As a historian of science myself, alarm bells went off immediately at the `anticipated the Scientific Revolution' line. The actual claim in the paper was the Plato was a Pythagorean, not that he had secretly already achieved the chief scientific insights of the 17th century. Sounds a lot more sensible in that light, and I don't know what to make of the thought that the paper needed to be dressed up with the sort of claim few serious historians would make. Kennedy's "non-expert" description on his Manchester webpage does a nice job of explaining why his finding is interesting without resorting to such tactics.

Although not officially diagnosed (I don't see the point of spending a lot of money being diagnosed given the lack of effective treatment), I too show all the symptoms of DSPD, and feel there is likely a genetic component to this problem as my father suffers from what appears to be ASPD, and my son (now in his 20's) also shows many signs of a sleep phase disorder (he has done sleep studies, etc, but as yet with no official detailed results, other than acknowledgement of a problem). I have been lucky enough to find others who share my sleep patterns if not my exact condition, and have also found ways to cope with my problem while holding down a somewhat regular job. I sometimes wonder if the internet could possibly bring all of us night dwellers together so we could form our own physical community, one where businesses are open to fit our sleep cycles, one where doctors, dentist, etc. don't demand one shows up for appointments 5 hours before our natural waking times, one where as a parent we don't have to deal with notes from schools about how our children are having problems in classes that occur during the middle of their natural sleep cycle, etc. Can you imagine it, going to a restaurant while they are serving breakfast and not be half asleep, going to the grocery store and having more than one lane open, aisles not blocked by restockers and boxes, much more importantly other people there that don't look like zombies.

The ignorance of history is a major factor here.

indeed

The founders lived in a world where the excesses of religion wielding political power was a very present thing.

Um, not so much. The excess was in secular leaders hijacking religion, making their own government-established versions and then using those to justify all of their secular abuses. The Church of England is a good example here, and the one our founders had most-clearly in mind

Thanks to the separation of church and state, we have been afforded the luxury of forgetting this.

No. Thanks to the "establishment clause" we have been spared the nightmare of a "Church of the United States" which everybody would be required to attend, fund, and submit to. The phrase "Separation of church and state" does not appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution; it appears in a letter Thomas Jefferson sent to a Baptist church in which he was telling them it was safe to support the new Constitution because it guaranteed the government would never interfere in their church (a promise now routinely broken and in the eyes of many, the deal is broken if the government forces certain issues like abortion and gay "marriage" i.e. if government gets to interfere in the teachings of the churches, then the doors are open for the churches to equally interfere in government).

But any ideology that deals in absolutes, whether it be secular or religious, will evoke the absolute to disdain lesser goods--and when you think you hold the absolute Truth or Good, all other goods become worthless. The perfect is not just the enemy of the good, it is the mortal enemy of all goods

Those absolutist Darwinists, Atheists, Marxists, etc are the most dangerous of all

Life, liberty, happiness, charity, tolerance, knowledge, reason,...

Good, religious themes... and if you think "reason" and "knowledge" are not "religious" then you have not read any of the writings of numerous religious scholars. Start with the Apostle Paul for a little light reading before you move along to much more recent academic works with really big words in them

and anything that is not held up as absolute will be cast aside, along with all who would defend them. Billions have died, and will die, for the idols of dogma.

Millions, yes, but not billions. And the millions were all at the hands of wealth-redistributing atheists/pagans (Hitler/Stalin/Mao/PolPot...)

If religion has an evolutionary advantage, it is probably in strengthening ingroup solidarity at the expense of outgroup antagonism; effective in prehistory, catastrophic in a world of globalisation.

Religion generally is anti-evolutionary, as are social welfare programs, laws against rape and murder, environmental laws, etc. (Anything that helps the weak survive or limits the reproduction of the strong)

I suspect that religions will, in this century, claim at least a billion victims, and make Stalin, Hitler, and Mao look like amateurs.

It's an old, tired trick to lump all faiths together under the label "religions" so they can share collective blame, but that's like blaming all "political systems" for the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Yes, one particular religion might get the bomb and begin a nuclear holy war... but the other religions would be no more responsible than "science" or "engineering" for what happened

n the aftermath, Richard Dawkins will sound positively mild and conciliatory.

No, he will just keep sounding ignorant, hostile, irrational, and socially toxic

There are almost as many Gods as there are believers, and the first thing you will discover when the state imposes religion is that the state's God is not your God.

Indeed, this is what many conservatives learned in the decades since the left kicked God out of the schools and started re-writing all the books with a left-wing bias... The state God that has proven itself most dangerous to humanity is Secularism. What the people in Texas are doing will not even move the books back as far to the right as they were in the sixties

Europe is secular precisely because most European countries have entrenched state religions. The separation of church and state allowed religions to evolve and compete, and is one of the main reasons that America is so religious. If these clowns get their way, religion will be disgraced in America as well. They will do the secularists job for them. Joy is the reason, love is the method, but pain is the teacher.

The country was far more civil and peaceful and kids were graduating with better math and English skills when the schools and schoolbooks were much further to the right than what Texas is contemplating. Those Texans are being blasted as radicals for putting Einstein and Neil Armstrong and Christmas back into the textbooks, and for telling kids that there were significant events in the 1st century of the U.S..... is everybody on slashdot so young that they do not remember when public school choirs sang Christian hymns at school, public school kids read bibles and prayed in class, kids in small towns routinely brought knives (pocket knives in particular were common items boys carried) and guns (shooting clubs and hunting-related activities) to school with NO violence at all? From all the screeching of the secularists here, a person who was too young to know better might think Texas was headed into some radical territory... the changes they are making will hardly be noticed they are so small. I am shocked at the ignorance of history on display in these postings. Clearly the left succeeded quite well in their history text book re-writing over the fast couple of decades while conservatives were not watching them!

The question is, how much pain can you stand? One would think that the spectacle of Islamic Jihadism would be enough to remind us of what religion is when given free reign,

Nope. Just tells me what direction radical Muslims would go in. It is no more enlightening about Christians, or Jews, or Hindus than Stalin is about George Washington.

but two hundred years of domesticated and tamed Christianity have encouraged the illusion that the creature has changed its nature. It hasn't. It's just biding its time...

You have it exactly backwards... two hundred years of the Christian idea that God gives rights to individuals (and that, therefore by extension government has no rights or powers but those it gets on loan from those individuals) have tamed secular government and "encouraged the illusion that the creature has changed its nature. It hasn't. It's just biding its time..."

Really? I thought that the only time a politician wasn't lying was when his/her mouth was full.

Nothing in the OSS or even in the GPL precludes people from making mods and selling it for a profit. NOTHING.

However, to do so, they just have to release the source code to their product in accordance to the licenses granted to the software/product in question.

On a side note, I just ran into another stupid company that has tied their software to a USB dongle. What a crock of shit that is. The funny thing is, I have no idea why they did this, as it isn't high on anyone's "pirate" list.

You mean 15 eur/hour on staff or as freelancers? Because I know of some romanian programmers earning less than 31.000€ here in Spain. A freelancer usually takes 30-60 eur/hour, and a consulting company a lot more.

Well, unfortunately that's not the worst of it. Merely *suggesting* the possibility of open source should make you a pirate.

I certainly believe it was an innocent joke without derogatory intent, and I absolutely don't want to make this a "gender war". My point was that everyone makes innocent jokes (us, our significant others, random /.ers), but it can be valuable to point out that even innocent jokes can be unsavory to some. More to the point, they tend to be unsavory mainly to people who aren't in on the discussion, often precisely the same people most of us would want to be a part of what we do because they might have something new to contribute.

Thanks for taking my earlier comment in the spirit of a helpful observation. It's easier to be mindful of what we're doing when people on all sides are being relatively sane.

I know you (and the others making menstruation jokes) are just trying to be funny, and you probably are to a lot of people reading this thread, but writing about women as computers with buggy code isn't exactly the best way to show them your respect. I wonder how many people connect comments like this to the threads that pop up from time to time wondering why there are so few women programmers and computer scientists?

One reason lower quality playback often sounds better is it smooths out some of the shortcomings in the original recording. A lot of people prefer lo-def for casual listening because the most authentic sound isn't always the easiest on the ears. NYT article on this a while back, but couldn't find it immediately...

As the subject of this reply suggests, Cornell is also getting in the robot game, although I don't think they're collaborating with MSFT in the effort. In fact, I'm signed up for the course right now. The idea had the full endorsement of the campus's top computer science pedagogue, and here's how my advisor explained it to me (I'm a math major): The point of an intro computer science class is to teach you how to write clean programs, independent of what language you're working in. Languages are relatively easy to learn. How to not write "spaghetti code" is not. It doesn't really matter what you're programming, be it java or aibo (Sony's robot dogs), so long as it has a computer's logical structure and you learn how to use it effectively. Also, many people underestimate just how much of a challenge many robotics programming tasks can be, and how relevant they are to emerging computer scientists. I've seen talks on uses of de Bruijn (forgive spelling) sequences for position recognition, and lectures on genetic algorithms for getting robots to perform complicated task. Someone tell me that these ideas are too simple or irrelevant, and I'll show you hordes of computer science professors who disagree.