evolution != abiogenesis

evolution is the change in allelles observable over generations.
abiogenesis is the study of the origins of life.

Please quite using that tired strawman argument.

thanks

It's tortoises all the way down :)

He wouldn't have done it via image. He'd have kicked 'em, and used [puppet | chef | salt ] to customize the configs.

They have to have better aesthetic values than Rosie on the Jetsons.....

Actually, yes. I was raised in a mainline Protestant denomination - not Baptist - and the items cited in the prior post were all part of the ideology, even if they were soft-pedaled because some of them weren't acceptable even then.

It's a morass of contradictions and Bronze Age rank superstition, with no saving grace but the poetry in some Old Testament books.

Exactly. The second world war was won, in large part, by the efforts of Bletchley Park (and its cognates elsewhere in the world).

It is a terribly important historical site. The copy of Colossus there is a major milestone in the history of computing.

Having been there in 2012, I agree. It's wonderful as is, and is an excellent monument to human ingenuity. And the volunteers are spectacular.

Me too. I've not had to do a serious job hunt for a long time; technical people of a certain level are in relative demand compared to other skillsets.

The practice of poaching employees to acquire needed skillsets, and employees benefitting from higher salaries as a result of this competition, is an old and honorable practice in the tech industry. This is an attempt to undermine competition and so the libertarians here should be cheering for the plaintiffs to win....anything else is inconsistent with a free-market worldview.

Of course, I'd argue that anyone with a basic sense of fairness should think so, too.

It's intended to keep salaries down, no mistake, and that's probably first among the reasons for it.
'Workplace stability' is a polite term for 'OMG we don't manage our staff well enough to have some redundancy and we allow ourselves to let people to become SPOFs' - and the average nontechnical corporate manager's response to this is to resort to underhanded means to retain staff and keep costs down.
There's nothing about this that actually benefits the worker.

Less about aesthetics perhaps than about the efficiencies gained by vertically integrated design.

Apple doesn't have to adapt to standards like interfaces and bus strips which affect the DIY market, so they can design a product which reduces overall size. The cost, unfortunately, is compatibility with anything outside the Apple world; the upside is a smaller package, which is important in some cases.

Remember that the goals wasn't just comparable performance, but comparable form factor. If the form factor constraint is lifted, it's much simpler. But at the 2x-the-size-of-the-Mac-Pro form factor, it was difficult to match the spec adequately. The small form factor of the Mac Pro is nice, but it's really the only differentiator - it's quite possible to build a comparable machine from off-the-shelf parts if size isn't an issue.

(And I don't say this as an Apple or Windows or Linux enthusiast, but as someone who uses whatever box I happen to have and who deals with the frustrations inherent in all OSes - after all, they're tools to an end, not an end in and of themselves).

Give me a grant and I'll get right on that arc reactor project....

I don't mean to make light of your experience, but I did the same in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I worked several jobs to put myself through a reasonably well-respected northeastern university, and got through 2 bachelors' degrees and a master's in just under six years.

And while I got a great education, and graduated very near the top of my class (top 1%), I'd have learned more, better, faster, in a model where studying was the chief obligation, not keeping myself housed, fed, and clothed by working many jobs. There's a reason why some cultures which value education have tended to give their students and scholar candidates the opportunity to nearly exclusively focus on their studies - in the near term, the return is highly variable, but in the longer term, the return from better-trained students is far higher.

Yes, there'll be people who abuse the system. That *always* happens. But that doesn't invalidate the value of better-educated students who can actually spend time *learning,* not constantly cramming to pass a class to acquire a credential. Look at what happened after the GI Bill - we had a high percentage of reasonably-well-educated people, who had gone to college in a wya that didn't give them a free ride but also didn't make their lives the grind that your life - and mine - was during their college years. The education afforded those people brought tremendous technological advances in every field from medicine to engineering to physics.

I would like to hope that the US, as a nation, finds it in its national interest to provide not merely incentives, but reasonable paths including publicly funded loans and grants, to educate its citizens. At the end of the day, an educated population benefits everyone.

Actually, it was the GOP who initially dubbed PPACA "Obamacare."

While the term "Obamacare" reads as disparaging the paln to certain parts of the GOP base, the use of the term may prove detrimental to the GOP in future, if it works. Given that MA enacted the same general plan as "Romneycare" based on Heritage Foundation ideas, and that it's generally worked OK in MA, the association of (the potential success of) individual-mandate private healthcare with the Democrats means the GOP threw away a mimetic advantage. If they'd called it "Romneycare Redux" or something like that - which is to say, associated it with its initial instantiation - they'd have kept a connection to the GOP.

I'm not too concerned about it. While it's not perfect, it's not godawful, either, and I'm curious to see how it'll play out. I'm hoping it does, not out of ideology, but because I know too many people who have been wiped out by medical costs when insurance dropped 'em -

This. I mean, private third-party validation is useful, but it shouldn't be the auditor of last resort.....