Model building like that is probably better done in R anyway

I have not been using Windows since 2007 (luckily, at my job I can bring my own laptop and basically the only little issue there is is that I am using Zotero with Libre Office and most of my colleagues Endnote with Microsoft Office... In those cases I will have to take responsibility for smooth working and compatibility. I always do my presentations in PDF (hate animated crap anyway)). Basically, every time I now get in front of a Windows machine, the first two words that strike me are "confusing" (the ribbon stuff in Office) and "boring" (Windows feel like a box with just a few buttons to press, very limited) - on the other hand, I am a pathological distro-hopper (although being hopping-free for a few years thanks to Arch... but starting to get the feeling that I want to try something new again... perhaps Alpine) so I am not representative of the typical computer user.

As long as the kids get to know about it. I am surprised how few that are aware of its existence. I have this cognitive dissonance where everything I read on the internet revolves around open source in general and Linux in particular. Then when I talk to "normal" people they have never heard about it!

Does steam need root? I needed root to install it (like any piece of software) on Arch linux, but it runs at low privileges. Also if you run the windows version under Wine it is completely unprivileged and only active in your assigned WINEPREFIX.

Right now, there are only 3 countries in the world that are non-metric: US, Burma and Liberia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metrication_by_year_map.svg). Some have made a partial conversion, Brittain officially changed to the metric system partially but their street signs are still in miles. I think a conversion in the modern society needs to take its time due to all the legacy material (maps, cars etc). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom And seriously, the Britts got lots of other standards compliance issues which probably hurts its consumers by more expensive custom-made products for that market, like cars made for left traffic and their own type of electrical plugs compared to the rest of EU.

As expected, lots of /.-ers fail to make the distinction between phages and (human-infecting) viruses... Phages have been tested as an interesting alternative to antibiotics. One disadvantage has been that they are very specific, which means that one often would have to apply many strains in order to fight an unclassified infection. On the other hand, with the advent of metagenomics, it has become clear that the composition of our commensal bacteria in the gut and on other places are critical for our health (both mental and physical) and that there may be several diseases caused by messing with this ecosystem by too frequent use of antibiotics (overlays of antibiotic usage and several diseases (heart diseases, diabetes, psychological diseases) per geographic area actually fit pretty nicely). An interesting application of phages could be to manipulate our commensal ecosystems in such a way that we ensure a "healthy" composition in our gut, lungs etc. Since the phages themselves are not alive, I have no idea what such a treatment would be called. It is not an antibiotic and it is not a probiotic... parabiotic? Nah... I will leave that to the marketers.

I would have agreed sometime before 2007 but after that I must say that stuff works amazingly good with Linux. Usually the out-of-the-box experience of Linux is far better than a fresh raw install of Windows with regards to drivers (OEM preinstalls not counted). Looking back, I can't even imagine how much time I spent searching for the relevant drivers for Windows, and in such an insecure way: to go to a homepage and download an installer from there (guessing that the web page is legit). To be fair, the last version of Windows I used was Xp back in 2006 or so... Things might have improved since then.

One thing that has always stunned me is how fast after the Earths crust had cooled down that life appeared. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life This if anything indicates that the determinig events leading to a self-replicating unit (perhaps RNA) must have happened pretty fast and thus been very probable. Take this perspective to the stars and all the potentially habitable planets out there and the universe is teeming with life! .... pretty cool if you think about it.

Sorry about a second reply, but I just came up with a clarification. When did you last hear an official member of Moderaterna argue anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-evolution and for the family as the fundamental unit building a society (all stuff Christian Democrats have been arguing for, also members of parliament)? Especially the last point, where Moderaterna focuses on the individual makes them liberal (in contrast to the Christian Democrats who often focuses on the family as the important unit).

It was a long time ago Moderaterna was a (value) conservative party (or "Högern" ("The Right) as the social democrats still likes to call them). For a long time, there was a conflict between the market liberals and value conservatives wihin the party, but by natural succession (the value conservatives got old and died), the party is basically a market liberal party with a few conservative remnants in their program, pro-monarchy being one of those (in contrast to Folkpartiet and Centern that are also liberal with regards to values).

In fact the original post does look at it through "American-tinted" glasses. For example, to describe the two coallitions as conservative vs social democrat/green is wrong. The big divisive ideological gap is rather "liberal" vs "social democrat" and the "conservative" coallition consists of 3 liberal party and only one conservative (the christian democrats, which is currently below 4% of the votes). In Swedish ears (I am a Swede in exile), "conservative" has a negative ring to it. Also in other European countries (for example Belgium), conservatives often have more common with the socialists arguing for a largeish wellfare state (both are group-oriented ideologies) whereas liberals argue for a smaller state (individual-oriented ideology). Many things in ideological comparisons between Europe and America common gets confusing, like the party colours blue (in Europe market liberal and right, in America "liberal" and left) and red (in Europe socialist and left, in America conservative and right).

I do hope that community distributions will pop up leveraging the work of CyanogenMod/AOSP but rather than Android on top of the custom kernel, Sailfish. I for one would love to flash my "old" Android phone (SGS+) to Sailfish (Currently on CM10). Doing that move would perhaps also break the catch 22 of users-vs-products, since (some) nerds will be happy to switch their phones from Android to "MeeGo++". The Qt on Wayland demos look sweet.... so it seems nice :) BTW: Why is Sailfish going to run on glibc? For embedded OSes I thought uClibc or musl would be a better fit.

Being a Linux user in the Biomedical field has its issues sometimes, especially with collaborative writing where most colleagues simply out of ignorance work with MS office and Endnote. The combination LibreOffice and Zotero (stand-alone version) has proven the best fit for me to do my work. One disadvantage can be that I need to send my documents with final formatting rather than with the citation tags in the document to ensure that stuff works on the computers of my colleagues.

The problem is not so much the rise of fake science journals (like the one started to get the "sasquatch genome" published...) but rather uncritical readers and especially journalists that package everything "sciencey" as The Truth. Among scientists, the value of a publication is reputation based - a journal with a high science citation index (so citations in newspapers do not count, only other scientific publications that have been accepted into the list of indexed journals) does provide more trust than one lacking any such measure at all. Despite this, citation index is also not everything (journals like Nature and Science like the spectacular stories, which often turn out wrong) and a scientist will thus also remain sceptical about findings found in such journals until they have been independently repeated directly or indirecly by follow-up studies.

Although (irrespective if we believe the specific numbers or not) ~1% of desktop users are Linux users, I think that 1% is a very significant one containing much of the people doing community contributions to open source projects (either patches or good bug reports). Because of this, I think the fate of the two ex-Sun projects OpenOffice and MySQL is very uncertain, despite having a massively higher user share thanks to MacOSX and Windows users and an established brand. Long-term, I think the developer mind share is more significant and that is obtained by being the default option in various Linux distros.