How do prove your understanding? Now, if only there was some sort of system to examine your understanding and award degrees...

Strongly typed languages often contain constructs that allow to emulate this behaviour if absolutely necessary. For example, F# (and thus, I assume, ocaml) allows unions.
type myType = {
| type_A of int
| type_B
| type_C of string
}

They are still strictly typed, just that their type is (A or B or C). That way, you get flexibility when you need it, while retaining the behaviour of a strongly typed language.

Simple doesn't mean unprincipled. I started coding exclusively in F# last summer, and I haven't looked back. On several occasions, I have written several hundred lines of complex scientific code in one go, ending up with a bug-free piece of software right after the first compilation. If you can do this in perl or python, you are a better programmer than me. Plus, the code looks gorgeous, and you can actually read it from top to bottom and understand what's going on.

You are bitter.

I'm a scientist, and I love my job. There's no job in the world that could be more exciting. Yes, you do have to deal with the administrative side. It's not like a corporate job is any different at that.

Every morning I wake up with a question in my head I want to answer by the end of the day. Nobody is allowed to tell me what to do, I do whatever I find interesting. Sometimes (rarely), I even simply decide to stay in bed, and nobody cares! Tell me of another job like that! Also, I love working with my students: I am surrounded by a group of people who are enthusiastic about questions that I am enthralled by myself. What better working environment could you imagine?

Yes, I could earn an order of magnitude more in a corporate environment. Yes, I waste a lot of time on grant applications and administrative rubbish. Who cares? I love this job. It gives me the chance to spend every single day of my live thinking about problems I care about. I find it awesome that society is willing to pay me money for doing so, and I feel privileged that I am allowed to teach hundreds of students every year, about something that I genuinely find important.

What's interesting is that the intellectual property lawyer behind the move, Horacio Gutierrez, has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president at Microsoft. Is this his way of announcing that he intends going on the attack against Linux?"

How is this important? Man gets promoted to lead IP division, proceeds to, well, lead IP division. I don't see why it's newsworthy that Microsoft's bigger court filings get filed by a high-ranking manager. The fact that he has just been promoted need not necessarily have anything to do with this.

You don't seem to have read my post.

To my claim that in dubio pro reo is a moral imperative to the general public you reply

It was never meant to be.

Which implies that there is some moral authority who gets to decide what a particular moral concept is "meant to be". On the other hand, you write

I can believe them to be guilty even if the findings are the opposite. That's called freedom. Freedom of thought is more important than the law. I'm free to judge. That I don't judge on your schedule doesn't mean I'm wrong, it means I'm different than you. Differences happen, and shouldn't be bashed just because it isn't what you'd do.

which claims the exact opposite: That there be no moral authority whatsoever.

Let me make my point clearer, since you seem to have missed it: Assuming someone's innocence until they are found guilty is a moral imperative, more so than a legislative one. It is founded on the categorical imperative: A society without this rule is a community of witch-hunters, where everyone can accuse anyone of everything. We don't want to be accused without a chance to defend ourselves, therefore we should not accusse others without a fair trial.

This has nothing to do with your personal freedom to think whatever you please about your neighbour. Instead, it is about your personal right to defend yourself, and be defended from prejudice. You cannot claim this right for yourself while simultaneously claiming a right to spread prejudice about others.

That's all it means. It is just a simple way of summing up our court system. It is NOT a command to the population at large.

You are painting a pretty bleak picture of this society. Of course everyone is free to believe whatever they want. But in a civilised society, under the rule of law, we like to let the law rule. That includes giving every man a chance to state their cause in court before judging them. That is indeed a "command to the population at large", although a moral one, not a legislative one.

The next desktop version of OS X is expected to be much smaller than the current one. From http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/:

While I agree with you that this story is a vacuous mix of buzz words, I do think that desktop OSes do get smaller indeed, and I think it's a good thing. But for different reasons. To me, it signals a shift on the OS developers' behalf, away from adding more functionality back to optimizing the code-base. Partly because their marketing strategy necessitates the system to run on mobile devices (Apple), partly because they have understood that the market is fed up with bloated OSes that get in the way (Microsoft). But regardless of the reasons, it's A Good Thing.

Actually, it doesn't need a root. Quite on the contrary, the developing graph could give amazing insight into the structure of research communities. It would be possible to identify researchers forming links between otherwise almost disconnected areas of research, and to find the great minds at the centre of such blocks. There is no "root" to the web of scientists. Even people like Erdös were only ever local subroots.

I think this project is a great idea. Unfortunately, it currently seems to consist of only a command line tool to sign reviews with GPG. That's nowhere near enough if it is to thrive beyond the CS world. It needs a simple, rock-solid GUI, and most importantly, lots of eye-candy for the graph. It will need to look cool and work well to build up the momentum for this to work at all.

I strongly support your statement. I am currently living in a European Country that I have no citizenship in. I am not allowed to vote, but I am allowed to pay taxes. But somehow that doesn't stop me from being the evil foreigner who takes away jobs for the locals.

The GP argument implicitly assumes that there is some fixed amount of work available, and that foreigners coming into the country somehow "take away" their work, or deteriorate their salary. I can assure you that, if anything, I am more expensive than a local (I get the same wage, but my employer paid a bonus to get me here. Also, I am stricter about taking all of my paid leave and not working overtime than the people around here).

The sad fact is that while the markets have become global, most workers still don't want to live global. It's just as easy for an American to get abroad as it is for an American company to hire people abroad. So why are Americans so hellbent on staying put? It can't be the standard of living: Many European countries offer a better deal than the States when it comes to work-live balance and purchasing power.

I'm pretty sure the GP's numbers are kilos of CO2 per person, per flight.

According to David MacKay's excellent book, an intercontinental flight uses about 12,000 kWh of Energy per passenger. Let's imagine the meeting takes about 10 hours. Unless your IT infrastructure uses 1.2 Megawatts, solely for this one video conference, there's no point in flying, CO2-wise.

No offence, but you must be new to the internet.

I don't know anything about this particular case, and this discussion is not about this particular person. But you will easily find a lot of unreasonable people on the internet. Because the more unreasonable they are, the louder they tend to voice their anger.

In other words: If someone actually commits libel against you in an internet forum, you are screwed:

If you sue them, you create a lot of headlines (the streisand effect), causing much more damage to your reputation. If you win the case, nobody will care (the media is not interested in some random dude being wrong in a forum). If you lose, it's even worse.

So what else can you do, really? Must be something that doesn't cause negative publicity. You might try adding a positive review to the forum under a pseudonym. But if anyone finds out about this, you have caused even more harm to your reputation.

The takeaway message seems to be: Don't trust anyone on the internet, for there is no penalty for lying on there.