I would just like to point out that Spiderman was not intended as a movie with an air of seriousness. You did catch that, right? It was meant as a *comic book* movie, specifically not graphic novel. It was intended by design to have silliness/campiness in the dialogue/action and a definite good and evil, with good winning in the end. The quoted line from William Defoe fit with the genre of film, and Defoe's acting job was much praised for his performance in Spiderman. The only complaint was that he had to wear that mask which hid his facial expressions.
Given the style it is meant to have from the beginning, it is an excellent film with excellent acting.
I can understand if you like the true graphic novel style better, but to directly compare it to Spiderman is missing the point and is unfair.
You're assuming this job is a one-off deal that would not even out in the end.
What you get with an in-house developer or a consultant with whom your have a long-term relationship costing you $8000 vs $5000 is that after they do their first implementation on this project, you now have a developer that is familiar with the codebase for this particular application.
This can potentially add a lot of value in the future, as now they bring to the table an understanding of the application that can be valuable for decisions about future uses of the application, as well as being able to implement bug fixes and features on this codebase faster than the first time around. I think this will pay off in the end, and you end up with a program that fits more to your needs than you would've probably gotten from a proprietary relationship, possibly with faster turnaround.
To say, as the GP claims, that nothing in the past two years have been any good is complete rubbish. Music quality hasn't somehow mysteriously declined. If anything it's improving, or remaining the same if you're cynical.
First of all, it's impossible to have heard even a fraction of everything released in the past two years. There are a multitude of independent artists that scratch out a living through constant touring and holding down a low-wage job when they're not touring, and they are often simply magnificent musicians.
When someone claims there's no good music, it means they've been herded into the cafeteria line that the RIAA has set up for them through mainstream radio, MTV, music stores, and whatever other avenues are used for music promotion.
Find a local bar that regularly hosts touring musicians and find out who's playing soon. Look the bands up online(their website, label website, myspace, et cetera) and find a couple that you might like. Go support them by attending the concert and maybe buy some merchandise they hock afterwards if you enjoyed the concert.
You can't make any conclusions simply from the failing grades of the students in your math teachers' classes. That's just as statistically unsound.
In order to make any kind of conclusions about the quality of the teacher, you have to control for the grading policy of his class compared with other teachers of his subject and objective benchmarks for material coverage. Did his tests adequately evaluate each students' knowledge of the intended course material? Did he simply grade things inordinately more unforgiving than the other teachers? Did he give no extra credit where all his other peers do? I really don't know just from a bunch of grades. Maybe all those students really deserved to fail. People in above threads are saying people shouldn't pass a class if they don't deserve to, so is this teacher just giving people what they deserve based on their performance?
So, the fact that students in his classes fail tells me nothing of his teaching ability. Only your anecdote, combined with your insinuation that his horrid teaching ability caused the poor grades, tells me that he was a bad teacher.
The feet-dragging on this may have to do with the fact that ISO is the primary way to acquire a Linux distro. Making it easy for people to burn/mount an ISO is opening a gateway away from Microsoft products. They'd rather not do that, so you get no support for ISO.
For the average computer user that hears about Linux, sure, they can download and burn things, but when they try to burn an ISO using the default software that might come with Windows or your random shareware burning software, it's just not going to work, thus creating a barrier to adopting Linux.
Easy Peasy is the rebranding of Ubuntu-eee and uses Ubuntu 8.10 as its upstream. So it's the next version up from the Ubuntu-eee that others have mentioned. It works great on my wife's eeePC 1000.
We don't have democratic elections and we never did, nor did the founding fathers ever intend it. Hell, we didn't even elect our senators for a long time after the country was founded.
The founding fathers were the elite of their society and did not want the uneducated mass of population to have the greatest say in who should run the country or what policy should be. They also wanted to make sure power was balanced among all the lands of the US, so that each part of the land could be represented significantly.
We aren't a democracy here in the US(at least nationally speaking). That word is only used for propaganda purposes.
"Technically" is the wrong word. Versioning of software is not *necessarily* tied to having X new features or being X% not in common with the previous version. It technically *is* a beta, since Microsoft has deemed it so.
Using the word "technically" here expresses that although Microsoft calls Windows 7 a beta of a new version of Windows, it is not really possible for it to be so because of some inherent requirement(s) to be a beta that Windows 7 does not meet. Since software version naming conventions are arbitrary and only serve the convenience of the developers, there is no way for Windows 7 to "technically" not be a beta.
The reason I go through this is because your use of this word expresses a bias that causes you to commit a fallacy in order to exaggerate the inadequacy of Microsoft. It is important to not do this when you are in less sympathetc company.
A good alternative to "technically" would be something like: "If Microsoft were following best/usual practices in software versioning, Windows 7 would not be a beta, it would be a service pack for Vista" or something like that.
At that point you move even further away from the car analogy, because you've now introduced a necessarily malicious entity into the picture who is the only real responsible party, and it requires a whole network of machines to have the desired effect.
Would a single individual besides the malicious botnet creator be liable? Sure, collectively the users of the botnet machines are liable, but you really have to stretch it to hold the individual users in the botnet accountable in this case.
If you remove one invidivual in the botnet, you would still have the same destructive force. In most cases, if you remove one individual from a car crash, the car crash is averted, so the benefits of individual training and licensing for driving are much more dramatic and positive. If you make sure an individual has some baseline level of driving ability, they are very likely to avert their own bodily harm to himself and many others.
Also, death indirectly resulting from IT infrastructure melting down is much less common than car crashes, which kill many people everyday.
I'm not saying I don't think it's important for people to know a baseline level of computer usage, but the car analogy simply does not hold as a way to make a case that people should have to get a computer operator license.
I think in the case of a botnet, general education to the public and a strengthening of the nation's IT security infrastructure is the most effective way to go.
Sure there is some kind of risk. But the question is, is it the kind of risk that the government is obligated to regulate.
That is of course a policy question, but to compare the comprimising and exploitation of information infrastructure to people being injured or dying is rather unhelpful to the conversation.
Maybe computer illiterate people shouldn't be using computers. We don't let people behind the wheel without a drivers license...
That's almost completely not analogous. Driving a car without proper training puts yourself and others' lives at risk. It is the responsibility of our government to preserve the lives of its citizens, thus the licensing requirement to ensure proper training.
Using a computer without proper training only wastes time and money. This is not something the government is obligated to prevent among its citizens.
Sounds about right. We seem to have to replace 6 CFLs for every one incandescent bulb.
I think you may have a problem with your light switches, if your CFLs are lasting such a short time.
Something to remember about CFLs is that their life is drained by switching them on and off much moreso than for incandescents. On the other hand, incandescents' life is drained by keeping them on much moreso than for CFLs.
I had an experience where when we installed a CFL in a particular socket, the corresponding switch was faulty(it would not go all the way up or down unless you pushed it harder than normal), causing the CFL to flicker very quickly. That CFL lasted a few months, I think. Then, we installed a new switch, put a new CFL in there, and haven't had a problem since(a year so far).
You may have a similar issue, or a faulty source of bulbs.
The fact is that there is still a very real discriminatory element in our society toward under-priveleged races. There are certainly many cases in which black people are demonstrably on equal footing with the more priveleged social groups, but it is also demonstrable that blacks continue to be underserved because of their skin color, in a significant number of cases to make it a problem.
I don't think the people saying they're finally on equal ground really believe there will be no longer a bias against them, nor did they not work toward the highest pursuits in our society before Obama was elected.
I think what they really mean, the right way to interpret their claim to be finally on 'equal ground', is that there is now proof that the consensus of the country is that it can accept blacks into any position in the country. This consensus existed for some time before Obama was elected, but we don't know how long. But we know that before a certain time, the consensus was that a black person could never be president of the USA.
In the end, it's a question of power. The black race began in the US at the bottom echelon of society, and were treated as such. Now, to have someone of that race at the very top echelon of our society, in the most powerful position in the entire world. One could see it as the final desegregation.
It means they have representatives working from the very top end of our society, advocating for them, even subconsciously, and the subconsciouses of people in our country will slowly change, seeing a black person as their leader. It will no longer be out of the question, and from now on, no position of power will be as biased against blacks because of the question as to whether or not blacks are capable or should be trusted with such power. Now people will become more comfortable with a black people having power over them.
To sum up, this election is both a proof of something that's been true for some time, and also an impetus for a shift in our society, though both have been and will be rather subtle.:-)
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you can't make a full-featured document that anyone else can open with their software.
A barrier to enabling this competition is Microsoft not properly documenting the most widely used software systems in the world, thus making it difficult to create functionally equivalent software that people will be able to use while having compatibility with Microsoft software, which is necessary in order to compete with them.
It is against this country's best interest to have monopolies controlling important infrastructures like software stacks that people depend on everyday. It becomes an unfair market, which makes our economy mercantilist rather than capitalist. Regulation of this sort keeps the market fair, drives innovation, and makes our infrastructure more secure by not putting all our eggs in one basket(the basket is Microsoft).
If all of Microsoft(people and servers) were to be blown up simultaneously by heavy bombs, and there was no competent replacement for the Microsoft software stack, much of our society would be really really screwed for quite a long time. This is a bad thing. There needs to be more than one option to the services and software Microsoft provides, for the good of our society.
I just got hired on to do some contracting work for a company using some.NET implementations.
As an Ubuntu user for the last 2+ years, Mono means I don't have to buy/install Windows on my machine, and can deliver C# code that works on the.NET platform.
For practical purposes, at least, Mono can be quite handy.
Miguel de Icaza has found his niche and delivers well within it. GNOME should probably keep use of Mono pretty limited to non-essential parts of its desktop, though, for the commonly mentioned patent liability. It would be particularly bad if something like GNOME Panel was reimplemented with Mono/Moonlight(as Miguel suggests), and then Microsoft played its ace rendering it useless.
Speaking is all of those things, in some sense. That is, vocal utterances with the intent(or side effect, even) to transmit information or state.
Some people may, however, mean it in the sense that restricts speech to such vocal utterances that achieve a human level of communicative effectiveness.
Our physical apparatus for speaking is also more complicated than most other animals, which some people may use as a delineation for speech.
Maybe you are not so much looking for a defition of "speaking" as much as what separates human language from other animal language. Some suggest it is the use of recursion, which allows for communication of a fine level of detail and abstraction. The abstraction thing is important too, being able to describe what does not exist or what is not right in front of us or what is not physical.
The reason it's important to find when human language evolved to more or less its current state is that it would be interesting to know why we have this most powerful tool that all other living things lack and has allowed us to for most purposes nearly conquer the planet.
While I myself am not either of those, in my experience, they have some merit, are a rare lifestyle, especially for republicans or conservative leaning folks, and I think it may be unique among the republican congress.
Tim Johnson is the representative of Champaign-Urbana, the district where University of Illinois is located, and where I happen to live and go to school.
Tim Johnson has impressed me a few times. He co-sponsored the Internet Radio Equality Act, for one. He's also a vegan and raw foodist, and you can supposedly have an ad-hoc meeting with him if you know where he speed walks daily.
And you trust your health insurance companies? Their sole purpose is to make profit. We'd be much much better off without them, paying doctors and hospitals directly. True, however, for what it's worth, at least insurance companies are regulated to some extent by the government, while as has been mentioned, Google is not held under the same restrictions that insurance companies are.
Alright, this is just plain wrong. There's plenty of incentive for professors to write textbooks, even if they don't make royalties off of them.
First, it is often a requirement to receive tenure or a promotion that you need to write a textbook.
Second, professors don't get paid for publishing their myriad journal and conference publications either, so why isn't there a paucity of any academic writing? In all cases of academic writing including textbooks it may increase your prestige and make you known better in your field. When you're prestigious in your field you get promotions and paid invitations to speak and better funding for your research.
Third, universities themselves could probably fund textbook writing, as that would increase the university's reputation and increase their quality of education.
Fourth, Professors also have the incentive to write textbooks when there is no textbook adequate for the material they want to teach.
Interesting thought. I was assuming in my post that ID implies a supernatural/extra-systemic creator, such as God, even if not anything like the juedeo-christian one. That is, a creator that created the whole universe and terran life, not just terran life. If the creator did not create the entire universe from outside the system, then yes, that would be testable through methods like what you propose.
I'm trying to exactly show that ID(in my sense, which is the most common) doesn't fit into a proper definition of science, and to put ID in its proper place in the realm of philosophy. If more people would focus on this distinction alone, instead of getting all huffy and distracted over the religious and political implications of ID, and even getting distracted over whether ID is true(which is nearly irrelevant), then the scientific community would make *much* more progress in defending its integrity.
Slashdot Mirror
I would just like to point out that Spiderman was not intended as a movie with an air of seriousness. You did catch that, right? It was meant as a *comic book* movie, specifically not graphic novel. It was intended by design to have silliness/campiness in the dialogue/action and a definite good and evil, with good winning in the end. The quoted line from William Defoe fit with the genre of film, and Defoe's acting job was much praised for his performance in Spiderman. The only complaint was that he had to wear that mask which hid his facial expressions.
Given the style it is meant to have from the beginning, it is an excellent film with excellent acting.
I can understand if you like the true graphic novel style better, but to directly compare it to Spiderman is missing the point and is unfair.
You're assuming this job is a one-off deal that would not even out in the end.
What you get with an in-house developer or a consultant with whom your have a long-term relationship costing you $8000 vs $5000 is that after they do their first implementation on this project, you now have a developer that is familiar with the codebase for this particular application.
This can potentially add a lot of value in the future, as now they bring to the table an understanding of the application that can be valuable for decisions about future uses of the application, as well as being able to implement bug fixes and features on this codebase faster than the first time around. I think this will pay off in the end, and you end up with a program that fits more to your needs than you would've probably gotten from a proprietary relationship, possibly with faster turnaround.
I second the parent's sentiment.
To say, as the GP claims, that nothing in the past two years have been any good is complete rubbish. Music quality hasn't somehow mysteriously declined. If anything it's improving, or remaining the same if you're cynical.
First of all, it's impossible to have heard even a fraction of everything released in the past two years. There are a multitude of independent artists that scratch out a living through constant touring and holding down a low-wage job when they're not touring, and they are often simply magnificent musicians.
When someone claims there's no good music, it means they've been herded into the cafeteria line that the RIAA has set up for them through mainstream radio, MTV, music stores, and whatever other avenues are used for music promotion.
Find a local bar that regularly hosts touring musicians and find out who's playing soon. Look the bands up online(their website, label website, myspace, et cetera) and find a couple that you might like. Go support them by attending the concert and maybe buy some merchandise they hock afterwards if you enjoyed the concert.
That's the way to find music you like.
Just a point to note...
You can't make any conclusions simply from the failing grades of the students in your math teachers' classes. That's just as statistically unsound.
In order to make any kind of conclusions about the quality of the teacher, you have to control for the grading policy of his class compared with other teachers of his subject and objective benchmarks for material coverage. Did his tests adequately evaluate each students' knowledge of the intended course material? Did he simply grade things inordinately more unforgiving than the other teachers? Did he give no extra credit where all his other peers do? I really don't know just from a bunch of grades. Maybe all those students really deserved to fail. People in above threads are saying people shouldn't pass a class if they don't deserve to, so is this teacher just giving people what they deserve based on their performance?
So, the fact that students in his classes fail tells me nothing of his teaching ability. Only your anecdote, combined with your insinuation that his horrid teaching ability caused the poor grades, tells me that he was a bad teacher.
The feet-dragging on this may have to do with the fact that ISO is the primary way to acquire a Linux distro. Making it easy for people to burn/mount an ISO is opening a gateway away from Microsoft products. They'd rather not do that, so you get no support for ISO.
For the average computer user that hears about Linux, sure, they can download and burn things, but when they try to burn an ISO using the default software that might come with Windows or your random shareware burning software, it's just not going to work, thus creating a barrier to adopting Linux.
I started from http://www.dell.com/ and navigated to the Dell Mini 9 page again, and the Ubuntu systems appear for me:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?c=us&cs=19&l=en&ref=lthp&s=dhs
Easy Peasy is the rebranding of Ubuntu-eee and uses Ubuntu 8.10 as its upstream. So it's the next version up from the Ubuntu-eee that others have mentioned. It works great on my wife's eeePC 1000.
http://www.geteasypeasy.com/
Actually, according to the Moonlight roadmap, they're planning a Moonlight 2.0 alpha version in March, and the first release version in September:
http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap
We don't have democratic elections and we never did, nor did the founding fathers ever intend it. Hell, we didn't even elect our senators for a long time after the country was founded.
The founding fathers were the elite of their society and did not want the uneducated mass of population to have the greatest say in who should run the country or what policy should be. They also wanted to make sure power was balanced among all the lands of the US, so that each part of the land could be represented significantly.
We aren't a democracy here in the US(at least nationally speaking). That word is only used for propaganda purposes.
"Technically" is the wrong word. Versioning of software is not *necessarily* tied to having X new features or being X% not in common with the previous version. It technically *is* a beta, since Microsoft has deemed it so.
Using the word "technically" here expresses that although Microsoft calls Windows 7 a beta of a new version of Windows, it is not really possible for it to be so because of some inherent requirement(s) to be a beta that Windows 7 does not meet. Since software version naming conventions are arbitrary and only serve the convenience of the developers, there is no way for Windows 7 to "technically" not be a beta.
The reason I go through this is because your use of this word expresses a bias that causes you to commit a fallacy in order to exaggerate the inadequacy of Microsoft. It is important to not do this when you are in less sympathetc company.
A good alternative to "technically" would be something like: "If Microsoft were following best/usual practices in software versioning, Windows 7 would not be a beta, it would be a service pack for Vista" or something like that.
Besides that, I agree with your post :-)
"Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way."
http://wubi-installer.org/
At that point you move even further away from the car analogy, because you've now introduced a necessarily malicious entity into the picture who is the only real responsible party, and it requires a whole network of machines to have the desired effect.
Would a single individual besides the malicious botnet creator be liable? Sure, collectively the users of the botnet machines are liable, but you really have to stretch it to hold the individual users in the botnet accountable in this case.
If you remove one invidivual in the botnet, you would still have the same destructive force. In most cases, if you remove one individual from a car crash, the car crash is averted, so the benefits of individual training and licensing for driving are much more dramatic and positive. If you make sure an individual has some baseline level of driving ability, they are very likely to avert their own bodily harm to himself and many others.
Also, death indirectly resulting from IT infrastructure melting down is much less common than car crashes, which kill many people everyday.
I'm not saying I don't think it's important for people to know a baseline level of computer usage, but the car analogy simply does not hold as a way to make a case that people should have to get a computer operator license.
I think in the case of a botnet, general education to the public and a strengthening of the nation's IT security infrastructure is the most effective way to go.
Sure there is some kind of risk. But the question is, is it the kind of risk that the government is obligated to regulate.
That is of course a policy question, but to compare the comprimising and exploitation of information infrastructure to people being injured or dying is rather unhelpful to the conversation.
Maybe computer illiterate people shouldn't be using computers. We don't let people behind the wheel without a drivers license...
That's almost completely not analogous. Driving a car without proper training puts yourself and others' lives at risk. It is the responsibility of our government to preserve the lives of its citizens, thus the licensing requirement to ensure proper training.
Using a computer without proper training only wastes time and money. This is not something the government is obligated to prevent among its citizens.
I think there are a couple ways to decide which projects to fund:
1) Applications for which there is no adequate solution yet(including those that have only adequate proprietary solutions)
2) Applications that would directly benefit various government projects(including improving security of government through code transparency)
3) Specific projects that have the largest user or developer base(objective metric for measuring attractiveness of the project)
Well, they're not great, but I don't think most decisions made by government are done much better...
Sounds about right. We seem to have to replace 6 CFLs for every one incandescent bulb.
I think you may have a problem with your light switches, if your CFLs are lasting such a short time.
Something to remember about CFLs is that their life is drained by switching them on and off much moreso than for incandescents. On the other hand, incandescents' life is drained by keeping them on much moreso than for CFLs.
I had an experience where when we installed a CFL in a particular socket, the corresponding switch was faulty(it would not go all the way up or down unless you pushed it harder than normal), causing the CFL to flicker very quickly. That CFL lasted a few months, I think. Then, we installed a new switch, put a new CFL in there, and haven't had a problem since(a year so far).
You may have a similar issue, or a faulty source of bulbs.
The fact is that there is still a very real discriminatory element in our society toward under-priveleged races. There are certainly many cases in which black people are demonstrably on equal footing with the more priveleged social groups, but it is also demonstrable that blacks continue to be underserved because of their skin color, in a significant number of cases to make it a problem.
I don't think the people saying they're finally on equal ground really believe there will be no longer a bias against them, nor did they not work toward the highest pursuits in our society before Obama was elected.
I think what they really mean, the right way to interpret their claim to be finally on 'equal ground', is that there is now proof that the consensus of the country is that it can accept blacks into any position in the country. This consensus existed for some time before Obama was elected, but we don't know how long. But we know that before a certain time, the consensus was that a black person could never be president of the USA.
In the end, it's a question of power. The black race began in the US at the bottom echelon of society, and were treated as such. Now, to have someone of that race at the very top echelon of our society, in the most powerful position in the entire world. One could see it as the final desegregation.
It means they have representatives working from the very top end of our society, advocating for them, even subconsciously, and the subconsciouses of people in our country will slowly change, seeing a black person as their leader. It will no longer be out of the question, and from now on, no position of power will be as biased against blacks because of the question as to whether or not blacks are capable or should be trusted with such power. Now people will become more comfortable with a black people having power over them.
To sum up, this election is both a proof of something that's been true for some time, and also an impetus for a shift in our society, though both have been and will be rather subtle. :-)
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you can't make a full-featured document that anyone else can open with their software.
A barrier to enabling this competition is Microsoft not properly documenting the most widely used software systems in the world, thus making it difficult to create functionally equivalent software that people will be able to use while having compatibility with Microsoft software, which is necessary in order to compete with them.
It is against this country's best interest to have monopolies controlling important infrastructures like software stacks that people depend on everyday. It becomes an unfair market, which makes our economy mercantilist rather than capitalist. Regulation of this sort keeps the market fair, drives innovation, and makes our infrastructure more secure by not putting all our eggs in one basket(the basket is Microsoft).
If all of Microsoft(people and servers) were to be blown up simultaneously by heavy bombs, and there was no competent replacement for the Microsoft software stack, much of our society would be really really screwed for quite a long time. This is a bad thing. There needs to be more than one option to the services and software Microsoft provides, for the good of our society.
I just got hired on to do some contracting work for a company using some .NET implementations.
As an Ubuntu user for the last 2+ years, Mono means I don't have to buy/install Windows on my machine, and can deliver C# code that works on the .NET platform.
For practical purposes, at least, Mono can be quite handy.
Miguel de Icaza has found his niche and delivers well within it. GNOME should probably keep use of Mono pretty limited to non-essential parts of its desktop, though, for the commonly mentioned patent liability. It would be particularly bad if something like GNOME Panel was reimplemented with Mono/Moonlight(as Miguel suggests), and then Microsoft played its ace rendering it useless.
Speaking is all of those things, in some sense. That is, vocal utterances with the intent(or side effect, even) to transmit information or state.
Some people may, however, mean it in the sense that restricts speech to such vocal utterances that achieve a human level of communicative effectiveness.
Our physical apparatus for speaking is also more complicated than most other animals, which some people may use as a delineation for speech.
Maybe you are not so much looking for a defition of "speaking" as much as what separates human language from other animal language. Some suggest it is the use of recursion, which allows for communication of a fine level of detail and abstraction. The abstraction thing is important too, being able to describe what does not exist or what is not right in front of us or what is not physical.
The reason it's important to find when human language evolved to more or less its current state is that it would be interesting to know why we have this most powerful tool that all other living things lack and has allowed us to for most purposes nearly conquer the planet.
While I myself am not either of those, in my experience, they have some merit, are a rare lifestyle, especially for republicans or conservative leaning folks, and I think it may be unique among the republican congress.
Tim Johnson is the representative of Champaign-Urbana, the district where University of Illinois is located, and where I happen to live and go to school.
Tim Johnson has impressed me a few times. He co-sponsored the Internet Radio Equality Act, for one. He's also a vegan and raw foodist, and you can supposedly have an ad-hoc meeting with him if you know where he speed walks daily.
Alright, this is just plain wrong. There's plenty of incentive for professors to write textbooks, even if they don't make royalties off of them.
First, it is often a requirement to receive tenure or a promotion that you need to write a textbook.
Second, professors don't get paid for publishing their myriad journal and conference publications either, so why isn't there a paucity of any academic writing? In all cases of academic writing including textbooks it may increase your prestige and make you known better in your field. When you're prestigious in your field you get promotions and paid invitations to speak and better funding for your research.
Third, universities themselves could probably fund textbook writing, as that would increase the university's reputation and increase their quality of education.
Fourth, Professors also have the incentive to write textbooks when there is no textbook adequate for the material they want to teach.
Interesting thought. I was assuming in my post that ID implies a supernatural/extra-systemic creator, such as God, even if not anything like the juedeo-christian one. That is, a creator that created the whole universe and terran life, not just terran life. If the creator did not create the entire universe from outside the system, then yes, that would be testable through methods like what you propose.
I'm trying to exactly show that ID(in my sense, which is the most common) doesn't fit into a proper definition of science, and to put ID in its proper place in the realm of philosophy. If more people would focus on this distinction alone, instead of getting all huffy and distracted over the religious and political implications of ID, and even getting distracted over whether ID is true(which is nearly irrelevant), then the scientific community would make *much* more progress in defending its integrity.