Thanks for that informative comment. I haven't had such terrible luck running GTK+ applications cross-platform, but you (and others) have clearly had some very bad experiences. And I readily admit that getting GTK+ to work on OSX is a pain. It really is too bad that the support isn't better. There are some good ideas in the GTK+ toolkit, and Cairo is nice for graphics work, but I agree -- developers ultimately want something that "just works".

There's nothing polite about derogatory hyperbole. The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all. In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms. I don't think that can reasonably be described as "utter rubbish".

Developing GTK+ apps on OSX is not as easy as it should be, but in my experience, at least, it's not all that difficult, either. It would be great to see this improved, though.

Betteridge's law of headlines says the answer is... wait a minute. TFA says the answer is "yes"?!?

Does this researcher know she has disproved one of the most oft-cited Slashdot axioms?

From the summary:

Encryption everywhere is great. But as long as the majority of us remain willing to hand over everything about our personal lives to Facebook, Google, etc., then mass surveillance by either private entities or governments will remain ridiculously easy. To me, that seems like the really hard problem to solve. There is no way those companies will deny themselves access to their users' unencrypted data.

Both of the linked articles present this as if it is a major problem requiring federal congressional action. Several other posters here have pointed out, though, that actually pulling something back out of public domain via this copyright "loophole" might actually be extremely difficult or even (practically) impossible.

It is perhaps telling that neither article presents a single example of a piece of work that was initially donated to the public domain by its author(s) and then removed from the public domain via this mechanism. So, does anyone know if this has ever actually happened? Given that neither article gives even one such example, I suspect this is not really a problem at all from a pragmatic point of view. Attempting to "fix" it by asking Congress to pass new copyright legislation could even backfire, because the additional provisions and changes that would inevitably get added to any such bill might end up creating new, real problems.

From the summary:

Wikipedia proved that "no cost and good enough most of the time" outcompetes "expensive and authoratative/reliable". I think this has a lot more to do with Wikipedia's success than the supposed quality of the contents.

Wikipedia also wins on its huge breadth. If what you want from your encyclopedia is plot summaries of television shows and extensive biographies of those shows' fictional characters, Wikipedia is really your only choice.

Exactly. One could use the exact same study design to "test" the hypothesis that any or all of the things you mentioned are why we evolved language, and the results would undoubtedly be the same. The only general conclusion one might draw is that humans evolved language to more effectively communicate with each other, which is practically self-evident.

That, and also that humans who spend their entire lives depending on language to communicate with one another can't communicate as effectively when they suddenly aren't allowed to use language for a few minutes. Who'd have thunk?

It must be fun to work in a field where experiments like this can get you published in a Nature-affiliated journal.

From what I can tell from TFA, this study purports to test the hypothesis that language evolved as a means to transmit the knowledge of how to make tools. The researchers found that present-day humans (college students, to be exact) can best teach other how to make a stone tool if they are allowed to talk to each other. The authors interpret this as evidence in support of their hypothesis.

The obvious problem, though, is that they ran the experiment on a bunch of subjects that have spent their entire lives (minus the first year or so) using language as their primary means of communication. So what result would you expect with this study population? The experiment is hardly a test of the conditions under which early language might have evolved.

You think that's why Brownback got re-elected as governor? If your analysis were even remotely correct, he would have had absolutely no chance at winning on Tuesday: he's led your state to huge upcoming budget deficits, an increased poverty rate, much lower economic growth than all four neighboring states, and a downgraded state credit rating.

Yet, despite all of the above, Brownback still kept his job, because, you know... "liberals and taxes are bad." Never mind if the alternative is flushing your state down the toilet.

I had the same thought. The cynic in me thinks that the big tech players are pushing these "learn to code" initiatives because they see it as a way to gain much lower operating expenses in the future. If they can eventually flood the labor market with a huge excess of coders, reduced wages and benefits will become the norm.

It looks like the majority of the top 20 most cited papers cover new methods or tools (e.g., a new lab technique or a new software program), not new fundamental scientific discoveries (e.g., the structure of DNA or expansion of the universe). I guess this isn't really surprising, but it is interesting. One could conclude that scientists who want to make a major impact on their field should spend their time inventing new methods for doing fundamental research and let other scientists actually do the research.

From TFA:

What that really means is that Airbus wants to turn the entire cabin into a window.

Also from TFA:

Well, I guess that technically, Airbus would be "getting rid of the windows", but if the end result is that everyone on the plane has a better view, I don't think it supports TFA's argument at all.

That's correct -- natural selection can only act on heritable traits. The post I was replying to, though, was certainly not making that argument. Instead, it seemed to suggest that the mixing of alleles during sexual reproduction somehow made it impossible to distinguish between "evolution via genes" and "purely environmental factors winnowing a population", and that truly makes no sense.

I am also curious -- can you give us any biologically relevant example of differential reproductive fitness in a population due to entirely non-heritable traits?

Of course not. Nobody said that individual lizards who decided to spend more time above ground would magically grow larger foot pads. If you read TFA, you will see that the authors observed two phenomena. First, they saw an almost immediate shift in the behavior of the native lizards following the arrival of the invasive anoles -- the native anoles spent more time on higher perches. The second change they observed was the increase in foot pad size that occurred over multiple generations. The first change was most likely a rapid modification of individual lizard's foraging behaviors; the second change was due to natural selection causing the population to shift toward larger foot pads.