[ijoshua]

<q>You just participated.</q>

I did not realize this was an argument. I guess I lost.

Seriously, though, the most interesting arguments don't resolve for quite some time, if ever. For example, who was the winner in the infamous Torvalds v. Tanenbaum argument over monolithic versus micro-kernels? One could say that Torvalds "won," in the sense that Linux became far more successful than Minix. Yet, Windows and Mac OS are both based, in part, on a micro-kernel architecture, and both have a greater share of the market than Linux.

[ijoshua]

I'd like to see a scoring system that evaluates the discussion or thread as a whole, rather than the individual contributions; a metric like a signal-to-noise ratio, where a thread gets a higher score for being on-topic and relevant, or a lower score for degenerating into a pissing match.