A matter of a missing comma. Imagine "New Method Discovered, For Making Telescopes On the Moon". A new method has been discovered, which allows for making telescopes on the moon.
That's a very good point. It may be that once America's social ills are fixed -- the large gap between rich and poor, the large patches in the safety net, the high barrier to education, etc. -- then violence will decrease to a 'noise' level low enough to be impossible to fix, all without gun control.
I'm not optimistic that this explanation will be sufficient, but it is a good hypothesis, and what needs to be done to implement it needs to be done anyway, so I hope we will see the social ills worked on and the results coming in, over the next decades.
I understand about long replies -- I would write longer ones too if I had the time, but any conversation is better than nothing. And I'm sure that differences of opinion between open-minded folks never prevents good conversation and improvement.:)
So how do you know that say, searches for "Barack" are any more meaningful than searches for "Ron Paul"? No, the writer had a neat theory and got so attached to it that he discarded a bad data point instead of admitting it didn't work for Ron Paul.
By including Ron Paul but at least being complete and honest, the analysis would have been more worthwhile than what it now is -- a pile of rubbish.
Just a quick note: I don't think that guns and a violent culture have anything to do with each other (as you thought I implied in another post). I think America's violent culture is probably just a product of her history.
I carry only defensive weapons, such as mace, or sometimes semi-offensive weapons such as knives. I distinguish between offensive and defensive weapons, but I'd also like to note that in a pinch, anything from a newspaper to a baseball cap can be used as an improvised defensive weapon.
I've taken chemistry and organic chemistry, and I appreciate how easy it is to manufacture explosives. But the government restricts and monitors access to those chemicals which could be used to make truly destructive explosives.
I apologise if you have experience planning military operations.
The reference you cite for crime rates is one data point -- less, as it is just one city! You know perfectly well that a city's borders are not monitored, unlike national borders, so this is not a very good argument. If you look at the UN's website, or NationMasters, and look around at countries and gun control, you will see the correlation to low gun violence with actual data.
I for one do not distinguish between keeping a police state in check and an armed insurgency. A small rebellious element has only ever given authorities the excuse to pass sweeping emergency powers in history. I do not think that guns serve any purpose of furthering democracy in the US. And can you ever cite me an example in the history of Western states where anything short of a full armed rebellion has ever done so? The only possible example I think you might cite is the Australian outback in the nineteenth century, but that just had the same effect -- consolidating power for the authorities.
I freely admit that my attitudes are elitist, but that hasn't anything to do with whether the observations are correct. I'm not elitist in the sense of thinking myself superior to anyone, but I recognise that the education and opportunities that I've been given have refined my mind and prevented it from falling into traps that people not given my opportunities can often fall into. That doesn't necessarily say anything in general; it doesn't weigh at all in a debate or argument, but I do consider nationalism and jingoism follies, and I do think that many people fall into these errors today.
Back to gun owners -- in America, most gun owners tend to be Republican or Libertarian, tend to equate gun control with the freedoms of the US Constitution, contrast it negatively with the gun control laws of other countries (with phrases like "I'm glad to live in a free country"), and in general would be unlikely to take arms against a system in which they believe.
I am sure you do not fall into that category, as you are a reasonable individual with, I'm sure, nuanced political views relying on your own thought rather than ideas fed to you. But then you're also not the typical gun owner.
I think that that is jumping the gun. I've certainly not led a sheltered life, although fortunately I've never been assaulted. This is mainly because an important thing I learned growing up in Eastern Europe was to avoid dangerous situations at all costs. You can't avoid everything, which is why I carry defensive weapons, but with a bit of planning you can avoid orders of magnitude more than without.
Elsewhere in this thread I posted blaming violent culture as the root cause of the problems. I still believe this is the case. Nevertheless, restricting guns is a step that can reduce violent crime rates, and examples to the contrary notwithstanding, is successful on average. You're right that some criminals will always have access to guns. But this is focussing on a small piece of the puzzle, when numbers don't lie (only statistics do...) and the numbers do say that restricting access to guns tends to decrease violent crime rates.
Getting back to experience; I rather doubt you have any experience in planning, organising or executing an insurgency. You say that if citizens need to practice violence against their government, that they would ignore what is legal and what is not. Perfectly true; but the government in the US (and most Western countries) keeps an extremely tight grip on explosives; legal or not, it would be extremely difficult to get any real quantities of explosives. Do you seriously believe that any insurgency in any Western country has a serious chance of success? If you do, then we may as well argue that instead, because it is pretty obvious to me that the answer is no; it has zero chance of success. In the US, even less, as most of the serious gun users are also bred to be strongly nationalistic and jingoistic, and all it takes is a right-wing government to come to power to make them happy. I did say most.
Or to put it more simply/generally, if x is the difference between then and now, then Mary and Jane are 4x and 3x years old, and they were 3x and 2x years old x years ago. For instance, substituting 1903 for now and x=3:
Mary is twice as old (at 12 in 1903) as Jane was (at 6 in 1900) when Mary was as old (at 9 in 1900) as Jane is now (at 9 in 1903).
The advantage of this formulation is that it also gives you the space of possible answers. Mary's age must be of the form 4k, k an integer.
A quick note -- the 99% figure is misleading, as it is not the figure that matters. This is just like cache hits vs cache misses -- the misses are the expensive, so the difference between a 98% and a 99% hit rate (or violent use rate) is actually double.
On top of that, guns are legal in America, so a lot more people have them. A better figure to examine is the number of crimes committed with guns per capita. In this, America has a very high rate.
Notice that in all the examples you cite, explosives are still important. Home bomb-making is still highly illegal in the US. So any insurgency in America would have zero chance of success based on just the legal weapons. Hence the second amendment is worthless today for the purpose of keeping the government in check or preventing a police state.
Guns are not the only problem, of course; America's violent culture is probably the greatest reason for its large number of gun-related crimes and deaths. Gun control would not solve that, although I think it would be a step in the right direction.
That's completely ridiculous. A multitude of FOSS software has no commercial counterparts; a multitude of software had an FOSS implementation before a commercial one, and for most of the software I come in contact with, the FOSS tools do more and better than the commercial tools. I am admittedly biased in sample: not much work with office tools or specialised professional tools. But for typical applications, and especially typical desktop applications, the FOSS palette typically outstrips, in features and polish, commercial offerings.
You're right that in niche applications where a commercial tool existed first and FOSS software is playing catch-up; it is playing catch-up. But that's a bit circular. The first step is for FOSS software to catch up in a niche, and the next typical step is to surpass other offerings in that niche (and then get involved in a feature race with commercial tools).
You're missing the long view. You call it purist crap, and people have said the same of GNU at so many stages -- and look, today we have a totally free system, precisely because people have _not_ compromised, but stuck to an uncompromisingly free system and developed and worked on it. Who gives a toss, in the long run, about any particular hardware manufacturers today, about Linux's market share, about 3d video drivers, or any of that? There will be totally free 3d video drivers, there will be free drivers, there will be all of what people use proprietary components for today. It's by focussing on that long view that FLOSS has gotten as amazingly far as it has today, and only by keeping focussed on that will it get there. We cannot stop and say "this is good enough" while there are any proprietary components needed for the systems we use. And as a byproduct of this development effort, other people, naysayers or otherwise, will be able to use the system and join the FLOSS world.
This is mentioned in the article. The top 3 pages when you exclude lists are United Kingdom, Billie Jean King, and United States.
Something about the sun never setting.;)
I'm sorry, but this DE is a complete Windows wannabe, down to the hard corners and the clock in the system time tool. I don't particularly like the Windows DE, preferring Xfce or fluxbox or Gnome.
Also, having had to code FLTK GUIs before, I think it's a pretty rotten toolkit. I mean, it does the job and there is even a UI designer, but it's painful to code against, in contrast to decent toolkits like QT.
Fluxbox, GNUStep, WindowMaker, IceWM are just as fast and have just as many apps, and IMHO, prettier themes. Xfce is a tad slower but also gives you much more power. So... why EDE?
Let's put merits aside for a moment and technologies -- specifically, the Penny Arcade quote. People have been predicting the demise of UNIX ever since its birth, technology bandwagons have come and gone, vi is supposed to be an outdated concept -- C is unfashionable -- and yet as a solid UNIX/shell/C have remained as strong as ever and seen the demise of most of their touted replacements. They have grown and evolved and become more powerful, to the point of vim, GNU, zsh/ksh, C++ being amazingly strong reworkings of the concepts, but the concepts have stayed, and conceptually they are supersets, not replacements. And nobody who has stuck to them has needed to move on because the platform disappeared. As a shell user from the moment I computationally became "aware", I have often wondered at so many new hypes, seeing that they rarely provided something I didn't already have a program for (and typically something that had text input and output) or had already written a shell script for. I can imagine that emacs users feel much the same way.
The iPhone is not for me, however well it may work for you, and I'm glad if it does, because it is a pretty novel and smooth way of interacting with a device. I don't need it, but I appreciate its power. (I also baulk at a price tag for a smartphone about $50, or anything but a laptop for $600... but that's a different affair.) I would be grateful if people didn't predict the relegation of me and my workflow and environment to the scrap-heap every time a new fad comes along, but I am getting used to it.
Don't mod me down as an Apple-basher. I prefer GNU and free software and cheap price-tags, but I do appreciate what Apple has done and is doing for UNIX, electronics, etc. They are a real counterpoint to Windows for an average user -- a solid, dependable, yet stylish OS, and much the same can be said of many of their products.
This logic is a bit circular. You say that corporations get away with too much, not for lack of regulation but because they can buy justice. But if there is little regulation, then there is no reason to buy justice -- all they have to do is not fuck up too bad, and beyond that they can get away with whatever they like. Take, for instance, the state of healthcare in the US. It's run for-profit, and people are sold all sorts of expensive snake oil by pharmaceutical companies, simply because the goal is not to cure people quickly, but to prolong the amount of time they are selling them drugs, and increase the volume of drugs they are being sold. Children routinely receive ten times as many different drugs in childhood as do children in other Western countries (which, though unstudied, may not exactly be helpful), yet their mortality rate is still the lowest in the Western world. Or just look at how exploitative first-world corporations are with drugs in the third world. Many countries have declared their patents null and void and are producing their own generics -- and it is difficult to argue against this, as it saves tens of thousands of lives.
What I am getting is that globalisation really _is_ harmful today, that an unregulated market really _is_ very harmful (and don't look at the symptoms: buying justice, ridiculous IP laws -- these are all symptoms), and that the only way we are going to make globalisation work is by strict regulation of enterprises. To be brief, I couldn't disagree with you more.
Full disclosure: I'm Hungarian...
I seriously don't understand why this was moderated Troll. Are you confusing "-1 Disagree" with "-1 Troll" again, mods? If anything, the parent was biting on the GP's troll, who said something about "looking bad as Teh Lunix". Never mind the ad hominem, but since when have Linux distros (and I'm not, admittedly, talking about the desktop, but about the server, where Linux is a market leader) seemed disorganised? They are light-years ahead of any commercial offerings in terms of the volume of quality, well-configured, well-integrated software they offer.
So why is the parent a troll? Yes, FOSS development is mean and lean. Yes, a majority of MS products are mediocre or crappy rushed jobs. Don't mod down someone because you disagree with some assertions. It was a perfectly reasonable reply.
I didn't say that. Things must be taken on a case-by-base basis. Why do you think the founders of America (assuming you are American) made the country a republic and not a direct democracy? Precisely because of the long view.
I recognised only Harrison Ford off your list... I also wouldn't recognise your impression, and I have in fact seen two Star Wars films (the first and fourth) but would never remember such a small detail.
The obvious but subtle difference is that there are no objective standards in Star Wars or D&D or Tolkien lore. It is like the humanities. Genius is recognisable, but everything else blurs together. This is not the case for math, sciences, engineering -- the "nerdy", not "dorky" subjects, by the OP's definition.
In all fairness, Churchill and de Gaulle were ready to announce an Anglo-French union just to keep from surrendering, because all of the BEF was still in France and most French divisions were completely intact. What happened was that the politicians and some army leaders lost their heads and surrendered. To prove that this was not a sound military decision, it stranded a lot of perfectly good French divisions and the whole of the BEF -- which only escaped by a sheer miracle in Dunkirk, minus equipment and supplies. I'm sure nobody is talking about the courage of the average French soldier. But I would not spare the politicians.
The French like their small independent booksellers but the average citizen will use the cheapest service (as per the free market!), so they need to protect them as a government. This is similar to how all governments are moving to reduce emissions but only a minority of citizens are taking their own steps.
Forgive me, but the whole point is to outdo the computer. Rosetta, the current best algorithm and program (and screensaver) to do protein structure prediction already has sophisticated AI techniques (although the whole problem is essentially a hill-climbing problem), and the whole point is that we want to utilise the most sophisticated visual intelligence known -- humans -- to solve an essentially visual problem. Already very early in the trials, we saw humans, non-biochemists, beat Rosetta, and that pattern has consistently held. Don't be so pessimistic about the project.
Slashdot Mirror
A matter of a missing comma. Imagine "New Method Discovered, For Making Telescopes On the Moon". A new method has been discovered, which allows for making telescopes on the moon.
That's a very good point. It may be that once America's social ills are fixed -- the large gap between rich and poor, the large patches in the safety net, the high barrier to education, etc. -- then violence will decrease to a 'noise' level low enough to be impossible to fix, all without gun control.
:)
I'm not optimistic that this explanation will be sufficient, but it is a good hypothesis, and what needs to be done to implement it needs to be done anyway, so I hope we will see the social ills worked on and the results coming in, over the next decades.
I understand about long replies -- I would write longer ones too if I had the time, but any conversation is better than nothing. And I'm sure that differences of opinion between open-minded folks never prevents good conversation and improvement.
So how do you know that say, searches for "Barack" are any more meaningful than searches for "Ron Paul"? No, the writer had a neat theory and got so attached to it that he discarded a bad data point instead of admitting it didn't work for Ron Paul.
By including Ron Paul but at least being complete and honest, the analysis would have been more worthwhile than what it now is -- a pile of rubbish.
Just a quick note: I don't think that guns and a violent culture have anything to do with each other (as you thought I implied in another post). I think America's violent culture is probably just a product of her history.
I carry only defensive weapons, such as mace, or sometimes semi-offensive weapons such as knives. I distinguish between offensive and defensive weapons, but I'd also like to note that in a pinch, anything from a newspaper to a baseball cap can be used as an improvised defensive weapon.
I've taken chemistry and organic chemistry, and I appreciate how easy it is to manufacture explosives. But the government restricts and monitors access to those chemicals which could be used to make truly destructive explosives.
I apologise if you have experience planning military operations.
The reference you cite for crime rates is one data point -- less, as it is just one city! You know perfectly well that a city's borders are not monitored, unlike national borders, so this is not a very good argument. If you look at the UN's website, or NationMasters, and look around at countries and gun control, you will see the correlation to low gun violence with actual data.
I for one do not distinguish between keeping a police state in check and an armed insurgency. A small rebellious element has only ever given authorities the excuse to pass sweeping emergency powers in history. I do not think that guns serve any purpose of furthering democracy in the US. And can you ever cite me an example in the history of Western states where anything short of a full armed rebellion has ever done so? The only possible example I think you might cite is the Australian outback in the nineteenth century, but that just had the same effect -- consolidating power for the authorities.
I freely admit that my attitudes are elitist, but that hasn't anything to do with whether the observations are correct. I'm not elitist in the sense of thinking myself superior to anyone, but I recognise that the education and opportunities that I've been given have refined my mind and prevented it from falling into traps that people not given my opportunities can often fall into. That doesn't necessarily say anything in general; it doesn't weigh at all in a debate or argument, but I do consider nationalism and jingoism follies, and I do think that many people fall into these errors today.
Back to gun owners -- in America, most gun owners tend to be Republican or Libertarian, tend to equate gun control with the freedoms of the US Constitution, contrast it negatively with the gun control laws of other countries (with phrases like "I'm glad to live in a free country"), and in general would be unlikely to take arms against a system in which they believe.
I am sure you do not fall into that category, as you are a reasonable individual with, I'm sure, nuanced political views relying on your own thought rather than ideas fed to you. But then you're also not the typical gun owner.
I think that that is jumping the gun. I've certainly not led a sheltered life, although fortunately I've never been assaulted. This is mainly because an important thing I learned growing up in Eastern Europe was to avoid dangerous situations at all costs. You can't avoid everything, which is why I carry defensive weapons, but with a bit of planning you can avoid orders of magnitude more than without.
Elsewhere in this thread I posted blaming violent culture as the root cause of the problems. I still believe this is the case. Nevertheless, restricting guns is a step that can reduce violent crime rates, and examples to the contrary notwithstanding, is successful on average. You're right that some criminals will always have access to guns. But this is focussing on a small piece of the puzzle, when numbers don't lie (only statistics do...) and the numbers do say that restricting access to guns tends to decrease violent crime rates.
Getting back to experience; I rather doubt you have any experience in planning, organising or executing an insurgency. You say that if citizens need to practice violence against their government, that they would ignore what is legal and what is not. Perfectly true; but the government in the US (and most Western countries) keeps an extremely tight grip on explosives; legal or not, it would be extremely difficult to get any real quantities of explosives. Do you seriously believe that any insurgency in any Western country has a serious chance of success? If you do, then we may as well argue that instead, because it is pretty obvious to me that the answer is no; it has zero chance of success. In the US, even less, as most of the serious gun users are also bred to be strongly nationalistic and jingoistic, and all it takes is a right-wing government to come to power to make them happy. I did say most.
Or to put it more simply/generally, if x is the difference between then and now, then Mary and Jane are 4x and 3x years old, and they were 3x and 2x years old x years ago. For instance, substituting 1903 for now and x=3:
Mary is twice as old (at 12 in 1903) as Jane was (at 6 in 1900) when Mary was as old (at 9 in 1900) as Jane is now (at 9 in 1903).
The advantage of this formulation is that it also gives you the space of possible answers. Mary's age must be of the form 4k, k an integer.
A quick note -- the 99% figure is misleading, as it is not the figure that matters. This is just like cache hits vs cache misses -- the misses are the expensive, so the difference between a 98% and a 99% hit rate (or violent use rate) is actually double.
On top of that, guns are legal in America, so a lot more people have them. A better figure to examine is the number of crimes committed with guns per capita. In this, America has a very high rate.
Notice that in all the examples you cite, explosives are still important. Home bomb-making is still highly illegal in the US. So any insurgency in America would have zero chance of success based on just the legal weapons. Hence the second amendment is worthless today for the purpose of keeping the government in check or preventing a police state.
Guns are not the only problem, of course; America's violent culture is probably the greatest reason for its large number of gun-related crimes and deaths. Gun control would not solve that, although I think it would be a step in the right direction.
The second war was actually started by America and not because of provocation. There were a lot of warmongers in Washington at the time.
That's completely ridiculous. A multitude of FOSS software has no commercial counterparts; a multitude of software had an FOSS implementation before a commercial one, and for most of the software I come in contact with, the FOSS tools do more and better than the commercial tools. I am admittedly biased in sample: not much work with office tools or specialised professional tools. But for typical applications, and especially typical desktop applications, the FOSS palette typically outstrips, in features and polish, commercial offerings.
You're right that in niche applications where a commercial tool existed first and FOSS software is playing catch-up; it is playing catch-up. But that's a bit circular. The first step is for FOSS software to catch up in a niche, and the next typical step is to surpass other offerings in that niche (and then get involved in a feature race with commercial tools).
A joke on stenography, i.e. taking dictation or notes via shorthand.
You're missing the long view. You call it purist crap, and people have said the same of GNU at so many stages -- and look, today we have a totally free system, precisely because people have _not_ compromised, but stuck to an uncompromisingly free system and developed and worked on it. Who gives a toss, in the long run, about any particular hardware manufacturers today, about Linux's market share, about 3d video drivers, or any of that? There will be totally free 3d video drivers, there will be free drivers, there will be all of what people use proprietary components for today. It's by focussing on that long view that FLOSS has gotten as amazingly far as it has today, and only by keeping focussed on that will it get there. We cannot stop and say "this is good enough" while there are any proprietary components needed for the systems we use. And as a byproduct of this development effort, other people, naysayers or otherwise, will be able to use the system and join the FLOSS world.
This is mentioned in the article. The top 3 pages when you exclude lists are United Kingdom, Billie Jean King, and United States. Something about the sun never setting. ;)
I'm sorry, but this DE is a complete Windows wannabe, down to the hard corners and the clock in the system time tool. I don't particularly like the Windows DE, preferring Xfce or fluxbox or Gnome.
Also, having had to code FLTK GUIs before, I think it's a pretty rotten toolkit. I mean, it does the job and there is even a UI designer, but it's painful to code against, in contrast to decent toolkits like QT.
Fluxbox, GNUStep, WindowMaker, IceWM are just as fast and have just as many apps, and IMHO, prettier themes. Xfce is a tad slower but also gives you much more power. So... why EDE?
Let's put merits aside for a moment and technologies -- specifically, the Penny Arcade quote. People have been predicting the demise of UNIX ever since its birth, technology bandwagons have come and gone, vi is supposed to be an outdated concept -- C is unfashionable -- and yet as a solid UNIX/shell/C have remained as strong as ever and seen the demise of most of their touted replacements. They have grown and evolved and become more powerful, to the point of vim, GNU, zsh/ksh, C++ being amazingly strong reworkings of the concepts, but the concepts have stayed, and conceptually they are supersets, not replacements. And nobody who has stuck to them has needed to move on because the platform disappeared. As a shell user from the moment I computationally became "aware", I have often wondered at so many new hypes, seeing that they rarely provided something I didn't already have a program for (and typically something that had text input and output) or had already written a shell script for. I can imagine that emacs users feel much the same way. The iPhone is not for me, however well it may work for you, and I'm glad if it does, because it is a pretty novel and smooth way of interacting with a device. I don't need it, but I appreciate its power. (I also baulk at a price tag for a smartphone about $50, or anything but a laptop for $600... but that's a different affair.) I would be grateful if people didn't predict the relegation of me and my workflow and environment to the scrap-heap every time a new fad comes along, but I am getting used to it. Don't mod me down as an Apple-basher. I prefer GNU and free software and cheap price-tags, but I do appreciate what Apple has done and is doing for UNIX, electronics, etc. They are a real counterpoint to Windows for an average user -- a solid, dependable, yet stylish OS, and much the same can be said of many of their products.
This logic is a bit circular. You say that corporations get away with too much, not for lack of regulation but because they can buy justice. But if there is little regulation, then there is no reason to buy justice -- all they have to do is not fuck up too bad, and beyond that they can get away with whatever they like. Take, for instance, the state of healthcare in the US. It's run for-profit, and people are sold all sorts of expensive snake oil by pharmaceutical companies, simply because the goal is not to cure people quickly, but to prolong the amount of time they are selling them drugs, and increase the volume of drugs they are being sold. Children routinely receive ten times as many different drugs in childhood as do children in other Western countries (which, though unstudied, may not exactly be helpful), yet their mortality rate is still the lowest in the Western world. Or just look at how exploitative first-world corporations are with drugs in the third world. Many countries have declared their patents null and void and are producing their own generics -- and it is difficult to argue against this, as it saves tens of thousands of lives. What I am getting is that globalisation really _is_ harmful today, that an unregulated market really _is_ very harmful (and don't look at the symptoms: buying justice, ridiculous IP laws -- these are all symptoms), and that the only way we are going to make globalisation work is by strict regulation of enterprises. To be brief, I couldn't disagree with you more. Full disclosure: I'm Hungarian...
I seriously don't understand why this was moderated Troll. Are you confusing "-1 Disagree" with "-1 Troll" again, mods? If anything, the parent was biting on the GP's troll, who said something about "looking bad as Teh Lunix". Never mind the ad hominem, but since when have Linux distros (and I'm not, admittedly, talking about the desktop, but about the server, where Linux is a market leader) seemed disorganised? They are light-years ahead of any commercial offerings in terms of the volume of quality, well-configured, well-integrated software they offer. So why is the parent a troll? Yes, FOSS development is mean and lean. Yes, a majority of MS products are mediocre or crappy rushed jobs. Don't mod down someone because you disagree with some assertions. It was a perfectly reasonable reply.
I didn't say that. Things must be taken on a case-by-base basis. Why do you think the founders of America (assuming you are American) made the country a republic and not a direct democracy? Precisely because of the long view.
I recognised only Harrison Ford off your list... I also wouldn't recognise your impression, and I have in fact seen two Star Wars films (the first and fourth) but would never remember such a small detail.
The obvious but subtle difference is that there are no objective standards in Star Wars or D&D or Tolkien lore. It is like the humanities. Genius is recognisable, but everything else blurs together. This is not the case for math, sciences, engineering -- the "nerdy", not "dorky" subjects, by the OP's definition.
Yes, but "The French" is not the average citizen, it is the government. That is, the long view.
In all fairness, Churchill and de Gaulle were ready to announce an Anglo-French union just to keep from surrendering, because all of the BEF was still in France and most French divisions were completely intact. What happened was that the politicians and some army leaders lost their heads and surrendered. To prove that this was not a sound military decision, it stranded a lot of perfectly good French divisions and the whole of the BEF -- which only escaped by a sheer miracle in Dunkirk, minus equipment and supplies. I'm sure nobody is talking about the courage of the average French soldier. But I would not spare the politicians.
So what is the percentage of Slashdotters that think it's a stupid idea in the land of make-believe, but downright dangerous nonsense on Earth?
The French like their small independent booksellers but the average citizen will use the cheapest service (as per the free market!), so they need to protect them as a government. This is similar to how all governments are moving to reduce emissions but only a minority of citizens are taking their own steps.
Forgive me, but the whole point is to outdo the computer. Rosetta, the current best algorithm and program (and screensaver) to do protein structure prediction already has sophisticated AI techniques (although the whole problem is essentially a hill-climbing problem), and the whole point is that we want to utilise the most sophisticated visual intelligence known -- humans -- to solve an essentially visual problem. Already very early in the trials, we saw humans, non-biochemists, beat Rosetta, and that pattern has consistently held. Don't be so pessimistic about the project.