Recently I read someone lamenting that math professors were setting their own equations with TeX, rather than leaving the typesetting to someone else, like they used to; this denied their secretaries the opportunity to evolve into highly skilled typesetters.
I think WP 5.1, and the secretaries and paralegals who used it, was just about the end of that evolutionary path that we should have taken. From there, they should have evolved into highly skilled typesetters, formatters, etc., using software designed for the user more sophisticated than 90% of programmers. Instead, their bosses got wow'ed by sexy easy-to-use shit that they could use, but that didn't allow the secretary to become a more skilled laborer. In fact, I'm pretty sure it decreased productivity, where we had had an opportunity to both increase productivity and create the industrial successors to the printing, setting, etc., industry of old.
Ah, but 64-bit processors aren't a full solution. They solve the source of the problem, but I'm sure we'll find all sorts of odd 32-bit assumptions and "clever" things wrt keeping a handle on that number-of-seconds-of-unix. Hopefully it'll all add up to a small problem, though
Given that they're describing the (already known) physiological effects of caffeine, I bet they're talking about the effects of the caffeine. FWIW, there are also a fair amount of anti-oxidents in (fresh) coffee; so it (might) reduce (slightly) your risk of cancer (provided you stay hydrated).
(To be fair, buffer overflows can happen to anybody, and it's not MS's fault that some sysadmins don't install updates.
Just interesting to hear a real pro take charge of an interview.)
No, buffer overflows cannot happen to just anybody. They only happen to people programming in languages without bounds checking. And more specifically, in those languages, they only happen to people who didn't roll their own bounds-checking systems. Apache, for example, is written in C, but despite that, it really ought not to have buffer overflow errors, because if you use proper Apache style and their utility functions, they won't happen.
There is no reason whatsoever that buffer overflow errors should ever happen. They only happen to coders who try to squeeze every last drop of performance out of code when they can't. Which leads to the question: how fast do you want the wrong answer?
This is absurd, doesn't slashdot even look at submissions before posting them anymore? This is sensationalist garbage from zdnet -- there's no news here. From the end of the article:
Jan van den Beld,
ECMA secretary general, said
the licence would cover only
Microsoft's own
implementation, not the
standard itself. "There are no
known rights owned by
Microsoft that would require
a licensing agreement," he
said.
Miguel de Icaza, Mono's
founder, said, "The consensus
is that [Microsoft] could stop
someone from implementing
the specs by using patents.
[But] nothing in dot-Net is
really innovative, so it would
be simple to use alternative
non-patented approaches."
Or maybe this is just a part of a vast conspiracy to fill my mailbox with junk, via the mono list. Ug.
It amazes me that slashdot still does this. If something could possibly be construed as new, then it makes sense for slashdot to just link to it. But this site has been around for some time. I really don't see how it would hurt to ask before linking for stories like this; it's not like slashdot would be missing some scoop. It's not like slashdot doesn't have the resources to proxy requests through itself and cache the results. Plus it would make slashdot a better site, if the links in the stories were reliable.
So it's Pine's / Pico's fault that people don't understand / misuse the license? Please. I'd take this license over Microsoft's
anyday
I agree wholeheartedly with the above. An anecdote: a few years ago, one of my users noticed that Pine would sometimes hang and corrupt his email box. It was fairly easy to repair the damage (I wrote a script to fix it using Emacs -- run pine, hang, corrupt, run inbox through Emacs, run pine again). However, this was not a very good solution. The bug was easy enough to find in Pine, because I had the source. Fixing it in a universally acceptable way (one that wouldn't cause new bugs on other peoples' systems) turned out to be difficult. So I went the quick-dirty-hack way, because I was primarily concerned with Pine working properly on my system. Great success story part of the anecdote.
The problematic part of the anecdote is what came next. Of course the Pine maintainers were interested in the bug, and of course they were not interested in my "fix." From my point of view, it fixed the problem, from theirs it cause bigger problems (for example, on the AIX systems that they run at the UW). Problem was, I couldn't make my own "nocPine" for GNU/Linux systems with the same configuration oddities as mine. So, I was able to fix the bug for a single user, but only for a single user:(
But when Pine came out, the mindset was different. They made it and they gave it away under terms that they thought were
reasonable.
And when it came out, it was under a license that qualifies as Free. They changed to the more restrictive license later, after Free Software had become fairly successfull.
And don't forget, Pine is a product of the University of Washington, who needed an easy-for-students-and-profs-to-use mail client for their network. Given that they are a public university, it would have been completely unreasonable for them to keep it to themselves. What's commendable is how accomidating the Pine maintainers have been to others' special needs that they don't have.
While I know that was supposed to be ironic, I felt the need to mention that I in fact do have a publish key. When editing the html files for any web site I maintain, I can hit F8 to publish the current buffer (this is in emacs, of course, where else would a hacker add such a silly feature).
Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if Compaq starts making keyboards with 'publish' keys to go along with the 'internet' and 'e-mail' and whatever other keys they're inventing.
..I got nice and angry at some of the comments posted on this article. It's funny to me that people I consider my peers (meaning
geeks) always tend to assume there is no racism in our field, because they honestly think that they're too smart to be racist.
The assumption among intelligent techies that they're too intelligent to be racist (or sexist, or otherwise bigoted) continues to amaze and frustrate me. Bigotry has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof. We live in a racist society, and that means some of the ideas, habits, and attitudes we adopt without realizing we are adopting them (which is known as acculturation), are racist. The only thing we can do, but that thing which we absolutely must do, is to try to recognize when we've unwittingly accepted bigotry--or bigoted behaviors, etc.--from our environment, and to reject that influence, replacing it with an anti-racist alternative.
I grew up in a progressive, multiracial, urban environment; because of this, I've known the above reality since I was preadolescent. That doesn't make me automatically liberated from racism, anymore than does the intelligence which God blessed me with. On the other hand, it does give me the ethical responsibility to fight bigotry both in and around me--with all the privileges I've been given, there's no excuse.
This attitude of "we're too intelligent to be racist: give me a talented programmer, and I'll hire him/her, white, black, or green!" is pure poison, and is the intellectual easy-way-out. It perpetuates accidental and institutional racism. It allows companies to tolerate hiring practices whereby they hire the friends, former-college-housemates, etc., of those already working there: if all/most of their friends are white--which is standard for a great many of non/anti-racist whites in this country--what do you think will happen? When the rules of a system favor one group, we're not surprised when that group dominates. This happens whether the people executing the rules want it to or not. And that's a real dirty secret in our industry. It's not enough for well-intentioned people to not actively discriminate; it's not even enough for well-intentioned people to fight active discrimination; we in this industry tend to be blessed with intelligence; along with privilege (intelligence) comes responsibility (intellectual rigor); intelligent, well-intentioned people in our industry, as in general, need to fight systemic bias, institutional racism, and accidental bigotry. That's the only way we can achieve communities where everyone is proud, everyone holds one's head high, everyone is respected, and where everyone can achieve. If we go the other way, we're all lost.
--Just Another Pimp Ass Urban Guinea
Re:Neither CS nor CIS: MATH
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
The first thing he told me is that Computer Science has NOTHING to do with computers. It is math. It is the study of what can be
computed. Whether you use your PIII or rocks and toilet paper. The answer will come out the same.
Absolutely. I think one of the best measures of whether someone "gets" CS is whether or not they write programs with pen and paper. I don't mean that they do their production programming in a notebook; I mean if you're sitting in a cafe and you want to solve a problem. The major difference I see between mathematicians and computer scientists is that mathematicians will solve their problem in the cafe, where computer scientists will solve the problem of how to solve their problem, without actually finding the solution:)
Lisp may be the environment you're yearning for. Common Lisp has a fantastic object system, and Lisps have had multiprocessing (Lispish for threads) for 20 years -- and the development environment to go along with it.
In the Free world, CMUCL has kernel-level threads support (for FreeBSD and Linux), but only in the current development versions.
In the commercial world, Franz's Allegro CL has OS-native threads on Unix, Linux, and Windows.
One of the advantages of Lisp is that it makes it very easy to get working code written very quickly, giving you time to change your design if need be, and to go back and optimize only the parts of the code that need it (no point optimizing code that gets run.001% of the time). One of the disadvantages is that it makes it easy for poor programmers (or naive Lispers) to write amazingly inefficient code that works correctly. But well written Lisp runs comperable to or faster than C++. Both CMUCL and ACL compile to the native architecture, of course.
Wow, I'd heard bad things about Java's GC, but that's amazing. Coming from a Common Lisp perspective, I'm appalled that the Java GC doesn't actually collect garbage, but just runs destructors!
This is a problem with the language, not with programmers' understanding of OO design. Finalization on objects can be a good way to prevent a programmer from accidentally forgetting to free a resource, but the garbage collector should certainly collect all the garbage!
MS will be porting it via Carbon -- with the choice of Carbon and Yellobox/Cocoa, it's a nobrainer for them
Which is really too bad for those who may want MS products for *nix; we have GNUStep which could in theory support an Office using the Cocoa API -- Carbon, on the other hand, I don't believe anyone has tried to support that on free unix, though I could be wrong.
Personally, I'm glad. The last thing we need is to add more proprietary software to our free systems, especially just as the free office suites are getting almost to the point where your manager can use them, and Mozilla works for 95% of the web (in my experience)
Oh bang paths, how I miss them. Once Upon A Time, there was a BBS running on a 286/10, and we had a menu item "INTERNET E-mail!" that was a text file explaining how, by bouncing your mail four BBSs down the line then through a gateway, it was possible to send mail to any internet e-mail address; and how to figure out YOUR VERY OWN INTERNET E-MAIL ADDRESS (how exciting and unreadable!). What we didn't mention was that it averaged 2-3 days between us and the internet:)
Open Source: (Oh-pehn Sor-ss): Source code for a given application is readily available to those who use the application.
You see. Nowhere in there does it say that the people get the source for free. Nor does it state that you cannot sell the source with the application and restrict the source only to those who have purchased a license.
That's just plain wrong. Unless you're using a markedly different definition than the one the rest of the world uses. It's true that open source does not equal free software, but they're almost the same in practice. From the Open Source Definition:
The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost -- preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
This isn't really an online vs. book publishing question; it's a self- vs. other-publishing question. There's no reason at all that you couldn't set the type with TeX, print it at a near-by offset printer's, and bind it at your local bindery. Being that I run a normal GNU/Linux distro, I can make a camera-ready copy, and, living in an urban University district, I live a couple minute walk from an offset printer's and about 10 minute drive from a small bindery.
The question is, even with the net, even with the ability to sell online copies and to sell, online, bound copies, do you think you can get enough attention, and is your writing good enough, to make money. If the writing is really good, you might be able to pull it off. However, a book label will lend you its brand name, one of which, unlike Stephan King, you don't have. I'd think you'd be more successfull -- at least for your first book -- going the book label route. Sherman Alexie might be a better example than Stephan King. Say he was 10 years younger, and had just published his first one or two books. Having just published The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses, I bet he could use his website, fallsapart.com (gratuitous plug), to sell online and bound copies of Old Shirts & New Skins and First Indian on the Moon, and do quite well at it. But Sherman Alexie is an amazing writer -- one whose reputation and hard work creates his own brand name. A lesser writer could probably do the same, but with significantly less success -- and would probably be better off using a publisher.
So I'd say you probably should go the other-published route for the first book or two, then decide if you think you're good enough, hard working enough, and lucky enough to go the self-publishing route. However, if you do decide to self-publish, I'm behind you all the way. Self-publishing is wonderful and fun! And remember, there are some publishing collectives, if you don't want to go it alone, but don't want to support corporate branding either.
Unfortunately, trademarks apply to specific areas, or trades.
I would say it's extreemly fortunate. Say I want to open up McIntosh Typesetting, Inc, or my uncle wants to open up McIntosh Fishing Services (which he did), should Apple have a trademark on my family name? Hell, I think it's fsck'ed up enough that I can't open up a McIntosh software company.
I'd like to point out that the long-term plan for emacs includes switching from elisp to a modern, lexically-scoped lisp -- almost certainly guile. Add that to scwm, the guile-based wm, and viola! (Btw, there's already a GuileEmacs, so you can get this environment today if you want!)
Here in Seattle, companies are dying for people with good unix/c/database experience. C++ and even Perl are pluses, but I really don't think you'd have any problem getting a job down here, even a fun one maybe.
I do wonder how much of this is because we're so close to MS. Because I know many out-of-work windows programmers here (waaaay too many for the number of jobs), but every unix programmer I know here can get a job (though not all choose to at all times:).
But I'd reccomend that you either move, or, if you like it in Montreal, that you maybe try to get a job from afar. From what I can tell, all the US cities with booming internet-based companies have more c/unix/database jobs than they can fill. And my company has at least one coder working from afar.
Why GNU is Unix (though of course it's not...)
on
The End of Unix?
·
· Score: 2
Unix is an operating system. Its purpose is to operate the hardware inside your computer, and to provide a programmatic and generalized interface to that hardwares' capabilities. As long as Unix continues to operate popular hardware and provide an interface that programmers like, Unix cannot die.
This touches on a point that is relevant to most people here: that's why GNU is a unix-like system. At first RMS, what with his love for all things lisp, had thought about making the free OS he was planning a really big lisp environment. But he realized that in order to be a general-purpose system, it would still need to be built on top of a general-purpose OS; so he chose unix. And that's why we have our wonderful unix-like system with Emacs (= a really big lisp environment) running on top of it.
The best way, imho, to make your wonderful ubercool environment it to build it on top of (a subset of) unix. That way you can let unix take care of the mundane things (device drivers and whatnot) that you don't want to, and be quite portable.
Luddite, my ass. Biology is where physics was at the turn of the 19-20th centuries, and chemistry at mid-century. It's gonna explode. We're currently researching fundemental questions in biology, and we ought to be spending amounts of money on it that reflect that. I'm all for continuing to spend money on physics, astrophysics, etc, research. However, biological research is horribly underfunded. It might be sexier to send probes to Europa, but I'd rather clear up things like the importance of female sexual selection. That's the evolutionary equivilant of still not understanding the mechanism of bromination!
Or we could spend it on organismal biological research, and answer far more fundemental questions than any space probe could hope to answer. -A bitter biologist
I don't normally reply to people's.sig lines, but since it's vaugely relevant (what w/ the topic being a court ruling):
"The state was indeed [...] the gendarme, but the kind of gendarmes who think they are somebody [...] and the capitalist class got rid of it [and replaced] it with a government of its own choosing [...] at all times under its control." - Errico Malatesta, "L'Anarchia"
Slashdot Mirror
I think WP 5.1, and the secretaries and paralegals who used it, was just about the end of that evolutionary path that we should have taken. From there, they should have evolved into highly skilled typesetters, formatters, etc., using software designed for the user more sophisticated than 90% of programmers. Instead, their bosses got wow'ed by sexy easy-to-use shit that they could use, but that didn't allow the secretary to become a more skilled laborer. In fact, I'm pretty sure it decreased productivity, where we had had an opportunity to both increase productivity and create the industrial successors to the printing, setting, etc., industry of old.
Ah, but 64-bit processors aren't a full solution. They solve the source of the problem, but I'm sure we'll find all sorts of odd 32-bit assumptions and "clever" things wrt keeping a handle on that number-of-seconds-of-unix. Hopefully it'll all add up to a small problem, though
Given that they're describing the (already known) physiological effects of caffeine, I bet they're talking about the effects of the caffeine. FWIW, there are also a fair amount of anti-oxidents in (fresh) coffee; so it (might) reduce (slightly) your risk of cancer (provided you stay hydrated).
No, buffer overflows cannot happen to just anybody. They only happen to people programming in languages without bounds checking. And more specifically, in those languages, they only happen to people who didn't roll their own bounds-checking systems. Apache, for example, is written in C, but despite that, it really ought not to have buffer overflow errors, because if you use proper Apache style and their utility functions, they won't happen.
There is no reason whatsoever that buffer overflow errors should ever happen. They only happen to coders who try to squeeze every last drop of performance out of code when they can't. Which leads to the question: how fast do you want the wrong answer?
It amazes me that slashdot still does this. If something could possibly be construed as new, then it makes sense for slashdot to just link to it. But this site has been around for some time. I really don't see how it would hurt to ask before linking for stories like this; it's not like slashdot would be missing some scoop. It's not like slashdot doesn't have the resources to proxy requests through itself and cache the results. Plus it would make slashdot a better site, if the links in the stories were reliable.
I agree wholeheartedly with the above. An anecdote: a few years ago, one of my users noticed that Pine would sometimes hang and corrupt his email box. It was fairly easy to repair the damage (I wrote a script to fix it using Emacs -- run pine, hang, corrupt, run inbox through Emacs, run pine again). However, this was not a very good solution. The bug was easy enough to find in Pine, because I had the source. Fixing it in a universally acceptable way (one that wouldn't cause new bugs on other peoples' systems) turned out to be difficult. So I went the quick-dirty-hack way, because I was primarily concerned with Pine working properly on my system. Great success story part of the anecdote.
The problematic part of the anecdote is what came next. Of course the Pine maintainers were interested in the bug, and of course they were not interested in my "fix." From my point of view, it fixed the problem, from theirs it cause bigger problems (for example, on the AIX systems that they run at the UW). Problem was, I couldn't make my own "nocPine" for GNU/Linux systems with the same configuration oddities as mine. So, I was able to fix the bug for a single user, but only for a single user :(
And when it came out, it was under a license that qualifies as Free. They changed to the more restrictive license later, after Free Software had become fairly successfull.
And don't forget, Pine is a product of the University of Washington, who needed an easy-for-students-and-profs-to-use mail client for their network. Given that they are a public university, it would have been completely unreasonable for them to keep it to themselves. What's commendable is how accomidating the Pine maintainers have been to others' special needs that they don't have.
Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if Compaq starts making keyboards with 'publish' keys to go along with the 'internet' and 'e-mail' and whatever other keys they're inventing.
The assumption among intelligent techies that they're too intelligent to be racist (or sexist, or otherwise bigoted) continues to amaze and frustrate me. Bigotry has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof. We live in a racist society, and that means some of the ideas, habits, and attitudes we adopt without realizing we are adopting them (which is known as acculturation), are racist. The only thing we can do, but that thing which we absolutely must do, is to try to recognize when we've unwittingly accepted bigotry--or bigoted behaviors, etc.--from our environment, and to reject that influence, replacing it with an anti-racist alternative.
I grew up in a progressive, multiracial, urban environment; because of this, I've known the above reality since I was preadolescent. That doesn't make me automatically liberated from racism, anymore than does the intelligence which God blessed me with. On the other hand, it does give me the ethical responsibility to fight bigotry both in and around me--with all the privileges I've been given, there's no excuse.
This attitude of "we're too intelligent to be racist: give me a talented programmer, and I'll hire him/her, white, black, or green!" is pure poison, and is the intellectual easy-way-out. It perpetuates accidental and institutional racism. It allows companies to tolerate hiring practices whereby they hire the friends, former-college-housemates, etc., of those already working there: if all/most of their friends are white--which is standard for a great many of non/anti-racist whites in this country--what do you think will happen? When the rules of a system favor one group, we're not surprised when that group dominates. This happens whether the people executing the rules want it to or not. And that's a real dirty secret in our industry. It's not enough for well-intentioned people to not actively discriminate; it's not even enough for well-intentioned people to fight active discrimination; we in this industry tend to be blessed with intelligence; along with privilege (intelligence) comes responsibility (intellectual rigor); intelligent, well-intentioned people in our industry, as in general, need to fight systemic bias, institutional racism, and accidental bigotry. That's the only way we can achieve communities where everyone is proud, everyone holds one's head high, everyone is respected, and where everyone can achieve. If we go the other way, we're all lost.
--Just Another Pimp Ass Urban Guinea
Absolutely. I think one of the best measures of whether someone "gets" CS is whether or not they write programs with pen and paper. I don't mean that they do their production programming in a notebook; I mean if you're sitting in a cafe and you want to solve a problem. The major difference I see between mathematicians and computer scientists is that mathematicians will solve their problem in the cafe, where computer scientists will solve the problem of how to solve their problem, without actually finding the solution :)
In the Free world, CMUCL has kernel-level threads support (for FreeBSD and Linux), but only in the current development versions.
In the commercial world, Franz's Allegro CL has OS-native threads on Unix, Linux, and Windows.
One of the advantages of Lisp is that it makes it very easy to get working code written very quickly, giving you time to change your design if need be, and to go back and optimize only the parts of the code that need it (no point optimizing code that gets run .001% of the time). One of the disadvantages is that it makes it easy for poor programmers (or naive Lispers) to write amazingly inefficient code that works correctly. But well written Lisp runs comperable to or faster than C++. Both CMUCL and ACL compile to the native architecture, of course.
This is a problem with the language, not with programmers' understanding of OO design. Finalization on objects can be a good way to prevent a programmer from accidentally forgetting to free a resource, but the garbage collector should certainly collect all the garbage!
Personally, I'm glad. The last thing we need is to add more proprietary software to our free systems, especially just as the free office suites are getting almost to the point where your manager can use them, and Mozilla works for 95% of the web (in my experience)
Oh bang paths, how I miss them. Once Upon A Time, there was a BBS running on a 286/10, and we had a menu item "INTERNET E-mail!" that was a text file explaining how, by bouncing your mail four BBSs down the line then through a gateway, it was possible to send mail to any internet e-mail address; and how to figure out YOUR VERY OWN INTERNET E-MAIL ADDRESS (how exciting and unreadable!). What we didn't mention was that it averaged 2-3 days between us and the internet :)
The question is, even with the net, even with the ability to sell online copies and to sell, online, bound copies, do you think you can get enough attention, and is your writing good enough, to make money. If the writing is really good, you might be able to pull it off. However, a book label will lend you its brand name, one of which, unlike Stephan King, you don't have. I'd think you'd be more successfull -- at least for your first book -- going the book label route. Sherman Alexie might be a better example than Stephan King. Say he was 10 years younger, and had just published his first one or two books. Having just published The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses, I bet he could use his website, fallsapart.com (gratuitous plug), to sell online and bound copies of Old Shirts & New Skins and First Indian on the Moon, and do quite well at it. But Sherman Alexie is an amazing writer -- one whose reputation and hard work creates his own brand name. A lesser writer could probably do the same, but with significantly less success -- and would probably be better off using a publisher.
So I'd say you probably should go the other-published route for the first book or two, then decide if you think you're good enough, hard working enough, and lucky enough to go the self-publishing route. However, if you do decide to self-publish, I'm behind you all the way. Self-publishing is wonderful and fun! And remember, there are some publishing collectives, if you don't want to go it alone, but don't want to support corporate branding either.
I'd like to point out that the long-term plan for emacs includes switching from elisp to a modern, lexically-scoped lisp -- almost certainly guile. Add that to scwm, the guile-based wm, and viola! (Btw, there's already a GuileEmacs, so you can get this environment today if you want!)
I do wonder how much of this is because we're so close to MS. Because I know many out-of-work windows programmers here (waaaay too many for the number of jobs), but every unix programmer I know here can get a job (though not all choose to at all times :).
But I'd reccomend that you either move, or, if you like it in Montreal, that you maybe try to get a job from afar. From what I can tell, all the US cities with booming internet-based companies have more c/unix/database jobs than they can fill. And my company has at least one coder working from afar.
This touches on a point that is relevant to most people here: that's why GNU is a unix-like system. At first RMS, what with his love for all things lisp, had thought about making the free OS he was planning a really big lisp environment. But he realized that in order to be a general-purpose system, it would still need to be built on top of a general-purpose OS; so he chose unix. And that's why we have our wonderful unix-like system with Emacs (= a really big lisp environment) running on top of it.
The best way, imho, to make your wonderful ubercool environment it to build it on top of (a subset of) unix. That way you can let unix take care of the mundane things (device drivers and whatnot) that you don't want to, and be quite portable.
X over a parallel port? ick
Luddite, my ass. Biology is where physics was at the turn of the 19-20th centuries, and chemistry at mid-century. It's gonna explode. We're currently researching fundemental questions in biology, and we ought to be spending amounts of money on it that reflect that. I'm all for continuing to spend money on physics, astrophysics, etc, research. However, biological research is horribly underfunded. It might be sexier to send probes to Europa, but I'd rather clear up things like the importance of female sexual selection. That's the evolutionary equivilant of still not understanding the mechanism of bromination!
Or we could spend it on organismal biological research, and answer far more fundemental questions than any space probe could hope to answer.
-A bitter biologist
"The state was indeed [...] the gendarme, but the kind of gendarmes who think they are somebody [...] and the capitalist class got rid of it [and replaced] it with a government of its own choosing [...] at all times under its control." - Errico Malatesta, "L'Anarchia"