I'm fine with the big bang theory and all that. I don't have a belief system that needs observed data to fit a pattern. OTOH, I'm struggling with the leaps here. Some scientists found some high quality hydrogen clouds. Their purity is a bit of an anomaly. But I don't see how this proves or disproves the Big Bang theory really. If I found a pocket of really pristine gold ore out around the Mount Ararat area could I use that to prove the biblical account in Exodus (which seems to have involved a lot of gold)?

I find the leaps that many of the "we're just science" community make now days not that far off of what the religious community is fond of grabbing at. Observe the data, document it, study it. But quit jumping at it to prove one model or the other please. Or at least state that in context. E.g "We observed some really anomalous gas purities. This is cool. We want to study it some more. It fits with some of the postulates of the Big Bang Model. It also fits with the fact that it's a big universe and we're not, and strange stuff happens in it."

The older I get the more prescient the observations about Science as a Religion in the Foundation series by Asimov seem to be coming to pass.

Ahem... there's not a lot of money to be made in IDE tools now days.

I know, I work for a tool vendor. Oh sure, if you're just one person and you make a nice little widget that you can sell for a couple of bucks, it'll give you a short term chunk of change. But really good tool development takes a lot of work for a lot of time. The market's willingness to remunerate that kind of effort with the kind of bucks it takes to support a group of really focused people has been on the wane for a long time.

It was PCs then, it's phones now. Android is the Windows 3.1/95 of phones. It's good enough, wildly popular, runs on all kinds of hardware, lots of options. Apple is closed garden, all-in-one-experience. Wonder how much of the overall history will repeat itself.

You misunderstand me. It's not a selfish/greedy worry about those groups of people not having money to pay for it.. I love helping people out. I do it regularly. I keep trying to find more ways to do it. It's a subset of that though. It's my frustrated worry about those groups of people who *could* have had enough money to pay for it, but don't because there's no accountability in our society any more.

Even worse, what happens when you show up at the emergency room: "I've broken my body again. Fix it please. I don't even know why I'm saying please, you're legally obligated to do it anyway. It's my right to be provided health care. Can I pay for it? No. I spent the money on the skull stuff."

I will happily support drug legalization, allowing people to choose their own destiny responsibly or not so, when I too have the liberty to let you be accountable for your own decisions.

...that both Nebraska and New York or home to some of the more prominent telemarketing companies?

Well... if this is what bipartisanship gets us... maybe I *will* go with the new theme of no-compromise-extremism.

Because boiling water and liquid nitrogen is what I regularly expose my discs to. Not.

How 'bout testing it against my kids, that drop them on the wood floor, and then swirl them around doing their own etching.

Never had to interact with Oracle much, that they're not well regarded is obvious, but if is the one thing they end up doing, then I will thank them and love them for it, in a perverse way. This overheard at OOPSLA during lunch many years ago:

Some Random Guy: "So James, really, what do you think the odds of Java really working are?"

James Gosling: "Of course it'll work, there's not a damn new thing in it!"

Or put better by Jan Steinman: "Java. All the elegance of C++ with all the speed of Smalltalk."

Rant aside, sadly, from what I hear, there's enough Java love fest going on at Google to keep things going for quite a while.

So let's say I did a lot of Linux back in the day, now days, I do it rarely under vmware with OSX. I've been installing (k)Ubuntu now and then again. What's the best KDE friendly distro these days (running under vmware)?

Someone needs to write up a blog article drawing random conclusion from handpicked examples of the success of forked projects, based on their names. Since both project names are retarded, I wonder what effect we can extrapolate that project names have on project success.

Write your article with flair and with, and /. will link to it, driving add dollars^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmonetization your way. And we the /. community can discuss an even more inane correlation.

And In other news, School Boards continue to be more likely to employ contract construction crews to build new schools, but continue to rely on custodians to keep them running.

I think you've left out an important part of the equation in your rebuttal. There's a real tension between supporting/evolving/migrating existing/legacy IT assets and developing brand new start-from-scratch ones. So while I of course loathe IT departments as much as the next guy, I don't think it's entirely the IT departments fault either. Managers tend to want both the old maintained/improved and the new as well. Whether the domain is IT or sewage control, it's hard to have an entity that does both efficiently simultaneously.

Giving rise to the advent of "countymandering" :)

Given /.'s affinity for Dup's... we can be assured that within 24 hours, this story'll be reposted, but with reference to the DailyBeast article. Ain't redundancy great? :D

Mod Parent Up+

There is no "free". There's pay now, and pay later. Given American consumerist tendencies to _have_ now and worry about paying later... it all actually seems like a pretty much done deal actually.