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Comment Regardless of evolution... (Score 0) 344

"biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life" That is just not right. The theory certainly has its weaknesses and so those should be taught. They are throwing the baby out with the bath water. I do not support teaching a creationist viewpoint either in public schools.

Comment Re:Improve the Republic .. not the democracy (Score 1, Interesting) 182

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.

"From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

"From bondage to spiritual faith;
  from spiritual faith to great courage;
  from courage to liberty;
  from liberty to abundance;
  from abundance to selfishness;
  from selfishness to apathy;
  from apathy to dependence;
  from dependency back again into bondage."

GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - RMS steps down as Emacs maintainer (gnu.org)

sigzero writes: "Short but sweet. RMS is stepping down:

From: Richard Stallman
Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500
Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand
over Emacs development to them."

Programming

Submission + - Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 is out (www.tcl.tk)

davygrvy writes: "Latest Release: Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 (Dec 20, 2007)

The 8.5 release was a long time in development, and brought about several good enhancements to Tcl/Tk.
Source releases, the exact changes and ChangeLog for each release are available in the SourceForge Tcl project's file distribution area:

Download Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Source Releases

Download ActiveTcl 8.5.0 Binaries

The change information is also included in each distribution.

Remember: For other ways to obtain Tcl/Tk (such as binary distributions, or different versions) see the main Tcl/Tk page. Highlights of Tcl 8.5
  • Speed: 8.5 now runs 10% faster than 8.4 with bytecode improvements, object caching and reduced memory usage.
  • Bignums: Tcl now supports arbitrary-precision integers, which improves math operations on large integers.
  • Safer interps: Tcl's powerful safe interpreter mechanism now has improved control of time and command limits in slave interpreters.
  • clock command: More robust implementation of command for specifying time, with significant l10n and i18n improvements.
  • dict command: New data structure that allows access to data by value rather than a variable name, which is substantially faster.
  • Additional improvements: Faster list search, new and improved mathematics procedures, anonymous procedures, new ways to package Tcl extensions, Tcl-level custom channel types, file and line location information for each command, and more.
Highlights of Tk 8.5
  • New modern theming engine: New and complementary widgets that make use of platform-specific theming on Mac OS X and Windows to better fit in with those environments, and feature an improved look and feel under X11. (screenshots)
  • New widgets: Part of the themed widget set, Tk now has core notebook, combobox, treeview and progressbar widgets.
  • text widget: Smooth scrolling, widget peering, and improved procedures for counting and replacing text.
  • Font rendering: Now uses anti-aliased text under X11, and a more modern text engine (ATSUI) on Mac OS X.
  • Additional improvements: Window transparency, new fullscreen option for windows, enhancements to specific widgets and window layout, and more.


There is of course much, much more. See 8.5 Changes on the wiki for a complete list of new features."

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