Hal was an early contributer to the Everything list, set up to discuss the ensemble everything theories of Max Tegmark and others like him.

In particuar the notion of the quantum theory of immortality received a lot of discussion. Hal followed the absolute SSA interpretation, which means he didn't believe in the quantum theory immortality. However, if he's wrong, I hope he didn't stay locked in for long!

It will happen, and usually sooner rather than later.

Problem is that instantly replacing said phone does not teach the right lessons to the kid either.

I first gave my son a mobile phone when he was about 10, when he started at a distant school involving taking public buses to get there. It was an old brick (late '90s nokia), and attached by a string to his schoolbag for the first few years. Even so, he still managed to lose it a couple of times (fortunately we always recovered it, even if it took several weeks).

Now at age 15 he's pretty good about it, so he gets a modern smart phone.

Having worked for one team that had a large, detailed coding standard - 100s of items, references to books that introduced another few 100 items, plus a whole bunch of undocumented standards that get discovered in code review, I can say that even after a year in the place, my coding performance was impacted, and coding reviews spent an enormous amount of time on style things.

In another place I worked at, there was perhaps only a dozen coding style items, every developer had their own style of working, and the crazy thing was it worked. You got used to the other coders' "accents" after a while, and the good thing was you didn't need to think too hard about the coding standard, nor waste much time in reviews.

So yeah - it depends.

Did anyone else think this was just a hole in the data? Or has the island been expunged already on GMaps.

They seem to be way overestimating the Windows numbers, and underestimating the Mac numbers

For many years, I've seen Windows share (as measured on various websites I own) hover around 70%, with MacOS climbing to around 20%. Linux has been stable in the range 5-10% - the remaining 1-2% is usually classified as "unknown".

My website data may be atypical, but it can't be _that_ atypical.

MSOffice works pretty well under wine. I do use it that way, as the native OS of my laptop is Linux, but one of my customers requires the use of MSOffice (not LibreOffice).

Its about Bose-Einstein statistics.

I use a small display (1000x600). Using a virtual desktop gets around this limitation. KDE has workspaces, but this is not as good. The toolbar at the bottom of the screen takes up valuable space. It took me ages to figure out how to turn off the mandatory screen lock (required renaming the kde locker executable so that it couldn't run).

Fvwm2 does all I need, plus runs rings around KDE performance-wise. The only thing it doesn't do (which might be handy), is support multiple screens properly.

Before IBM released their PC, these items were called microcomputers...

Just because one might believe in a Multiverse, doesn't make one not care about the future of one's current self. Your future states are what you should care about, not the other selves in the other universes - they're effectively different people, and because they're outside your causal influence, you should care less about them than people you are in causal contact with.

Still, as other posters have commented, the real reason why (some) physicists are mad, is the seeming giving up on scientific testibility. I think this is wrong - that scientific testibility is possible, in principle and practice, and the ontological benefits of a Mulitverse are worth it. I could recommend David Deutcsh's book "Fabric of Reality" for an excellent discussion, or my own book "Theory of Nothing" (gratutitous plug warning).

The title of this posting is wrong. The original article says that "free programs are not always cheaper".

There are, of course, plenty of situations where this is true: an example might be in the area of digital video editing, where free software is still inferior to turnkey solutions, and requires a lot more effort and patience to set up.

Conversely, there are plenty of situations where the per-seat license of proprietry software is crippling compared with using free software. High performance computing clusters are a classic example of this.

Both of these seemingly contradictory statements satisfy the original article's statement: "free programs are not always cheaper".