In the 1990s, I wanted to get into developing GUI apps for Linux. The single biggest reason why I gave up on it was that the Linux GUI effort fractured into KDE and Gnome camps.

At the time, I figured that one of the two would win out over the other. There was no telling which might win, and I was reluctant to back what might be the losing horse. This was a serious demotivator. Of course, 15 years later, we've ended up with the worst of both worlds: many Linux installations take up the disk space for both, and we've got two unharmonized APIs continuing to fight for a following.

With MacOS, there is no question what API you should use. Apple offers a very clear path. For that reason, I feel more confident developing for that platform.

I work at a company of around 8000 people, and I regularly use software in all of these categories.

Sorry, but this is bull. Your statement that "voice recognition is at its limits phonetically" is just wrong. I work in the voice recognition industry, and in the past five years, I've seen the recognition error rate markedly and measurably go down, and this trend is continuing.

There are actually two kinds of models involved in voice recognition:

1) the acoustic model (which has to do with looking at a sequence of time slices of the acoustic signal and working out what sequence of phonemes could most likely have given rise to it). You say that voice recognition is at its limits phonetically, but these models are actually getting better over time with larger sets of training data, and the improved models measurably result in a lowered word error rate.

2) the language model (which has to do with specifying which words exist, and in what order they are most likely to occur). These language models can be very simple, as in the case of a yes/no question in a phone-based app (your model might accept "yes" and "yes ma'am", but not any arbitrary English utterance); or they can be very large, as in the case of a general-purpose dictation application.

In conjunction with the recognizer, what these two models give you is a raw string of recognized words. What sort of processing you do on that string is a separate question. There are obviously all sorts of things you can do with the string. The parsing and processing techniques are getting more sophisticated, and are getting integrated with other systems in interesting ways. This is largely a separate question from the accuracy of the string itself, which is the output of the recognizer (I say "largely" because your application might activate a different language model based on the current context, which does affect recognition accuracy).

Suppose there was a large apartment building, and child pornography was found in one apartment. Should the government have the right to indefinitely hold the belongings of the residents of all of the other apartments in the building?

In the very unlikely event that a kind-hearted, mentally disabled person could become dictator, that person would not be dictator for very long. The first concern of an individual who is in power is to stay in power, because he or she is continually in competition with others who want power.

If a leader stays in power for a while without doing ruthless things, it just means that that leader had the good fortune of not being presented with situations where ruthlessness was required. I doubt that this happens very often.

How does the size of the user base of Dancer compare to that of Catalyst? How do the growth curves compare? Are these things known?

Having a larger support community is one factor I need to consider, partly because it's easier to get help when I need it, and partly because a more widely-used framework is likely to continue to be supported over time. The inherent technical superiority is, of course, another factor to consider.

What do you guys think of Catalyst these days? Does Catalyst still have enough support behind it to make it worth my while to sit down and really learn Catalyst?

This is assuming that I already know Perl well, and that I'm also not interested in switching to another language at the present time.

I've still got the old Apple ][ wire-bound manuals. Yeah, I know, it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever again go poking into the assembly code of Apple DOS, but I've just never been able to consign those manuals to the trash bin.

I've also still got the manuals for the TRS-80 Color Computer. I can still flip them open and immediately remember writing programs using those exact BASIC commands.

You missed the joke. CinthIA = CIA. The woman whose voice is used for one of the numbers stations is known as Cynthia because of the station's supposed connection to the CIA.

This is precisely my point: the free software community should have thrown away one of the two APIs ten years ago.

Choice is not always a good thing. Would you be better off if you had a "choice" of different voltages and socket types for your various household appliances? Is it important to be able to choose a hair dryer which runs on 60vDC and a toaster which runs on 150vAC? Oh, sure, you could have all kinds of voltage adapters for "interoperability", but there's no need for any adapters if everything runs on the same current.

The functional differences between Gnome and KDE are trivial; they are minor variations on the same window/widget paradigm found on MacOS and Windows. If there are individual differences in taste, they would be better handled as user preference settings within a single environment.

I think the free software community has really shot itself in the foot by continuing this division between Gnome and KDE.

Around ten years ago, I was interested in building some GUI apps for Linux, but there was no clear path as to which of the two GUI APIs I should learn. I found the lack of a clear path to be enough of a discouragement that I ended up losing interest. I doubt that I'm the only one who has felt that way about it.

Paying your taxes is one of your basic duties as a citizen. Other than jury duty, taxes are the only compulsory duty expected of U.S. citizens (we don't even have compulsory military service, much less any form of conscripted labor). In case you need to have this spelled out, taxes are what make it possible for us to have roads, public schools, a police department, an army and a navy, and so on.

Of course, there's plenty of room for debate about how much we should be taxed, and how the money can most wisely be spent. Liberals have a particular view on this question.

Don't confuse this question with the question of "freedom". You may not agree with the liberal view on taxation and government spending, but you're just plain mistaken if you think that liberals oppose freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and so on. Liberals strongly support those freedoms. There is nothing in the liberal view on taxation and government budgeting which contradicts those freedoms.

To answer your question about age grading, you have to look at a population at more than one point in time. In cases where this has been done (e.g. speakers of central American Spanish), what we find is that young adults have the highest percentage of the incoming feature (higher than both children and older adults). As those same young adults get older, their use of the incoming feature does decline some, but not down to the levels of the previous generation. The 40-year-olds today have a higher percentage of the incoming variant than the 40-year-olds twenty years ago.

Variants in speech can serve as social markers which you use to identify yourself as a member of a group. As a guess, I imagine that the slight decline in use of the incoming variant as you get older has less to do with "learning standard English better", and more to do with it not being quite as important to sound cool as you get older. As a 40-year-old, you probably still wear clothes which identify you as a member of a certain group, but you probably don't dress in quite as trendy a way as you did when you were 20.

Actually, it appears that AAVE is a product of the Great Northern Migration of African-Americans in the early 20th century. Prior to that time, there was little to no distinction between the dialects of southern whites and southern blacks.

The pieces of evidence for this claim include:

• Phonograph recordings made in the 1930's of former slaves
• Diaries and letters written by semi-literate slaves and former slaves in the 19th century. Since the writers were semi-literate, the spelling is a better indication of the pronunciation than standard spelling would be.

• Something which linguists call "age grading". If you take speakers of AAVE today and compare younger speakers with older speakers, the younger speakers actually have a higher percentage occurrence of the distinctive features of AAVE. This suggests that AAVE is becoming increasingly distinct from standard American English over time.

There are other pieces of evidence as well, but those are some of the important ones.

Your statement is uninformed. ADHD is real.

I agree that ADHD is overdiagnosed, but ADHD is a real pathological condition with a biological substrate. It is a matter of ongoing research by neurologists. Those who have ADHD are not just "kids being kids".

I had a severe case of ADHD as a child, back in the 1970's when the name for the condition was "Hyperactivity". I knew perfectly well that I would keep getting in trouble and be rejected by my peers if I engaged in behaviors such as singing songs in class at inappropriate times, but I could not help it. No amount of punishment from my teachers or parents made the slightest difference. I would continually resolve to stop misbehaving and to start paying attention in class, and I certainly punished myself enough for being a bad kid, but I see now that no amount of willpower could change the basic biological problem.

When I finally got a correct diagnosis and started meds (which, in those days, was Dexedrine), the problematic behaviors stopped as abruptly as if a switch had been flipped. My grades immediately went from all F's to all A's. My teachers, who did not know that I had started meds, were astonished at the sudden change.

Fortunately, I largely outgrew the condition in early adulthood. That is not uncommon in cases of childhood ADHD.