether it is of value.
Its frankly embarassing how long this stuff has taken to pan out. It must have been three or four years ago - when SDRAM was just going into production, and not long after Intel had started trumpeting RAMBUS - that many systems houses came out and set "there is no way this can be manufactured".
Its a testment to Intel's unprecedented power and the weakness of engineering arguments in this kind of decision making that this thing has lived as long as it has.
Linus is also pretty strict about what he lets into the codebase. Anyone hoping to run a successful project has to be. It seems to me that the main difference in models is that the BSDers have a "core team" which communicates mostly only within itself about major design decisions, whereas most Linux discussions happen publicly. On that count Mozilla is more like Linux, as they make a point of making everything public, warts and all.
The cathedral vs bazaar thing was never about having strict control over additions to the code base. Rather it was about getting the code out there in order to generate the changes that you then have the option of using. In fact one of ESR's essays "Homesteading the Noosphere" pretty much says that only OSS projects with firm central control over the codebase and good motivation every really work.
The Mars trilogy gets happier as it goes on, although it gets worse before it gets better.
The problem with the Turing Test is that it tries to make a computer human and that's not really what AI is all about - it's more about trying to solve problems using various techniques in order to make programs useful.
Is that what they tell you these days ? How is that distinct from any other kind of programming ? The real fact of the matter is that AI is based on an incorrect (but intuitively very attractive) idea that humans minds and computers are similar. Since its become increasingly obvious that this is not the case, the people who staff the AI departments of universities have backed off further and further from this. By the time I was there, they had realised the brain's "hardware" was radically different from a computers and had backed off into a kind of dualism based on the C-T hypothesis, claiming that conciousness (as if we had any idea what that is) is a program that can run on widely differing hardware platforms. Obviously they've backed off even further now.
If what they say about having faster performance with x86 code that Merced is true, then this is a good strategy. From what I hear its very unlikely Microsoft will have an un-kludged 64-bit version of Windows NT ready by the time Merced (or even McKinley) ships. That means we're likely to see people running 32 bit Windows code on 64 bit Intel processors, and seeing only trivial performance inprovements relative to what is possible, for some time to come. Remind you of anything ?
If take-up on the IA-64 instruction set on Windows is slow, and I strongly suspect it will be because of lack of (a certain) OS support and lack of software usage, this definitely gives AMD an opening for a new (or recycled) instruction set on a processor that will run 32 bit software faster than Merced. Maybe they can even pull it off.
That sounds just like my former employer. You have my sympathies and I recommend you do what I did and move. There are better jobs. Have faith.
Thats fine. If you feel you can filter comp.os.linix.advocacy, or alt.politics.libertarian, or rec.arts.sf.written for interesting and useful content using only your brain, I'd like to know how you do it.
Personally, even checking what each thread started off being about would take me the best part of a day.
I think this whole science versus religion debate is mistaken really. The problem is that religious texts from the past tend to provide both an account of history, much of which is mythological, but some of which is almost certainly correct, and a system of ethics. Both of these are general wrapped up in a concept of "revelation", that they are the Word of God and therefore beyond any challenge.
The problem seems to emerge when the account of history is challenged, either by science showing it is impossible, or by historical research showing that they cannot have happened as detailed. To anyone who is knowledgable and honest with themselves, this means either some parts of some sacred texts are false and either are not the Word of God, or science is somehow unreliable. I have trouble relating to the latter view, so I won't even attempt to account for it.
The former is much more interesting. The very possibility the bible might be false (or even only false in parts, or essentially correct but corrupted) seems to arouse anxiety in many religious persons. This is understandable I guess, but it results in what seem to be less than honest attempts to ignore the evidence by claiming it is "just a theory" (as if any human idea could ever be anything else).
What I think is missed in this is that the veracity of particular 2000 year old writings has no real baring on the validity of a system of ethics. "Love the Lord your God, and Love your neighbour" seems to be a pretty good way to live regardless of whether man evolved from apes or a particular man was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change.
To summarise a little: Science has no take on ethics. There is no scientific way to live your life. Similarly religious views of the physical world should give way to scientific ones.