Then explain why discovering that the morning star and the evening star were observationally the same should mean that the religion reacted by merging the god of war and the goddess of love.

Our theories don't consider religious beliefs to be scientific and effective, but they did. So it was science. And they performed experiments (observational) that caused them to revise theories.

That was why I mentioned them. Also the scoffing and denials on Slashdot. I, personally, again think that there's not enough evidence to decide.

If you patent it, and the government considers it valuable enough, they can just take the patent (and classify it so that you can't reveal it).

If you patent it, and you don't have a stable of lawyers and an indefinitely large war chest, then a major corporation can just take it, rephrase the patent, and patent it themselves.

If it's a trade secret, and you can produce a working plant (wouldn't need to be more than a pilot plant) then you can sell the secret to someone who can afford to get into patent battles.

Actually astrology was a science. It was quite successful at predicting eclipses, and determining when to plant which crop. Also at scheduling religious festivals.

Perhaps, though, instead of saying it was a science I should say it was engineering, but it did have (several different) theoretical backstories, so science is probably better. It caused the Babylonians considerable grief when they discovered that the goddess of love was also the god of war. So it even made reliable predictions...that people were loath to accept.

Now none of this has much to do with what you see in daily newspapers, or even what professional astrologists predict. but that is really "cargo cult astrology", it copies the outward shape of the real thing, but it's missing the genuine internals. It derives more from Roman fascination with various means of prognostication than from actual living astrology.

Things aren't that simple. The early transistors weren't reproducible...not predictably. And nobody knew why. It eventually turned out that they could be poisoned by trace amount of materials below the amounts chemically detectable at the time. IIRC it took over a decade of very careful work to figure that our, or it may just have been to figure out how to prevent the poisoning. And that had significant money behind it. (I think it was pre-breakup AT&T.)

Now I haven't seen anything convincing that indicates that cold fusion will work, but I also haven't heard of any significant investigation. Merely various spot checks by people who say either they can't get it to work or "I'll sell you this black box.". I'm dubious about its actually working, but not convinced, and don't see any reason that anyone else is convinced...either way.

To me this seems like "this is a low probability proposal which has some claimed marginal evidence and no reasonable theoretical justification and no convincing evidence". Remember just how difficult it is to actually prove that something is false, where you don't know care what mechanism that might be causing it. Were I investing, I don't think I'd invest in it, because even though the potential payoff is astronomical, the probability is extremely small, and the difficulty in reaching a definite negative proof is extreme. And other people have already failed to reach a positive proof. And only a positive proof has a reasonable payoff. (Buying Lockheed stock seems like a better use of the money.)

But remember that when Gnome went from Gnome2 to Gnome3, KDE4 became the superior choice. And the appear to be an equivalent of xfce appears to be X Window (and it's associated tools).

Analogies are always tricky, of course.

Sorry, but *you* are an anonymous coward. This means that your assertions have no value. There's no particular reason to believe anything you claim about yourself.

You could make logical arguments, or refer to other sources, and those would be reasonable contributions, but assertions aren't useful.

P.S.: I also dislike and distrust systemd. But this doesn't cause me to accept your assertions.

testing has had some really bad problems with systemd. But it *is* testing.

OTOH, I see not one single advantage to me in using systemd. I see several advantages in avoiding it. E.g., I have a non-standard partition arangement that I frequently need to hand edit into fstab. I'm not convinced that this will remain possible under systemd, as it seems to frequently say "my way or the highway". This causes me to lack any trust in it remaining usable. (It currently is usable, but then I switched to Ubuntu to experiment with it without rendering my system unbootable. So in a reasonably debugged system it works. But it isn't nearly as flexible. I don't trust the intentions of its developers. And when an error in the log files gets responded to with a "won't fix" reply, I feel my distrust is vindicated. I'm also disturbed that they are expanding it to include its own terminal interface. This seems to clearly be an embrace and extend operation. The existence of the third step is, at this point, merely a hypothesis, but the circumstantial evidence is suggestive.

I don't know about him, but I date the automagic systems back to early versions of Mandrake Linux.

Please note: There's no reason a felxible desktop system can't be sysV init. Many have been. In fact, almost all of them until extremely recently. Debian Etch was an excellent desktop system. I've disliked many of the changes since then. (The only one I found useful was the automatic identification of SCSI devices w/o regard to boot order, though UUIDs are clumsy to type, and I which that a simpler system specific id could have been used.)

Do you imagine that you provided evidence?

Admittedly, once evidence was provided, I would attempt to judge it's quality before accepting it, but I didn't see that you even offered any.

I wish I could believe he was serious.

What else is there to say. When I've been lied to enough I stop believing. Sometimes cynical is just realistic.

I'm sure that you're right, but perhaps you're ignoring one fact. Projects has an optimum number of contributors. Getting more than the optimum number is an actual hindrance to success. What that optimum number is varies with the project and with the management system. Sometimes the important thing is do get reasonable decisions made quickly. Sometimes it's important to smooth over people's feelings.

Linux has done well enough that I suspect that Linus has made nearly optimal choices given the available resources including his available time and energy, but also including the organizational structure, the management tools (both code and personnel), etc. I do feel that he might do a bit better if he had to make a few fewer personal decisions, but then some people would feel snubbed. I know that frequently things have gone back and forth several times before Linus acted in such a way as to close off debate (temporarily).

Guido manages. I'm not sure about Larry Wall, but I suspect so. Walter Bright manages.

Different people have different management styles. Linus' style *is* rather abrasive at times, but he gets the job done. (As do Guido and Walter Bright. Perl, however, seems to have stagnated.)

P.S.: I'm not a user of Perl, so someone more familiar with the community may well correct my opinions as an outside observer.

It's not an arbitrary point of "divergence", it's a retrospective one. You can't know that these two individuals who are siblings are members of a different species until considerably later you observe that their descendants can no longer interbreed (or never choose to do so). Picking those two individuals as the fork isn't arbitrary, but it's also impossible to do at the time, you can only do it by looking at their descendants.

It's not so much the generation time, as that rodents generally have a faster mutation rate than primates. Generation time is also significant, though as it allows less-viable variations to be more quickly weeded out.