This, this and this are fairly realistic. Those are only examples from povray hall of fame, there are better raytracers.
POV-Ray has for many years included a radiosity engine that works alongside (IIRC, actually as a preliminary step before) the actual "raytracer". This enables it to produce scenes that involve radiosity effects and not just what can be done by raytracing alone (at the cost of taking more time than just raytracing the scene.)
How germane it is discussions of "raytracing" as a method of rendering for games depends on whether the discussion is really of "raytracing", per se, or a similar combination of radiosity-based rendering and raytracing. From what I dimly remember of how radiosity works, I don't think its as easily parallelizable as the strictly raytracing part, and thus may not have the natural advantage in scalability that is claimed for raytracing.
Null is one of the squirreliest concepts in database theory, because there should probably be many flavors of null.
Or none. You can sensibly approach the problem either way (though many NULLs, I think, ultimately leads to madness.)
Having one NULL, OTOH, is just plain broken, but you can often enough work around it by just trying to limit the use in any one table to one interpretation, and limiting the ways application code depends on interpretation when you can't be certain what any given NULL means. Meanwhile, many NULLs raises the question of how you manage the use of all those NULLs, and no NULLs means more joins, which are attractive from a theoretical perspective, but can be a performance hit.
It seems to me that the "broadcasted frequently" isn't a valid reason for why DVD recording devices aren't popular,
Yes, it is.
because there are recording devices that are popular.
And that's another reason.
That there is both less reason to need recording devices, and that another recording device has taken the lions share of the demand that does exist in the US for such devices are both valid, non-contradictory, explanations for the lack of popularity of a particular recording device in the US.
If there was more demand, a second-tier device could still be successful. If the alternative hadn't been entrenched as early, the DVD-R might not be second-tier in the US. Absent either of those factors, DVD-Rs would be more popular, so both together help to explain why the DVD-R is not particularly popular.
You're aware, I hope, that you can represent RDF (or any other graph model) in XML, making utter nonsense of your claim?
You can represent XML in an a pure RDBMS, too. But you wouldn't want to, and it wouldn't be great for tree queries, and an XML-centric query tool won't be a good way to do graph queries on RDF represented in XML. And you probably don't want to think about graph queries on an RDBMS representation of an XML representation of RDF.
The thing that bugs me a lot about this so-called semantic web is its reliance on humans to be accurate.
This is oft-repeated argument against the Semantic Web, but it doesn't hold up to close examination. The Semantic Web doesn't rely on human accuracy any more than computer applications in general do, and the Semantic Web also provides a platform on which one can establish distributed trust systems, etc., to address problems associated with source unreliability.
To use your current example, what if your person was classified as a "programmer", or "software engineer" rather than a computer scientist?
That's what defined ontologies exist to deal with.
Any process can be subverted; paper-ballot elections were stolen through a large number of different means long before computers were invented.
This isn't to say that paper ballots can't be abused. Even so, we have a long history of dealing with election fraud where paper ballots are involved. We know what it looks like and it tends to be obvious.
Its pretty obvious when electronic ballots are used, too -- pretty much the same way that paper-ballot fraud is (pre-election polling being dead on except in precincts where machines from a certain manufacturer were used, counts for certain candidates in precincts above the total number of registered voters, etc.)
The media (and, following their lead, most of the public) may ignore these clear signs, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
All of this is not to say that paper ballots aren't important: they are, because without them you've got nothing to reconcile a fishy-looking election too. And because of the long-history of paper-ballot fraud, we've gotten pretty good and protecting against the kinds of things that would mess up the paper trail, if there is a recount. We can't do that as reliably without paper. But we shouldn't pretend that paper-ballot based elections are somehow more pure, or have more obvious first signs of fraud. Short of going back and doing a recount, the signs of fraud are pretty much the same for paper ballots as they are for electronic ones.
Modern games that will play on consoles like the PS3 and Xbox 360 will easily fit on a DVD9.
Last generation console games of the type that were played on the PS2 and Xbox will, certainly. Some PC games push the size of a DVD, and part of the whole point of a "next generation" console is to expand the scope of what can be done, not just to do the same with a slight increase in graphics quality. A higher-capacity drive gives you a degree of freedom you don't have in a drive that supports only a capacity that is already nearly fully exploited.
Now, because a lot of the first few years of games for the PS3 are going to be incremental updates of existing titles, or constrained by ideas about what you can do on a console shaped by the last generation, or constrained by marketing decisions to make games that play on different consoles without a lot of unique content development for one or the other, it probably will be a while before any game uses the greater capacity for much. But it certainly has utility in terms of what it enables.
Of course, for Sony, that's probably not reason enough to include it. Its a factor, but Bluray was included largely to play Bluray movies — to push Bluray as a standard for movies and because Sony felt that the capacity to play HD movies would push the PS3 as a console.
I think you might have a problem with comprehension or something.
I think you might have a problem with remembering what you wrote, even when it is cut-and-pasted into the post you are responding to.
First, what you describe is called gerrymandering for the most part.
Yes, that's what I was describing. Using that name didn't add anything to the comment I was making so I didn't use it.
Second, I never said it was done without regard to who is in power. I said it is done by the state.
You did say it was done by the state. You also said it was done without regard to who is in power. Cut-and-pasted, again:
Redistricting is done by the state without regard to who is in power.
Now, perhaps you didn't mean the "without regard to who is in power" part, but you certainly said it, and I can hardly be expected to read your mind and know that you meant the "by the state" part but not the "without regard to who is in power" part.
It's only a blog. It's not pretending not to have a bias.
Not disclosing a personal financial interest in a competing project when holding yourself out as a news source focussed on a particular project is precisely "pretending not to have bias".
He's allowed to say what he likes.
No one is saying he is not allowed to say what he likes. What people are saying is that he has an ethical obligation to disclose the conflict of interest if he holds himself out as a news source (whether the form is as a blog or otherwise). Ethics aren't a matter of what you are compelled to do or not do (though certain professions also have binding ethical codes), but what you should do or not do.
How is this any different than (insert most media sources here)?
Yes, other people do unethical things. That's no excuse to ignore the specific instances of people doing unethical things. In fact, its why it is important to take note of them.
Just because it's Microsoft in this case makes this newsworthy?
No, undisclosed conflicts of interest are always newsworthy, to the extent that they relate to a subject that is itself a focus of attention in the community in question. The OLPC has been the subject of attention on Slashdot, and OLPC News has been a frequently-cited source in Slashdot discussions of it (and, IIRC, also the source of several of the front-page Slashdot stories regarding it, though I'm not going to bother going back and checking at the moment.) The undisclosed conflict of interest at OLPC News is, therefore, worthy of attention at Slashdot.
Conflict of interest? This is as much of a conflict of interest as a RedHat employee saying bad things about Microsoft.
Yes, its exactly that kind of conflict of interest: if a site that purported to be a "Windows News" site, that was highly critical of Windows, didn't disclose that one of its primary writers was a RedHat employee, that would also be an unethical conflict of interest. When you hold yourself out as a news source on a subject, and have personal financial interests that are indicative of a natural bias (or print material from someone who does), the ethical thing to do is disclose your (or the source's) interest so that readers have a fair opportunity to consider it when interpreting your reports. Failing to do so is unethical.
I live in fear of the day that the radical anti-realists on the Christian right team up with the radical anti-realists on the postmodernist left.
Um, why?
The "anti-realists on the postmodernist left" consist of a handful of academics and some kinds who think its a cool way to stand up against the Establishment. They don't have substantial money, political power, numbers, connections, or organization or any prospect of ever getting any of those things. Even if they were to ally with the Christian Right (which itself is just about inconceivable: the Christian Right's central problem with scientific realism is that the Christian Right's core ideology is that there is an objective reality, and its not the one that science points to while the postmodernist anti-realists problem with scientific realism is that they reject an objective reality and view pushing the idea of any particular such reality as a form of oppression) you'd never even notice the difference, they wouldn't make a perceptible change in the political power of the Christian Right.
I mean, if you need to live in fear of something, their are threats that are simultaneously far more serious and far more likely to be realized than that.
I think we should goto a group representative democracy. Many other countries have this, essentially if your political party has 10% support they get 10% of the representation.
If you go to even small (say, 5 member) multimember districts, you can get proportional results without abandoning direct voting for candidates (you just use Single Transferrable Vote or some similar method). Since you have to go to multimember districts (and usually large ones) to use part list systems (what I assume you mean by "group representative democracy"), and doing so makes individual candidates no longer accountable to the general electorate, I'd rather go the candidate-centered-proportional route.
Redistricting is done by the state without regard to who is in power.
No, its done by those in power, with regard to their own power interests. There are a few states that instead of doing this overtly with legislatures, have panels of retired judges (but those are former officials, either elected or appointed, who are then appointed to redistricting boards by current officials) do it, but to think that it is done "without regard to who is in power" is, well, dangerously naive.
Reread that quote. Its not opposed to teaching Evolution as how the universe was formed, it wants standards rewritten so that evolution is taught as one of the theories of how the Universe was formed:
"...requesting that the State Board of Education direct the Florida Department of Education to revise/edit the new Sunshine State Standards for Science so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed."
Going to be interested to see how they teach that. (And on what basis.)
One does have trouble imagining how organs like the eye developed through mutation.
The fact that you can't imagine how something could be true is not an argument (at least, not a valid one) against a scientific theory. Though its pretty much all the anti-evolution folks have.
Even scientists who promote Evolution don't agree that we came from monkeys.
Correct. In fact, its pretty much universally accepted that we didn't. "Evolution says we came from monkeys" is a distortion from the anti-evolution forces.
Some think we came from pigs
Source?
some thing we came from primordial ooze through another mammal.
All scientists think that we came from the first life on Earth (where that came from is outside of evolution, while "primordial ooze" is a popular expression for the dominant theory on that, there are other conjectures, and it really doesn't matter to evolution), and that somewhere in the chain of species leading to our own were several other mammal species.
It's that one specific take on it dominates High School science classes and is taught as though concensus exists on it even though it does not.
High school science classes typically teach two things: (1) the scientific method, and (2) useful simplifications of the currently dominant theoretical models in the field covered by the class. (These "useful simplifcations of currently dominant models" are often exactly equivalent to models that have since been rejected; for instance, my high school physics class taught Newtonian mechanics.)
They very often don't teach alternative models except as occasional illustrations that such things do exist to illustrate the scientific method.
Nobody with logic denies survival of the fittest. People do have a problem with Evolution trying to take on speciation though.
Since we understand the mechanisms by which traits are passed on, and we have observed changes both less than and resulting in speciation and understand the processes which lead to these changes, the only excuse for people having this problem honestly is ignorance, which is correctable.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but is this really so bad?
Yes.
In each field of science there is so much that can be covered, that evolution never need come up.
I disagree.
Geology, chemistry and even biology has so much depth that can be covered empirically that theoretical science could be left out entirely from primary education
You can't teach "science" with some kind of hard line between "empirical" and "theoretical".
and the kids would never be at a loss.
Yes, they would.
Evolution is a controversial subject
Evolution is not a scientifically controversial subject.
and could be covered much more in depth and less interference at a university level
Except if you avoid it entirely, you have to knock out huge chunks of biology, as well as a lot of the applications that are interesting and typically tought in geology.
(Of course the same groups that are opposed to teaching evolution are opposed to lots of the results in geology, and will start on that next if you surrender evolution.)
You're right, I should have more clearly stated that I've never seen a living organism evolve.
Under modern evolutionary theory (since the synthesis of Charles Darwin's work with that of Gregor Mendel), a "living organism" is not a thing that is considered to evolves. "Evolution" is a process of change that produces differences between successive generations of organisms, individual organisms do not evolve.
So, yeah, you haven't seen a living organism evolve: neither has anyone else. Living organisms don't evolve.
Populations over time (sometimes reasonably short time, given the right conditions and creatures that have short generations) do evolve, and that evolution has been observed.
While I agree with you, I have to point out that scientists themselves are often guilty of this. By definition, physics shouldn't have "String Theory", but the "String Hypothesis".
Well, it shouldn't have a "String Theory", but that doesn't mean it can't have "String Theory"; string theory seems to me to be a field of "theory" in the unenumerable sense used in mathematics (e.g., "knot theory"), that takes as its underlying basis the conjectures of a particular fundamental model of physics (I'm not sure its even a "hypothesis" in the conjecture->hypothesis->theory heirarchy, since I'm not sure that clear tests for falsification have yet been proposed—which would make it a viable hypothesis—much less carried out, repeatably, without falsifying it—which would make it a viable theory.)
As you say, it could just be that most web apps are one-offs.
That's probably a factor. I think also (and both of these are related to them being one-offs, to a degree) a lot are either: 1) Works-for-hire where the customer is owns the code. 2) Custom development provided by someone who also is paid to manage the application once it is deployed, and the customer doesn't control the servers.
In either case, trying to obscure the code from the customer is unnecessary (also, some incorporate code that is released under the GPL or other license that requires making source available, so obscuring source serves no purpose.)
Welcome to the real world, Ruby developers. There's been so much hype around Ruby, and especially Rails, for a few years now that no one has even been allowed to voice an opinion that makes negative remarks about either.
The constant stream of negative comments about both Ruby and Rails on Slashdot, and from fans of other languages in every other forum on the internet, apparently all came from "no one", is that it?
Right.
That honeymoon period is now well and truly over.
No, it never existed. Not even a little bit.
And, long term, it'll be a good thing for the langauge that the hype period is over. Now the serious work can begin.
The serious work began years ago; the hype (which provoked constant criticism rather than preventing it) was a product of successes in the "serious work", not something the preceded serious work.
Yes, but as far as I know, RoR is the main package people use for Ruby
If by "package" you mean "web framework" ("web application development" and "programming" aren't the same thing), you are probably right that RoR is, if not the most frequently used, at least the most widely-talked-about Ruby "package".
versus Python which has 5-6 packages that I know of.
Assuming, again, you mean "web frameworks" when you say "packages" (Ruby and Python each have thousands of packages available, most of which are not web frameworks), Ruby has Ruby on Rails, Nitro, Camping, Merb, Ramaze, and Sinatra, and possibly others.
, I was assuming that most readers would be smart enough to figure out I meant the standard way you do things in PHP or Python, or whatever language (you may also note ModPython is not a language, it's a library, though it doesn't actually do much for HTML generation).
Isn't ModPython is an Apache module for running Python code from a persistent process rather than starting the interpreter for each CGI request? Hardly the same thing as a library...
As for the general apps, that's the info I'd like to know, but haven't been able to find much info on. Almost all demos I've seen build off of a database. There's plenty of sites I'm interested in making that actually have no database whatsoever.
By going back, I didn't mean revision control. I meant changes in the structure of the code (you might have heard of refactoring?) or even the database.
Revision control handles "going back" with changes in code structure, doesn't it? As for the database, if you manage your schema updates through rails "migrations", then, yes, it is easy to rollback, modify, and reapply them. (And you can do data changes through migrations as well, if necessary.)
As other posters have noted, many of these complaints/thoughts come from RoR being a framework. I wonder if it would be possible to re-create RoR, but in a more library-form. User has to do more work (no generated files), but more flexibility in the long run?
You don't have to use the rails generators (including the "rails project-name" command that sets up the initial files and directory structure) if you don't want to. ISTR seeing some tutorials on building rails apps that way (along with ones on doing them without using ActiveRecord at all, etc.), which may be the best way for some people to get to understand what's going on with Rails.
Most good books on Rails should discuss what the generators do (Agile Web Development with Rails is pretty much the standard, but there are several more out now) enough that you can work without them if you want to: they are conveniences, not indispensable to the system.
I'm thinking that this will be one of those languages where I'll actually have to buy a book or two on the basics, and really read them
If you are averse to buying a book, the first edition of the main Ruby language reference book (Programming Ruby, aka "the Pickaxe") is available online for free (a few things have changed since then, but unless you are using 1.9.0 you probably won't run into many of them).
If your concern with learning Ruby is just for Rails (which sounds like it may be the case), you might be better off (though it takes buying a book) to just pick up Agile Web Development with Rails, which is to Rails what the Pickaxe is to Ruby, and, while its mostly focussed on Rails, contains a section on Ruby basics for people for whom Rails is their first exposure to Ruby. I'd recommend AWDwR to anyone interested in Rails, anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
POV-Ray has for many years included a radiosity engine that works alongside (IIRC, actually as a preliminary step before) the actual "raytracer". This enables it to produce scenes that involve radiosity effects and not just what can be done by raytracing alone (at the cost of taking more time than just raytracing the scene.)
How germane it is discussions of "raytracing" as a method of rendering for games depends on whether the discussion is really of "raytracing", per se, or a similar combination of radiosity-based rendering and raytracing. From what I dimly remember of how radiosity works, I don't think its as easily parallelizable as the strictly raytracing part, and thus may not have the natural advantage in scalability that is claimed for raytracing.
Or none. You can sensibly approach the problem either way (though many NULLs, I think, ultimately leads to madness.)
Having one NULL, OTOH, is just plain broken, but you can often enough work around it by just trying to limit the use in any one table to one interpretation, and limiting the ways application code depends on interpretation when you can't be certain what any given NULL means. Meanwhile, many NULLs raises the question of how you manage the use of all those NULLs, and no NULLs means more joins, which are attractive from a theoretical perspective, but can be a performance hit.
Yes, it is.
And that's another reason.
That there is both less reason to need recording devices, and that another recording device has taken the lions share of the demand that does exist in the US for such devices are both valid, non-contradictory, explanations for the lack of popularity of a particular recording device in the US.
If there was more demand, a second-tier device could still be successful. If the alternative hadn't been entrenched as early, the DVD-R might not be second-tier in the US. Absent either of those factors, DVD-Rs would be more popular, so both together help to explain why the DVD-R is not particularly popular.
You can represent XML in an a pure RDBMS, too. But you wouldn't want to, and it wouldn't be great for tree queries, and an XML-centric query tool won't be a good way to do graph queries on RDF represented in XML. And you probably don't want to think about graph queries on an RDBMS representation of an XML representation of RDF.
This is oft-repeated argument against the Semantic Web, but it doesn't hold up to close examination. The Semantic Web doesn't rely on human accuracy any more than computer applications in general do, and the Semantic Web also provides a platform on which one can establish distributed trust systems, etc., to address problems associated with source unreliability.
That's what defined ontologies exist to deal with.
I was under the impression that EA had little to do with SimCity Societies other than selling it, that it was developed out-of-house by Tilted Mill.
Any process can be subverted; paper-ballot elections were stolen through a large number of different means long before computers were invented.
Its pretty obvious when electronic ballots are used, too -- pretty much the same way that paper-ballot fraud is (pre-election polling being dead on except in precincts where machines from a certain manufacturer were used, counts for certain candidates in precincts above the total number of registered voters, etc.)
The media (and, following their lead, most of the public) may ignore these clear signs, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.
All of this is not to say that paper ballots aren't important: they are, because without them you've got nothing to reconcile a fishy-looking election too. And because of the long-history of paper-ballot fraud, we've gotten pretty good and protecting against the kinds of things that would mess up the paper trail, if there is a recount. We can't do that as reliably without paper. But we shouldn't pretend that paper-ballot based elections are somehow more pure, or have more obvious first signs of fraud. Short of going back and doing a recount, the signs of fraud are pretty much the same for paper ballots as they are for electronic ones.
Last generation console games of the type that were played on the PS2 and Xbox will, certainly. Some PC games push the size of a DVD, and part of the whole point of a "next generation" console is to expand the scope of what can be done, not just to do the same with a slight increase in graphics quality. A higher-capacity drive gives you a degree of freedom you don't have in a drive that supports only a capacity that is already nearly fully exploited.
Now, because a lot of the first few years of games for the PS3 are going to be incremental updates of existing titles, or constrained by ideas about what you can do on a console shaped by the last generation, or constrained by marketing decisions to make games that play on different consoles without a lot of unique content development for one or the other, it probably will be a while before any game uses the greater capacity for much. But it certainly has utility in terms of what it enables.
Of course, for Sony, that's probably not reason enough to include it. Its a factor, but Bluray was included largely to play Bluray movies — to push Bluray as a standard for movies and because Sony felt that the capacity to play HD movies would push the PS3 as a console.
I think you might have a problem with remembering what you wrote, even when it is cut-and-pasted into the post you are responding to.
Yes, that's what I was describing. Using that name didn't add anything to the comment I was making so I didn't use it.
You did say it was done by the state. You also said it was done without regard to who is in power. Cut-and-pasted, again:
Now, perhaps you didn't mean the "without regard to who is in power" part, but you certainly said it, and I can hardly be expected to read your mind and know that you meant the "by the state" part but not the "without regard to who is in power" part.
Not disclosing a personal financial interest in a competing project when holding yourself out as a news source focussed on a particular project is precisely "pretending not to have bias".
No one is saying he is not allowed to say what he likes. What people are saying is that he has an ethical obligation to disclose the conflict of interest if he holds himself out as a news source (whether the form is as a blog or otherwise). Ethics aren't a matter of what you are compelled to do or not do (though certain professions also have binding ethical codes), but what you should do or not do.
Yes, other people do unethical things. That's no excuse to ignore the specific instances of people doing unethical things. In fact, its why it is important to take note of them.
No, undisclosed conflicts of interest are always newsworthy, to the extent that they relate to a subject that is itself a focus of attention in the community in question. The OLPC has been the subject of attention on Slashdot, and OLPC News has been a frequently-cited source in Slashdot discussions of it (and, IIRC, also the source of several of the front-page Slashdot stories regarding it, though I'm not going to bother going back and checking at the moment.) The undisclosed conflict of interest at OLPC News is, therefore, worthy of attention at Slashdot.
Yes, its exactly that kind of conflict of interest: if a site that purported to be a "Windows News" site, that was highly critical of Windows, didn't disclose that one of its primary writers was a RedHat employee, that would also be an unethical conflict of interest. When you hold yourself out as a news source on a subject, and have personal financial interests that are indicative of a natural bias (or print material from someone who does), the ethical thing to do is disclose your (or the source's) interest so that readers have a fair opportunity to consider it when interpreting your reports. Failing to do so is unethical.
Um, why?
The "anti-realists on the postmodernist left" consist of a handful of academics and some kinds who think its a cool way to stand up against the Establishment. They don't have substantial money, political power, numbers, connections, or organization or any prospect of ever getting any of those things. Even if they were to ally with the Christian Right (which itself is just about inconceivable: the Christian Right's central problem with scientific realism is that the Christian Right's core ideology is that there is an objective reality, and its not the one that science points to while the postmodernist anti-realists problem with scientific realism is that they reject an objective reality and view pushing the idea of any particular such reality as a form of oppression) you'd never even notice the difference, they wouldn't make a perceptible change in the political power of the Christian Right.
I mean, if you need to live in fear of something, their are threats that are simultaneously far more serious and far more likely to be realized than that.
If you go to even small (say, 5 member) multimember districts, you can get proportional results without abandoning direct voting for candidates (you just use Single Transferrable Vote or some similar method). Since you have to go to multimember districts (and usually large ones) to use part list systems (what I assume you mean by "group representative democracy"), and doing so makes individual candidates no longer accountable to the general electorate, I'd rather go the candidate-centered-proportional route.
No, its done by those in power, with regard to their own power interests. There are a few states that instead of doing this overtly with legislatures, have panels of retired judges (but those are former officials, either elected or appointed, who are then appointed to redistricting boards by current officials) do it, but to think that it is done "without regard to who is in power" is, well, dangerously naive.
Going to be interested to see how they teach that. (And on what basis.)
The fact that you can't imagine how something could be true is not an argument (at least, not a valid one) against a scientific theory. Though its pretty much all the anti-evolution folks have.
Correct. In fact, its pretty much universally accepted that we didn't. "Evolution says we came from monkeys" is a distortion from the anti-evolution forces.
Source?
All scientists think that we came from the first life on Earth (where that came from is outside of evolution, while "primordial ooze" is a popular expression for the dominant theory on that, there are other conjectures, and it really doesn't matter to evolution), and that somewhere in the chain of species leading to our own were several other mammal species.
High school science classes typically teach two things: (1) the scientific method, and (2) useful simplifications of the currently dominant theoretical models in the field covered by the class. (These "useful simplifcations of currently dominant models" are often exactly equivalent to models that have since been rejected; for instance, my high school physics class taught Newtonian mechanics.)
They very often don't teach alternative models except as occasional illustrations that such things do exist to illustrate the scientific method.
Since we understand the mechanisms by which traits are passed on, and we have observed changes both less than and resulting in speciation and understand the processes which lead to these changes, the only excuse for people having this problem honestly is ignorance, which is correctable.
Yes.
I disagree.
You can't teach "science" with some kind of hard line between "empirical" and "theoretical".
Yes, they would.
Evolution is not a scientifically controversial subject.
Except if you avoid it entirely, you have to knock out huge chunks of biology, as well as a lot of the applications that are interesting and typically tought in geology.
(Of course the same groups that are opposed to teaching evolution are opposed to lots of the results in geology, and will start on that next if you surrender evolution.)
Under modern evolutionary theory (since the synthesis of Charles Darwin's work with that of Gregor Mendel), a "living organism" is not a thing that is considered to evolves. "Evolution" is a process of change that produces differences between successive generations of organisms, individual organisms do not evolve.
So, yeah, you haven't seen a living organism evolve: neither has anyone else. Living organisms don't evolve.
Populations over time (sometimes reasonably short time, given the right conditions and creatures that have short generations) do evolve, and that evolution has been observed.
Well, it shouldn't have a "String Theory", but that doesn't mean it can't have "String Theory"; string theory seems to me to be a field of "theory" in the unenumerable sense used in mathematics (e.g., "knot theory"), that takes as its underlying basis the conjectures of a particular fundamental model of physics (I'm not sure its even a "hypothesis" in the conjecture->hypothesis->theory heirarchy, since I'm not sure that clear tests for falsification have yet been proposed—which would make it a viable hypothesis—much less carried out, repeatably, without falsifying it—which would make it a viable theory.)
That's probably a factor. I think also (and both of these are related to them being one-offs, to a degree) a lot are either:
1) Works-for-hire where the customer is owns the code.
2) Custom development provided by someone who also is paid to manage the application once it is deployed, and the customer doesn't control the servers.
In either case, trying to obscure the code from the customer is unnecessary (also, some incorporate code that is released under the GPL or other license that requires making source available, so obscuring source serves no purpose.)
The constant stream of negative comments about both Ruby and Rails on Slashdot, and from fans of other languages in every other forum on the internet, apparently all came from "no one", is that it?
Right.
No, it never existed. Not even a little bit.
The serious work began years ago; the hype (which provoked constant criticism rather than preventing it) was a product of successes in the "serious work", not something the preceded serious work.
If by "package" you mean "web framework" ("web application development" and "programming" aren't the same thing), you are probably right that RoR is, if not the most frequently used, at least the most widely-talked-about Ruby "package".
Assuming, again, you mean "web frameworks" when you say "packages" (Ruby and Python each have thousands of packages available, most of which are not web frameworks), Ruby has Ruby on Rails, Nitro, Camping, Merb, Ramaze, and Sinatra, and possibly others.
Isn't ModPython is an Apache module for running Python code from a persistent process rather than starting the interpreter for each CGI request? Hardly the same thing as a library...
"Rails without a database".
Revision control handles "going back" with changes in code structure, doesn't it? As for the database, if you manage your schema updates through rails "migrations", then, yes, it is easy to rollback, modify, and reapply them. (And you can do data changes through migrations as well, if necessary.)
You don't have to use the rails generators (including the "rails project-name" command that sets up the initial files and directory structure) if you don't want to. ISTR seeing some tutorials on building rails apps that way (along with ones on doing them without using ActiveRecord at all, etc.), which may be the best way for some people to get to understand what's going on with Rails.
Most good books on Rails should discuss what the generators do (Agile Web Development with Rails is pretty much the standard, but there are several more out now) enough that you can work without them if you want to: they are conveniences, not indispensable to the system.
If you are averse to buying a book, the first edition of the main Ruby language reference book (Programming Ruby, aka "the Pickaxe") is available online for free (a few things have changed since then, but unless you are using 1.9.0 you probably won't run into many of them).
If your concern with learning Ruby is just for Rails (which sounds like it may be the case), you might be better off (though it takes buying a book) to just pick up Agile Web Development with Rails, which is to Rails what the Pickaxe is to Ruby, and, while its mostly focussed on Rails, contains a section on Ruby basics for people for whom Rails is their first exposure to Ruby. I'd recommend AWDwR to anyone interested in Rails, anyhow.