Religion is used to give arguments that have no firm basis support that protects them from being assailed. Proof of that is how fast the Mayan Temple System was abandoned in Central America when climate fluctuation destroyed the economy based on corn in the 13th century. Conversely, Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam, Judism, are scoundrel refuges for people who don't want their idea of moral authority and cultural centrism to be questioned. A scientific discovery which refutes special creation isn't going to deter this sort of thinking in people, whether it comes from Islamic extremists or Southern Baptists who embrace the Inerrant Word from Scripture. A better response is to base political and economic institutions on secular norms that reduce the influence of these reactionary forces. The challenge is that secular systems do not teach moral principal enough so that moral authoritarianism does not find appeal in those wronged by economic and political expediency. This is why we have movements like ISIS at the current time; not because they are theologically based. It is because academic and institutional sources for secular leadership do not base their training on sound ethics, even ethics that is based on universal human rights, let alone the sanctity of life wherever it exists.

This is more immediate than the questions which science will answer: How complexity beginning in inanimate physical systems can result in life without resorting to an intelligent designer. Such talking points have a hidden agenda to give moral authority to cultural beliefs. The question of how life arose is less important than how origins justifies the norms embraced by religion. How the physical universe stores information, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not violated by local stores of complex information, may be the answer to false dichotomies about life, and research may tell us that other places have solved this issue millions of times over, producing living systems that are unique from the one on Earth, or convergant with ours but where it is impossible for the similar systems to be genetically related; there being no panspermy possible. I think that some unique chemistry not like our own will be found to support life that would be fundementally alian to ours, That would surely put an end to Special creation. This finding could be a simple as finding trace fossils on Mars or other Solar System body revealing a biology basically different from what appeared on the Earth.

Of course the true Bigots will wiggle and change the terms of the argument and say that God changes the rules how ever he wants, small "h" deliberate.

If true secularists want to defeat religious bigotry and theocracy, they should start by embracing ethics and based more firmly on standards stronger than business expediancy, for example, or short-term profit, or survival of some organization. Every time some secular leader fails to do things either to live up to principal or based on some strong ethical system, this gives fuel to those who will act with authority based on ethnic pride, such as Putin and the Russians, or out of moral bigotry, such as ISIS and some of the religious people in America.

Yeah, the Russians will have Astroglide for Putin it to the Ukranians, if we are not careful!

This is the oldest story in human existence, and one that needs to be retold over and over, that if a business man can create a captive market or a planned failure rate of a product and hide those facts, he will base his business model on added cost to his customers. This is based on axioms of economics that point to the use of non-transparency to selfish advantage. No only will business people serve to add inefficiency and cost to keep the margin up, but they will also fight very hard to defend the business model against creative destruction seeking complicity of government if needed.

The answer to these abuses has always been disclosure and the flow of information about the ruse, which the linkage of business interests and politics attempts to suppress.

The humble razor blade can be made to last much longer than it does in any commercial product. It is laziness, convenience, and flooding the market with cheap product and telling lies to consumers that allows this. It amazed me how fast electric cars have appeared on the market once the peak of Oil was passed, and that there was a largely forgotten history of electric cars a century ago, and this was one reason the alternative to the internal combustion engine was so quickly re-introduced, now if only we could make it possible to create electricity without breaking carbon bonds and store electricity in efficient batteries. That would make a big difference and it would undercut cartels in energy.

And blame the U.S. Constitution for that! YES, the venerated document that defines the structure of the government and the separation of powers. It has come to betray the intention of the Founders to divide up power so that no one branch can dictate to the rest. Sounds like a great idea until you invent large financial and business institutions whose wealth rivals that of whole nations. This is a change that the Founders could not have anticipated, or judging by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist, was intentional, see, New York had the fix in even back in 1789. Business and Finance are the tools of the aristocracy that assured Hamilton.

The problem is that Congress, particularly the House, has power of the purse strings, and even if it gives tacit power to establish executive departments, it can underfund them at will, especially if the business interests who have gotten more and more access to members of Congress don't want enforcement funded. The oldest trick in the book is for Congress to pass a law that enacts a popular reform and to later defund it because the power brokers in the duopoly don't want it.

Of course passing amendments to the U.S. Constitution is a slow and drawn-out process. One can see the possibility that rapid change or a huge crisis; some have been warning that a failure to repair the systemic problems in banking, finance, and investment, that contributed to the Crash of 2008 have not been fixed and might lead to another meltdown and soon, will outstrip the process and lead to even more radical change in the nation than Constitutional processes will allow. The worst case is a total national disruption leading to a governmental crisis or oven a Civil War. The Congress would have to act very differently in the face of such a crisis than it has over the past 30-40 years. this has happened before, rescuing the Union several times. Another possibility is that technical and demographic change will lead to the Union becoming irrevelent and Constitutional reform taking the shape of several sections of the country separating from the rest.

First. the urban centers of the country are under represented by any current apportionment that recognizes States Rights and the current bicameral legislature. This divide is widening and is reflected in political debates about Gun Control and the power of other rural-centered issues from social issues to energy priorities. One thing that may tip the balance is energy independence of the urban coasts by the coming on-line of non-carbon based fuels, nuclear fusion, and alternative nuclear fuels like Thorium. Once free of the Carbon Lobby in the Conservative central states, and able to desalinate water cheaply from the oceans, the populations on the two coasts will see the center of the nation as a millstone and see the Constitution as the tool of keeping the rural states in power and they will demand succession.

This breakup does not have to take the form of the Civil War of 1861. The coasts do not need the center to be viable economically or to threive, especially the West Coast. Right now it is energy and water that limits what the economy of the Western U.S. can do, and that could change overnight if nuclear fusion is proven to be viable. The economic clout of the Gulf Coast and Midwest will simply evaporate or become much less important. They may ask to separate from the rest to protect their conservative social values, and we on the costs will say "Be Our Guest!", no Civil War results.

Desalination of seawater made affordable by nuclear fusion would result in one huge risk, the disruption of ocean circulation by the creation of dense brine especially if done in the eastern sides of ocean basins where the introduction of brine would disrupt nutrient-rich upwelling. We may have to farm the salty brine on the land to dispose of it and also to create high albeido regions to cool the overheated atmosphere caused by burning of carbon fuels. Maybe it would be just that either the Gulf Coast has to receive the salt or leave the Union.

The water molecules may come and go, but if most of the water now available to us was locked up as water ice and not exposed to solar neutron flux the isotope rations of hydrogen would be less than what is expected if all of the water were exposed to it through out the entire time of its presence in the solar nebula, that is, if the water arrived in the vicinity of the sun at the same time it was formed. I think that the argument is that isotope ratios indicate that according to a model of the expected isotope ratios that the water had to exist before the sun ignited. The starting of the solar neutron flux did not have time to produce the isotope rations expected from the model, therefore. So, it is a model, a prediction and a contradiction of the prediction, isotope ratios have to be less than expected because the water ice existed before the sun and the hydrogen in it was not subjected to solar neuron flux, or any nearby source of neutrons.

I am fighting with Ubuntu and debian and the hell of it is that I like recent stuff, like Ipython 2 and Emacs 24, and yet debian and Ubuntu are awful bloatware. Most of the debian packages, at least the ones I've seen through Ubuntu are crap, half written non-orthogonal code. And I am just amazed what I can do inside emacs. I am beginning to think that I ought to revert to the command line and make emacs my GUI and forget all the other crap, including the browsers, which are all huge. And what really gets me upset is the cache files that gets put on my home dir by Google and Mozilla and countless other applications that come off the debian tree. Some idiot came out with a tiling GUI file display manager, and I kept thinking that has all been done in emacs 30 years ago; some idiot trying to reinvent something old.

We should encourage the investment that leads to Silicon Valley and its elites. Tax the crap out of the investment until it goes away, like go the hell to Texas, let them deal with the side effects. I applauded when Ellon Musk picked Nevada for Tesla's Battery Factory. We don't want the risk of pollution that would create and that means 6500 people who don't live in California. In fact, I'd like to see people leave California, and discouraging investment and job growth is one way to do that. So, encourage lots of people who don't have roots here to leave. Make it a deeper reason than just some flash-in-the-pan job to be here. We could, as a state, choose to be a no-growth, no investment, place, and that fact is that a 200 year drought might just be the ticket for that!

So, how many of the 6 Million odd people who live in the San Francisco Bay Area could actually compete with you for a job? And if they could, are there enough positions to go around? The first answer is that very few of the people who live here could compete with you because for lots of reason YOU are a member of an elite. The second answer is that there really are FEWER positions available than the lying sacks of shit who run many of the companies here want to admit. The positions are so specialized because there are far more people pestering the HR departments of their companies for those few positions, AND, they are taking advantage of the law to hire off-shore "talent" whether or not those people are creative or productive. The demand exceeds the supply and for some segments of the industry hiring an idiot who does what he is told is cheaper than wading through all the supply to find a better match.

Where this matters is that more and more you work in an ivory tower with the great unwashed baying at the gate and resenting you more and more because you say smug things like we hear here that belie the reality out there. I have been on both sides of the divide. I know what it is like to work on the inside and I know what it is like to be "out" like I am now. The reason I am out has to do with external factors that make me uncompetative, such as mounting physical disability. I was excluded during the dot.gone "recovery" which really wasn't. There is a big lie that Silicon Valley was like it was before 2004 or that it is pulling its weight, that it deserves to be revered any more as a job creator, even if it is a wealth creator; the number of people employed by the best capitalized companies is really quite small in number. I would like to see SV discouraged and the companies move away, like to Texas, as its impact on this area has turned largely negative. Only 1-percent'ers are benefiting and the rest of us are having to pay in higher property values and rents, and we pay more taxes because of the property pressures. I'd like to see many of the companies move out. The Party's Over!

Go do your own research. Investigate the origins of PC-DOS and the BASIC interpeter and the relationship Gates had with people in the early days around 1977. You will see that he "borrowed" from people and did not invent major parts of what he later called his own.

But the biggest case against Gates is the misinformation he spread, that the design of Windows was an answer to the complexity of the UNIX shell and that his proprietory approach was just a business ploy to create a captive market and to deny consumers the knowledge that they could have used to get more powerful and reliable tools. Microsoft practiced monopolistic and preditory strategies on its customers, the OEM agreement with hardware vendors; it kept them in the dark deliberately so that they would believe that Windows was magical and mysterious, under Gates, when it was just inferior and lacking in use. Remember that Microsoft had Xenix, a UNIX for X86, and deliberately dumbed down MS-DOS so it could keep its users in the dark. It wasn't until Vista that Windows had decent logging so that a user could actually have a clue to diagnose problems. That was intended and the market for Windows was captive enough so that ignorant users would still go buy an inferior product, even today, The answer to Microsoft is not Linux it is OS X. If Apple wanted to kill Microsoft it would be to embrace Hackintosh and cut the cost of the hardware by half.

An additional thought on this topic. One thing that is interesting about knowledge in our era is that the rate at which it changes is so fast that by the time we reach middle age and beyond that what we learned in school has become significantly out of date. When I took Physics in college there was no Standard Model for QM and no unification of forces. There was still this bewildering zoo of resonances whose underlying unity was not understood yet. The Feynman Lectures in Physics are now available on line. They are clearly still relevant but they show well the state of particle physics as it was in 1961. Someone ought to write the addendum that brings that up to date. In astronomy the identity of quaesars was still a hot topic and no one had confirmed the existence of black holes, whereas today they may be the drivers of the evolution of the Universe, and Dark Matter and Dark Energy were not recognized at all and today they are universally accepted as major players.

I took my degrees in Geology and when I was an undergrad Plate Tectonics was just coming into acceptance. Its ramifications developed during the early years of my career. The high trophic activity of the dinosaurs was a concept that was developed after I completed my degrees, as was the affinities of birds with therapsids. One must keep reviewing after one has finished school even if one is not in a profession. Things you learned in school are bound to be changed.

The first programming language I learned was FORTRAN. My experience has carried me through procedural languages like FORTRAN and Pascal to C and to scripting languages like perl, but then to OO enhancements the result in Java and Python and finally to functional languages like lisp. Most of this I didn't know out of college but am still learning on my own, one has to do that and to be motivated to pursue new topics on your own. It is quite amusing to me how programming goes full circle and what is old becomes new again, the relevance of lisp to new trends in programming that are more functional and try to reduce side effects, like Haskell. But the ideas were developed before I existed in the 1930's and yet they are finding expression in new languages like Clojure.

I am almost 70 and I don't have a problem with topics I may have been exposed to in high school or college. I have found that sooner of later you will revisit topics from earlier in your experience. The only issue is flexibility of your mind. A secondary issue is where to begin. I think that one must develop a sense of where topics fit together and then one's own curiosity propels one forward. And it is wise to sip at the font of knowledge and not try to gulp it all down at one sitting. Gluttony will defeat you. You must be patient.

Also, individuals have different abilities to make sense of different kinds of knowledge, so for example, I know that I will never be able to work at a graduate level in mathematics. I only recently realized that poor vision was a big impediment for me in reading mathematical expressions and understanding them; so I have had some recent success in re-reading math, but I will never be expert in it. On the other hand I have had an acute memory for music and have been able to remember large chunks of the classical literature for which it is easy to get and use the printed music and study it. I have been able to contribute at the upper division and graduate level because of this ability.

But what is more important about the OP is the tacit question of why you want to revisit these topics? Is it to earn a professional level of expertise? And the next obvious question is do you intend to pursue an advanced degree in the topics? You are free to do that. If for example, you wouldn't have enough years in a career with an PhD in physics to pay off the tuition needed to get the degree, then maybe you need to be content to enjoy the topic and keep your day job. Maybe, you want to consider getting a teaching degree so you can teach Physics in high school or a community college. There is nothing to stop you from enjoying any topic that passes your attention.

Have you looked at most of the Debian packages, for example? 75% of them are crap for the one reason that developers get a head of steam, no pun intended, write 70% of what would be a complete project and lose interest, and what is left off is the most important part, decent docs. There ARE good projects with decent docs in Debian, but most are poorly documented. That is because developers do the worst job of writing in any clear language what their packages do. So, open source dies not because source goes away, but because not enough effort was spent on explaining what the software does or how it was intended to be used, and so it dies because no one wants to invest the effort needed to figure it out. Very few people can read others' source and intelligently figure out what the code does, and if they can they usually can't string together words in a spoken language to describe it. I think that poor linguistic expression is revealed in another way that obstructs usage in a big way. This is feature bloat, software that attempts to do everything and ends up doing nothing very well because it is too poorly designed to be used by human beings. Open source repositories like Debian are full of this kind of stuff. It isn't that they are not powerful, it is that they are not useful.

Look at the package recordmydesktop and try to make sense of its documentation. Its man page is very complex and its controls are low-level, requiring use of signal.h interrupts. not something you want a novice to have to deal with. It is as though some guy wrote it as an afternoon hack of low-level tools and didn't bother to learn enough GTK to write a few buttons for the GUI it comes with. Far worse than that is trying to figure out the interactions with the system.

Object Oriented Development is not a solution to this problem because refactoring further obscures user logic. Good OOD is not the same as clear user logic, in fact they often work against one another. With OOD documentation is even more important because of this. So FOSS projects really die because the documentation does not support their use so that others can come along and use them without direct community help.

I had to read some COBOL about 30 years ago as part of migrating a database. I had done my first programming in FORTRAN which is almost as old. I suspect that the call for COBOL is that there is need for people to read old code that still needs to be maintained, but my impression of the language is that it was really just about 80% boiler plate and 20% executable. So, couldn't a metalanguage be invented that reads COBOL source and produces some source code that reflects something widely used today, even something much newer?

True enough, for now. The radicals are going to wake the giant, who doesn't want to put boots on the ground against them, maybe the other Arab states will see the threat as too close to home and go in and clean the radicals out. If not, the U.S. has engineering not according to the fundie Islam which can easily decimate ISIL.. And we can make life very hard for them without putting our people on the ground. We could do a Putin on them and mention that we could use nuclear weapons on them, and even if we don't do that we could theoretically make large parts of Eastern Syria and Western Iraq uninhabital for decades. We should have done this in Eastern Afghanistan to the Pashtoon homeland where most of the Taliban insurgants who have fought us there come from. So, we have placed ourselves at a temporary disadvantage because of poor leadership from Obama; he had failed on the international stage too, but we don't have to continue in that vein and because we allow for creative solutions to problems that religious fundies don't use, we can defeat them. After all it could be said that Hitler lost his war because he didn't believe in science, especially Jewish science, and we developed the bomb because of the threat that he might get it; he didn't, and it was because of his racist and religious beliefs. In similar fashion if it came to direct conflict with ISIL we could clobber them with a engineering hammer, either a high energy or particle beam or just unloading our nuclear waste in the middle of the Syrian dessert. We could cook them man by man or en-mass if we have to. We are playing nice-nice trying to pick off individual terrorists with drones and avoiding taking out innocents with them, we don't have to continue with that restraint. So these guys in their Islamic state are going to under estimate us, and we in turn are going to learn how to be leaders and why sometimes it takes a hammer to drive a nail home.

By the way this mess started when American and European businessmen set out to steal the wealth of the Middle East by dividing the factions that exist there. Evey nation that was devised by the Western Powers after WWI in 1921 at the end of the Ottoman Empire was conceived by Brittan and France and later the U.S. as a way to allow for Western businesses to steal from the region or to set up puppet states, the Monarchies of the modern states, including Iraq and Egypt, that allow for foreign companies to garner resources at minimal benefit to the population. we did this by splitting religious sects and ethnicities that have considerable hatred for one another. That is how WE created bin Lauden, who was radicalized by contact with Western businessmen. We sowed dragon's teeth for profits, and we pay the price in terrorism. It looks like Crusades to Islam and even though moderates don't blame us as much, it is rich soil for anyone with a grudge. The point is that if you do not forget history, you can see why these threats arrise, and now it is out of hand and we have to get nasty to address it. We are paying for bad leadership in the past. We are paying for the two Bushes and Clinton using Oil politics to drive our policy in the area. We are paying for how we were set up for 9-11 by ignoring the hatred we had come to invite, because we placed corporation profits and our oil supply above human dignity. About the best thing that could happen in the post-peak-oil era is to find an energy source, invent fusion, that depreciates the value of the oil reserves in the world, but especially those under Iran and Iraq. Then we can gracefully back out of the region. Until then, our options become increasingly distasteful.

So, how many of you have downloaded an open source package, or even read the description posted by the developer and been unable to figure out what is does? How many of you have installed such a package and found that the documentation doesn't help you to use it, or is so complex that it is difficult to figure out where to begin to use it? I think this is a common problem. Either you are forced to read source code if it is available and quite often the source is inscrutable because the code has been refactored to run efficiently as an OOD implementation but the user logic for the package is lost or obscured because the developer either cannot write or didn't make an effort?

I would love to work for LA people who can write and where my challenge is to show that I understand some package by explaining it to them so that they could write the documentation. There is quite a bit of software out there that requires developer skills to figure out and use. The LA types could help developers communicate what their work does. I try to write as well as I can, I think that being able to write is as important as any coding task I have ever faced.

I am quite interested in Literate Programming and Reproducible Results tools that are beginning to become important, for example emacs org-tool and the iPython notebook. There are liberal arts people who can do more than edit MS Word and some of them actually use emacs, although not many, but tools that mix code and markdown could be an area where writers can really help.

This is quite a separate problem from business administration or business politics. I grant you that shit floats and some of the smoozers rise to positions they don't deserve for not being competent technically when the product is technical and engineered. I have worked for a couple of these types and it is no fun.