It's 2014, nobody cares. Don't be an attention-whore.

...of simpler times hundreds of years ago...

But isn't this the same reason that evangelicals have traditionally distrusted Catholicism, and one of the main selling points of fundamentalist Christianity? Catholicism is pretty much the exemplar of organized religion: doctrine is determined by the church hierarchy rather than the text of the Bible, which of course has been prone to all kinds of abuse, and the dependency on church membership for salvation gives the institution immense secular power. With fundamentalism, on the other hand, all that matters is accepting Jesus as lord and savior, and following the text of the Bible, which has been static for many centuries (ignoring the translation issue for now) and isn't prone to tampering by present-day authorities. (My understanding was that this is one of the same attractions of Islamic law elsewhere in the world.) Given the history of the Catholic church in medieval Europe, I can see why this would be attractive to the spiritually-minded (which I am definitely not).

And how do they port it across operating systems? Java based? How does the parallelism work?

Telling me how much it weighs isn't news for nerds, Taco.

The Chinese launch failure was especially disastrous because it crashed in a populated (civilian) area. At least most of the launch failures haven't been fatal (Challenger being the obvious exception).

The whole "commercial" launch thing is a misnomer. It's business as usual, except that this time NASA does less micromanagement, and there are some new faces at the table. That's all.

And the contracts won't be cost-plus, meaning the contractors don't have a blank check and projects will actually have to stay on budget. There may be legitimate arguments why this is a bad idea for a national space program (personally, I disagree), but it does represent a rather large change from the way launches were done in the past.

What is the case in which you would -not- call a biological change "evolution", and how is that different from the mere criteria for "reproduction"?

To start with, any time the change was brought about by deliberate, external intervention. For example, Bt-expressing corn, or glyphosphate-resistant crops, are obvious examples of "intelligent design" in the literal, non-pseudoscientific sense. We know this because "we" (i.e. humans) made these modifications ourselves, by a known and reproducible mechanism. I would argue that conventional breeding isn't really "evolution" either, although it relies on more natural phenomena rather than direct genome manipulation.

The fact that these biological changes are genuinely intelligent design does not prove the general case, however, because we've only had the technology for direct genetic manipulation for a few decades, and only know about selective breeding for a few millennia. For other biological changes, we assume evolution, because the directly observed mechanisms by which evolution operates rely on processes that we know have been possible for hundreds of millions of years (if not billions). If you want us to start considering intelligent design, you need to demonstrate a mechanism that predates human civilization.

we have not actually observed it happening

Um, wrong.

Fedora and systemd can DIAF.

Like "best practice" or "zero tolerance" - I hear it all the time, senior managers and leaders talking about how The Cloud has "infinite storage" or "we'll put it all in 1 big database".

It's not visionary to assume there's a machine large enough to solve your problem, it's daft, and it's lazy.

All because he sold questionably valuable software company in the Internet dotcom boom. The rest gets easier when you have millions in capital.

I mind Slashdot's endless fellating of him more than I mind him.

Pervasive surveillance is the point.

They clearly don't teach spelling at your socialist primary school.

Because everything you do is CPU bound?

Just shows what big pharma actually does for the money they get. Not much it seems.

Why would Big Pharma waste time trying to cure Ebola? It's a disease that affects a relatively tiny number of people in (mostly, until the past month) Third World nations. It is only notable due to the terrifyingly (and unusual) high mortality rate, but there is absolutely no financial incentive to go after it right now.