ESR has contributed to Emacs, particularly some language modes and other Lisp code, but his contributions are small compared to many other people. He's far from #2.
Likewise on Python. He's contributed, but he isn't a leader. Emacs and Python are not "that guy's software."
The projects that ESR has led have been tiny compared to Emacs, or the Linux kernel, or any of the major GNU programs. There are at at least a hundred people whose contributions to free software are vastly more significant than ESR's.
ESR was a useful advocate back in the late 90s, but he's less important than he thinks he is.
No; not everyone reproduces equally.
For natural selection, the definition of "better" is that the fraction of the population that contains a given gene increases. It has nothing to do with smarter, bigger, stronger, or the like. And there are all kinds of oddball complications, like genes that help with survival if you have one copy, and that kill you if you have two (sickle-cell anemia is like that; if you have one sickle-cell gene you don't get the disease, but you are resistant to malaria).
African people will soon evolve resistance to HIV, because of the massive infection rates among people of reproductive age. Those who are more resistant will be more likely to survive and have children. There are some indications that this is already starting to happen.
Evolution has selected for resistance to disease organisms. About 90% of indigenous Americans died when the Europeans came because they lacked genetic resistance to a number of European diseases.
In some populations, the ability to digest milk as an adult (which was a mutation) was a survival trait that got a lot of people through the winter alive. Most adult humans are lactose-intolerant, because their ancestors found other things besides milk from cattle to live on.
There are other, similar examples. Computer systems tend to deduce either that there's a type of insect called "time flies", or that the latter sentence refers to the aerodynamic properties of fruit.
Someone will patent the idea of recording brain stimuli. They'll then go on to establish a separate patent on the recording of each particular stimulus and emotion. They'll attach a line directly from your headset gear to the USPTO, so it will automatically file a new patent every time it detects that you're having a new experience you hadn't had before. Eventually you won't be allowed to have a thought without a fully-paid up license from MindCo, and if you can no longer pay, you'll have to have a lobotomy.
No, there isn't high-quality research going on in garages and dorm rooms. Lots of entrepreneurs doing skunk-works projects, and that's great. But they don't have the level of funding, or the long-term perspective, that would let them invent the next laser or the next transistor (both products of Bell Labs), and they are too focused on a quick killing to discover the microwave remnant of the Big Bang (also from Bell Labs).
We still have the universities, and IBM still has a sizable research division. But the exclusive focus by most of today's companies on the next quarter's revenue means we're eating the seed corn.
When you disclaim something, you remove your own responsibility for it. For example, if I saw something about the law and then say "Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer", I am using the word correctly: I'm disclaiming any responsibility towards people foolish enough to follow my advice, as well as warning them why they shouldn't take it too seriously.
Your "disclaimer" is really a "claimer": you are saying that you speak from an insider position and know what you are talking about. So don't misuse the word "disclaimer" in such circumstances.
Unless, that is, you mean to say that though you are one of the ISC guys, you are just giving your unofficial opinion, other ISC guys disagree, etc.
But it doesn't read that way.
An intelligent designer would create intelligent designs, with each feature designed perfectly to fit its intended purpose. Evolution would frequently produce borderline botches that are "just good enough".
While we see plenty of beauty and elegance, we also see large numbers of botches: mistakes no intelligent designer would ever make. Examples include the human back, which is flawed enough to keep chiropractors in business because we descend from four-legged creatures and the back isn't really optimized for walking on two legs. But there are bigger ones: the nerve that connects the larynx to the brain goes through the heart, both in the human and the giraffe. We have a blind spot in our eyes because of the way the optic nerve is connected, though it isn't hard to come up with a design that lacks this flaw.
Evolution will get rid of botches that interfere with survival and reproduction, but it's neutral with respect to botches that are just annoying.
And that's what we see.
The physicist David Deutsch had a theory that McFly could kill his own father, but that this would just spawn off a new time line in which his father died young and didn't have a kid, in parallel with the time line in which there was no murder and McFly was born. So you could go back and time and do whatever you want, but it would not affect your own history.
It all falls out of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the closed time-like loops would not "really" be closed and paradoxes could not happen, but you could meet many copies of yourself. Or find out what might have happened had you made a different decision.
They didn't convict this sleazebag because he had PGP. They convicted him because the nine-year-old girl that he photographed nude testified against him!
Now, said sleazebag is trying to get a new trial because the prosecutor was allowed to bring up his use of PGP. I certainly agree that mere presence of PGP does not prove criminal intent; after all, I have a similar program (GPG) on this machine. But even if that evidence should not have been allowed, it is at most a trivial error that did not appear to affect the case.
Perhaps. But the nickname of the long-time Saudi ambassador to the US is not "Bandar Clinton", but "Bandar Bush", reflecting his longtime personal relationship to the Bush family. There's no question as to which party the Saudis prefer doing business with.
It was always a proprietary product, so either whoever supplied it to you (your school, perhaps) paid for it, was given copies by Mathworks, Inc., or pirated it.
Re:No such thing as "geostationary orbit over the
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No Billboards in Space
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I didn't say that a geosynchronous satellite would be made to appear as large as the moon; you'd do a LEO satellite for that, and use a balloon to have huge size and light weight.
No such thing as "geostationary orbit over the US"
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No Billboards in Space
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A geostationary satellite has to be over the equator, and the US has no territory at the equator. Likewise, a lot of satellites never pass directly over US soil, but could still appear as large as the Moon to Americans.
These things have to be solved with international treaties (which would be easy enough to get, because people in other countries don't want this kind of crap any more than Americans do), unfortunately the party in power hates the idea of treaties so they'd rather assert US authority to control the world instead.
Wal-Mart demands, and gets, censored versions of CDs from major record companies. Also, many filmmakers record alternative versions of some dialog to make it easier to show the film on network TV later on (where the "seven words you can't say" rule applies). So, it's possible.
Suppose Microsoft wanted to come up with a way to get the bad guys to avoid attacking Microsoft. Maybe they could spread the word that a significant range of IP space is honeypots and honeymonkeys and lions and tigers and bears, so then all the kiddies go off and attack someone else.
No, the solution does not force the spammers to pay money. They crack your machine, and make you pay to send their spam, by masquerading as you. A growing fraction of spam these days is sent by machines not owned by the spammer.
Spammers hide because they are crooks. They sometimes shill for legitimate businesses, but they are still crooks.
Red Hat has a number of people who are working full time on free Java, and they've done a lot of work on getting OpenOffice to work with the free implementations.
What you're missing is that it is a lot easier for regulators to block a proposed merger deal, than to try to convict and punish a company for being a monopoly. All they have to do is say "no", then Microsoft would have to go to court to overturn them. They don't even have to give an outright "no", they can hold up the merger indefinitely asking for more information about the effect on the market.
FTC regulators have held up far smaller software acquistions, even though they work for George Bush.
Simply put, Microsoft will not be allowed to buy Red Hat or Sun. Even with Bush in charge.
You think that Internet commerce will break down if someone can sniff your credit card number. But then, when you go to a restaurant, you hand over your physical credit card to some waiter you don't know from Adam.
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Likewise on Python. He's contributed, but he isn't a leader. Emacs and Python are not "that guy's software."
The projects that ESR has led have been tiny compared to Emacs, or the Linux kernel, or any of the major GNU programs. There are at at least a hundred people whose contributions to free software are vastly more significant than ESR's.
ESR was a useful advocate back in the late 90s, but he's less important than he thinks he is.
No; not everyone reproduces equally. For natural selection, the definition of "better" is that the fraction of the population that contains a given gene increases. It has nothing to do with smarter, bigger, stronger, or the like. And there are all kinds of oddball complications, like genes that help with survival if you have one copy, and that kill you if you have two (sickle-cell anemia is like that; if you have one sickle-cell gene you don't get the disease, but you are resistant to malaria). African people will soon evolve resistance to HIV, because of the massive infection rates among people of reproductive age. Those who are more resistant will be more likely to survive and have children. There are some indications that this is already starting to happen.
Evolution has selected for resistance to disease organisms. About 90% of indigenous Americans died when the Europeans came because they lacked genetic resistance to a number of European diseases.
In some populations, the ability to digest milk as an adult (which was a mutation) was a survival trait that got a lot of people through the winter alive. Most adult humans are lactose-intolerant, because their ancestors found other things besides milk from cattle to live on.
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Time flies like an arrow.
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Fruit flies like a banana.
There are other, similar examples. Computer systems tend to deduce either that there's a type of insect called "time flies", or that the latter sentence refers to the aerodynamic properties of fruit."I'd be happy to beat the crap out of him!"
Someone will patent the idea of recording brain stimuli. They'll then go on to establish a separate patent on the recording of each particular stimulus and emotion. They'll attach a line directly from your headset gear to the USPTO, so it will automatically file a new patent every time it detects that you're having a new experience you hadn't had before. Eventually you won't be allowed to have a thought without a fully-paid up license from MindCo, and if you can no longer pay, you'll have to have a lobotomy.
We still have the universities, and IBM still has a sizable research division. But the exclusive focus by most of today's companies on the next quarter's revenue means we're eating the seed corn.
When you disclaim something, you remove your own responsibility for it. For example, if I saw something about the law and then say "Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer", I am using the word correctly: I'm disclaiming any responsibility towards people foolish enough to follow my advice, as well as warning them why they shouldn't take it too seriously. Your "disclaimer" is really a "claimer": you are saying that you speak from an insider position and know what you are talking about. So don't misuse the word "disclaimer" in such circumstances. Unless, that is, you mean to say that though you are one of the ISC guys, you are just giving your unofficial opinion, other ISC guys disagree, etc. But it doesn't read that way.
While we see plenty of beauty and elegance, we also see large numbers of botches: mistakes no intelligent designer would ever make. Examples include the human back, which is flawed enough to keep chiropractors in business because we descend from four-legged creatures and the back isn't really optimized for walking on two legs. But there are bigger ones: the nerve that connects the larynx to the brain goes through the heart, both in the human and the giraffe. We have a blind spot in our eyes because of the way the optic nerve is connected, though it isn't hard to come up with a design that lacks this flaw.
Evolution will get rid of botches that interfere with survival and reproduction, but it's neutral with respect to botches that are just annoying. And that's what we see.
It all falls out of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the closed time-like loops would not "really" be closed and paradoxes could not happen, but you could meet many copies of yourself. Or find out what might have happened had you made a different decision.
And someone thinks this is "Insightful?" Double Wow.
Now, said sleazebag is trying to get a new trial because the prosecutor was allowed to bring up his use of PGP. I certainly agree that mere presence of PGP does not prove criminal intent; after all, I have a similar program (GPG) on this machine. But even if that evidence should not have been allowed, it is at most a trivial error that did not appear to affect the case.
Perhaps. But the nickname of the long-time Saudi ambassador to the US is not "Bandar Clinton", but "Bandar Bush", reflecting his longtime personal relationship to the Bush family. There's no question as to which party the Saudis prefer doing business with.
It was always a proprietary product, so either whoever supplied it to you (your school, perhaps) paid for it, was given copies by Mathworks, Inc., or pirated it.
I didn't say that a geosynchronous satellite would be made to appear as large as the moon; you'd do a LEO satellite for that, and use a balloon to have huge size and light weight.
These things have to be solved with international treaties (which would be easy enough to get, because people in other countries don't want this kind of crap any more than Americans do), unfortunately the party in power hates the idea of treaties so they'd rather assert US authority to control the world instead.
Wal-Mart demands, and gets, censored versions of CDs from major record companies. Also, many filmmakers record alternative versions of some dialog to make it easier to show the film on network TV later on (where the "seven words you can't say" rule applies). So, it's possible.
Suppose Microsoft wanted to come up with a way to get the bad guys to avoid attacking Microsoft. Maybe they could spread the word that a significant range of IP space is honeypots and honeymonkeys and lions and tigers and bears, so then all the kiddies go off and attack someone else.
For most publications, it's the responsibility of the editors to catch typos (hint, hint).
Spammers hide because they are crooks. They sometimes shill for legitimate businesses, but they are still crooks.
RMS still supports efforts to make GNU software run on proprietary platforms, even now.
Red Hat has a number of people who are working full time on free Java, and they've done a lot of work on getting OpenOffice to work with the free implementations.
What you're missing is that it is a lot easier for regulators to block a proposed merger deal, than to try to convict and punish a company for being a monopoly. All they have to do is say "no", then Microsoft would have to go to court to overturn them. They don't even have to give an outright "no", they can hold up the merger indefinitely asking for more information about the effect on the market.
FTC regulators have held up far smaller software acquistions, even though they work for George Bush.
Simply put, Microsoft will not be allowed to buy Red Hat or Sun. Even with Bush in charge.
Paul Graham's numbers were even worse than the SBA's: 9 out of 10 chances for failure. The point is, so what? A failing startup is not a disaster.
You think that Internet commerce will break down if someone can sniff your credit card number. But then, when you go to a restaurant, you hand over your physical credit card to some waiter you don't know from Adam.