The order of songs in an album is indeed an artistic decision. It definitely deserves copyright protection.

You're an Anonymous Coward!

'Nuf said.

Given that the population we are discussing are developers and other IT people, intuitively it makes sense because FF and Chrome provide all sorts of developer tools that you don't get with IE.

Some fields where there is growth and potential for breakthrough will include the field of statistics proper and fields that rely heavily on it. The revolution in information technology has enabled growth in the field of statistics because it has allowed the investigation of theoretical questions that could not be tested before cheap and powerful computational facility came before. CART and Random Forest algorithms, for example, were made possible by the IT revolution. Fields like genetics (obviously) and sociology and psychology (less obviously) will grow because of this.

Note that in these last two fields (sociology, psychology), there have in the last 100 years been no breakthroughs that are the equivalent of a heart-transplant or splitting the atom. So, there is indeed room for growth in these fields.

That said, along with information technology, fields in the humanistic sciences will still probably be constrained by the ability to reliably a) observe phenomena, and b) account for a vast number of hidden variables. So advances there will be the result of revolutions in ability to observe human phenomena.

The Fast Light Optical Gyroscope project will marry researchers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center; the US Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center and Northwestern University

A hypothetical scenario:

If all that Simberg, Steyn et. al. wanted to do was have a look at Mann's data, this is how they might be going about it:

W: Simberg, Steyn write inflammatory articles about Mann and his hockey stick graph, hoping Mann tries to sue their asses.
B: Mann tries to sue their asses.
W: Simberg & Steyn subpoena data out of Mann's ass.
B: Mann must choose which is more important, the anonymity of his data or realizing the slim possibility of owning S & S's asses but still being more likely to lose.
W: S & S smile.

It's called Zugzwang, baby!

I have heard of Git, and I know people who have recommended it instead of Subversion. I myself also use subversion for my own personal projects, because it's free and for the reason you mention: I don't use its full power on my own stuff. However, there are little conveniences in proprietary software that you appreciate, even when not using its full power.

For example, when creating a QA test plan, I take screen shots from the application I'm working with and directly paste them into table cells to show exactly what the system response should look like. When I do this in MS Word (2007), it resizes the image to the size of the cell. When I try this with OpenOffice Writer, the screen goes dark, and then it doesn't do paste the image. That might just be my bad luck or I don't have the latest, greatest patch that takes care of the problem. But I appreciate the relative lack of bugs in MS Word as compared with OO Writer.

Another thing I like about MS Word is the ability to move paragraphs or table cells up and down using shift + arrow keys. Maybe that's a "power user" feature, and I'm sure it could be implemented in OO Writer. But a point about proprietary software is that you have people spending the best part of their waking hours developing and perfecting these products whereas most open source initiatives are volunteer efforts. More time goes to the proprietary projects, so more attention to detail can be given to them.

Let's just say that both open source and proprietary software occupy their own important niches.

I work in a U.S. fed agency, and I use a Linux distro, but most of the rest of my colleagues use Microsoft Windows.

Some observations about Windows vs. Linux:

1) You still need to have above average skills to get your work done on Linux, even if you are using a relatively user-friendly distro like Ubuntu. Most people, by definition, are not above average.
2) Some proprietary software is and always will be much better than anything comparable in the open-source world:
a) As compared with MS Office (Word, Excel, etc.), OpenOffice is a piece of crap.
b) Ditto for Subversion. As compared with proprietary source control like Harvest or Merant PVCS, Subversion is also a piece of crap.

That said, a government putting some of its spending power behind some key open source projects could produce some quality open-source software to shore up some of these shortcomings.

Also, open source software provides unprecedented opportunity for others to innovate with the software itself in ways you cannot do with proprietary software.

So, I fully approve of and support France's direction in supporting open source software in their government administration.