And instead of hunting criminal, they'll hunt terrorists.
They already did. In the comics, the movies and the tv series. Of course, back in the eighties terrorists could still be white non-muslims. The word has been redefined a little (or should I say re-imagined?)
I think the analog between transistors and neurons is a little unfair. The human brain apparently contains about 10^11 neuron (100 billion), but also 10^14 synapses, which would also need to be simulated. However, I should admit that I underestimated the current complexity that we can reach. Indeed, if we assume that Moore's law will hold (especially with the current trend towards parallelism), then in twenty years a state of the art research project may create something of complexity similar to the brain
With regards to the complexity of the brain's initial wiring, I'm not sure I share your optimism. There's a good chance that it shows great amounts of self similarity. If that is true, then it should be possible to understand the whole in terms of its constituent parts. Its encoding in DNA could also provide great insights, but both DNA and the brain are still hugely complex structures that were not designed to be readable by humans. It's possible that the whole thing gets cracked before 2029, sure, but this is the kind of prediction that people have been making for years, and it's always 20 to 40 years in the future, just far enough away to make it plausible. Usually the promising research at the time doesn't quite deliver and other projects and approaches take the spotlight.
you're misquoting Edsger Dijkstra. He said: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim". I'm not sure Minsky would agree.
The way I interpret Dijkstra here, is that he meant when a submarine starts to look sufficiently like a fish, we will call its actions 'swimming'. When it has the exact same range and 'functional ability' as a fish, but moves by spinning its rotors, we don't call it swimming. Thus the human criterion for intelligence (according to Dijkstra) is weighted to much by how the intelligent machine does what it can do, rather than the actual range of what it can do. It needs to do it like we do it, rather than just get the same result. I think that line has blurred since Dijkstra said that, and I can say (as a student in AI) that at least these days, researchers in plain AI look only at what humans can do, and try to replicate the results.
That's largely because everybody realizes that we don't have the hardware to do it the same way humans do. Kurtzweil seems to think we'll have it soon, I seriously doubt that in twenty years we'll have something of similar complexity to 20 billion neurons, and even if we do, we'll have no way to configure the linking and weights of those neurons (or whatever it'll be). It's just too complex, and we don't have billions of years of evolution to find the right parameters for us. We need a shortcut, and not enough of that shortcut has been found yet. There might be a breakthrough between now and 2029, but I don't think that would validate Kurtzweil's prediction.
your comment that "We should concentrate on making computers be the best computers... ", confuses me to no end. Computers can perform thousands of wonderful tasks. They're inching closer to mastering language (aspects of it at least), they're recognizing visual input, making diagnoses, controlling complex actuators. Every step along the way to humanoid AI has given us incredibly useful technology. Besides that, the models that the search for strong AI gives us have given cognitive psychologists actual working models of the way the brain works, which can help us to understand things like schizophrenia. And that's a field that's only just begun. This research is one of the most fertile areas there is. Your statement seems to suggest a misunderstanding of what AI actually does.
You're right, that doesn't make sense. I should've thought that through.
But the Muslim commentary you tend to hear after these controversies does go along the lines of "how would they like it if we insulted Jesus". And that, I think, shows a rather fundamental misunderstanding of western culture.
More importantly, who gives a shit what they think is "unacceptable"?
I know I don't. I don't care almost to the point that this petition doesn't bother me at all. Wikipedia is never going to give in to any of this. Anybody who knows the very least about how Wikipedia operates knows this isn't going to make any kind of a dent in their resolve. For that same reason, I'm not scared of this perceived Muslim threat. Not really.
I did however sign the counter-petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/support-wikipedia-muhammad-pics . Because what does concern me deeply is the language and the numbers. 100,000 is a lot, even for an internet petition, especially considering that this is a group that is not exactly married to the internet. Then there's the language. This petition calls for the removal of the image out of respect for muslims. I'm all for respect for other religions. I will let other people believe whatever the hell they want. I will even suffer a reasonable amount of discomfort to let them do so. We need to give each other some space, at least. That is what respecting other people's religion is. This has nothing whatsoever to do with respect. That's what scares me, how very much they are convinced that these claims are justified, that they're entitled to have this image removed based on their religion alone. That means the whole muslim/western discussion that's so hot at the moment is based on completely shifted views. We use the same words, but we define them differently.
The muslim world doesn't understand the western world at all, and I doubt we understand them very well. When we 'insult' Muhammad, they instantly start insulting Jesus in a sort of "see how you like it" rationale. It seems unimaginable to them that the largest part of the western world does not give a shit what anybody says about Jesus. Which is not to say we are completely free of such taboos. Say the wrong things about the holocaust, and you'll see international outrage and ambassadors being withdrawn and whatnot. The point is, they don't see what the west is really like. (And like I said, the same probably goes for us, although I have more faith in the availability of objective information over here. I doubt I need to explain that one under this story). Until these views get straightened out, we can't work through the tensions that we have at the moment.
So that's why I signed the counter petition. Because I really want it to reach at least similarly high numbers. Not because I'm afraid that Wikipedia will remove the message, but because I want a message out there that is strong enough to make the people that signed the first petition question their sense of entitlement. Just show that there are a hell of a lot of people out there that have very different opinions about what respecting actually religion means. Show these people what world they actually live in. In other words: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/support-wikipedia-muhammad-pics" here
You know that people have written 260 page books on using Google, right? People write big books about simple things. Drupal's theme system is rapidly converging on that sweet spot of being as simple as possible, but no simpler. If you know how to make a static website from valid xhtml and CSS, you can pick up the zen theme and start filling in the blanks.
It's actually easier than writing CSS from scratch, because the major hassles (how do I do three column layout again? Why is ie rendering it like that?) have been taken care of. Best practices that you didn't know about have been taken into account. Then you get to the little things that every website needs; tiny tweaks in the html output, some added javascript, some extra functionality, and nearly everything I've needed so far is in the API.
Having a really simple theming system is nice to get started, but when I need some to tweak something that the API doesn't expose, that means I need to start hacking the core, which means I need to redo the theme for every update (ie. every vulnerability that's found) and I'm married to the code for the rest of my life. I'd rather spend two more days learning a slightly more complicated system.
It might even be a good thing. These open/closed source combo's tend to have a very user-unfriendly open source version with plenty of annoyances, and a lovely smoothed out closed version. I don't know how they do it, but the open source devs never seem to focus on features that would make the closed version obsolete.
Now, if MS would force Zimbra to alienate the OS community (which they will by just attaching their name to it) the whole thing would get forked in a second into a pure open source project. Google would no doubt hand them a large bag of cash, and maybe even some man power.
The closed source blanks would get filled in with open source code. Friendly installation. Free and open integration with Outlook. We'd finally have a good fully open exchange alternative with no drawbacks. Businesses would finally have a reliable way to migrate to open source. Start by migrating away from Exchange, then move to an open source office suite (which will pick up momentum as they get more business users), and finally move to open source desktops. People would get used to Linux at their jobs, and consider moving their home machines to Linux as Vista continues to annoy and XP support is dropped. Linux takes over the desktop, Microsoft loses their hold on the market, Adobe and other companies start supporting UNIX systems. Peace emerges in the middle east. Obama gets elected president with Ron Paul as a running mate and Kucinich as first lady. Jesus returns to earth and gives everybody high fives for a job well done.
Well... maybe the fork would happen. I think "Joombra" has a nice ring to it.
Here's the thing, what if you forgot about all that. What if you just used a 15-year old casette recorder and sang into it for about half an hour. Just for the sake of hypothesis. There are plenty of singers who could make that worth listening to. Imagine if we had tapes like that from Elvis' early days? They'd be worth a fortune.
Of course, if you're going to do it 'properly' and by the book, making an album is a hell of a job. But you can get around it. By working with what you've got, you're challenging yourself to be creative, and many new ideas can come from that. People make movies at home, as a hobby. You don't hear anybody shouting "but you need a budget, a good chase scene with large explosions will cost at least half a million dollars!". You do without, you think of something else. That's what projects like these are about, the limiting factor actually breeds creativity. Maybe an album needs a budget of 20 000 dollars, but music doesn't.
The rest of your attitude confuses me even more. Nobody's telling you you need to give anything away for free... Just keep doing what you're doing and the world will keep on turning. Meanwhile some people will try to make free albums in a short amount of time, sharing their knowledge and experiences and creating an atmosphere of creativity. You don't have to take part in any of it. When I tell certain people that I'm vegetarian, they get really defensive, almost to the point of aggression. I've never suggested in my life that anybody should become a vegetarian too, it's just a personal thing, and still people feel attacked by it. I've come to the conclusion that my not eating meat forces them to justify why they do, and the ones that can't really do it get defensive. Maybe this is the same thing?
Don't underestimate the power of pure curiosity. Maybe launching paper airplanes from a space station isn't directly going to contribute to anything great like curing cancer, but when that great thing does happen, I'm certain that the big leaps are going to be made by people that just followed their curiosity, instead of worrying about the significance of what they're doing.
As an example, Richard Feynman had sort of a breakdown early in his career. His inspiration had run out, everybody was waiting for the genius to do something brilliant, and he was feeling miserable. Then he decided that he wasn't going to care about people's expectations, about what kind of research was respectable, he was just going to follow up on the little things that interested him. He sat in a cafeteria, looked at a spinning plate (I don't remember the details, there was a spinning plate somehow) and he decided he would try to figure out the forces that made that plate spin like that. He did figure it out, proudly showed it to some senior, who said 'great, but what's the relevance'. There wasn't any, he'd just followed his nose, and solved a problem. Later that little solution turned into to the research that earned him a Nobel prize and became the most accurate scientific theory to date (or second most accurate, I'm no expert).
The point is that many scientists don't work well on something that is prescribed in any way. They need absolute freedom to just do stuff that interests them. If they really have to they can work on things that are more immediately relevant, but not with passion, and it'll never be as great as the stuff they do when just follow their instinct. And these scientists tend to be the ones that come up with the great breakthroughs.
So if these guys want to send up 30 grams with the next shuttle, and take up three minutes of the astronauts' time, I'm fine with that. It's important in a subtle way. It's also very cool.
Does ODF have a scripting language defined? That would be a perfect selling point. Switch all your complicated macro-based documents to ODF and this will never happen again.
If you're going to print pictures with people in them, especially on a large scale, make sure you know about model releases. Any company that hires lawyers knows about this, and I seriously doubt that they'd let anything slip through the cracks. Any company that doesn't have lawyers working for them would surely not print on such a great scale that huge amounts of damages could be claimed. In any case the legal history of cases based on granted copyright without model releases should be examined before we start spreading FUD about a license that's been pretty good to and for us.
On the second point, if you're actually worried that someone is 'gaming the CC' to get your money, just send them an email asking if you may use the image under the specified license. Problem solved. No need to be afraid of the CC license.
I hope this guy is happy with the 50 bucks worth of extra clicks on his google ads he got from his slashdot feature. This may well hurt the commons just like all the disinformation about the GPL has hurt open source acceptance. You know how lawyers are. Until there's precedent, they will advise their boss against using the Commons. Better safe than fired.
I disagree with your wording. 'They' should only teach you one language. Then you know how to code, and you can do the rest yourself. If you can't teach yourself python, you don't belong in college (at least not in the CS classes). Even C or C++ you can pick up as you need it. So long as they take into account that not all students are quite proficient with a language when it's obligatory for a class. I was taught java explicitly in a class designed to teach programming. I was taught Prolog in a class designed to teach Logic (Prolog is kind of an exception). I learned all other languages during classes as I needed them, or I thought they's be useful. The only problem here is C/C++ because it's tricky to go from java to C, but we learned about C in a class about the inner workings of the computer (which is a great way of explaining C, and why those weird things that java doesn't have are necessary or useful).
There's only a limited amount of time to teach students about a lot of important topics, so it's a waste of time to start teaching them languages, when they're supposed to be able to do that by themselves. And if the newly hired developer isn't familiar with the the language, or the technology you use, you educate them. Invest in your people. Companies need to get off this idea that IT people come readily instructed for whatever they want done. We're smart people with an active interest in our field. You invest in us, respect us, and we will learn. Consider us little robots that can be turned on and off, and come pre-packaged with the right knowledge, we will zone out and play solitaire all day.
Another problem is that when you've spent five years writing your own, increasingly beautiful code in a pleasant language like java, you don't want to take a job maintaining some hideous monstrosity of a C++ system with all kinds of deprecated syntax, ugly commercial libraries, and various design-philosophies spread across thousands of modules. You're not trained to be a developer, you're trained to be a scientist. It costs a lot of money for people to take that kind of job, when they've spent years of their life and thousands of dollars to educate themselves on something they're passionate about. They'll have actual ideas and insights. Stuff gets outsourced because programmers in another country don't worry about the overall design and the big picture, like people do when they all work in the same office and care about their company. We should be glad that these jobs are getting outsourced. It's not the kind of work you want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
They already did. In the comics, the movies and the tv series. Of course, back in the eighties terrorists could still be white non-muslims. The word has been redefined a little (or should I say re-imagined?)
So my upcoming title "Awesomely Rad FORTRAN" is still ok?
There were also hardcore swirls and hardcore eddies. Fluid dynamicists are all about the IPv6.
I'd rather have no dichotomy at all, than a false dichotomy.
Three people who depend on three different sources are unreliable.
I think the analog between transistors and neurons is a little unfair. The human brain apparently contains about 10^11 neuron (100 billion), but also 10^14 synapses, which would also need to be simulated. However, I should admit that I underestimated the current complexity that we can reach. Indeed, if we assume that Moore's law will hold (especially with the current trend towards parallelism), then in twenty years a state of the art research project may create something of complexity similar to the brain
With regards to the complexity of the brain's initial wiring, I'm not sure I share your optimism. There's a good chance that it shows great amounts of self similarity. If that is true, then it should be possible to understand the whole in terms of its constituent parts. Its encoding in DNA could also provide great insights, but both DNA and the brain are still hugely complex structures that were not designed to be readable by humans. It's possible that the whole thing gets cracked before 2029, sure, but this is the kind of prediction that people have been making for years, and it's always 20 to 40 years in the future, just far enough away to make it plausible. Usually the promising research at the time doesn't quite deliver and other projects and approaches take the spotlight.
you're misquoting Edsger Dijkstra. He said: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim". I'm not sure Minsky would agree.
The way I interpret Dijkstra here, is that he meant when a submarine starts to look sufficiently like a fish, we will call its actions 'swimming'. When it has the exact same range and 'functional ability' as a fish, but moves by spinning its rotors, we don't call it swimming. Thus the human criterion for intelligence (according to Dijkstra) is weighted to much by how the intelligent machine does what it can do, rather than the actual range of what it can do. It needs to do it like we do it, rather than just get the same result. I think that line has blurred since Dijkstra said that, and I can say (as a student in AI) that at least these days, researchers in plain AI look only at what humans can do, and try to replicate the results.
That's largely because everybody realizes that we don't have the hardware to do it the same way humans do. Kurtzweil seems to think we'll have it soon, I seriously doubt that in twenty years we'll have something of similar complexity to 20 billion neurons, and even if we do, we'll have no way to configure the linking and weights of those neurons (or whatever it'll be). It's just too complex, and we don't have billions of years of evolution to find the right parameters for us. We need a shortcut, and not enough of that shortcut has been found yet. There might be a breakthrough between now and 2029, but I don't think that would validate Kurtzweil's prediction.
your comment that "We should concentrate on making computers be the best computers... ", confuses me to no end. Computers can perform thousands of wonderful tasks. They're inching closer to mastering language (aspects of it at least), they're recognizing visual input, making diagnoses, controlling complex actuators. Every step along the way to humanoid AI has given us incredibly useful technology. Besides that, the models that the search for strong AI gives us have given cognitive psychologists actual working models of the way the brain works, which can help us to understand things like schizophrenia. And that's a field that's only just begun. This research is one of the most fertile areas there is. Your statement seems to suggest a misunderstanding of what AI actually does.
I think you're confusing organized crime with the sex industry.
You're right, that doesn't make sense. I should've thought that through.
But the Muslim commentary you tend to hear after these controversies does go along the lines of "how would they like it if we insulted Jesus". And that, I think, shows a rather fundamental misunderstanding of western culture.
I know I don't. I don't care almost to the point that this petition doesn't bother me at all. Wikipedia is never going to give in to any of this. Anybody who knows the very least about how Wikipedia operates knows this isn't going to make any kind of a dent in their resolve. For that same reason, I'm not scared of this perceived Muslim threat. Not really.
I did however sign the counter-petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/support-wikipedia-muhammad-pics . Because what does concern me deeply is the language and the numbers. 100,000 is a lot, even for an internet petition, especially considering that this is a group that is not exactly married to the internet. Then there's the language. This petition calls for the removal of the image out of respect for muslims. I'm all for respect for other religions. I will let other people believe whatever the hell they want. I will even suffer a reasonable amount of discomfort to let them do so. We need to give each other some space, at least. That is what respecting other people's religion is. This has nothing whatsoever to do with respect. That's what scares me, how very much they are convinced that these claims are justified, that they're entitled to have this image removed based on their religion alone. That means the whole muslim/western discussion that's so hot at the moment is based on completely shifted views. We use the same words, but we define them differently.
The muslim world doesn't understand the western world at all, and I doubt we understand them very well. When we 'insult' Muhammad, they instantly start insulting Jesus in a sort of "see how you like it" rationale. It seems unimaginable to them that the largest part of the western world does not give a shit what anybody says about Jesus. Which is not to say we are completely free of such taboos. Say the wrong things about the holocaust, and you'll see international outrage and ambassadors being withdrawn and whatnot. The point is, they don't see what the west is really like. (And like I said, the same probably goes for us, although I have more faith in the availability of objective information over here. I doubt I need to explain that one under this story). Until these views get straightened out, we can't work through the tensions that we have at the moment.
So that's why I signed the counter petition. Because I really want it to reach at least similarly high numbers. Not because I'm afraid that Wikipedia will remove the message, but because I want a message out there that is strong enough to make the people that signed the first petition question their sense of entitlement. Just show that there are a hell of a lot of people out there that have very different opinions about what respecting actually religion means. Show these people what world they actually live in. In other words: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/support-wikipedia-muhammad-pics" here
You know that people have written 260 page books on using Google, right? People write big books about simple things. Drupal's theme system is rapidly converging on that sweet spot of being as simple as possible, but no simpler. If you know how to make a static website from valid xhtml and CSS, you can pick up the zen theme and start filling in the blanks.
It's actually easier than writing CSS from scratch, because the major hassles (how do I do three column layout again? Why is ie rendering it like that?) have been taken care of. Best practices that you didn't know about have been taken into account. Then you get to the little things that every website needs; tiny tweaks in the html output, some added javascript, some extra functionality, and nearly everything I've needed so far is in the API.
Having a really simple theming system is nice to get started, but when I need some to tweak something that the API doesn't expose, that means I need to start hacking the core, which means I need to redo the theme for every update (ie. every vulnerability that's found) and I'm married to the code for the rest of my life. I'd rather spend two more days learning a slightly more complicated system.
Who cares about them, doesn't anybody realize that we're cut of from the Iranian network? What will I do without Ahmadinejad's delightful blog?
It might even be a good thing. These open/closed source combo's tend to have a very user-unfriendly open source version with plenty of annoyances, and a lovely smoothed out closed version. I don't know how they do it, but the open source devs never seem to focus on features that would make the closed version obsolete.
Now, if MS would force Zimbra to alienate the OS community (which they will by just attaching their name to it) the whole thing would get forked in a second into a pure open source project. Google would no doubt hand them a large bag of cash, and maybe even some man power.
The closed source blanks would get filled in with open source code. Friendly installation. Free and open integration with Outlook. We'd finally have a good fully open exchange alternative with no drawbacks. Businesses would finally have a reliable way to migrate to open source. Start by migrating away from Exchange, then move to an open source office suite (which will pick up momentum as they get more business users), and finally move to open source desktops. People would get used to Linux at their jobs, and consider moving their home machines to Linux as Vista continues to annoy and XP support is dropped. Linux takes over the desktop, Microsoft loses their hold on the market, Adobe and other companies start supporting UNIX systems. Peace emerges in the middle east. Obama gets elected president with Ron Paul as a running mate and Kucinich as first lady. Jesus returns to earth and gives everybody high fives for a job well done.
Well... maybe the fork would happen. I think "Joombra" has a nice ring to it.
Here's the thing, what if you forgot about all that. What if you just used a 15-year old casette recorder and sang into it for about half an hour. Just for the sake of hypothesis. There are plenty of singers who could make that worth listening to. Imagine if we had tapes like that from Elvis' early days? They'd be worth a fortune.
Of course, if you're going to do it 'properly' and by the book, making an album is a hell of a job. But you can get around it. By working with what you've got, you're challenging yourself to be creative, and many new ideas can come from that. People make movies at home, as a hobby. You don't hear anybody shouting "but you need a budget, a good chase scene with large explosions will cost at least half a million dollars!". You do without, you think of something else. That's what projects like these are about, the limiting factor actually breeds creativity. Maybe an album needs a budget of 20 000 dollars, but music doesn't.
The rest of your attitude confuses me even more. Nobody's telling you you need to give anything away for free... Just keep doing what you're doing and the world will keep on turning. Meanwhile some people will try to make free albums in a short amount of time, sharing their knowledge and experiences and creating an atmosphere of creativity. You don't have to take part in any of it. When I tell certain people that I'm vegetarian, they get really defensive, almost to the point of aggression. I've never suggested in my life that anybody should become a vegetarian too, it's just a personal thing, and still people feel attacked by it. I've come to the conclusion that my not eating meat forces them to justify why they do, and the ones that can't really do it get defensive. Maybe this is the same thing?
Really? I did that in Java, and I had a hell of a time. Clearly Perl is the superior language.
Don't underestimate the power of pure curiosity. Maybe launching paper airplanes from a space station isn't directly going to contribute to anything great like curing cancer, but when that great thing does happen, I'm certain that the big leaps are going to be made by people that just followed their curiosity, instead of worrying about the significance of what they're doing.
As an example, Richard Feynman had sort of a breakdown early in his career. His inspiration had run out, everybody was waiting for the genius to do something brilliant, and he was feeling miserable. Then he decided that he wasn't going to care about people's expectations, about what kind of research was respectable, he was just going to follow up on the little things that interested him. He sat in a cafeteria, looked at a spinning plate (I don't remember the details, there was a spinning plate somehow) and he decided he would try to figure out the forces that made that plate spin like that. He did figure it out, proudly showed it to some senior, who said 'great, but what's the relevance'. There wasn't any, he'd just followed his nose, and solved a problem. Later that little solution turned into to the research that earned him a Nobel prize and became the most accurate scientific theory to date (or second most accurate, I'm no expert).
The point is that many scientists don't work well on something that is prescribed in any way. They need absolute freedom to just do stuff that interests them. If they really have to they can work on things that are more immediately relevant, but not with passion, and it'll never be as great as the stuff they do when just follow their instinct. And these scientists tend to be the ones that come up with the great breakthroughs.
So if these guys want to send up 30 grams with the next shuttle, and take up three minutes of the astronauts' time, I'm fine with that. It's important in a subtle way. It's also very cool.
I'm the same way with ghosts coming after me while I'm eating tic-tacs in my maze.
Maybe they should start distributing a rebranded version of Pidgin as their client. Sort of complete the circle.
What about Wagner? Am I not allowed to enjoy his music, because he was an anti-semite?
It's perpendicular to tupperware.
Does ODF have a scripting language defined? That would be a perfect selling point. Switch all your complicated macro-based documents to ODF and this will never happen again.
Just hope they're using signed ints to store that value.
So you're saying you can recognize pornstars by their genitals, but not by their faces? Truly, you are the master of pron-sadness.
Okay, so two points...
If you're going to print pictures with people in them, especially on a large scale, make sure you know about model releases. Any company that hires lawyers knows about this, and I seriously doubt that they'd let anything slip through the cracks. Any company that doesn't have lawyers working for them would surely not print on such a great scale that huge amounts of damages could be claimed. In any case the legal history of cases based on granted copyright without model releases should be examined before we start spreading FUD about a license that's been pretty good to and for us.
On the second point, if you're actually worried that someone is 'gaming the CC' to get your money, just send them an email asking if you may use the image under the specified license. Problem solved. No need to be afraid of the CC license.
I hope this guy is happy with the 50 bucks worth of extra clicks on his google ads he got from his slashdot feature. This may well hurt the commons just like all the disinformation about the GPL has hurt open source acceptance. You know how lawyers are. Until there's precedent, they will advise their boss against using the Commons. Better safe than fired.
I disagree with your wording. 'They' should only teach you one language. Then you know how to code, and you can do the rest yourself. If you can't teach yourself python, you don't belong in college (at least not in the CS classes). Even C or C++ you can pick up as you need it. So long as they take into account that not all students are quite proficient with a language when it's obligatory for a class. I was taught java explicitly in a class designed to teach programming. I was taught Prolog in a class designed to teach Logic (Prolog is kind of an exception). I learned all other languages during classes as I needed them, or I thought they's be useful. The only problem here is C/C++ because it's tricky to go from java to C, but we learned about C in a class about the inner workings of the computer (which is a great way of explaining C, and why those weird things that java doesn't have are necessary or useful).
There's only a limited amount of time to teach students about a lot of important topics, so it's a waste of time to start teaching them languages, when they're supposed to be able to do that by themselves. And if the newly hired developer isn't familiar with the the language, or the technology you use, you educate them. Invest in your people. Companies need to get off this idea that IT people come readily instructed for whatever they want done. We're smart people with an active interest in our field. You invest in us, respect us, and we will learn. Consider us little robots that can be turned on and off, and come pre-packaged with the right knowledge, we will zone out and play solitaire all day.
Another problem is that when you've spent five years writing your own, increasingly beautiful code in a pleasant language like java, you don't want to take a job maintaining some hideous monstrosity of a C++ system with all kinds of deprecated syntax, ugly commercial libraries, and various design-philosophies spread across thousands of modules. You're not trained to be a developer, you're trained to be a scientist. It costs a lot of money for people to take that kind of job, when they've spent years of their life and thousands of dollars to educate themselves on something they're passionate about. They'll have actual ideas and insights. Stuff gets outsourced because programmers in another country don't worry about the overall design and the big picture, like people do when they all work in the same office and care about their company. We should be glad that these jobs are getting outsourced. It's not the kind of work you want to do.