... he'd have had support from a substantial portion of the Slashdot readership.

Wow. You genuinely believe that, don't you? Which probably explains this priceless line:

Hint: under Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, you wouldn't be saying that, with or without the thin gloss of anonymity that comes from posting under a screen name. If web forums had existed in their day, very bad things would have happened to anyone posting such a comment. You clearly have no idea what "the full force of government to stifle opposition" actually looks like, and for all our sakes, I sincerely hope you never find out.

Which, amazingly, is exactly what the authors of the paper did. It's open-access; click the link and read it for yourself.

Oh, wait, I forgot. On Slashdot, scientists are morons and people who read an article on a pop-sci site a month ago know everything, and any use of statistics can and must instantly be banished with the Words Of Power, Which I Will Not Utter Here.

They control for the type of procedure, so you can rule out the obvious confounding factor of scheduling procedures that are inherently more dangerous for later in the week. It doesn't tell you about the differences between the individual patients, of course ("this hip replacement's going to much trickier than that one, so I'll do it on Friday") but the numbers do not provide any evidence for the hypothesis that this kind of schedule-shuffling is going on. Comparing between types of procedures, the numbers for risk (Table 1, toward the bottom) look pretty flat, with the obvious (and unsurprising) exception that procedures performed on the weekend tend to be lower risk. Between Mondays and Fridays, there's essentially no difference at all.

Stupid researchers! They never thought of that! [rolls eyes]

No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth the fusor is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.

And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.

That's pretty much the kind of thing I was thinking of when I said, "I'm sure it will find its uses." It's very different from replacing Windows as the primary corporate and home user desktop OS, which is what I had the impression OP had in mind.

It has no chance of dethroning Windows. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Look, no one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. ReactOS may be eventually be 99 44/100 % Windows compatible. It may look like Windows, feel like Windows, and act like Windows almost all the time--but it won't be Windows. And sooner or later, anyone running it will run into some instance where Windows does this but ReactOS does that. Now, when this happens (when, not if) developers will say, "That's interesting, we should fix that." But regular users will think, "Serves me right for trying to use this cheap knockoff. Guess I'll just get the real thing." And if anyone asks them about their experience with ReactOS, that's pretty what they'll say.

ReactOS is an interesting project, and I wish them the best of luck. I'm sure it will find its uses. Taking significant market share away from Microsoft isn't one of them.

The same, BTW, applies to open-source clones of other Microsoft products, which is why it's kind of dismaying that the OpenOffice family (LibreOffice, etc.) tries so hard to imitate Microsoft Office interface standards. Those aren't the only way to design office software, and there's no reason to assume they're the best, either. The more you chase the market leader, the less chance of eventually becoming the market leader you have. Try to do something different and better instead. That's about the only way any piece of software has ever broken another's market dominance, and probably the only way it ever will.

Now that I think about it, yeah, I guess I was one of the beta users. What the hell, I tried that with Gmail, years ago, and that worked out pretty well ...

The pre-public-release G+ was kind of odd-looking, but my God it was fast. I'm really sad about how quickly it went downhill.

I'll just re-quote from the article the passage I quoted in a previous post:

Understanding this is pretty easy; if you choose not to do so, that's your business, so to speak.

No it's not. The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives. The bullshit list is business jargon, which is inherently meaningless and is therefore very useful to C*Os and those who like to imagine themselves in such positions.

For any /.er working in an environment like that, I'd like to think this would be a sign that it was time to get the hell out.

When G+ started out, it was clean, fast-loading, reliable, and did exactly what it was supposed to do and no more. You know ... like Google used to be. I had real hopes that G+:FB::Google:Yahoo.

Every change since then has made it uglier, slower, and buggier; with the latest interface changes they've not only caught up to but actually surpassed Facebook in the amount of irritating crap they shove at the user. Google may be able to coast on people's affection for them as a search engine (especially when the competition is Bing) but they're going to find it increasingly difficult to break into new markets if all they do is ape the worst behavior of the existing market leader--which in this case emphatically includes "adding a bunch of new 'features' when the ones we already have are kind of crap."

I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.

:)

I'm pretty sure GPP is making fun of Ken Ham's thought-stopping advice to his followers, which is supposed to immediately make "evolutionists" stop dead in their tracks, fall down on their knees, pray for forgiveness, and embrace the obvious Truth. Or something like that.

You left off the rest: "with his most mundane statements breathlessly repeated as though they were great wisdom." It's not Tyson's being an effective science popularizer that bugs me--I'm all for that--but the cult-of-personality aspect which seems to follow. Again, this is very much as it was with Sagan.