How about the fact that we don't fully understand liquid water?

Your post addresses some of the basic understanding, but it is more complicated than you paint it. After all, if it wasn't why would there still be a lot of research into it? Consider this thought experiment:

You have a large solution of water with 3 oil molecules floating around inside of the water. Eventually, these 3 molecules bump into each other and stick. By having these two molecules start acting like one, there is a relatively large entropic penalty to be paid, and our understanding of a lot of these other forces doesn't explain who is paying for the entropic loss.

I had exactly the same response to the article - they've created a mathematical model the reflects what they observe, but they still don't really understand the mechanism. Looking at the comments of the article, I found a link to the original article. From what I can understand (by reading the abstract), it sounds as if the work was (surprise) a lot more complicated than the article linked above. From the abstract:

A quantitative and general model is derived for the interaction potential of charged bilayers that includes the electrostatic double-layer force of the Derjaguin–Landau–Verwey–Overbeek theory, attractive hydrophobic interactions, and repulsive steric-hydration forces. The model quantitatively accounts for the elastic strains, deformations, long-range forces, energy maxima, adhesion minima, as well as the instability (when it exists) as two bilayers breakthrough and (hemi)fuse.

In short, as far as I understand it, their model is built upon a lot of existing models and considers many, known phenomena. If you dove into the actual article, you may get a sense of the "why" but it strikes me as a complicated enough of an explanation that it would probably take a strong background in physical chemistry to fully grok.

Does gravity work because mass distorts space or because of gravitons? At the heart of it most science doesn't care why, but it does care what.

No, it is engineering that really doesn't care about why. Steel is stronger than wood, which is why we build big buildings out of steel and not wood, but to make a building, we don't need to understand why, only how it behaves.

Science is all about explaining why something happens. If someone could determine, conclusively, the mechanism of how gravity works, that would be a major scientific discovery. At that point, then, we'll how to ask why THAT happens, and thus science continues.

The average females instinct, no matter how independent and successful she is, is still to "settle" with a provider (due to the large investment she makes in the offspring). That hasn't changed. The males instinct (to spread seed far and wide due to lesser investment in offspring) is to mate with as many females as possible. This also hasn't changed.

Further to this point, you can see how female and male sexuality play out in the absence of the other gender (ie, homosexual relationships). On the one hand, you have male dominated gay clubs where there is a culture of lots of quick and meaningless sex. On the other hand, you have the following joke (which I originally heard from a lesbian friend of mine):

What does a lesbian bring to the second date? A U-haul.

(These are, of course, generalizations. There are plenty of lesbians having quick, meaningless hook-ups and plenty of gay men in long-term, committed relationships.)

I would argue that the number of programs licensed under the GPL has more to do with the fact that it is a good idea and a lot less to do with RMS as a spokesman.

Don't get me wrong - I think that he has made some great contributions to the world. I just think that his cause may be better served by another spokesman.

If you're trying to convince people, you need to avoid out-right insulting them and mocking them

I don't remember the Apple fanboys criticising Steve Jobs for mocking and insulting Microsoft.

Well, that's a problem with the fanboys, which shows that childish name calling isn't the providence of one group of people.

We should stop tolerating ANY kind of name calling and derision, especially when it comes from someone we agree with. Unfortunately, it is a widespread issue that goes way beyond the discussion at hand.

I'm sorry, did you need a hug? It sounds like maybe you needed a hug, so I thought I'd offer.

If you think I was bemoaning the fact the RMS was trashing Jobs, I must not have been clear.

Let's put aside any bias for or against Steve Jobs, and look at what we're talking about. RMS clearly has a strong, vocal idea about how he'd like software to exist in the world. That's fine, we all have our own opinions. Turns out, though, that he also wants to convert others to his opinion. Great, that's fine, too.

Now, when the name Steve Jobs is a hot news topic, where every piece is about praising him, there's an opportunity to join the discussion and to explain some of the very basic principals behind open source, etc. In other words, he could take the time to educate and inform, thereby advancing his cause.

Instead, he resorts to name-calling and bitterness. That's a failure as a spokesman, and I can only see this as helping his cause if he manages to convince someone else to step up and speak up in his stead.

The funny thing I think was the a Wall Street worker who pointed out that they were all using Apple products

You do recognize that this is a classic ad hominem attack, right? I hope you truly don't believe that *every* one of them is out there on the street "using Apple products."

Really, does use of these products have *anything* to do with the message? if the message is kooky and stupid, can't the media just point that out? Instead, they latch onto this one, minor detail, that describes *some* of the protesters in order to try to paint the whole movement as a bunch of spoiled, whiny kids.

I personally participated in a lot of the protests in Madison, WI, earlier this year. From my experiences in attending rallies, then going home to read about them online, one thing is clear - our media is a failure and it is impossible to get an accurate picture of such an event by reading about it in the news.

Please keep that in mind.

I sort of agree that Stallman isn't a very palatable spokesman - but on the other hand, the FSF has an uncompromising message, and requires an uncompromising figurehead.

Believe it or not, it is possible to be both polite and uncompromising. Stallman seems to be a master of the latter and a novice at the former.

Let's not delude ourselves. As far as software is concerned, with some notable exceptions, Apple always took the hard proprietary line in order to protect and add value to their hardware. It's natural for RMS to point it out. Especially at this moment in time, in a controversial manner, because well, that's what he does.

It is appropriate for RMS to point out the privacy/openness issues, but he really, really doesn't need to be so harsh to do it.

Read his words - he implies that anyone using any Apple product is a "fool" who has willingly stepped into a "jail." (Those are his specific word choices.) He has good points, but by being so polarizing, he is only pushing people further away from his own position. Rather than a few sentence rant, his time would have been better served by putting together a few thoughtful paragraphs that acknowledge the positive impacts from Steve Jobs (ie, his emphasis on usability) while pointing out the downsides (ie, software freedom, etc.).

A post like that might even cause others to think, rather than encouraging them to dismiss RMS as a crazy lunatic.

You need to take a stroll around the mall a couple more times. There are plenty of other such religions, some of them even popular. Not to knock Buddhism.

Examples, please.

It is true that RMS serves an important role as a vocal advocate. The trouble is that he has little political or social grace. For example, his description of Steve Jobs - "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom".

If you're trying to convince people, you need to avoid out-right insulting them and mocking them. The kind of sentiment expressed above can be loved by people of a similar outlook, but for anyone else, the harsh, mightier-than-thou attitude is a huge turnoff.

The trouble isn't his message, it is how he tries to deliver it. For most people, who don't have a technical background, he just comes across as a crazy, ranting lunatic, which probably hurts his cause more than it helps.

To make linux really take off, there needs to be someone with the charisma and vision of Steve Jobs, with the philosophical ideals of Stallman. Now *that* would be great.

I have to believe (for the sake of my soul) that someone at Microsoft wanted to do that but was *stopped* for some reason from adding the extra 0.5 KBs of synonymous commands for each of the included commands.

In my experience, I would say that it's more likely that the people working on this feature looked at a requirement on paper that said something like "Voice activated SMS ability," implemented the narrowest version of that, and moved on.

As a recent example - I work in a biotech company, and we have a software package that allows people to view our data graphically. Okay fine. Simple enough. Since our customers are scientists, it is helpful for them to easily share data with other people, and a couple of us started advocating for the ability to select some data in our software, hit copy, then go into your favorite other program and hit paste, which would paste the exact image from our application as an image.

In other words, it was an extremely useful feature that fits very well into the standard paradigm of how people expect software to work.

One of the VP's an older electrical engineer, didn't see the point. You could get the same functionality by installing the program "Snag-it" on your computer, then invoking the shortcut key to Snag-it to copy and paste the image. As much as we tried, he never managed to understand that just selecting and hitting copy and paste was a HUGE difference in usability from having to use another application.

Its a mindset, and part of the culture of an organization - either you care about design and usability or you don't.

You just attacked my statements.

Huh? I certainly expressed a distaste for your rhetoric, but then I spent a while arguing the merits of understanding and compromise. I don't think that this is any different from any other kind of political debate. Perhaps you see fewer "attacks" coming from the right simply because you tend to lean more to the right?

I also hardly think that the right is innocent when it comes to slandering the left. After all, there is a book title "Liberalism is a mental disorder." How is that for friendly, reasonable discourse? If you want to hear more examples, just turn on your local right-wing radio or the editorial staff on Fox.

In the end, there is a loud, vocal minority on both the right and left. Or, rather, should I say the Republicans and Democrats, since at this point, neither party seems very much interested in right/left ideology so much as it is interested in defending its own team. (Based upon some of your statements, we probably agree on this point.) From everything you've said, though, it sounds like you are more willing to give the right a pass than you are willing to give the left a pass.

Next time you find yourself listening to/watching/reading an article that reeks of bias to you, take the time to notice how, specifically, the bias is conveyed. Then, when you read something that espouses an opinion that you agree with, look for those same tricks. it is eye-opening just how much bad dialogue is going on.

Yes I have a very broad statement I stand by. Removing the power from the federal government and restoring it to lower levels of government universally improves the nation, where states and other localities disagree the people will move to the places they find more suitable regionally isolating failed policies instead of making failure of policy a national universal constant.

This statement comes a bit out of nowhere in the context of this discussion, but I'll bite...

The one large objection I have to your statement is the absolutism in it. Although I generally identify as more left-leaning, I am very skeptical of government, so the general idea of giving the government less power is a good one.

At the same time, there can be issues that are not well solved locally. For example, take environment regulations. If these were all up to local control, we could easily find ourselves in a situation where a community upstream in a watershed decides to relax their rules, which causes extreme pollution and toxicity in the communities downstream from it. Here, if water quality is enforced only at the local level, there is no efficient way for those most effected to push those polluting. More generally, I think that although we should try to keep the rules in society to a minimum, we need to examine each issue individually and try to see what the most efficient solution can be.

In the end, though, I am coming more and more to the opinion that local/federal private/public are not the most important factors for how well a system works. No matter what the system, if there isn't built-in transparency and accountability, the system will fail, since the most greedy and corrupt will tend to accumulate towards the top of the power pyramid. The more we (as citizens) push for this transparency and accountability in large, powerful organizations, the better things are.