Only placing the company's reputation at risk will provide sufficient motivation for it to assign such a problem the proper priority.

Guess what? The vast majority of them never will use algebra in real life. Most jobs simply don't require it.

Then you don't understand algebra. Everyone uses algebra, whether they realize it or not. E.g. You are at the supermarket and you see milk is on special: "Get two for $5.00." Most people can figure out that one costs $2.50. In other words, 2x = 5, solve for x.

I will, however, agree that most people never learned it well enough to use it for anything more complicated. Your comment proves my point: "When you don't understand something, it's easy to say it has no purpose".

When you don't understand something, it's easy to say it has no purpose. It sounds just like kids in high school whining about algebra when they don't see how they will use it in "real" life.

laughed pretty hard at this one. He's blowing smoke. His own damn cars cost nearly that much!

I am pleased to say that I was the one who first added Vim to the Sunsite Linux archive back in 1993. I had transferred to a company which did its development on Windows (yuk) and went looking for a vi-clone which I could use on it. I came across Vim and found it to be very solid, but with some bugs to fix. I regularly emailed Bram on these issues and he was very responsive to my reports and suggestions on how to improve its tag support (vis-a-vis ctags). Back then, the newly-available Linux archive only had the vi-clone Elvis, which wasn't nearly as good. So, thinking that I had discovered a gem, I uploaded Vim to the Sunsite Linux archive and eventually it got picked up for use as the resident vi editor by each of the Linux distributors.

In 1996, I developed Exuberant Ctags as a better ctags. Bram started including it in his Vim distributions and our programs were paired together in much the same was that Elvis was packaged with its own ctags clone, and Emacs was packaged with its own ctags. Eventually, Exuberant Ctags became large enough that it caused the Vim distribution to become too large to fit on a 5.25-inch floppy and Bram said it was time to let them grow separately. Exuberant Ctags, as well, got picked up by the Linux distributors as the resident ctags program.

I have always enjoyed working with Bram over the years and wish I could have met him. He is a very pleasant and easy person to work with, very accommodating, and very bright. I think very highly of him and I am glad to see his editor become one of the bulwarks of Linux distributions, as well as used on many other platforms.

Darren Hiebert

So what's your basically saying is that researchers found that an idea that has already been rejected by over 90% of people won't take hold in those who already rejected it. These researchers are brilliant!

The flaw in this reasoning is that before the percentage holding the idea reaches 10%, it must be less than 10%. But the assertion is that it cannot grow perceptibly if held by less than 10%. Built-in contradiction.

Richard Stallman already warned us about this threat to liberty 11 years ago in The Right to Read.