Also, the computer revolution really took off because computers became ever cheaper and easier to manufacture. The problem with Babbage's design was that a lifetime wasn't long enough to build one without CAD/CAM. So, even if he'd worked twice as fast and got the thing working, it would have been a one-off for another few decades.

If Babbage had succeeded, it would have sparked the "man as machine" line of thought that has changed so much in our society, and that could have changed the course of history in all sorts of ways. Maybe we would have had wetware trials rather than monkey trials. But I don't see mechanical computing ever getting past the early mainframe stage in terms of numbers of machines or direct relevance to the average person's life. The Babbage Clone industry would really have struggled.

Apart from the observation above that this story is from the Daily Mail (which, among other things, campaigned against vaccinations for many years - hardly a pro-science position), there are lots of reasons to walk out of a lecture. In the case of Richard Dawkins, the man is intentionally offensive about all forms of religious belief, to a point that many atheists in Britain do not want to be associated with his rhetoric. Presenting evolution is one thing. Littering that presentation with, eg describing religious faith as if it is a psychiatric disorder. (Before everyone agrees with him on this point, could we remember that this was the pretext for the forced "treatment" of thousands of people in the former USSR, and that something similar happened to homosexuals in many countries. In other words, it's an argument that lays the foundations for some shocking human rights abuses.)

Walking out during a Richard Dawkins rant may, in some cases, be a statement *for* reasonable intellectual dialogue rather than tub-thumping atheist fundamentalism.

I live in France, where you can't get kids into kindergarten or school without vaccination certificates. And they cut child benefit too. The result is a very high vaccination rate, and that protects those who cannot be vaccinated such as very young children.

First, books are not all entirely sequential. One of the reasons I still buy paper books on IT is that I reckon I can often find what I want faster than by searching. Yesterday I wanted to remind myself how to iterate through a directory using Perl. I know the recipe is in "Perl Cookbook". I know that book is within arm's reach. I remember the chapter is about a quarter of the way through. Flick flick - bingo, all in about ten seconds. If I don't know the book well I look at the contents page, which is no slower than skimming links on a screen. Yes, I'm sure a computer is faster in theory, but that isn't my subjective experience, and I don't think that's because I'm incapable of using a computer. Grabbing a book and flicking to roughly the right place is actually not a bad random access heuristic.

Second, sequential is often good. It often *is* the pedagogy. When I first get a book (not a cookbook...) I often start on page one and read to the end, maybe skipping bits that really don't interest me. Yes, that takes longer if I'm looking for one specific answer. But, if the book is well-constructed, it often gives me a much better feel for the overall subject than I would get by looking at 200 modules, each of which is designed to stand on its own. And, in practice, I'd probably only read 20 of those 200 modules because there's no narrative to pull me onto the next module.

A great example of this for me is "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl. You can google most of the answers to specific regex problems, and I did that a lot. Ploughing through hundreds of pages of dense and often obsessive text (breaking off from writing a chapter to get Richard Stallman to patch emacs regexes counts as obsessive, right?) meant that I finally understood how regexes work, what happens under the hood and why some apparently innocuous regexes never terminate.

Hypertext and modularity have their place. But I wouldn't dance on the grave of sequentially structured information just yet.

I think a more likely outcome is something like the patent pool that was forced into place by the US government around the 1920s to avoid a situation where, basically, no company could build a plane without infringing another company's patents. Otherwise, sooner or later, Android will be in trouble, but so will Apple and all other US companies.

Seriously, if you think the potential problem is in mud etc in your gutter get rid of the mud etc in your gutter! As others have said, it's vanishingly unlikely that you have a radiation problem, but getting your drainage to work properly will reduce all sorts of other risks, from bad smells and overflowing waste pipes to various insect breeding grounds.

The overwhelming proportion of OSS users, and even OSS enthusiasts, never contribute to OSS, so the whole premise of the claim seems flawed to me.

There are idiots on all sides, and maybe sometimes I'm one of them. But, in this particular case, it's not a question of "world view". If you take a world view in the sense of looking at the world as a whole, the whole of American politics is shifted to the right. That's not a statement about "world view", it's a truth claim that can be validated or falsified by looking at the evidence, eg the sort of policies held by "left wing" American parties and how the compare with the policies of "right wing" parties elsewhere.

I'd respectfully suggest that your "world view" simply ignores where the rest of the world is on these issues. Rather than comparing democrats, republicans, Fox or CNN with some baseline derived from worldwide trends, it uses a baseline based on some definition of "the American Way" or something. If you only compare America with itself, you magnify the differences within America. If you stand back and view the range of mainstream American views from a worldwide perspective, all those American views seem to bunch on one end of the global range. That's all the post that started this was saying.

You may disagree, and that's absolutely fine. But if you want to make that argument, show us were, for example, any mainstream American party wants to spend more on public healthcare than the current French, "hard right" administration, or which mainstream American party is arguing for five weeks a year of paid vacation per year (also in France), or for a legally binding 35-hour working week (the whole of the EU), or... Again, it's not a world view thing, it's a "what does the evidence say?" thing.

If someone here claimed that computers ran on steam and doughnuts, would 1000 people saying "That's wrong!" prove systematic bias?

Of course comments like this suggest that some other system has benefits! What exactly are you saying - that the rest of the world should understand that "America is best in every possible way imaginable" is the only comment that is welcome? My experience of discussing all sorts of subjects with Americans in all sorts of contexts is that the answer is generally "yes". No criticism of any sort is welcome from elsewhere, and if you break that rule everything you say forever more is written off because you "hate America." This is rather depressing, and also rather self-defeating.

Europe (and most of the rest of the democratic world) is far more left-leaning than the US, which was exactly what

There is not a single media organisation in the United States that espouses any kind of opinion that's even remotely "left of center"

was saying a few posts above. If you take the world as a reference, it's hard to find anything remotely mainstream in the US is that is left of centre by world standards. That's not an America-hating statement. It's as close to a factual statement as it is possible to get in political broad brush strokes.

Try translating the above few posts into the realm of IT and you might see the problem. It goes something like this:

A: Android has very little market share
B: Um, no, that isn't true
A: AAAAGH, YOU HATE ME!!!

and then you mod up A.

I'm a European and, from where I'm sitting, the problem isn't cultural bias on either side. It's the way any criticism of any aspect of American culture results in "individuals, like you, generally believe they're far more civilized (excuse me--civilised) and above such things".

Suggesting that America is far to the right compared with most other countries isn't about hating America. It isn't even necessarily a bad thing. It's a simple observation. Most of the policies of American democrats look moderate-right in a European context. The current French government is hard right by European standards, despite being more interventionist and more wedded to the public sector than any American politician I have ever heard. Nationalising popular music, anyone? Imposing a legal quota for French music played on private radio stations? Government purchases of old cars about every second year? Social charges that are over a third of income for most people? Five weeks statutory vacation a year plus a dozen national holidays? How much of this is in the Democrat manifesto?

So when right-leaning Americans talk about Democrats as if they are virtually communists, it really is very hard for anyone outside America not to burst out laughing.

I tried really hard to talk myself into Python a few months ago. Bought and read several books, wrote some code... and then discovered that the 2.6/3.0 thing is still a mess, with half the libraries on each side of this enduring divide that the Python community insisted at the time would never exist because the Python community would never have a legacy code problem because, well, it just wouldn't. AFAICS this disaster came about because the most important thing was not to do a single thing the Perl way. Unfortunately, excellent backwards compatibility (as in "works across the decades") was one Perl feature that really was worth copying.

I develop on Linux. The rest of my organisation uses Macs. After wasting several hours trying to get a very simple Python program to run unmodified across both platforms (PIL being the specific problem) we gave up and went back to a mix of older technology, all of which works perfectly across platforms. It's a pity, because Python looks really cute in theory, but in practice it was just an anagram of "long day", at least for our use case.

So how about Emacs/XEmacs, which was arguably the first great open source fork? Both projects are still around, but I don't get the impression that the fork (XEmacs) has run away with the ball by any stretch of the imagination.

Any chance someone could explain how this works in Florida at present? I'm trying to work out what the point would be of alcohol testing if anyone who is likely to be over the limit can refuse to take the test...

The first commercial ARM OS, in the mid-80s. It booted in a couple of seconds (often from ROM), had co-operative multitasking, anti-alised fonts and booted in a couple of seconds.