Whew! That's quite a treatise, Jerry..., and I agree with you.
Although I've forgotten exactly how I came to make the below assertion, I think I was just trying to point out, that as useful as this ongoing debate is about VFP vs .NET and the future of VFP, it will be elusive and nonproductive to think we will get to the 'truth'. That notwithstanding, the 'attacks'(i.e., non-personal ones) on various indivduals are quite useful, in that they put to the test the hypotheses espoused by those various individuals. I don't feel I've learned any 'truths' here, but I have learned a lot!

Pete

>>At least from a scientific point of view, 'Truth' is an elusive concept, and is not a very useful concept.
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>Exactly. It amazes me how many people see 'truth = science', especially those who have never been envolved in the process of 'science'. Sorta like computers... 'computers don't make mistakes'..
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>>Humans are prone to state a hypothesis or theory, look around for all the 'facts' to support it, and tend to ignore disconfirming evidence. However, this is weak science. A stronger approach is to state the hypothesis, then let the community present facts that attempt to falsify the hypothesis. If the hypothesis can withstand a lot of these attacks, it does not prove the hypothesis is 'true' (because something may still come along that falsifies it), but it gives the community more 'faith' that the hypothesis is strong. I'll leave it to all of you to decide if this analysis applies to the present debate :).
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>>Pete
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>For a long time an hypothesis was an 'explaination' that fit all available data and allowed for predictions of phenomena not yet observed. You assumed a theory to be true and devised an experiment to prove it false because a million tests can NOT prove a theory true, but only one test is needed to prove a theory false.
>"Scientific Laws" are merely theories that have not yet been proven wrong.
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>Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is an example. It explained all classical physical observations (F=ma, etc...), introduced an explaination as to why the speed of light appears to be constant in the vaccum of space, in all frames of reference, and made a prediction, based on the assertion that light has mass, that the path of ray of light passing close to a massive object will be bent in relation to the mass of both the object and the photon of light. Einstein even suggested an experiment which could prove his theory false: the apparent displacement of the position of a star as light from it grazes by the limb of the Sun during an eclipse of the Sun. Today, however, the 'Standard Model' of physics has failed numereous times to explain quantum events, and several predictions have proven to be wrong, especially in the areas of Neutrino particles and zero point energy.
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>Today, government funding agencies like the NIH (biological science) or NSF (physical science) are the biggest suppliers of cash to public and private scientific research. The attitudes and beliefs of folks in charge of those two agencies control the direction of science research and essentially what is 'truth' in science, and most truth is controlled by politically correct thinking. For example, even though the Theory of Chaos (Dr Lorenz in particular) has demonstrated attempts at long term prediction of the weather are impossible because of the 'butterfly effect', it doesn't stop the NIH from funding such models. Computer models depend on the mathematical models being used, and what comes out of them depends on the values of initial conditions put into them. Predictions of 4-8 degree rises in oceanic temperatures over the next 50 years, along with topography maps showing hot spots on various land areas, are common. The problem was that atomospheric and surface temperatures
>accumulated from an independed and unbias source, ICBM targeting data, which required such temps to an accuracy of a fraction of a degree in order to assure accurate targeting of warheads, showed that over the 20+ years such data was collected the mean temperature of the surface, the atmosphere and the earth in general was constant. There was no global warming during a period when the global warming advocates were claiming that a 0.5 F warming had already occured. These turn of events would never do, so they started looking for evidence which would prove their theories of global warming while ignoring evidence which was contrary, and the NIH and NSF funded such one sided misadventures. Now, we have lots of 'proof' for global warming. And all this from the same crowd who, twenty five years ago, was screaming about the coming of a new ice age or 'nuclear winter'. Their solution for either problem, of course, hasn't changed... Socialism/Marxism/Communism, take your pick.
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>The whole episode reminds me of how biological science was set back 35 years in the former USSR by Stalin's adoption of the quack science put forth by Lysenko, in which he tailored biology to coordinate with Marxist viewpoints of evolution.
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>"The key question was that of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
>Lamarckists cited Engels on their behalf. B.M. Zavadovsky and others of his persuasion replied that they could not be tied to outdated science and had to break with belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, even if this meant abandoning views held by Marx and Engels or Darwin and Timiriazev."
>http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/lysenko.htm
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>"Lysenko's fame as the sort of man who would achieve results continued to spread. With it came a sympathetic hearing for whatever theoretical views he chose to express, no matter how vague or how unsubstantiated. Lysenko's practical achievements were extremely difficult to assess. His methods were seriously lacking in rigour, to put it mildly. His habit was to report only successes. His results were based on extremely small samples, inaccurate records, and the almost total absence of control groups.
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>In 1931 and 1932, a number of geneticists were branded as "menshevising idealists" and lost their positions at the Communist Academy. There was increasing pressure to abandon basic research that was unlikely to lead to immediate practical measures that would advance Soviet agriculture and there were strong implications that research in "pure science" was tantamount to sabotage."
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>Like Lysenko, today's Global Warmers are not above adjusting the evidence to support their theories. And, because many are in positions of control, they think nothing of destroying the careers of those who attempt or actually publish work that disagrees with politically correct thought.
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>The more things change, the more they remain the same... Thankfully, the internet allows opposing evidence to be heard... but for how long? When the internt becomes the propriatary property of a country or a company, will they hesitate to remove or block opposing views when they so easily, and with impunity, strip words from dictionaries in order to control discussion itself?
>JLK