20060504
    The Science and Technology Brief is a biweekly glance at interesting science and technology news and profiles on science and technology that is or will affect us all. For Thursday: ‘Will Vista Be Just That?’, ‘More Organizations Should Get This Smart’, ‘Why Science Might Be Loosing the ID Debate’.
Will Vista Be Just That?
    Are these the signs of strain that so many anti-Microsoft activists have been waiting for? Software pundits and Microsoft watchers are predicating that the next version of Vista will be delayed, even to the second quarter of 2007.
    Many anti-Microsoft activists see this possibility as part of growing evidence that the software behemoth cannot adapt to the fast paced and security necessary world of modern computing. Because of this, these activists claim that Microsoft’s days could well be numbered.
    I, along with some tech pundits out there, have a different view, seeing instead Microsoft’s delay of its next flagship operating system, its choice not to include features in that OS it could not complete, and its much longer and more thought out beta and update process as signs that the company might just be finally getting it.
    While Microsoft remains an almost predatory monopoly in some respects, I grant credit to the fact that right now this post is written using Microsoft Word, posted via Internet Explorer, and you are likely reading it via Internet Explorer. If Microsoft was so bad and doing as many things wrong as the activists claim, someone would have already come up with a better product and we would all be using it right now.
    Of course, right now this is just all food for thought. We will have to wait and see what is true.
More Organizations Should Get This Smart
    Veterans of government and educational purchasing programs know the value to the employee of those programs, but how many other organizations- corporations, nonprofits, etc- offer such programs. I suspect that the answer is a mediocre one.
    The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod has taken their technology purchasing to the next level by offering bulk purchasing power to its churches and schools. This same program will eventually be opened up to the synod’s membership as well.
    Why is this significant? Because such programs reduce the cost of technological ownership for everyone involved, allowing everyone to benefit from the efficiency and management gains offered by such technology. Whether such an organization is a church, a school, a business, or a group of individuals, such benefits can only result in gains.
    Ultimately, any organization that uses technology and has membership that also uses technology will benefit from such a program. Programs like ShopWELS should be a model for those organizations to start their own.
Why Science Might Be Loosing the ID Debate
    Why is the controversial notion of Intelligent Design making such inroads against the scientific community? It is not because ID, as it is being presented in the mainstream, is all that well thought out or even accurate to what even the ID proponents are trying to say, but instead because it reveals the fact that the scientific community cannot even defend its own theories against a badly formulated and technically inaccurate quasi-science.
    That reality exists because the scientific community is guilty of the same fundamentalism and chicanery that they accuse their ID opponents of using. There is no doubt that within the current teachings of evolution, there are irrefutable, empirical truths, but those truths are wrapped up in a package of plain old charlatanry and speculation that has no place in the realm of scientific endeavor.
    If the scientific community really wanted to end the debate once and for all, it would do so by discarding the great body of supposition that has grown up around evolutionary theory and stick to doing empirical scientific research to discover what is true, not what it wants to be true. It is very likely that such an endeavor will result in the disproof of some of evolution’s most honored traditions, and it will also prove that the ID proponents are not completely wet either.
    Yet, this very fact will prevent the modern scientific community from doing exactly what it should, and that is because science has become a religion just as surely as the beliefs of the proponents of ID are often based on religion. Until science becomes science again, there is no hope for resolving such a debate with the only possible resolution, empirical fact.
DLH
