"Formal specification language" is "formal" because it's a formal language in the same sense that any of the many dialects of "regular expressions" or even PHP itself is a formal language. Nothing more, nothing less. The fact that you keep calling C/C++ standard specifications "informal" means that you're just parrotting buzzwords without actually understanding them. When you talk about formal specification languages or any formal languages at all, the word "informal" is inapplicable because it's a completely different kind of formality (syntactic formality) than the word "informal" implies (semantic formality). The word "informal" has meaning only when you want to make a distinction between formalised natural language and non-formalised natural language.

Just to make it clear, by "looking for markers" I meant developing a new test for the disease.

Whether or not those 10 proteins are markers for Alzheimer's is not the issue at all. When you look for markers, the search goes this way: disease => chemicals. But when you start testing patients for markers, you're actually using the inverse of that relationship: chemicals => disease. If the disease is rare, false positives will vastly outnumber the number of patients really afflicted by the disease even though you test for the right markers.

There are 3 important percentages for disease tests:
- How many people are afflicted by the disease in the general population?
- How many afflicted people get positive result?
- How many healthy people get positive result (false positive)?

I'll give you an example. Let's say we have some test with perfect accuracy (100% of people afflicted by the disease get positive test) but the test has 10% rate of false positives. We'll test 1000 people.

If the disease afflicts 50% of the population, about 550 people will get positive result but about 50 of them are healthy.

If the disease afflicts 10% of the population, about 190 people will get positive result but about 90 of them are healthy.

If the disease afflicts 1% of the population, about 109 people will get positive result but about 99 of them are healthy.

If the disease afflicts 0,1% of the population, about 101 people will get positive result but about 100 of them are healthy.

Is the problem clear now?

My distro does rolling updates so there's no "major upgrade" to do every year or so. The only big change since 2006 was the switch form KDE 3.5 to 4.x. Everything else installed in the background while I was doing something more interesting.

Allow me to brag a bit: I've switched to Linux in 2006. Since then, I've made a complete hardware replacement twice. Each hardware replacement meant only about 2 hours of downtime while I was installing the packages essential for work and copying the whole /home and most of /etc directories from the old machine. After that, I was back in business pretty much exactly as I've left the old machine (minus some less important packages that were still installing in the background for another couple of hours). It's really awesome when you don't need to spend a month manually reinstalling and reconfiguring all the software you had on the previous system.

Democracy is slow and it takes tons of work to agree on anything. That's not a bug, that's a feature.

When the people were marching right outside their front door wielding pitchforks and torches.

As long as any company holds such position, the Armageddon is just around the corner. Bailout was not a solution, it simply delayed the inevitable.

Who the hell cares about that? Last time I checked, the perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis were helping FBI prosecute the victims! That's the real problem here.

The world is in uproar over NSA and the whole US Government STILL can't get themselves to rule those actions illegal and stop them. Why would you expect them to do so quietly when continuing business as usual seems to work fine for them despite all the outrage outside?

The analogy is not about victims of either evil at all. It's all about people who did nothing to stop evil that was right in front of them. It's about people who thought it was not their problem. And most importantly, it's about people who made themselves blind to the evil they were actively participating on as expendable grunts because "it was their job."

In that sense, Holocaust was only made possible by "people living and working in the real world." Because without all those otherwise completely normal good people who were "just doing their job," the real monsters could never get that far.

Go thank nVidia for keeping the specs secret for so long. Open drivers for current generation AMD hardware beat the proprietary driver hands down in 2D performance and stability, they're a little behind in 3D performance but close to catching up.

I also find it very comforting to know that we'll actually have a working driver for current-generation graphics hardware AT ALL even after so long.

Pretty well. And the hardware specs released by AMD are not complete by a long shot.

Driver development for single piece of hardware requires pretty much fixed amount of work. In that case, you can use time as substitute for manpower.

Yes, he often did that too. But most of the product ideas he copied were already discarded by the company that invented them as useless toys with no market potential. Jobs took the discarded designs, polished them a bit, hyped them to stratosphere and then successfully brought them to the market. That does deserve some credit as innovation.