Yup. But the fossil record tends to be rather sketchy, and has little concern for what we consider our "needs".

Well, I don't think that quite matches the scientific concept of "species". By your definition, almost all species who were alive 50,000 years ago would be considered extinct, but hardly any biologists would agree with that. It's true that no humans alive today have 100% Neanderthal genes, but it's also nearly certain that there are no living humans with 100% Cro-Magnon genes, either. What happened would be considered a mixing of several human sub-species after migrations of one or more African groups into Eurasia. The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing. This sort of thing happens in species all the time, when conditions allow such genetic mixing, and the result is rarely considered a new species.

The fact is that modern humans are all one species. We can and do interbreed when groups mingle, and there are no groups of modern humans that are genetically incompatible. If sub-species "disappear" by genetic mixing, that is usually not called an extinction event. It's just the routine and normal mingling of subspecies.

An interesting contrast is that most North American duck species are known to hybridize occasionally, and the offspring are usually fertile. Does this mean they're really all one species? No, because they all mingle a lot, but interbreeding is rare. They have "behavioral" species-separation features, mostly based on female mate choice. The females are mostly all mottled brown (protective coloring), and the males often approach females of other species (because they can't tell them apart either ;-). But the females usually only accept males that have the "right" color markings; the others are ugly to them. This suffices to keep the species separate, though there is probably a very low level of genetic interchange between many of the species.

But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).

I shouldn't have to remind you of the things in the modern world that depends on real-time instructions from software.

You are not one of those things! You GIVE orders to computers, not take! The computer is supposed to be your bitch. Thirty years ago people worried about Terminators, and now I find out that all Skynet has to do, is nicely tell people to jump off cliffs. I can't wait until Google Surgeon, when everyone thinks they should just blindly do what they're told, preferably with impatience and in real time.

Google Surgeon [speaking slowly]: "Snip the art--"

Doctor: [snip] "Yeahyeah doesanyoneknowhow tospeedupthisthing'sspeech?"

Google Surgeon: "--ery, but first, clamp off the blood supply so the patient doesn't bleed to death."

It is positively dangerous when you have to go round a roundabout twice for it to catch up! (In a 40 ton rig).

WTF? How can a mapping program possibly be dangerous or time-sensitive?

(Please don't tell me you are one of those MORONS who relies on software for real-time instructions, instead of having your own plan that was possibly originally aided by software. If you're a moron, then it's not the software that's dangerous; it's that some even bigger, stupider moron allowed you to drive a 40 ton vehicle (or even a 1 ton vehicle) on roads that might have other people within a quarter mile.)

All I can think of, is that the slowness is somehow keeping you from being able to review your route before you it's time for you to leave, so that you end up driving faster to catch up.

Florian, I was anything but wrong about you! Look at all of that self-justifying blather!

Anyway, I have better uses of my time than to waste another minute with you.

I'm really not interested in hearing from you any longer. It's very clear that we'll never agree on anything, and the fact is I don't consider you someone whose opinion I value or who is worthy of any of my time.

Just troll people with the question mark.

That should be "SCO and MS arguments".

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

It's a different grade of fighting, tho. Males fight until everyone settles out where they are in the social hierarchy, then it stops; this stable endpoint is disrupted when the goal is always promotion. Kinda like always adding a new male to the mix.

But the root difference is that males fight to secure their own status, while females fight to kill anyone they see as competition. Males beat each other up, then go have a beer. But when females see another female as a rival, it never ends til one is dead. Can't quite get away with murder in the office, but the virtual hairpulling just goes on and on.

Depends if the job requires physical strength.

My concern would be more along the lines of what I've observed in all-female offices. The social environment is a lot more likely to get ugly for those of lower status than when there's even one male present.

Incidentally this is nothing unique to humans; in most animals, an all-female group fights a lot, but add even one male and things calm down. All-male groups may fight at first but soon find equilibrium. All-female groups never give it up until all the "targets" are dead.

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg issue. Debian doesn't get the help because Debian doesn't make itself worthy of getting the help. There have previously been paid developers working on Debian, they simply weren't paid by Debian.

Copyrights don't apply in this case. Patents might. The Supreme Court has recently been struggling with drawing a line between "abstract ideas" (which are not patent-eligible) and concrete methods (which are patent eligible). In general, you can't patent the math per se, but you can patent (for example) a space craft programmed to perform that particular maneuver. As applied to ship building, if it's sufficiently novel, you may be able to patent a ship having certain hull parameters, but you won't generally get a patent just for "make it BIGGAR!" The patentability will usually lie in your solution to the problems you encountered in the process of making it bigger, which means that if somebody finds a different way to make it bigger, you may not be able to stop them. (This isn't legal advice, of course.)