In fact, Newton did this himself.

I recall a story of some mathematical puzzle or hypothesis which had been unsolved by a number of mathematicians for many years. It was brought to Newton's attention, whereupon over the course of a few days (maybe a weekend?) he invented a new branch of mathematics and solved the puzzle. He published his results anonymously, but no-one was fooled and immediately (if somewhat resignedly) congratulated Newton on his genius (again).

Can't remember the hypothesis or the resulting branch of mathematics though.

English - An Indo-European language closely related to the Romance, Germanic, Greek, Nordic and Gaelic languages, with extra loan words from almost every other culture they've invaded or been invaded by over the last 1800-odd years. :-)

The award is not for "contributions to the recording industry", it's for "significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording."

Steve Jobs' contributions to the "recording industry" may well have been negative or damaging, but they have nothing to do with the field of recording. They were entirely to do with content distribution, which is totally different.

(IANA sound engineer, but I know a few...)

The big problem is that the QR code to a human being is nothing more than "that little square with a bunch of strange blocks in it."

Are you sure? Wanna try some Snow Crash?

Yeah, I know.

But I didn't want to add too much more to the body of the post, or saddle it with footnotes which would have detracted from the ending.

On the other hand, I couldn't think of a better example to use. Except maybe the curvature of the Earth, but that'd feel like ripping off Asimov's "The Relativity of Wrong" essay. Any suggestions on a better example I could use next time? (Because it's not like posts like the GGPs aren't going to come up again)

Since the modern scientific method was invented approximately 400 years ago, not one single repeatable experiment has ever been devised, by anyone, anywhere, anywhen, which has been able to show an "irregularity" (truly random processes such as radioactive decay, quantum weirdness, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle notwithstanding)

Occam's razor. Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.

When Newton discovered his laws of motion, he was right to accept them. When the scientists who followed him for the next 300-odd years accepted them, they were right to do so. Even though he was eventually shown to be wrong by Einstein, until that point, no-one had any good reason not to accept those laws. However, as soon as Einsten came up with new data, came up with new theories, came up with new experiments, came up with new evidence and proved Newton wrong, then scientists changed how they saw motion.

Yes, scientists should always be aware that their theories might not be correct, that there may be an edge case they've not seen yet. But until someone's actually found it, the best you can do is go with what you've got. If an experiment ever comes along to show that the universe isn't regular, science will use that to show how the universe is not regular. Anyone who refuses to accept the new evidence will not be, to all intents and purposes, a scientist. And science might have to do a lot of work to probe the boundaries (if any) of that irregularity and work out how much it affects the millions of experiments and observations that have been done over the last few centuries.

But until that time comes along, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the universe is regular. Because that's what every experiement ever done has ever shown.

Your black swan argument could just as well be a 10-headed sheep argument. So what if no-one's seen them? No-one's proven that there aren't 10-headed sheep. So it's an absurdity to say they don't exist!

Bollocks.

If you show me a 10-headed sheep, I'll believe you. Until then, it is so mind-bogglingly unlikely that such thing exists that they are not worth considering in any reasonable model of the universe, and you're just engaging in philosophical wankery, not science.

If the 2nd law of thermodynamics proves that evolution is impossible, because of a local decrease of entropy, then it also proves that life and growth is impossible, because those processes are equivalent local decreases of entropy within a closed system of globally increasing entropy, only on smaller timescales. Therefore, given that life is actually possible, this shows that either the 2nd law of thermodynamics is wrong, or that his understanding of a "closed system" is wrong.

... i.e. /home/karellen, but the whole /home partition.

Well, to be more precise, I encrypt the /var partition, and /home is a bind mount to /var/local/home

Yup, I guess that's why many European societies which have much tighter gun controls and lower levels of firearm ownership than the US are so much less polite.

Oh, wait...

Yes, my ATI drivers had a hand in this, but that's part of the problem itself: why do all new GUIs demand glossy, sugar-coated rendering at the cost of my processing power? [...] For the record, even KDE4's non-accelerated mode rendered incorrectly.

I used to be the biggest proponent of Linux around, but it is really difficult to advocate something when its quality is dropping so quickly, and you yourself are barely able to operate it.

If KDE4's non-accelerated mode is rendering incorrectly, then I suspect that that is a serious problem with your graphics card drivers, or maybe even your graphics card. Really. And if you're using an out-of-tree driver with serious problems, I don't see how you can claim that it's the quality of Linux that's the problem. The Linux devs have no influencing there at all.

Lots of people (e.g. all the KDE developers) have been using KDE4 all day, every day, for 4 years or so now. Don't you think they'd have the means, motive and opportunity to clean up such problems if they were experiencing them? The fact that they're not experiencing them (and, as an almost-worthless anecdote which I'll throw in anyway, neither am I) is a pretty good indication that the problems you're experiencing aren't in the KDE part of the stack which you share with them. Or in Qt. Rather, they're much more likely to be in the part of the stack which is unique to you - your drivers and graphics card.