There is no concensus that Evolution means we evolved from protazoa in the Sea of goop.
Well, the actual scientists involved in the actual debates that exist around details of evolutionary theory can spell "protozoa", and don't generally refer to a "Sea of goop", but yeah, there actually is a broad scientific consensus around all life on Earth having a common origin.
He could just say "I think what I stated there is true, and even then I don't think that proves anything creationist say."
He could say that, but considering as how the science has advanced since he wrote the paper over half a century ago, and he is aware of that advance, it would probably be a lie for him to say it.
Admitting that what was justifiably held out as the best hypothesis in the past is no longer the best hypothesis is part of science.
If you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a certain span from the lineage from Adam through to Solomon.
No, if you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a contradiction, because there are two creation stories in Genesis that are contradictory if taken literally.
Book 1, I tell you was written 150 years ago and since it's publishing, has been generally accepted as fact by millions of people. Book 2, I tell you was written 2000 years ago and since it's publishing has been generally accepted as fact by billions of people. Which could be assumed to be true?
Neither, based on that information.
Book 1 is a "The Origin of Species".
Probably not; while the number of people since the 1850s that believe that some form of evolution through natural selection is true may number over a billion, the number that view that particular work of Darwin's as inerrant, even the total since it was published, probably do not number into the millions.
Book 2 is the Christian Bible.
No, its not either. The Christian Bible isn't "a book that was written 2,000 years ago". It is a bunch of disparate works that were first assembled from disparate writings as a single, defined canon about 1,600 years ago, though different versions of the canon have been accepted by different groups of Christians since. Some of the source material assembled into the canon was first written more than 2,000 years ago, some less.
And there's no evidence that "billions of people", even in total, ever believed that the Bible was literally true.
Either way, I have two books in front of me, neither of which _I_ personally can prove as fact, so I'm taking somebody's word for it that it's true.
If your only ability to judge the truth of claims is to make a decision based on relative popularity and age, I'd say that you are so deficient in critical thinking skills that any decision you could make would be worthless, in any case.
This is more a blow (in the long term) to the idea that science yields objective truth, IMO.
The belief that science, as its principal focus, produces "objective truth" rather than models of reality with pragmatic utility is a quasi-religious belief that interferes with understanding what science is and what it does.
Sure, scientific investigation of proposed models involves observations, which are (or are idealized as; arguably, all observations are to some degree subjective, though science tries to minimize and neutralize the subjectivity to the extent possible) objective facts, but those are instrumental, not the end product.
'Microsoft will publish an irrevocable pledge not to assert any patents it may have over the interoperability information against non-commercial open source software development projects.'
Aren't software patents banned in the EU anyway? So, aside from the fact that this was forced out of them, does it mean anything in the first place?
So odds are that if we ever have to collide with a comet, we will most likely be idealy placed to see its tail just before the collision.
While I agree with the rest of your post, is this really true? It seems to me that with the eccentricity of comet orbits, if we do hit one, it will likely be crossing the Earth's orbit at an extreme angle, and thus the Earth -> Comet line of sight will be at a narrow angle to the Sun -> Comet -> Tail line.
Personally I don't get it...why do we always have to compare the features of X distro with the latest Windows release?
Uh, because if the Linux share of the computing world is going to grow, its got to be at the expense of Windows. There ain't anywhere else for it to come from.
The very fact that we are doing so is degrading to the distro, its basically saying that the distro should be like windows
No, its saying that the distro has to provide a reason to choose it over Windows. Now price is one, of course, but often not enough, given the fact that most software that consumers are aware of is written for Windows. So people have to know that what they are doing in Windows can be done in Linux, either with the same software (through Wine or otherwise) or through alternatives which are functionally adequate, and ideally superior in some way (again, price is often one way, but often not enough.)
as if somehow Window is the "baseline" for this benchmark.
Windows is the baseline. If people buy computers without actively choosing an OS, its what they are most likely to end up with. It is what most people who might switch to Linux, given an adequate reason, are using now. The facts make it the baseline.
The whole point of using *nix/*bsd is to be different from the mainstream...be more efficient, productive, whatever.
And, ideally, that's what the comparisons show: that the Linux way is better, for which it must first be at least as good and must be usable.
Why do we always have to compare the two OSes as if they should both be the same
We don't; OTOH, one of the barriers to transition is fear of the difficulty of switching. So demonstrating that things are similar enough that this fear is overblown is a way of overcoming that.
The linux distro will get rated down because it doesn't have some windows bug/feature. I don't get it.
Well, if it doesn't have a windows feature, then people choosing to leave Windows for it will be losing something. So that's a valid reason for it to be rated down. And sometimes missing a bug can result in missing a feature that matters to users, like compatibility with particular software. Though that's, I would assume, less frequently a problem.
So people, please stop your incessant comparisons and side-by-side screenshot postings...they can't be compared as if they were cars; they are Different Things
Two different cars are different things just as much as two different OS's are; like different cars, different OS's are different tools which can be applied to the same task. Comparing them side-by-side as it relates to that task is not a bad idea, but a good one.
People who have used SPDIF fiber optic audio will all agree that analog audio is obsolete. Ever had a cellphone near analog speaker wire?
The moderately-priced consumer sound systems I've seen that support SPDIF don't actually do anything about that, to the extent that its a problem, since they will take SPDIF into the receiver which uses conventional speaker wire out the speakers. Its basically, for most users, a way to cut out one analog-hop and the potential quality degradation associated with it out of the mix, not a way to reduce interference from speaker wires.
OTOH, I've never experienced any cellphone interference from the (fairly cheap) conventional speaker wires on the surround-sound system I use at home, in the first place.
"D&D Fourth Edition Books All Releasing in June" is perfectly good english; the form of `to be' that would be in front of `releasing' is implied.
There is no form of "to be" that would make sense in front of "releasing". "Release", in English, does not have an intransitive sense of the form "X releases" that is equivalent to the transitive form with an unspecified subject where and the subject of the intransitive form as the object, i.e., " releases X".
It does have some slang intransitive (in appearance) uses, in which the (usually inappropriate for polite company) object is omitted from the transitive form, but implied. But I would assume that was not the sense intended.
Second, you made it passive.
Yes, I made it passive because its the most economical way to express the intended information in English. The subject of the verb "release" is the actor that is releasing something, the object is the thing released. To express a known thing being released by an unspecified actor, you use the passive voice; usually its better to use the active voice and specify who is releasing it, but I wasn't intending to add information, just present the information the headline presented more properly.
Since when is the original formation of DNA not part of the theory of evolution?
I never said the initial formation of DNA was not (or was) part of the theory, I said the emergence of the first life was not within the scope of the theory. That being said, the original formation of DNA is probably outside the scope of the theory for the same reason that the emergence of the first life is.
DNA is at the core of the entire theory.
Yes, it is. That doesn't make its first formation within the scope of the theory. That DNA exists is an observed fact. How it has operated within the process of the development from the first life on Earth to the modern diversity of life is within the scope of evolutionary theory. How life emerged, and how DNA emerged (unless DNA emerged after life, which ISTR being a hypothesis floated wherein the earliest life may have used RNA alone, but that's a vague memory that may or may not be correct and mostly an aside here) are outside of the scope of evolutionary theory, though related to it.
My background is physics. From my perspective, a theory that fails to explain all the observations is lacking, especially when those observations are central to the area the theory tries to explain.
The emergence of life (and, most likely, also the emergence of DNA) is outside of, rather than central to, the area evolutionary theory (which is actually a body of theory, not a single theory) explains.
That is not to say the theory is invalid, but it certainly can't be used, as is, to rule out other theories.
Theories never "rule out" other theories, anyhow. Theories may be superior to other theories because they explain more or are more parsimonious. The only thing that "rules out" a hypothesis (whether it has been previously tested enough to be labelled a theory or not) is irreconcilable facts, and even then those may, in the absence of a theory which explains both the observations explained by the first theory and the inconsistent observations, serve only to limit the domain of utility of the first theory. (Relativity and quantum mechanics are, as I understand, pretty much the textbook examples of this.)
The entire theory of evolution, apart from some form of intelligent design, is based on random mutation.
No, it is not.
A virus certainly isn't introducing intelligent mutations.
You are positing a false dichotomy between "random" and "intelligent". Something is random if, and to the extent that, it is not determined by some preceding cause. The motion of an object acted on by forces in Newtonian mechanics is not "random", it is a mechanistic effect of causes. Yet there need be no intelligence involved. Likewise, the mutations on which evolution relies are largely non-random, even though no intelligence is posited for them (note that evolutionary theory does not "rule out" intelligence, but positing an intelligence is unscientific since it is unnecessary hypothesis that adds no predictive power to theory.)
Simply knowing the source of mutations does not make them non-random.
"Knowing" is irrelevant; the mutations having a mechanistic cause makes them non-random. I'm a bit surprised that someone claiming a background in physics would not understand the different between something random and something mechanistically determined.
If the article is worthwhile in the first place, a bad edit does not make it less worthwhile.
Yes, it does.
On the contrary, it makes the article a target for a correction.
Since the correction is to restore the lost utility, I don't see how that is "on the contrary".
Either the "open standard" will be extremely flexible, in which case you'll have all the problems you have with PC gaming, what with random problems with devices and confusing requirements, that drives people to consoles in the first place
I think what drives people to consoles is that the price:performance ratio at entry is better because consoles are heavily subsidized (very narrow margin, or actually sold at a loss) which gets made up for on the tail end by the cut of game sales the console makers demand in exchange for access to the platform.
Of course, that means the long-term cost probably isn't much different, but the entry cost is, and that keeps consumers buying consoles, because its cheaper to buy a console than a computer as well built for gaming, and once you have the console, it makes sense to keep buying more games.
Of course, that whole model doesn't work if the platform is open, since the console-maker can't recoup the subsidy.
EA's head of international publishing made some interesting comments on what he'd like to see in the future of gaming. 'We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible.'
Of course you do, your business is selling entertainment (including console) software.
OTOH, the people whose business is selling development licenses to entertainment software platforms (that is, console makers) don't want that, and you whining and stomping your feet about it isn't going to get them to change as long as you keep helping them out by making software for their consoles. And if you stop making software for their consoles, well, you'll cut off your own major source of income, and probably not change their behavior at all.
D&D 1st and 2nd edition were both on the market for decades.
In the case of AD&D 2nd edition, 1.1 decades (1989-2000), with a substantial revision (though it didn't get an official new version like 3.5) of the core books in 1995.
And 1st Edition AD&D was 1977-1988, also 1.1 decades,
Really, 3rd Edition lasting from 2000-2008 with a revision in 2003 isn't all that much shorter than either of the previous editions.
They are just trying to make people buy tons of their printed material, which is exactly what their business model was with Magic the Gathering.
Yes, their business model is to make people want to buy the products they are producing.
The NORC study doesn't claim in any place I can find that there were more votes cast for Gore.
The NORC study doesn't claim anything about the number of votes cast, it talks about what the content of the existing ballots were. It supports a certain conclusion about the number of votes cast.
While it does give scenarios in which Gore would have gotten more votes counted, as far as actual votes CAST, it seems to stick to what seems to be obvious: it was a statistical tie.
"A statistical tie" is a meaningless phrase unless you are talking about a random sample. It refers to a case where the sample does not provide enough information to support, at a given confidence level, a generalization about the entire universe the sample was drawn from. When you count the entire universe of ballots, which the NORC ballot study did, it makes no sense to talk of a statistical tie, since there you aren't generalizing about a wider universe from a random sample.
For kids, Alice has the staying power that Squeek and LOGO don't.
Alice uses an interesting approach, one which is in Squeak (Squeak-Alice, an implementation of the same idea in Squeak, is included in the Squeak distribution), and somewhat similar things are being done with Logo (e.g., in StarLogo TNG.)
I'm assuming you're talking about 2000, as he obviously won the majority of votes in 2004.
Well, duh. Bush wasn't "put into power" after the 2004 election, as he had been in power for nearly four years prior to that election. So if I'm talking about how Bush was "put into power", I'm talking about 2000.
Just like if I'm talking about "how the Sun was formed", I'm talking about something that happened billions of years ago, not how it came to rise this morning.
Several media organizations did a study of the different possible combinations of Florida districts that could have been recounted. All the studies found that Bush would have won regardless of the combination of districts that were ordered to perform recounts. While this obviously doesn't jibe with the dogmas of your political religion, it does jibe with reality.
Well, no. First, as you note, it was "a study" that was done, so "all the studies" is ludicrous. More importantly, you got the results wrong, perhaps because they don't jibe with the dogmas of your political religion. The NORC did a study funded by several media organizations, which is probably the one you are thinking of, which showed that a statewide recount including overvotes with a clear intent (mostly, the substantial minority of overvotes where a voter both marked a candidate and wrote-in the same candidates name) would have resulted in a Gore win. (See, for instance, here.) It was spun by several news outlets as showing that Bush would have won, based on the results of counting examining only undervotes by several different standards. While it is by no means certain whether this would have been the case (breathless headlines to the contrary), since all we know is that overvotes weren't yet being counted but that the judge supervising the recounts was considering the issue when they were halted, the claim I made which wasn't about who would have won under the recounts as they were being conducted, but about who actually had more people cast votes for them in the state; as far as that was determined by the study, the answer is "Al Gore".
Having worked in a couple of California state departments and seen how many others work, I can safely say that the vast majority of state workers use three applications -- word processing, email, and web browsing.
Having worked in several departments of the State of California, I can safely say that, IME, this isn't true, and that, even to the extent it is, both internal consistency (for support) and interoperability with what is in use in private industry are frequently important for many, and likely most, departments. Also important is support for legacy applications. The last two are big weights pushing toward Windows for most departments, and even though they don't apply to every employee, the first makes it so that Windows becomes desirable for virtually all. Where its not, they use other OS's, but those tend to be servers, not end-user systems.
Windows people have as many problems with incompatibilities between various Office & Windows versions than I do sharing from a different OS.
I've never known a state department to maintain a diversity of Windows and Office versions, either. They tend to transition a whole department at a time.
The name is misleading since they do not evolve using the mechanism of evolution (random mutation)
Actually, genetic algorithms generally do evolve using random mutation.
Their initial state isn't created by random mutation, but (even ignoring the error in characterizing biological mutation as necessarily random), neither is the initial state of life in evolutionary theory; evolutionary theory explains the divergence from the first life to the present diversity, not the emergence of the first life.
The name isn't "misleading" if you understand evolution.
This is probably why there is such a formal separation of church and state in the US, because the country was partly founded by people who had experienced the worst side of what can happen when that separation is not present.
Well, that's a popular myth around the "wall of separation", though the fact is that the people that came here fleeing religious persecution were, for the most part, many generations removed from the people that founded the country or drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights; the prohibitions in there on religious tests and other federal government interference in and establishment of religion more reasonably stems from the fact that different states in the early union had different dominant sects, and none wanted to risk any of the others using the federal government to institute an unwelcome national religion; the extension of the prohibition universally to state governments was a post-Civil War result of incorporation under the 14th Amendment.
In any case, the irony isn't that the US has a formal barrier, but that the substantive separation of religion and government in many places in Europe is much greater, despite the fact that they have less of a formal barriers than the US, even to the point of having an established Church.
Say what you will about Microsoft but these fonts looks better than anything on Linux and Mac.
You are, of course, welcome to your opinion. I find them to be fairly good, but not necessarily better than the earlier MS Web fonts, or a number of free fonts available for a wide variety of platforms. And, IIRC, they don't cover as much of the Unicode range as well as some free fonts that look just as good but whose core purpose is international use and are, in that respect, clearly inferior.
The article goes on to state that 'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.'
If you are a web designer, won't you either: 1) Be specifying specific fonts on the assumption that your users will (a) have them, and (b) have their user-agent configured to respect the fonts specified on your page, or 2) Be not specifying specific fonts, on the assumption that your users will be presented the fonts they prefer.
In the first case, unless you specify the new MS fonts, you don't need them to see what your users will see on Vista or elsewhere; in the second, you have no idea what your users may see, since there is a near-infinite area of possible settings they could be using, though the MS core fonts will let you see what people using IE under Vista will see in the default settings.
(Incidentally, the fonts are also bundled with Office 2007, and quite likely users without Vista have them, and some probably use them as their default fonts for web browsing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the actual scientists involved in the actual debates that exist around details of evolutionary theory can spell "protozoa", and don't generally refer to a "Sea of goop", but yeah, there actually is a broad scientific consensus around all life on Earth having a common origin.
He could say that, but considering as how the science has advanced since he wrote the paper over half a century ago, and he is aware of that advance, it would probably be a lie for him to say it.
Admitting that what was justifiably held out as the best hypothesis in the past is no longer the best hypothesis is part of science.
No, if you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a contradiction, because there are two creation stories in Genesis that are contradictory if taken literally.
Neither, based on that information.
Probably not; while the number of people since the 1850s that believe that some form of evolution through natural selection is true may number over a billion, the number that view that particular work of Darwin's as inerrant, even the total since it was published, probably do not number into the millions.
No, its not either. The Christian Bible isn't "a book that was written 2,000 years ago". It is a bunch of disparate works that were first assembled from disparate writings as a single, defined canon about 1,600 years ago, though different versions of the canon have been accepted by different groups of Christians since. Some of the source material assembled into the canon was first written more than 2,000 years ago, some less.
And there's no evidence that "billions of people", even in total, ever believed that the Bible was literally true.
If your only ability to judge the truth of claims is to make a decision based on relative popularity and age, I'd say that you are so deficient in critical thinking skills that any decision you could make would be worthless, in any case.
The belief that science, as its principal focus, produces "objective truth" rather than models of reality with pragmatic utility is a quasi-religious belief that interferes with understanding what science is and what it does.
Sure, scientific investigation of proposed models involves observations, which are (or are idealized as; arguably, all observations are to some degree subjective, though science tries to minimize and neutralize the subjectivity to the extent possible) objective facts, but those are instrumental, not the end product.
Aren't software patents banned in the EU anyway? So, aside from the fact that this was forced out of them, does it mean anything in the first place?
While I agree with the rest of your post, is this really true? It seems to me that with the eccentricity of comet orbits, if we do hit one, it will likely be crossing the Earth's orbit at an extreme angle, and thus the Earth -> Comet line of sight will be at a narrow angle to the Sun -> Comet -> Tail line.
Uh, because if the Linux share of the computing world is going to grow, its got to be at the expense of Windows. There ain't anywhere else for it to come from.
No, its saying that the distro has to provide a reason to choose it over Windows. Now price is one, of course, but often not enough, given the fact that most software that consumers are aware of is written for Windows. So people have to know that what they are doing in Windows can be done in Linux, either with the same software (through Wine or otherwise) or through alternatives which are functionally adequate, and ideally superior in some way (again, price is often one way, but often not enough.)
Windows is the baseline. If people buy computers without actively choosing an OS, its what they are most likely to end up with. It is what most people who might switch to Linux, given an adequate reason, are using now. The facts make it the baseline.
And, ideally, that's what the comparisons show: that the Linux way is better, for which it must first be at least as good and must be usable.
We don't; OTOH, one of the barriers to transition is fear of the difficulty of switching. So demonstrating that things are similar enough that this fear is overblown is a way of overcoming that.
Well, if it doesn't have a windows feature, then people choosing to leave Windows for it will be losing something. So that's a valid reason for it to be rated down. And sometimes missing a bug can result in missing a feature that matters to users, like compatibility with particular software. Though that's, I would assume, less frequently a problem.
Two different cars are different things just as much as two different OS's are; like different cars, different OS's are different tools which can be applied to the same task. Comparing them side-by-side as it relates to that task is not a bad idea, but a good one.
4k colors -- 12-bit color -- is "Full-color"? Really?
The moderately-priced consumer sound systems I've seen that support SPDIF don't actually do anything about that, to the extent that its a problem, since they will take SPDIF into the receiver which uses conventional speaker wire out the speakers. Its basically, for most users, a way to cut out one analog-hop and the potential quality degradation associated with it out of the mix, not a way to reduce interference from speaker wires.
OTOH, I've never experienced any cellphone interference from the (fairly cheap) conventional speaker wires on the surround-sound system I use at home, in the first place.
There is no form of "to be" that would make sense in front of "releasing". "Release", in English, does not have an intransitive sense of the form "X releases" that is equivalent to the transitive form with an unspecified subject where and the subject of the intransitive form as the object, i.e., " releases X".
It does have some slang intransitive (in appearance) uses, in which the (usually inappropriate for polite company) object is omitted from the transitive form, but implied. But I would assume that was not the sense intended.
Yes, I made it passive because its the most economical way to express the intended information in English. The subject of the verb "release" is the actor that is releasing something, the object is the thing released. To express a known thing being released by an unspecified actor, you use the passive voice; usually its better to use the active voice and specify who is releasing it, but I wasn't intending to add information, just present the information the headline presented more properly.
I never said the initial formation of DNA was not (or was) part of the theory, I said the emergence of the first life was not within the scope of the theory. That being said, the original formation of DNA is probably outside the scope of the theory for the same reason that the emergence of the first life is.
Yes, it is. That doesn't make its first formation within the scope of the theory. That DNA exists is an observed fact. How it has operated within the process of the development from the first life on Earth to the modern diversity of life is within the scope of evolutionary theory. How life emerged, and how DNA emerged (unless DNA emerged after life, which ISTR being a hypothesis floated wherein the earliest life may have used RNA alone, but that's a vague memory that may or may not be correct and mostly an aside here) are outside of the scope of evolutionary theory, though related to it.
The emergence of life (and, most likely, also the emergence of DNA) is outside of, rather than central to, the area evolutionary theory (which is actually a body of theory, not a single theory) explains.
Theories never "rule out" other theories, anyhow. Theories may be superior to other theories because they explain more or are more parsimonious. The only thing that "rules out" a hypothesis (whether it has been previously tested enough to be labelled a theory or not) is irreconcilable facts, and even then those may, in the absence of a theory which explains both the observations explained by the first theory and the inconsistent observations, serve only to limit the domain of utility of the first theory. (Relativity and quantum mechanics are, as I understand, pretty much the textbook examples of this.)
No, it is not.
You are positing a false dichotomy between "random" and "intelligent". Something is random if, and to the extent that, it is not determined by some preceding cause. The motion of an object acted on by forces in Newtonian mechanics is not "random", it is a mechanistic effect of causes. Yet there need be no intelligence involved. Likewise, the mutations on which evolution relies are largely non-random, even though no intelligence is posited for them (note that evolutionary theory does not "rule out" intelligence, but positing an intelligence is unscientific since it is unnecessary hypothesis that adds no predictive power to theory.)
"Knowing" is irrelevant; the mutations having a mechanistic cause makes them non-random. I'm a bit surprised that someone claiming a background in physics would not understand the different between something random and something mechanistically determined.
Yes, it does.
Since the correction is to restore the lost utility, I don't see how that is "on the contrary".
So what? Who said you did?
I think what drives people to consoles is that the price:performance ratio at entry is better because consoles are heavily subsidized (very narrow margin, or actually sold at a loss) which gets made up for on the tail end by the cut of game sales the console makers demand in exchange for access to the platform.
Of course, that means the long-term cost probably isn't much different, but the entry cost is, and that keeps consumers buying consoles, because its cheaper to buy a console than a computer as well built for gaming, and once you have the console, it makes sense to keep buying more games.
Of course, that whole model doesn't work if the platform is open, since the console-maker can't recoup the subsidy.
Of course you do, your business is selling entertainment (including console) software.
OTOH, the people whose business is selling development licenses to entertainment software platforms (that is, console makers) don't want that, and you whining and stomping your feet about it isn't going to get them to change as long as you keep helping them out by making software for their consoles. And if you stop making software for their consoles, well, you'll cut off your own major source of income, and probably not change their behavior at all.
In the case of AD&D 2nd edition, 1.1 decades (1989-2000), with a substantial revision (though it didn't get an official new version like 3.5) of the core books in 1995.
And 1st Edition AD&D was 1977-1988, also 1.1 decades,
Really, 3rd Edition lasting from 2000-2008 with a revision in 2003 isn't all that much shorter than either of the previous editions.
Yes, their business model is to make people want to buy the products they are producing.
That's pretty much every business model.
...but, Slashdot editors! Hello?! "D&D Fourth Edition Books All Releasing in June"? No.
No.
No.
"D&D Fourth Edition Books To Be Released in June"? Yes.
The NORC study doesn't claim anything about the number of votes cast, it talks about what the content of the existing ballots were. It supports a certain conclusion about the number of votes cast.
"A statistical tie" is a meaningless phrase unless you are talking about a random sample. It refers to a case where the sample does not provide enough information to support, at a given confidence level, a generalization about the entire universe the sample was drawn from. When you count the entire universe of ballots, which the NORC ballot study did, it makes no sense to talk of a statistical tie, since there you aren't generalizing about a wider universe from a random sample.
Alice uses an interesting approach, one which is in Squeak (Squeak-Alice, an implementation of the same idea in Squeak, is included in the Squeak distribution), and somewhat similar things are being done with Logo (e.g., in StarLogo TNG.)
Well, duh. Bush wasn't "put into power" after the 2004 election, as he had been in power for nearly four years prior to that election. So if I'm talking about how Bush was "put into power", I'm talking about 2000.
Just like if I'm talking about "how the Sun was formed", I'm talking about something that happened billions of years ago, not how it came to rise this morning.
Well, no. First, as you note, it was "a study" that was done, so "all the studies" is ludicrous. More importantly, you got the results wrong, perhaps because they don't jibe with the dogmas of your political religion. The NORC did a study funded by several media organizations, which is probably the one you are thinking of, which showed that a statewide recount including overvotes with a clear intent (mostly, the substantial minority of overvotes where a voter both marked a candidate and wrote-in the same candidates name) would have resulted in a Gore win. (See, for instance, here.) It was spun by several news outlets as showing that Bush would have won, based on the results of counting examining only undervotes by several different standards. While it is by no means certain whether this would have been the case (breathless headlines to the contrary), since all we know is that overvotes weren't yet being counted but that the judge supervising the recounts was considering the issue when they were halted, the claim I made which wasn't about who would have won under the recounts as they were being conducted, but about who actually had more people cast votes for them in the state; as far as that was determined by the study, the answer is "Al Gore".
Having worked in several departments of the State of California, I can safely say that, IME, this isn't true, and that, even to the extent it is, both internal consistency (for support) and interoperability with what is in use in private industry are frequently important for many, and likely most, departments. Also important is support for legacy applications. The last two are big weights pushing toward Windows for most departments, and even though they don't apply to every employee, the first makes it so that Windows becomes desirable for virtually all. Where its not, they use other OS's, but those tend to be servers, not end-user systems.
I've never known a state department to maintain a diversity of Windows and Office versions, either. They tend to transition a whole department at a time.
Actually, genetic algorithms generally do evolve using random mutation.
Their initial state isn't created by random mutation, but (even ignoring the error in characterizing biological mutation as necessarily random), neither is the initial state of life in evolutionary theory; evolutionary theory explains the divergence from the first life to the present diversity, not the emergence of the first life.
The name isn't "misleading" if you understand evolution.
Well, that's a popular myth around the "wall of separation", though the fact is that the people that came here fleeing religious persecution were, for the most part, many generations removed from the people that founded the country or drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights; the prohibitions in there on religious tests and other federal government interference in and establishment of religion more reasonably stems from the fact that different states in the early union had different dominant sects, and none wanted to risk any of the others using the federal government to institute an unwelcome national religion; the extension of the prohibition universally to state governments was a post-Civil War result of incorporation under the 14th Amendment.
In any case, the irony isn't that the US has a formal barrier, but that the substantive separation of religion and government in many places in Europe is much greater, despite the fact that they have less of a formal barriers than the US, even to the point of having an established Church.
Probably not one distinguishable from just "viewing the entire web" to start with.
You are, of course, welcome to your opinion. I find them to be fairly good, but not necessarily better than the earlier MS Web fonts, or a number of free fonts available for a wide variety of platforms. And, IIRC, they don't cover as much of the Unicode range as well as some free fonts that look just as good but whose core purpose is international use and are, in that respect, clearly inferior.
If you are a web designer, won't you either:
1) Be specifying specific fonts on the assumption that your users will (a) have them, and (b) have their user-agent configured to respect the fonts specified on your page, or
2) Be not specifying specific fonts, on the assumption that your users will be presented the fonts they prefer.
In the first case, unless you specify the new MS fonts, you don't need them to see what your users will see on Vista or elsewhere; in the second, you have no idea what your users may see, since there is a near-infinite area of possible settings they could be using, though the MS core fonts will let you see what people using IE under Vista will see in the default settings.
(Incidentally, the fonts are also bundled with Office 2007, and quite likely users without Vista have them, and some probably use them as their default fonts for web browsing.)