> unless you managed to hold _exactly_ to the speed limit the whole time. I don't think that this is a practical possibility
I have GPS and cruise control. Maintaining exactly the posted speed limit according to Einstein is not only a practical possibility but something I do fairly regularly.
The speed measurement potential of this does bother me though. If I'm cruising up the M40 late at night and have the entire road to myself, I don't want to get home and find that I've been banned just for cruising at 85-90mph.
There's no need to shout. This is supposed to be a (n at least semi-) scientific discussion, not a slanging match.
OK, I make the additional assumption that God created the star plus the light in transit so that we can see it straight away without having to wait for the light to get here. Doesn't your assumption that this wasn't the case also count as an extra assumption that balances out my extra assumption, and if not, why not?
Well, yes of course. But you can't assume the universe is not young, take observations like this, then use them to prove the universe is not young; that's what scientists generally call invalid reasoning on the grounds of being a circular argument. All observing a star 15bn light years away proves is that that star is 15bn light years away; it requires other assumptions, or observations that themselves do not rest on the "not young" assumption because then you've still got a circular argument, before you can conclude "therefore the universe is at least 15bn years old."
IMHO since ID proponents get accused of being unscientific, it's only fair that its opponents should be required to be scientific.
Why is that a trick? If he didn't create the light in transit between the star and us then obviously we wouldn't be able to see the stars. Creating the light in transit doesn't have to mean that God's trying to make us think the universe has been around longer than it has; it's an obvious requirement if he wants us to be able to see stuff further away than the speed of light would allow.
A standard QWERTY keyboard with all the right keys in all the right places with all the right functions.
I don't want the cursor keys in some other wacky configuration than up on its own and left/down/right below. I want them at the same level as the spacebar. I don't want function keys to default to some weird application keys and resist all efforts to set them back to function keys *COUGH*Logitech*COUGH*. I don't want Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn in some other combination than 3x2 or anywhere other than directly above the cursor keys, with 1/2" gaps between the main keys, those 10 and the number pad. I don't want it to be wireless. I don't want it to use batteries. I don't want a built in mouse. I don't want it to cost a fortune. I don't want it to be a piece of shit. *EVERY* keyboard in PC World fails the above spec on at least one count, and Maplin who you'd have thought would know better are just as bad.
All the right keys. All the right places. Good quality and price. Why can I only get such keyboards with new computers, and why don't places that supply them with new computers also stock them on their own?
Spot on. It's the inability of so many drivers to give appropriate attention to the main task in hand - namely driving - that causes the problems. As for myself I can drive perfectly safely even when texting; I hold the mobile at the top of the steering wheel so that it's just a couple of quick focus changes to look at the phone, drive slower, leave larger gaps and text more slowly. But now this is illegal, rightly so in my opinion even though it means I can no longer do it. The driver must be aware of the road conditions as his NUMBER ONE PRIORITY. But how this isn't obvious is beyond me. Making the other person on a mobile phone conversation wait or repeat his last comment is considerably less important than road safety, and a comment to the effect of "I'm driving" at the start of the conversation (regardless of who called who) should be enough to make the other party realise that this might happen.
My own preferred solution to many of the problems we have on the road is the horribly politically incorrect notion of further training, I'd favour driver retesting perhaps every 3-5 years, not just for old giffers, providing they were made less academic and more practical (one handed driving to be considered a fault only when ACTUALLY dangerous rather than all the time, for instance and FFS if you've got powered steering you can navigate 99% of the road network with just one finger), and to this end I've done advanced driving (actually advanced motorcycling which has had a positive impact on my driving as well). Personally I'd also want incentives adding for as many people as possible to do advanced driving, perhaps through lower taxes, reduced frequency of driver retesting or whatever. IMHO you can't beat a bit of education for solving problems; after all, isn't that why it's compulsory to send kids to school?
The OP can be abstracted back to "why do we design stuff around files"? You work the way you work because the application is designed around files. Due to business requirements, those files must be 30M+, and because it's designed around files, you have to have a File menu.
OK, that's fair enough, but why is it designed around files in the first place? If it were designed around the concept of data views, the server only needs to send a view of the data to the user (unless all 30M+ is displayed on the screen at once and all 30M changed on every edit). The user then manipulates that view somehow or other, and any changes get automatically saved as deltas (like source code control). Want to save changes? Already done. Want to rollback? Delete the delta. Save As something else? Create a "release" with the specified deltas with the new name. Avoid vast amounts of network traffic? Save read-only copies of the stuff locally, although bear in mind that you can get 30M of network data for "free" every time someone visits a project. Want to implement document revision control/sccs? You've already got it for free.
It should be possible to design the system so that it doesn't need to send 30M+ twice over the network so that you can make a simple edit, but of course that redesign would be radical. If you need to change "foo" to "bar" on page 7, the only data you should need to transfer across the network is page 7 (one way) plus three bytes (the other), plus a bit of control clutter.
Then whether the server uses actual files, stuffs the data into a database, uses CNC to engrave the data on stone tablets or whatever could be transparent to the users; all they do is access the work and make changes, as the OP suggests "should" be possible.
No; the GP said "The law says X" without reference; this is largely useless without a specific reference which presumably the GP knows, so the P simply gave the GP the opportunity to say where or if they were just making stuff up.
I don't know if it's law or contract or whatever but in all my jobs I've accrued holidays at the rate of (annual leave)/12 days per month, if I leave at any time other than at the end of a holiday year then my holiday entitlement is calculated accordingly which gives me a credit or debit which is included in my severance pay. So if I take all my leave before quitting, then I could end up owing the company money; equally, if I haven't taken accrued days (for example if I leave at the end of Feb having only taken 2 days) then I have a credit which is usually paid extra - in the example that's an additional 4 days' pay if I get 3 days/month.
In my first job which included sysadmin work on handing in my notice they said don't come in tomorrow - I was well chuffed, except that I wanted to keep a bunch of scripts I'd written and they said I couldn't (that's how I lost my DCL text-mode Mandelbrot generator). Not all jobs have been the same though, and my current place certainly has the policy of making you work your notice right through to the bitter end.
There's no reference to falsifiability in the Dictionary.com definition of science. Is this definition incomplete?
Interesting stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability, in particular "Mathematical theorems are unfalsifiable", "Much that would be considered meaningful and useful, however, is not falsifiable" and "The Popperian criterion provides a definition of science that excludes much that is of value; it does not provide a way to distinguish meaningful statements from meaningless ones".
So I do not feel that I can accept your premise that anything unfalsifiable cannot be science. I'm inclined to agree that ID is unfalsifiable, but not that this makes it unscientific.
It's partly a matter of interpretation. Any scientist who wants to be taken seriously has to draw conclusions that favour evolution from any new information. Scientists that don't draw conclusions that favour evolution get the "you're unscientific" treatment, funding withheld and so on. Therefore of course everything you see shouts "evolution" at you and you don't see evidence of ID. That doesn't mean ID is unscientific.
Perhaps you don't see evidence for ID because you aren't looking in the right places. Have a look round icr.org some time.
> ID is not a scientific theory
Why not? dictionary.com defines "science" as "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena". By this definition evolution and ID are both scientific theories.
I think you need to read up on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, young fella-me-lad. Clearly these are not stars but star-sized olives, placed into the interstellar bolognese sauce by His FSMness.
> Dual core has poor support in Windows currently.
Oh I dunno. Or perhaps I haven't got dual core, or don't really understand what's happening, either of which is likely. Task Manager seems to think I have 2 CPUs - my PC has a P4 540. A couple of days ago I kicked off a processor intensive task. It used 50% CPU. Then I started a second. It used the other 50%. Then a third. The second went down to 25% and the third ran at 25%, so I guess 2 and 3 were sharing a core. So I was interested to see what would happen when the first terminated - would 2 and 3 continue at 25%, or would they realise half the CPU had just come available and use it? The latter - they continued at 50% each, which suggests to me that one of the threads automatically jumped core. So I don't really see how it could work much better.
Only in the same way that going for a walk steals a sale of petrol from the garage. Or that going for a drive steals a sale from the bicycle shop. Or that going for a bicycle ride steals a sale from a shoe shop. Just about anything you do could be considered as stealing a sale from something else, so this is not a helpful way of looking at things. Eating chicken tonight? You've just stolen a sale from a beef farmer. Eating beef? Ditto for chicken farmers. Going veggie? You've just stolen loads of sales from all meat-based industries.
So stop with the "stealing a sale" stuff please; it's pure bollocks.
> The pollution is shifted to wherever the power to make the metals is produced.
True. But how does it compare with zillions of cars worldwide being started in the morning on full choke? If Al/Mg/Zn/whatever can be produced at a power plant that runs continuously at peak efficiency, then ok it's still polluting but it's better than what we currently have.
One enormous benefit of this approach is that the raw materials are completely recycled. Burn oil, you have no oil left. Convert Mg to MgO and back again and you still have your original Mg.
A completely pollution free solution this is not. But it's an improvement, no?
...nothing more. Non-irritating ads I can live with. For me non-irritating means static, not interfering with the page layout, and not loading significantly more quickly than the content I'm actually interested in.
Unfortunately advertisers seem to think that ads have to be animated, take up 90% of the screen space, get in the way as much as possible, then worst of all to appear almost instantly while the actual content takes forever to arrive. If that's their attitude then my attitude is that they can all go and fsck themselves.
So I use Proximodo to filter out all sorts of crap by default, whitelisting good sites. Unfortunately Slashdot ads fail on three counts (animated, interfere with content, appear too quickly) so they stay blocked. As another poster said, Google ads are ok - for me they're mostly irrelevant because I only look at ads when I'm actually shopping for something, but they are static text and appear with the content without disrupting the screen.
And no, I don't buy magazines that are so stuffed with ads that the only way to get around is via the index. For some bizarre reason I prefer to read stuff cover to cover. If the mags were free then fair enough, but a 500 page magazine with about 20 pages of content *cough*computer shopper*cough* is just taking the p*ss.
Even TV ads irritate me, particularly on Sky, where you get 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes at an elevated volume level, although that wouldn't be so bad if the ads were actually vaguely intelligent/amusing (cf cinema ads which are usually pretty good) and less repetitive*. Adverts are one reason I've completely canned telly. Now TV-free since August 2002!
* Top/tail ads. WTF's that about??? Look, if I didn't want it 30 seconds ago I'm not going to want it now, am I? And if I did it's still not going to make any difference, with the one possible exception of pi**ing me off so much that I buy from your competitor instead. And repetition within an ad that I'm going to see every 10 minutes anyway - that's a guaranteed way of getting onto my "never purchase from the advertiser" list. The only good thing about ads that are laid on really thickly is that it's expensive to do and can't last long.
reminds me of that Dilbert where Wally goes on SH training, then goes up to Alice and says something like "Amazing - 30 minutes training completely erased billions of years of evolution. Do something sexy and watch me ignore it!"
Yeah, for some reason, when you scroll off the bottom (or top for that matter) of the screen, the text moves so that the point is in the middle of the screen instead of just scrolling the lot up (down) by one line.
It seems every version of emacs I download has this same feature. If you have found downloads where this isn't the case, I'd like to know where you get it from, cos I want one too.
Well, yes, but only if you know what weird word Emacs uses to describe a function. Want to reformat text to the margins? Look up "fill", then wonder why a semicolon makes it reformat the entire paragraph to lines containing seventy spaces, a semicolon, and one word. Want cursor down to scroll by ONE LINE AND ONE LINE ONLY JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER TEXT APPLICATION ON THE PLANET? Tough titty, without vast amounts of reprogramming. Want it to always pad with spaces instead of using tabs? No chance. Used to "vi" and want to do a yank? Look up kill. Paste? Look up "yank". Now try to work out why vi::yank and emacs::yank are exact opposites. And(())())(what's(((((((((((((()with all)()())(((())(())( the brackets?))))))))))))))))))))
Having said that though, Emacs is still my main text editor. I think it's amazing, if somewhat quirky.
...do we get the three button optical mice that are like the PilotMouse(iirc) but with optical innards instead of a ball? I'm bored with cleaning my balls. I personally have an instant market for seven of these mice.
Nigeria isn't poor! Their lawyers can charge $43000 for five minutes' work - there's no way they'd be able to do that (and survive in business) if Nigeria were poor.
No, but I have seen high-ranking scientists ranting remarkably emotionally about something they believe to be a threat to their beliefs. See the comments by Richard Dawkins, professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, at the following BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/2981663.st m where he feels threatened by creationism being taught alongside (NOT instead of) evolution.
His comments are not about explaining observed data and making predictions. They are the emotional ranting of someone who thinks his faith has been threatened.
Slashdot Mirror
> unless you managed to hold _exactly_ to the speed limit the whole time. I don't think that this is a practical possibility
I have GPS and cruise control. Maintaining exactly the posted speed limit according to Einstein is not only a practical possibility but something I do fairly regularly.
The speed measurement potential of this does bother me though. If I'm cruising up the M40 late at night and have the entire road to myself, I don't want to get home and find that I've been banned just for cruising at 85-90mph.
There's no need to shout. This is supposed to be a (n at least semi-) scientific discussion, not a slanging match.
OK, I make the additional assumption that God created the star plus the light in transit so that we can see it straight away without having to wait for the light to get here. Doesn't your assumption that this wasn't the case also count as an extra assumption that balances out my extra assumption, and if not, why not?
Well, yes of course. But you can't assume the universe is not young, take observations like this, then use them to prove the universe is not young; that's what scientists generally call invalid reasoning on the grounds of being a circular argument. All observing a star 15bn light years away proves is that that star is 15bn light years away; it requires other assumptions, or observations that themselves do not rest on the "not young" assumption because then you've still got a circular argument, before you can conclude "therefore the universe is at least 15bn years old."
IMHO since ID proponents get accused of being unscientific, it's only fair that its opponents should be required to be scientific.
Why is that a trick? If he didn't create the light in transit between the star and us then obviously we wouldn't be able to see the stars. Creating the light in transit doesn't have to mean that God's trying to make us think the universe has been around longer than it has; it's an obvious requirement if he wants us to be able to see stuff further away than the speed of light would allow.
A standard QWERTY keyboard with all the right keys in all the right places with all the right functions.
I don't want the cursor keys in some other wacky configuration than up on its own and left/down/right below. I want them at the same level as the spacebar. I don't want function keys to default to some weird application keys and resist all efforts to set them back to function keys *COUGH*Logitech*COUGH*. I don't want Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn in some other combination than 3x2 or anywhere other than directly above the cursor keys, with 1/2" gaps between the main keys, those 10 and the number pad. I don't want it to be wireless. I don't want it to use batteries. I don't want a built in mouse. I don't want it to cost a fortune. I don't want it to be a piece of shit. *EVERY* keyboard in PC World fails the above spec on at least one count, and Maplin who you'd have thought would know better are just as bad.
All the right keys. All the right places. Good quality and price. Why can I only get such keyboards with new computers, and why don't places that supply them with new computers also stock them on their own?
Spot on. It's the inability of so many drivers to give appropriate attention to the main task in hand - namely driving - that causes the problems. As for myself I can drive perfectly safely even when texting; I hold the mobile at the top of the steering wheel so that it's just a couple of quick focus changes to look at the phone, drive slower, leave larger gaps and text more slowly. But now this is illegal, rightly so in my opinion even though it means I can no longer do it. The driver must be aware of the road conditions as his NUMBER ONE PRIORITY. But how this isn't obvious is beyond me. Making the other person on a mobile phone conversation wait or repeat his last comment is considerably less important than road safety, and a comment to the effect of "I'm driving" at the start of the conversation (regardless of who called who) should be enough to make the other party realise that this might happen.
My own preferred solution to many of the problems we have on the road is the horribly politically incorrect notion of further training, I'd favour driver retesting perhaps every 3-5 years, not just for old giffers, providing they were made less academic and more practical (one handed driving to be considered a fault only when ACTUALLY dangerous rather than all the time, for instance and FFS if you've got powered steering you can navigate 99% of the road network with just one finger), and to this end I've done advanced driving (actually advanced motorcycling which has had a positive impact on my driving as well). Personally I'd also want incentives adding for as many people as possible to do advanced driving, perhaps through lower taxes, reduced frequency of driver retesting or whatever. IMHO you can't beat a bit of education for solving problems; after all, isn't that why it's compulsory to send kids to school?
The OP can be abstracted back to "why do we design stuff around files"? You work the way you work because the application is designed around files. Due to business requirements, those files must be 30M+, and because it's designed around files, you have to have a File menu.
OK, that's fair enough, but why is it designed around files in the first place? If it were designed around the concept of data views, the server only needs to send a view of the data to the user (unless all 30M+ is displayed on the screen at once and all 30M changed on every edit). The user then manipulates that view somehow or other, and any changes get automatically saved as deltas (like source code control). Want to save changes? Already done. Want to rollback? Delete the delta. Save As something else? Create a "release" with the specified deltas with the new name. Avoid vast amounts of network traffic? Save read-only copies of the stuff locally, although bear in mind that you can get 30M of network data for "free" every time someone visits a project. Want to implement document revision control/sccs? You've already got it for free.
It should be possible to design the system so that it doesn't need to send 30M+ twice over the network so that you can make a simple edit, but of course that redesign would be radical. If you need to change "foo" to "bar" on page 7, the only data you should need to transfer across the network is page 7 (one way) plus three bytes (the other), plus a bit of control clutter.
Then whether the server uses actual files, stuffs the data into a database, uses CNC to engrave the data on stone tablets or whatever could be transparent to the users; all they do is access the work and make changes, as the OP suggests "should" be possible.
No; the GP said "The law says X" without reference; this is largely useless without a specific reference which presumably the GP knows, so the P simply gave the GP the opportunity to say where or if they were just making stuff up.
I don't know if it's law or contract or whatever but in all my jobs I've accrued holidays at the rate of (annual leave)/12 days per month, if I leave at any time other than at the end of a holiday year then my holiday entitlement is calculated accordingly which gives me a credit or debit which is included in my severance pay. So if I take all my leave before quitting, then I could end up owing the company money; equally, if I haven't taken accrued days (for example if I leave at the end of Feb having only taken 2 days) then I have a credit which is usually paid extra - in the example that's an additional 4 days' pay if I get 3 days/month.
In my first job which included sysadmin work on handing in my notice they said don't come in tomorrow - I was well chuffed, except that I wanted to keep a bunch of scripts I'd written and they said I couldn't (that's how I lost my DCL text-mode Mandelbrot generator). Not all jobs have been the same though, and my current place certainly has the policy of making you work your notice right through to the bitter end.
There's no reference to falsifiability in the Dictionary.com definition of science. Is this definition incomplete?
Interesting stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability, in particular "Mathematical theorems are unfalsifiable", "Much that would be considered meaningful and useful, however, is not falsifiable" and "The Popperian criterion provides a definition of science that excludes much that is of value; it does not provide a way to distinguish meaningful statements from meaningless ones".
So I do not feel that I can accept your premise that anything unfalsifiable cannot be science. I'm inclined to agree that ID is unfalsifiable, but not that this makes it unscientific.
> I fail to see evidence for ID
It's partly a matter of interpretation. Any scientist who wants to be taken seriously has to draw conclusions that favour evolution from any new information. Scientists that don't draw conclusions that favour evolution get the "you're unscientific" treatment, funding withheld and so on. Therefore of course everything you see shouts "evolution" at you and you don't see evidence of ID. That doesn't mean ID is unscientific.
Perhaps you don't see evidence for ID because you aren't looking in the right places. Have a look round icr.org some time.
> ID is not a scientific theory
Why not? dictionary.com defines "science" as "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena". By this definition evolution and ID are both scientific theories.
I think you need to read up on the Flying Spaghetti Monster, young fella-me-lad. Clearly these are not stars but star-sized olives, placed into the interstellar bolognese sauce by His FSMness.
Good point. Anything that wouldn't work in Saskatchewan obviously wouldn't be any use anywhere else on the planet.
> Dual core has poor support in Windows currently.
Oh I dunno. Or perhaps I haven't got dual core, or don't really understand what's happening, either of which is likely. Task Manager seems to think I have 2 CPUs - my PC has a P4 540. A couple of days ago I kicked off a processor intensive task. It used 50% CPU. Then I started a second. It used the other 50%. Then a third. The second went down to 25% and the third ran at 25%, so I guess 2 and 3 were sharing a core. So I was interested to see what would happen when the first terminated - would 2 and 3 continue at 25%, or would they realise half the CPU had just come available and use it? The latter - they continued at 50% each, which suggests to me that one of the threads automatically jumped core. So I don't really see how it could work much better.
Only in the same way that going for a walk steals a sale of petrol from the garage. Or that going for a drive steals a sale from the bicycle shop. Or that going for a bicycle ride steals a sale from a shoe shop. Just about anything you do could be considered as stealing a sale from something else, so this is not a helpful way of looking at things. Eating chicken tonight? You've just stolen a sale from a beef farmer. Eating beef? Ditto for chicken farmers. Going veggie? You've just stolen loads of sales from all meat-based industries.
So stop with the "stealing a sale" stuff please; it's pure bollocks.
typo: the S should be a C **ducks**
> The pollution is shifted to wherever the power to make the metals is produced.
True. But how does it compare with zillions of cars worldwide being started in the morning on full choke? If Al/Mg/Zn/whatever can be produced at a power plant that runs continuously at peak efficiency, then ok it's still polluting but it's better than what we currently have.
One enormous benefit of this approach is that the raw materials are completely recycled. Burn oil, you have no oil left. Convert Mg to MgO and back again and you still have your original Mg.
A completely pollution free solution this is not. But it's an improvement, no?
> They've just opened a clinic...
> We also covered this story last july.
So have they just opened the clinic or not?
...nothing more. Non-irritating ads I can live with. For me non-irritating means static, not interfering with the page layout, and not loading significantly more quickly than the content I'm actually interested in.
Unfortunately advertisers seem to think that ads have to be animated, take up 90% of the screen space, get in the way as much as possible, then worst of all to appear almost instantly while the actual content takes forever to arrive. If that's their attitude then my attitude is that they can all go and fsck themselves.
So I use Proximodo to filter out all sorts of crap by default, whitelisting good sites. Unfortunately Slashdot ads fail on three counts (animated, interfere with content, appear too quickly) so they stay blocked. As another poster said, Google ads are ok - for me they're mostly irrelevant because I only look at ads when I'm actually shopping for something, but they are static text and appear with the content without disrupting the screen.
And no, I don't buy magazines that are so stuffed with ads that the only way to get around is via the index. For some bizarre reason I prefer to read stuff cover to cover. If the mags were free then fair enough, but a 500 page magazine with about 20 pages of content *cough*computer shopper*cough* is just taking the p*ss.
Even TV ads irritate me, particularly on Sky, where you get 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes at an elevated volume level, although that wouldn't be so bad if the ads were actually vaguely intelligent/amusing (cf cinema ads which are usually pretty good) and less repetitive*. Adverts are one reason I've completely canned telly. Now TV-free since August 2002!
* Top/tail ads. WTF's that about??? Look, if I didn't want it 30 seconds ago I'm not going to want it now, am I? And if I did it's still not going to make any difference, with the one possible exception of pi**ing me off so much that I buy from your competitor instead. And repetition within an ad that I'm going to see every 10 minutes anyway - that's a guaranteed way of getting onto my "never purchase from the advertiser" list. The only good thing about ads that are laid on really thickly is that it's expensive to do and can't last long.
reminds me of that Dilbert where Wally goes on SH training, then goes up to Alice and says something like "Amazing - 30 minutes training completely erased billions of years of evolution. Do something sexy and watch me ignore it!"
...the sound of millions of slashdotters around the world not giving a hoot.
Yeah, for some reason, when you scroll off the bottom (or top for that matter) of the screen, the text moves so that the point is in the middle of the screen instead of just scrolling the lot up (down) by one line.
It seems every version of emacs I download has this same feature. If you have found downloads where this isn't the case, I'd like to know where you get it from, cos I want one too.
Well, yes, but only if you know what weird word Emacs uses to describe a function. Want to reformat text to the margins? Look up "fill", then wonder why a semicolon makes it reformat the entire paragraph to lines containing seventy spaces, a semicolon, and one word. Want cursor down to scroll by ONE LINE AND ONE LINE ONLY JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER TEXT APPLICATION ON THE PLANET? Tough titty, without vast amounts of reprogramming. Want it to always pad with spaces instead of using tabs? No chance. Used to "vi" and want to do a yank? Look up kill. Paste? Look up "yank". Now try to work out why vi::yank and emacs::yank are exact opposites. And(())())(what's(((((((((((((()with all)()())(((())(())( the brackets?))))))))))))))))))))
Having said that though, Emacs is still my main text editor. I think it's amazing, if somewhat quirky.
...do we get the three button optical mice that are like the PilotMouse(iirc) but with optical innards instead of a ball? I'm bored with cleaning my balls. I personally have an instant market for seven of these mice.
Nigeria isn't poor! Their lawyers can charge $43000 for five minutes' work - there's no way they'd be able to do that (and survive in business) if Nigeria were poor.
No, but I have seen high-ranking scientists ranting remarkably emotionally about something they believe to be a threat to their beliefs. See the comments by Richard Dawkins, professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, at the following BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/2981663.st m where he feels threatened by creationism being taught alongside (NOT instead of) evolution.
His comments are not about explaining observed data and making predictions. They are the emotional ranting of someone who thinks his faith has been threatened.