Are you sure about that? My memory is hazy but I remember fairly early arguments about what the extension language should be and Python was already an option.

Python was released in 1991 and Guile started 1993-1995 according to wikipedia. It's possible the decision to use scheme as an extension language was made before anyone heard of Python, but my recollection is that they could have just used Python instead of developing their own. I don't know lua so I can't speak to that.

But you're at least right that the decision to write their own Scheme instead of using Python looks a lot stupider in retrospect (now that we know that Python has caught on but Scheme languishes) than it did at the time.

1. Language Neutrality: The idea here is that users could program in whatever language they wanted. Unfortunately this never panned out because it requires the huge programming task of writing a translator from every languange into scheme. They should have known from the beginning that writing and maintaining all this code was unrealistic.
2. Macros: Yes, Lisp is very elegant, you can define your own syntax! But how many people need to write new unheard of forms of flow control in an extension language? And need to do it so often that Lisp's elegance at doing this would pay off?
3. Other CS Prof features: Yes, Lisp is usually tail recursive, so you can build stuff like coroutines. Again, how many people need coroutines when scripting GnuCash? And you can do coroutines in other languages, it just 10% less elegant (for instance, in Python you need a trampoline).

So basically their decision was optimized on all the wrong criteria. Instead it should have been optimized on:

1. Ease of use: Can user, who may not be a professional programmer, look at an example, vaguely understand how it works, and modify it slightly? This is possible with Python probably, but not with Lisp.
2. Community: How many programmers are already using it and what are its prospects for the future? GNU even further splintered the notoriously fragmented Scheme community when they chose to make their own scheme implementation instead of using one of the many very functional pre-existing Scheme implementations, several of which were explicitly designed as extension languages.
3. Efficient use of resources: If they had chosen Python or Lua they could have leveraged the existing work put into those languages as well as all the future work that would be done by those communities. Instead they decided to reinvent the wheel and develop their own Scheme implementation, almost from scratch (yes I know it forked from SIOD).

Most of the posts will probably be "yeah MBAs don't contribute anything" versus "engineers are geeks who can't communicate". In reality MBAs working for companies usually know what the company does in detail, and there are plenty of engineers who can communicate.

It's still an issue though, because the opportunity cost of learning about "business" is less learning about something else. According to this article,

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.

The rise of MBAs is also tied to the rise of finance. Most people agree that the US funneled too many resources into the finance sector, which then just destroyed them. Instead of designing more complicated mortgage securities, those physicists could have been doing physics. Although "managing" doesn't necessarily have to be about finance, most business schools spent a lot of time teaching their students about CAPM and Black-Scholes. (If you don't know what these mean, good for you!)

But of course business schools are not a fixed target. Most have reacted to the financial crisis and are now, for instance, emphasizing globalization and how to work in multiple countries. Time will tell I guess if this path is any better.

Personally, I think the biggest damage is done by the outlook that most MBA programs teach. Instead of thinking that your company's goal is to build the best vacuum or whatever, you learn that the goal is to maximize shareholder value, and that gaming the system is what everyone is doing. Over the long run, countries probably don't want too many of those people in charge.

I just don't see how any finite number of years would count as unlimited under any reasonable definition of the word "unlimited".

A trillion year copyright would reasonably be called "unlimited". Do you disagree? I think this would be pretty obvious to the average person.

My apologies if I'm unfairly stereotyping you, but I think the confusion is just because Slashdot is filled with math-professor and computer programmer types. If you are writing a computer program, you have to assume the computer will take you literally, even if the results are ridiculous. But this isn't true for most communication (including laws)—a person is the intended recipient, not a computer. And the constitution is not a computer program. It's true that in math class, a trillion is a finite number. But to a person, a trillion years is the same as forever.

I've probably wasted too much time already writing a post that no one will read, but it may be appropriate here to quote Supreme Court Justice Breyer in his dissent in the Eldred vs Ashcroft case:

The lack of a practically meaningful distinction from an author's ex ante perspective between (a) the statute's extended terms and (b) an infinite term makes this latest extension difficult to square with the Constitution's insistence on "limited Times."

If you're going to criticize other people's interpretation of the US Constitution you should at least understand their position before doing so. The case you're thinking of had nothing to do with X years being "limited" and X+n years being "unlimited".

No, you're (partially) wrong. The official position was both that X+n years counts as "unlimited" AND what you said. The head anti-copyright extension lawyer, Larry Lessig, explains it well in chapters 13 and 14 of his book Free Culture.

How could a finite number of years count as "unlimited"? It's pretty simple really, unless all you do is math all day (thus guaranteeing all Slashdotters will be confused). The constitution says "limited times". Clearly they just meant a finite number of years right? Wrong, because then Congress could just say that copyright lasts a trillion years. Do you really thing the intention was to allow a trillion years?? That interpretation makes the phrase "limited times" vacuous, and is implicitly calling the authors of the constitution idiots.

Yes, some work and argument is required to interpret and understand what "limited time" means. That is pretty common with laws—it is often not clear how to apply them to particular cases. Luckily, we have a whole branch of government (the judiciary) whose job it is to interpret laws.

This is cool and all, but I would be scared to go anywhere near that. That's way over class 3 on the laser safety scale and minor reflections could do permanent damage to your eyes. I've played with ~0.5W lasers, and those are scary enough. Apparently this is 1kW! The class 3 limit for pulsed lasers in that frequency is 1/3000th as much apparently (30mW). Basic safety goggles only filter out so much light and you can still get blinded through them.

I would guess it's just a matter of time before whoever bought this accidentally hits something shiny and the "ricochet" blinds someone.

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game... Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

I think he'd be quite at home on Slashdot, except he would actually be very smart instead of just thinking he was very smart.

weakly researched but confidently stated opinions.

Women are systematically excluded not because they're women, but because the entire process promotes assholes and women are flaming assholes a little less often.

Yup, irony indeed!

I'm assuming the gene doesn't actually make you "religious", it just predisposes you to being suggestible and superstitious, which is pretty much the foundation of any religion.

Actually, according to the article and some related ones, religiosity is highly correlated with conservatism and authoritarianism. This isn't my field, but I think attitudes like Social Dominance Orientation are also related. The basic idea is that people will normally settle on a worldview that fits their personality, right or wrong. Conservatives and authoritarians will naturally gravitate to a stable, hierarchical system, and organized religions (and governments?) frequently embody those characteristics.

The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations

I am all for keeping an open mind but after reading that last sentence, I suspect the paper is quite ridiculous and may actually be a funny read.

You probably haven't done much statistical or scientific work, but it's quite common to propose models that cannot be solved analytically. Instead, the models are tested with methods like Monte Carlo simulation against empirical observations or common sense boundary conditions. If you actually read TFA, you'd see that the simulations (section 3b of the paper) are merely used to show that the equations given imply that the hypothetical gene frequency would stabilize at less than 100% of the population.

Yeah, you might think using simulations in social science is funny, but it would be like this dialogue:

• Computer Tech: Sorry, your computer is fried, it needs a new motherboard.
• You: You dumbass, everyone knows computers are made in factories, they don't have mothers!!1! HAHA

The funny thing is that I thought academics would lean towards the free will argument, but I guess sometimes they take "there must be an explanation for everything" too far and convince themselves that human behaviour is easily explained with statistical models with ridiculously weak premises.

TFA itself sites a lot of work done on this. It even mentions specifically one bit of evidence: "twin studies that quantify the genetic and environmental determinants of what they call the ‘traditional moral triad’ of authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness ... show that 40 to 60 per cent of the observed variation in such personality traits is explained by genotypic variation."

So yeah, professional scientists actually try to do science and then believe what their science seems to tell them. Those silly academics!

According to TFA, he created a model that assumes the presence of a religiosity gene or genes

That's the way science works, each article has to start by assuming something rather than starting from scratch every time. Otherwise science books would keep getting longer and longer :)

But nowhere is there any further mention of what those genes may be or any evidence for them, or even past research on the subject.

Was TFA we read the same? In my version the first six references, all mentioned in the first paragraph, address this very point. For the lazy, here are links to the first three.