When payoff is proportional to the risk, yes. When you are practically guaranteed to get more money back out than you put in, no, it's not a service, it's rent collecting at its finest.
You seem to see rent collecting as inherently unfair, which I find an odd concept. Investing in a company is collecting 'rent' on your money in a certain sense, as is leaving the money in the bank (lending to the bank), and lending from the bank, and without that service (and there would be no service if you were not 'practically guaranteed to get more money back out than you put in') you wouldn't be able to buy a house, start a business, buy a car on credit etc etc etc. Do you really disagree with all those activities for anyone other than those rich enough to pay up front in cash?
Not at all. The key thing about capitalist means of production is that there is a significant barrier of entry regarding owning them. That's what makes collecting rent possible in classic capitalism - a disgruntled worker can't just buy a factory of his own to work in; it would take a great deal of them to pool up together to be able to afford that. A website does not have such barrier of entry - everyone can host one, dirt cheap.
Yes, so things have changed significantly. That doesn't mean the definition of means of production should suddenly shift to try to categorise all those people who are now potential petit bourgeoisie as capitalist pig-dogs, it tells us that in some spheres the means of production are now within the grasp of ordinary people. That has changed everything in the western world (though of course we just exported our manufacturing which has created other imbalances and inherited wealth means that it will be a long time before the effects are fully felt). We have come a long way since 1848, and in many ways have seen regulated capitalism develop the socialist world Marx dreamed of in the west.
That's a rent extraction - not economic value through gain in actual goods or services.
You don't consider lending money or investing to be a service? I'd love to see the mental gymnastics you have to perform to square that one away.
In an information economy the intangible can become as valuable as the tangible, and 'actual work' can be performed on bytes, transforming them into some other non-random set of bytes, without coming into contact with the real world - all that is solid melts into air, but the air is still considered valuable. The distinction of rent from payment for labour is really quite a difficult one to make when you consider service to be labour, as many services (say setting up a website) could be considered simply owning the means of production and collecting rent from your users. Things have moved on a bit from 1848 when there was a far more clear distinction between those who laboured and those who had the means to hire labour.
It always astonishes me that on a geeky site like Slashdot with an audience that in theory puts such a high value on science, you get so many global warming denialists.
While I don't think you should have been modded flame-bait, if you're interested in intelligent debate instead of polarised trash-talking, you'd be better to leave out labels like denier and denialist - these have been fashioned to ridicule those they are attached to rather than advance the debate.
It is perfectly scientific to be sceptical about anthropogenic global warming, and that does not mean you put no high value in science, it may just mean you are not convinced by the evidence so far presented that global warming is caused solely or mainly by human interference. It should be noted just as a baseline that we are not sure exactly how fast the climate has changed in the past, however we are sure it has changed in radically more profound ways than the current spate of warming and swung from very high temperatures to very low. Even in recent memory (Little Ice Age), we've had a period of cooler weather which we can't fully explain.
I believe in anthropogenic global warming but am also of the opinion we don't really understand how our climate works or what the triggers and turning points are, does that make me a denier or a believer?
for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.
And those who are sucked into a fad or bubble are often the last to admit that they were wrong.
In addition to Facebook being far more spammy than any email I've ever owned, the fact that it is popular with vast numbers of people does not mean that they can turn that into significant revenue - enough to justify $100 billion valuation would be quite remarkable when they've already jumped the shark.
from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money.
Gosh, I wonder who leaked those? I wonder if they were even real or subtly tweaked? Frankly I think Facebook will be about as successful longterm as MySpace, Geocities, eWorld, Yahoo and a bunch of other 'portals' which were due to replace the internet any time soon before the last tech bubble, but even if it is way more successful than those, why should it replace email? Given their public hostility to the concept of privacy, why would you possibly want to trust Zuckerberg and Facebook with your private correspondence?
This IPO is not a game-changer, it's not the start of a new paradigm, and it's not worth $100b, it's business as usual for Goldman Sachs, who see their role as extracting as much real money from the economy as possible while putting in as little as possible themselves - it seems there's an endless line of patsies who are willing to fund their robber-baron lifestyle. Good luck ever getting your money back if you invest in this sucker's game.
So in that light, I find that the USSR was probably instrumental in the creation of the EU.
If you read the original statements, you'll find that the raison d'être of the agreements and a proposed federal superstate was to prevent European war. The USSR was not yet the bugbear it was to become, particularly to Americans, and was not the driving force behind these agreements, or behind the founding of the EU. The EU was envisioned from the very start as the end of a long process of unification in the European Coal and Steel Community agreement, explicitly founded to prevent war within Europe. To quote the founder:
The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible."
So I'm afraid your narrative about the USSR being 'probably instrumental' and the sole reason for the EU existing is wishful thinking - it is not even mentioned in the ECSC proclamation. You can be hostile to the EU, there are plenty of reasons to be in its current state, but trying to claim it was founded as a bulwark against communism is simply wrong. I'm sure its politicians are opportunistic, self-serving and needlessly bureaucratic (like most politicians), and further unification is debatable, but again, the founding principles of an 'ever closer union' were to prevent war and promote integration between EU countries, not to protect against the USSR. In that aim at least it has succeeded and will hopefully continue to succeed.
I'm not really sure I understand why one would expect to program without a game plan
It's quite possible to mess up both agile and more traditional styles of development - obviously neither approach is a magic bullet which will transform a bad team/product into a good one.
To address your specific concern above, agile is a response to some obvious failures of the top-down model - sometimes it's very hard to pin down requirements in advance, or they simply change because of external factors, or the wrong people are asked for requirements, which doesn't become clear till the software is delivered after a long period of work isolated from use, broken as designed. That means trying to plan everything in advance doesn't always work, and *sometimes*, with the right team, it's easier to start with a basic app which works well in a very simple way, and then build up layers of features as you decide which things are actually important to your users.
Now in some cases it's easy to define all requirements in advance, the use-cases are very simple, the users few and clear on what they want, and an agile approach is not really required, in others with lots of potential users/use-cases sometimes it's better to start small and work up to something bigger, or there's a danger you'll never finish.
Of course this can go horribly wrong if you use it as an excuse to never properly define requirements, never solicit proper feedback from users, or to just hack up any old thing and call it finished. There is no system which can deal with bad attitude, lack of effort or incompetence, and there are many ways to mess up every project - if you have the wrong team and leadership they'll find every possible way to make things go wrong, no matter which approach you take. No idea what went wrong here, but it's unlikely to be development methodology and far more likely to be the result of politics and infighting between different departments and users.
You have confused some dates here. While there was a movement to unification for some industries shortly after the Second World War, the EU itself didn't come about formally till after the fall of the USSR. Meanwhile, the USSR was a known threat from well before the Second World War.
The EU is just an extension of the coal and steel agreement between France and Germany and the EEC:
These were explicitly designed to avoid war by promoting 'ever closer union' between the major powers of Europe and forming a federal union (eventually to manifest itself as the EU), and have worked quite well in that respect, as has the EU which continues that integration and expands it to further nations, though of course you can't prove something has worked by the mere absence of war. It does have major fault lines which may yet see it collapse in acrimony, and of course it has problems of legitimacy as the parliament which is democratically elected has less power than it should. I'm not sure about harming the European economy, as it has removed a lot of barriers to trade and free movement of workers - I'm all for that and see it as a positive result of european integration. There are lots of negatives of course, and like most politics the EU has seen a lot of farce. I'm not convinced that local or national politics in say the UK is any less corrupt than that seen in Europe, it's just on a smaller scale.
As to war, the USSR was our ally in the second world war, which you have neglected to mention. Just because the US felt the threat of the invasion of Europe by the USSR most keenly, that doesn't mean that defending against the USSR was the function of the EU (which the previous poster asserted) - I'd say a far more credible justification for it (something explicitly stated in the earlier agreements just after the war, and continually cited afterward as a justification for ever closer union) was to prevent war within Europe by integrating the lead countries so tightly that they couldn't countenance war with each other. The USSR is really peripheral to all consideration of the EU and the reasons for its founding.
The sole justification that the original poster made was that the EU prevented large scale war. That pretext vanished twenty years ago.
Presumably you mean the collapse of communist satellite regimes to the USSR? That was never the purpose of the EU. The EU was founded after the second world war, in which the USSR fought on the winning side incidentally - it was not yet the enemy it became, to prevent the major powers in Europe from again triggering a world war due to their rivalry - the promise of ever closer union was supposed to keep that in check and prevent war. For that purpose it has served admirably up to the present crisis, and the threat is still every much there of a pan-european war unless we have a pan european state to channel those rivalries in different directions. So the original purpose of the EU is still to prevent european warfare (NB not world war, european war), and in fact in times of economic crisis it is more important then ever.
The second point that has you think "trolling" for some reason, is just the obvious point that the EU is failing harder than the US is. The EU has this huge complex government (it started complex with a ridiculously large constitution, for example), and not much to show for it aside from creating some economic failures.
The current string of economic failures have their origins in the dysfunctional US financial system, and the spread of opaque financial instruments like CDS and MBS from the US to the rest of the financial world, which helped sell sub-prime real estate and dodgy debt to banks all over the world, without them realising what they were getting. So I find it hard to accept that the EU fails harder than the US, unless you take GDP as the only measure of financial success. I'd say the US still has the systemic problems which caused the current crisis, and has done nothing to address them.
The EU has actually been quite a success economically in tying the poorer countries in southern Europe to the richer northern ones and allowing citizens to move at will between all of them, thus redistributing labour and wealth. The Euro of course has come close to failure caused by hubris and overconfidence, though they might yet pull it off if they can get through this crisis. I'm not sure you could say the EU 'caused' failures, so much as ignored the misbehaviour of constituent governments until it was too late.
Iran has expressed a repeated and rather vocal interest in destroying the US and Isreal. I happen to live in the US and so have a vested interested in our continued existence.
Whether Iran has nukes or not is not an existential issue for the US, by any stretch of the imagination, it could conceivably be considered one for Israel, however they have their own nukes and a capable army, and Iran's greatest advantage is not nukes but their size - they could easily invade Israel with conventional means and prevail, and yet they haven't.
If I thought Iran would play nice, I wouldn't have a problem with them arming themselves.
Who decides who plays nice? Who decides whether the US is playing nice enough?
The US has invaded substantially more countries than Iran, sponsored a puppet regime in Iran which led to revolution, terrorism in Iran (Jundallah), and even sponsored an evil dictator in a decade-long devastating war with Iran which involved the extensive use of banned chemical weapons and bombing of civilians (an evil dictator they later decided had to be deposed 'in the interests of the international community').
If you're sincerely talking about the world as a meritocracy where only the decent upstanding countries deserve nukes, you need to take a serious unbiased look at your own country's recent behaviour, and decide whether you really have any justification for taking any interest in the actions of other countries outside your borders, and attempting to police their behaviour. By your own set of standards, the US cannot be trusted with nukes, and should also be intensely interested in removing nukes from North Korea and Pakistan, two very unstable states, one of which *still* receives massive US funding. The fact that there is no interest in removing nukes from North Korea now that they have them, and that the failed state of Pakistan receives massive funding in spite of their arsenal should be a clue that this is not about the nukes. Like WMD in Iraq, the nukes are a smokescreen used to whip up the home population into a patriotic frenzy.
Frankly I think the coming war with Iran has nothing to do with making the world a better place or removing nukes from the middle east, and everything to do with a desire to definitely control the Middle East as a base against China and Russia, and because the oil supply will become increasingly important to enemies of the US and the US itself as oil becomes more costly. This will end in tears of course, just like the earlier attempt to control Iran ended with a deposed Shah, but the Iranian regime is a willing partner in this dance to war, so unfortunately that's what we will get.
Look how they killed the solar industry in the US.
The US killed their own solar industry through lack of interest. For all the money spent on two pointless wars over the last decade, the US could now be energy independent and exporting solar power if they had put the huge amount of government money into promoting a home-grown solar industry. The US has massive areas of the country which are ideally suited to solar power, and many areas which would benefit from it. Protectionism is alive and well in other industries, and I don't see why the US could not impose tariffs on solar, or make it otherwise difficult to import it to prevent dumping. As oil prices become increasingly volatile, this obsession with controlling the middle east and lack of interest in alternatives to fossil fuels is going to hurt the US more and more.
That's not a chinese conspiracy, it's simply incompetence on behalf of US leaders and lack of interest on the part of the US public.
Another option of course are car clubs combined with public transport. This solution works really well in large cities where people do not need a car the vast majority of the time, and is also far cheaper than owning a car.
Don't gloss over the fact that Iran has a government run by evil people who horribly oppress their own population, and would love to destroy the population of other countries too.
In the eyes of the rest of the world, and without hyperbole, the US has a government who fits this description. That is not to say that the US is similar to Iran or as oppressive, but it is an oppressive state (particularly abroad), run by corrupt politicians who see no problem with collateral damage in other nations running into the tens of thousands of civilians, in order to install their chosen puppet government in a country.
During the Iran Iraq war the US support Saddam, an evil dictator who they now vilify, in Pakistan they supported Musharaf, in Afghanistan they support Karzai, in Uzbekhistan they support Karimov, etc, etc. The Iraq war and the Iranian 'nuclear problem' are pretexts in order to dominate the region Civilian deaths in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq all fit the description you give of destroying the population of other countries Recent protests in the US have been brutally put down, no killings yet, but heavily policed US citizens can now be sent to guantanamo bay and held indefinitely without trial
I don't think anybody actually believes that, even if they have to act as if they do.
And yet the US money keeps on flowing for Pakistan - billions over the last decade. You even funded the mujahideen, which really is the textbook example of why this sort of interference ends in tears.
The best thing the US could do in this region is to stay out, and spend their money on positive civilian programmes in nations which are open enough to allow proper oversight. The clumsy US attempts to gain influence in the Middle East and vilify Iran are just playing into the hands of the likes of Ahmadinejad who, like Saddam, actively courts war in order to stoke up nationalism at home.
You guess wrong in my case. I do a lot of reading on an LCD screen - attached to my laptop, on a tablet, on a phone. In fact I spend most of my working life and much of my liesure time reading the web and books on it, and the advantages for reading (colour, resolution, response time) outweigh the disadvantages (lower battery life, sunlight) to my mind. YMMV.
Okay. So by your logic, its alright if I develop a nuclear bomb in my garage. And if my neighbors complain, and the police arrest me and shut me down for violating any number of laws, then the neighbors and the police are the aggressors ?
Ah, so you're saying that the US should in fact be concentrating on Israel, Pakistan, and India and preparing to invade them? All those regional powers have developed nuclear weapons recently, in violation of proliferation treaties, why are they not considered a threat and demonised?
The reason they are not threatened and subject to military incursions is quite simple; they do not threaten US interests, and (at least until recently in the case of Pakistan) are US allies - therefore they can do whatever they like, including lie about whether they even have nuclear capability (Israel) and develop nuclear weapons.
Aside from that, your analogy is completely flawed - a citizen of a state is in an entirely different position vis-a-vis their government and fellow citizens than one sovereign state versus another. Or perhaps you view the world as some sort of superstate which the US is in charge of because of their manifest destiny?
Iran has been steadily demonised by the US in preparation for war (and has an equally silly penchant for painting the US and UK as the great satan - at this point the propaganda on both sides is equally farcical). This will lead to war, perhaps an unintended global war, and is not something we should view lightly or see as some small policing action. The US has neither the money, nor the stamina, nor the men, to pacify Iran as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, and even if they could, would invading an entire region of the world be justified - at what point do the lies used to justify these invasions become too much?
If I was a US taxpayer I would be seriously concerned that it is viewed as acceptable to provoke yet another gulf state in this way. The US is already losing two wars of attrition in the region, and if they start another, the larger powers like Russia and China may take an interest in backing insurgencies, in which case the US will simply bleed till it withdraws in ignominy. There is no easy solution here.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that the average person who probably doesn't even remember anything about it is using advanced math? I don't believe that at all.
I'm trying to tell you the average person could find Maths incredibly useful in their life, and that's why we have it as a basic subject. You've changed this statement in two ways in order to make it easier to argue against - turned Maths into Advanced Maths, and started talking about what the average person does, rather than what they should do. Perhaps average people don't use Maths as much as they should (esp. in your country), but that is not an argument for removing everything but the most basic maths from the syllabus, quite the contrary.
Maths is a very useful basic subject to know, and yet it is completely abstract and often not apparently useful (see the geometry of triangles for one example). However once studied it can be useful for people from builders to administrators.
In the same way programming could also be considered useful, although apparently an abstract skill with little application, it's the sort of thing that could make an administrator using excel explore macros rather than processing 500 lines of data by hand, or a builder consider automating some of the basic maths they have to perform in the course of their work on their phone for quick access.
However we have a philosophical roadblock which is making you object to all of these arguments with spurious responses, which is that you don't like the idea of any mandatory classes at all. In my opinion mandatory schooling is essential to teach children the value of subjects like maths, and part of that mandatory schooling should be classes on programming, just as we currently impose English and Maths.
In other words, even if what you said is true, I still view mandatory classes as a complete waste of time.
No pain, no gain, you sissy! - Precisely, if you want to fight a law, unjust or not, and have it overturned, you have to be prepared to suffer for it in the real world, and persuade enough other people to do it too, not try to subvert things from the comfort of your basement, or worse (as anonymous have done in the past) get some other sucker to pay for your actions instead (like the naive LOIC users).
That's an example of what I mean about the messiness inherent in our code ecosystem.
To be fair, it is one point out of many you made in your initial post; all the others were addressed by Ruby.
Trying to interface between languages/libraries is always going to be painful, now and in the future, as languages and requirements change and evolve, and either the interface remains static and the user has to work around the shortcomings, or the interface changes and breaks previous uses. This is a problem common to library design, API design and even language design. I honestly don't think defining a standard for library interfaces would help do anything other than slow down progress - we already have a defacto one with C, and it is hardly elegant.
The best solution to your problem that I have seen is the unix solution of many discreet tools which pass data via files and pipes. So you'd write your processing code in your language of choice, and then call out to that using the platform vendor's language of choice for GUI programming, passing either data in files and/or arguments.
"May not be of immediate practical use" should be changed to, "probably won't ever be of any practical use," in my opinion.
If you're talking about maths and programming, your opinion is entirely wrong in my opinion. Maths has always been incredibly useful in everyday life, from basic algebra to geometry (hypothenuse triangles for checking walls are in square etc), and programming will become more and more useful as more of our lives are taken over by computers. Already our lives are full of them (phones, cars, word-processors, the web etc).
Quite apart from the practical applications, there are good reasons for teaching skills like abstract thinking - those skills are taught via writing essays on subjects which the students may or may not find interesting, tackling geometry problems, analysing literature and perhaps in future writing simple programs. None of these skills are strictly vocational or immediately useful, but they are all very useful in a rounded education, which apparently you don't believe in.
What if everyone needs to be a rocket scientist in the future? Plumbers? Roofers? Why is programming getting special treatment?
You seem to see programming as some sort of purely vocational skill leading to one career path. For a start, the rocket scientists of the future (and of today) rely heavily on maths and programming. Maths is also useful for Plumbers and Roofers, but they probably wouldn't choose to do much of it at school, given the choice. Just as we teach maths to people now as a basic skill, teaching programming might well make it onto the basic curriculum in the future purely because it will spread to be used in so many facets of our life, and it also teaches elements of logic and algorithms which are applicable in many different areas.
If you ask school children what they'd like to learn (as you advocate here), it won't include any of those abstract skills, but that doesn't make them any less essential or useful.
Yes sure Python is similar (though it does have the whole whitespace issue, which some people find difficult). Lua is another popular one which is used a lot and would be a great teaching language. Having extensively used these scripting languages I find it a real trial to go back to working in another C clone and discover that very little has moved on in 20 years. It's time compiled languages took some hints from scripting languages where clarity and concision of syntax are concerned.
Latin used to be the common language of scientists across the world, it was something all educated people would learn and all learned discourse was conducted in the language. I imagine they are harking back to that time as a reminder that sometimes languages can transcend boundaries and become almost universal - presumably they believe programming languages could become a new lingua franca.
Because real code is 1) still full of useless boilerplate that has to be there for the benefit of the compiler/interpreter, not the software engineer, 2) overcomplicates the syntax, again for the benefit of the compiler, and most of all, 3) still stinks up code reuse!
Perhaps in the languages you use. Ruby doesn't actually have most of the problems you have highlighted -
Parenthesis are optional Semicolons are optional Begin/End is optional No pointers Glyph prefixes are not required for variables (except @ used for class variables) No header files No namespaces (a plus in my book as it adds complication) Embed c etc if you must, though this will never be painless in any language as it deals with legacy issues from other languages.
I'm sure languages will improve as people realise all that syntax is getting in the way more than it helps.
Is it worth making people learn things that they won't need just so they can see slightly higher test scores (if that)?
If this is really what you think education is about, your education has failed you.
The reason for teaching students interesting topics like programming or maths which may not be of immediate practical use are twofold:
It teaches them that learning can be an end in itself - rewarding, and a pleasure (if they are taught well) Later in life they may find that programming (for example) becomes essential to their daily life, or would at least make it immensely more satisfying.
For example let's say they end up working in a supermarket which becomes fully automated - knowledge of the principles of programming might make the difference between keeping their job and moving into maintenance of the new systems or losing it, knowledge of maths might make their job an awful lot easier, as they'll be able to see shortcuts in calculating stock levels, check their employer's new pension plan is actually going to benefit them, etc, etc.
It's an identifier, not a password. Anyone expecting it to be secret or treating it as a password is wrong. SSNs should be public identifiers as they are in other nations, not some secret code.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the interesting reply; I think this cuts to the heart of things.
People see value without effort as unfair, and yet everyone is striving to attain this.
When payoff is proportional to the risk, yes. When you are practically guaranteed to get more money back out than you put in, no, it's not a service, it's rent collecting at its finest.
You seem to see rent collecting as inherently unfair, which I find an odd concept. Investing in a company is collecting 'rent' on your money in a certain sense, as is leaving the money in the bank (lending to the bank), and lending from the bank, and without that service (and there would be no service if you were not 'practically guaranteed to get more money back out than you put in') you wouldn't be able to buy a house, start a business, buy a car on credit etc etc etc. Do you really disagree with all those activities for anyone other than those rich enough to pay up front in cash?
Not at all. The key thing about capitalist means of production is that there is a significant barrier of entry regarding owning them. That's what makes collecting rent possible in classic capitalism - a disgruntled worker can't just buy a factory of his own to work in; it would take a great deal of them to pool up together to be able to afford that. A website does not have such barrier of entry - everyone can host one, dirt cheap.
Yes, so things have changed significantly. That doesn't mean the definition of means of production should suddenly shift to try to categorise all those people who are now potential petit bourgeoisie as capitalist pig-dogs, it tells us that in some spheres the means of production are now within the grasp of ordinary people. That has changed everything in the western world (though of course we just exported our manufacturing which has created other imbalances and inherited wealth means that it will be a long time before the effects are fully felt). We have come a long way since 1848, and in many ways have seen regulated capitalism develop the socialist world Marx dreamed of in the west.
That's a rent extraction - not economic value through gain in actual goods or services.
You don't consider lending money or investing to be a service? I'd love to see the mental gymnastics you have to perform to square that one away.
In an information economy the intangible can become as valuable as the tangible, and 'actual work' can be performed on bytes, transforming them into some other non-random set of bytes, without coming into contact with the real world - all that is solid melts into air, but the air is still considered valuable. The distinction of rent from payment for labour is really quite a difficult one to make when you consider service to be labour, as many services (say setting up a website) could be considered simply owning the means of production and collecting rent from your users. Things have moved on a bit from 1848 when there was a far more clear distinction between those who laboured and those who had the means to hire labour.
It always astonishes me that on a geeky site like Slashdot with an audience that in theory puts such a high value on science, you get so many global warming denialists.
While I don't think you should have been modded flame-bait, if you're interested in intelligent debate instead of polarised trash-talking, you'd be better to leave out labels like denier and denialist - these have been fashioned to ridicule those they are attached to rather than advance the debate.
It is perfectly scientific to be sceptical about anthropogenic global warming, and that does not mean you put no high value in science, it may just mean you are not convinced by the evidence so far presented that global warming is caused solely or mainly by human interference. It should be noted just as a baseline that we are not sure exactly how fast the climate has changed in the past, however we are sure it has changed in radically more profound ways than the current spate of warming and swung from very high temperatures to very low. Even in recent memory (Little Ice Age), we've had a period of cooler weather which we can't fully explain.
I believe in anthropogenic global warming but am also of the opinion we don't really understand how our climate works or what the triggers and turning points are, does that make me a denier or a believer?
for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.
And those who are sucked into a fad or bubble are often the last to admit that they were wrong.
This time is different
In addition to Facebook being far more spammy than any email I've ever owned, the fact that it is popular with vast numbers of people does not mean that they can turn that into significant revenue - enough to justify $100 billion valuation would be quite remarkable when they've already jumped the shark.
from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money.
Gosh, I wonder who leaked those? I wonder if they were even real or subtly tweaked? Frankly I think Facebook will be about as successful longterm as MySpace, Geocities, eWorld, Yahoo and a bunch of other 'portals' which were due to replace the internet any time soon before the last tech bubble, but even if it is way more successful than those, why should it replace email? Given their public hostility to the concept of privacy, why would you possibly want to trust Zuckerberg and Facebook with your private correspondence?
This IPO is not a game-changer, it's not the start of a new paradigm, and it's not worth $100b, it's business as usual for Goldman Sachs, who see their role as extracting as much real money from the economy as possible while putting in as little as possible themselves - it seems there's an endless line of patsies who are willing to fund their robber-baron lifestyle. Good luck ever getting your money back if you invest in this sucker's game.
So in that light, I find that the USSR was probably instrumental in the creation of the EU.
If you read the original statements, you'll find that the raison d'être of the agreements and a proposed federal superstate was to prevent European war. The USSR was not yet the bugbear it was to become, particularly to Americans, and was not the driving force behind these agreements, or behind the founding of the EU. The EU was envisioned from the very start as the end of a long process of unification in the European Coal and Steel Community agreement, explicitly founded to prevent war within Europe. To quote the founder:
The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman on 9 May 1950 as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible."
http://www.schuman.info/9May1950.htm
So I'm afraid your narrative about the USSR being 'probably instrumental' and the sole reason for the EU existing is wishful thinking - it is not even mentioned in the ECSC proclamation. You can be hostile to the EU, there are plenty of reasons to be in its current state, but trying to claim it was founded as a bulwark against communism is simply wrong. I'm sure its politicians are opportunistic, self-serving and needlessly bureaucratic (like most politicians), and further unification is debatable, but again, the founding principles of an 'ever closer union' were to prevent war and promote integration between EU countries, not to protect against the USSR. In that aim at least it has succeeded and will hopefully continue to succeed.
I'm not really sure I understand why one would expect to program without a game plan
It's quite possible to mess up both agile and more traditional styles of development - obviously neither approach is a magic bullet which will transform a bad team/product into a good one.
To address your specific concern above, agile is a response to some obvious failures of the top-down model - sometimes it's very hard to pin down requirements in advance, or they simply change because of external factors, or the wrong people are asked for requirements, which doesn't become clear till the software is delivered after a long period of work isolated from use, broken as designed. That means trying to plan everything in advance doesn't always work, and *sometimes*, with the right team, it's easier to start with a basic app which works well in a very simple way, and then build up layers of features as you decide which things are actually important to your users.
Now in some cases it's easy to define all requirements in advance, the use-cases are very simple, the users few and clear on what they want, and an agile approach is not really required, in others with lots of potential users/use-cases sometimes it's better to start small and work up to something bigger, or there's a danger you'll never finish.
Of course this can go horribly wrong if you use it as an excuse to never properly define requirements, never solicit proper feedback from users, or to just hack up any old thing and call it finished. There is no system which can deal with bad attitude, lack of effort or incompetence, and there are many ways to mess up every project - if you have the wrong team and leadership they'll find every possible way to make things go wrong, no matter which approach you take. No idea what went wrong here, but it's unlikely to be development methodology and far more likely to be the result of politics and infighting between different departments and users.
You have confused some dates here. While there was a movement to unification for some industries shortly after the Second World War, the EU itself didn't come about formally till after the fall of the USSR. Meanwhile, the USSR was a known threat from well before the Second World War.
The EU is just an extension of the coal and steel agreement between France and Germany and the EEC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Community
These were explicitly designed to avoid war by promoting 'ever closer union' between the major powers of Europe and forming a federal union (eventually to manifest itself as the EU), and have worked quite well in that respect, as has the EU which continues that integration and expands it to further nations, though of course you can't prove something has worked by the mere absence of war. It does have major fault lines which may yet see it collapse in acrimony, and of course it has problems of legitimacy as the parliament which is democratically elected has less power than it should. I'm not sure about harming the European economy, as it has removed a lot of barriers to trade and free movement of workers - I'm all for that and see it as a positive result of european integration. There are lots of negatives of course, and like most politics the EU has seen a lot of farce. I'm not convinced that local or national politics in say the UK is any less corrupt than that seen in Europe, it's just on a smaller scale.
As to war, the USSR was our ally in the second world war, which you have neglected to mention. Just because the US felt the threat of the invasion of Europe by the USSR most keenly, that doesn't mean that defending against the USSR was the function of the EU (which the previous poster asserted) - I'd say a far more credible justification for it (something explicitly stated in the earlier agreements just after the war, and continually cited afterward as a justification for ever closer union) was to prevent war within Europe by integrating the lead countries so tightly that they couldn't countenance war with each other. The USSR is really peripheral to all consideration of the EU and the reasons for its founding.
The sole justification that the original poster made was that the EU prevented large scale war. That pretext vanished twenty years ago.
Presumably you mean the collapse of communist satellite regimes to the USSR? That was never the purpose of the EU. The EU was founded after the second world war, in which the USSR fought on the winning side incidentally - it was not yet the enemy it became, to prevent the major powers in Europe from again triggering a world war due to their rivalry - the promise of ever closer union was supposed to keep that in check and prevent war. For that purpose it has served admirably up to the present crisis, and the threat is still every much there of a pan-european war unless we have a pan european state to channel those rivalries in different directions. So the original purpose of the EU is still to prevent european warfare (NB not world war, european war), and in fact in times of economic crisis it is more important then ever.
The second point that has you think "trolling" for some reason, is just the obvious point that the EU is failing harder than the US is. The EU has this huge complex government (it started complex with a ridiculously large constitution, for example), and not much to show for it aside from creating some economic failures.
The current string of economic failures have their origins in the dysfunctional US financial system, and the spread of opaque financial instruments like CDS and MBS from the US to the rest of the financial world, which helped sell sub-prime real estate and dodgy debt to banks all over the world, without them realising what they were getting. So I find it hard to accept that the EU fails harder than the US, unless you take GDP as the only measure of financial success. I'd say the US still has the systemic problems which caused the current crisis, and has done nothing to address them.
The EU has actually been quite a success economically in tying the poorer countries in southern Europe to the richer northern ones and allowing citizens to move at will between all of them, thus redistributing labour and wealth. The Euro of course has come close to failure caused by hubris and overconfidence, though they might yet pull it off if they can get through this crisis. I'm not sure you could say the EU 'caused' failures, so much as ignored the misbehaviour of constituent governments until it was too late.
Iran has expressed a repeated and rather vocal interest in destroying the US and Isreal. I happen to live in the US and so have a vested interested in our continued existence.
Whether Iran has nukes or not is not an existential issue for the US, by any stretch of the imagination, it could conceivably be considered one for Israel, however they have their own nukes and a capable army, and Iran's greatest advantage is not nukes but their size - they could easily invade Israel with conventional means and prevail, and yet they haven't.
If I thought Iran would play nice, I wouldn't have a problem with them arming themselves.
Who decides who plays nice? Who decides whether the US is playing nice enough?
The US has invaded substantially more countries than Iran, sponsored a puppet regime in Iran which led to revolution, terrorism in Iran (Jundallah), and even sponsored an evil dictator in a decade-long devastating war with Iran which involved the extensive use of banned chemical weapons and bombing of civilians (an evil dictator they later decided had to be deposed 'in the interests of the international community').
If you're sincerely talking about the world as a meritocracy where only the decent upstanding countries deserve nukes, you need to take a serious unbiased look at your own country's recent behaviour, and decide whether you really have any justification for taking any interest in the actions of other countries outside your borders, and attempting to police their behaviour. By your own set of standards, the US cannot be trusted with nukes, and should also be intensely interested in removing nukes from North Korea and Pakistan, two very unstable states, one of which *still* receives massive US funding. The fact that there is no interest in removing nukes from North Korea now that they have them, and that the failed state of Pakistan receives massive funding in spite of their arsenal should be a clue that this is not about the nukes. Like WMD in Iraq, the nukes are a smokescreen used to whip up the home population into a patriotic frenzy.
Frankly I think the coming war with Iran has nothing to do with making the world a better place or removing nukes from the middle east, and everything to do with a desire to definitely control the Middle East as a base against China and Russia, and because the oil supply will become increasingly important to enemies of the US and the US itself as oil becomes more costly. This will end in tears of course, just like the earlier attempt to control Iran ended with a deposed Shah, but the Iranian regime is a willing partner in this dance to war, so unfortunately that's what we will get.
Look how they killed the solar industry in the US.
The US killed their own solar industry through lack of interest. For all the money spent on two pointless wars over the last decade, the US could now be energy independent and exporting solar power if they had put the huge amount of government money into promoting a home-grown solar industry. The US has massive areas of the country which are ideally suited to solar power, and many areas which would benefit from it. Protectionism is alive and well in other industries, and I don't see why the US could not impose tariffs on solar, or make it otherwise difficult to import it to prevent dumping. As oil prices become increasingly volatile, this obsession with controlling the middle east and lack of interest in alternatives to fossil fuels is going to hurt the US more and more.
That's not a chinese conspiracy, it's simply incompetence on behalf of US leaders and lack of interest on the part of the US public.
And there are no "secret agreements".
MS has widely used secret agreements in the past to exclude competitors from a market, what makes you think they are not doing this now?
Another option of course are car clubs combined with public transport. This solution works really well in large cities where people do not need a car the vast majority of the time, and is also far cheaper than owning a car.
Don't gloss over the fact that Iran has a government run by evil people who horribly oppress their own population, and would love to destroy the population of other countries too.
In the eyes of the rest of the world, and without hyperbole, the US has a government who fits this description. That is not to say that the US is similar to Iran or as oppressive, but it is an oppressive state (particularly abroad), run by corrupt politicians who see no problem with collateral damage in other nations running into the tens of thousands of civilians, in order to install their chosen puppet government in a country.
During the Iran Iraq war the US support Saddam, an evil dictator who they now vilify, in Pakistan they supported Musharaf, in Afghanistan they support Karzai, in Uzbekhistan they support Karimov, etc, etc.
The Iraq war and the Iranian 'nuclear problem' are pretexts in order to dominate the region
Civilian deaths in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq all fit the description you give of destroying the population of other countries
Recent protests in the US have been brutally put down, no killings yet, but heavily policed
US citizens can now be sent to guantanamo bay and held indefinitely without trial
I don't think anybody actually believes that, even if they have to act as if they do.
And yet the US money keeps on flowing for Pakistan - billions over the last decade. You even funded the mujahideen, which really is the textbook example of why this sort of interference ends in tears.
The best thing the US could do in this region is to stay out, and spend their money on positive civilian programmes in nations which are open enough to allow proper oversight. The clumsy US attempts to gain influence in the Middle East and vilify Iran are just playing into the hands of the likes of Ahmadinejad who, like Saddam, actively courts war in order to stoke up nationalism at home.
I guess you don't read much
You guess wrong in my case. I do a lot of reading on an LCD screen - attached to my laptop, on a tablet, on a phone. In fact I spend most of my working life and much of my liesure time reading the web and books on it, and the advantages for reading (colour, resolution, response time) outweigh the disadvantages (lower battery life, sunlight) to my mind. YMMV.
Okay. So by your logic, its alright if I develop a nuclear bomb in my garage. And if my neighbors complain, and the police arrest me and shut me down for violating any number of laws, then the neighbors and the police are the aggressors ?
Ah, so you're saying that the US should in fact be concentrating on Israel, Pakistan, and India and preparing to invade them? All those regional powers have developed nuclear weapons recently, in violation of proliferation treaties, why are they not considered a threat and demonised?
The reason they are not threatened and subject to military incursions is quite simple; they do not threaten US interests, and (at least until recently in the case of Pakistan) are US allies - therefore they can do whatever they like, including lie about whether they even have nuclear capability (Israel) and develop nuclear weapons.
Aside from that, your analogy is completely flawed - a citizen of a state is in an entirely different position vis-a-vis their government and fellow citizens than one sovereign state versus another. Or perhaps you view the world as some sort of superstate which the US is in charge of because of their manifest destiny?
Iran has been steadily demonised by the US in preparation for war (and has an equally silly penchant for painting the US and UK as the great satan - at this point the propaganda on both sides is equally farcical). This will lead to war, perhaps an unintended global war, and is not something we should view lightly or see as some small policing action. The US has neither the money, nor the stamina, nor the men, to pacify Iran as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, and even if they could, would invading an entire region of the world be justified - at what point do the lies used to justify these invasions become too much?
If I was a US taxpayer I would be seriously concerned that it is viewed as acceptable to provoke yet another gulf state in this way. The US is already losing two wars of attrition in the region, and if they start another, the larger powers like Russia and China may take an interest in backing insurgencies, in which case the US will simply bleed till it withdraws in ignominy. There is no easy solution here.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that the average person who probably doesn't even remember anything about it is using advanced math? I don't believe that at all.
I'm trying to tell you the average person could find Maths incredibly useful in their life, and that's why we have it as a basic subject. You've changed this statement in two ways in order to make it easier to argue against - turned Maths into Advanced Maths, and started talking about what the average person does, rather than what they should do. Perhaps average people don't use Maths as much as they should (esp. in your country), but that is not an argument for removing everything but the most basic maths from the syllabus, quite the contrary.
Maths is a very useful basic subject to know, and yet it is completely abstract and often not apparently useful (see the geometry of triangles for one example). However once studied it can be useful for people from builders to administrators.
In the same way programming could also be considered useful, although apparently an abstract skill with little application, it's the sort of thing that could make an administrator using excel explore macros rather than processing 500 lines of data by hand, or a builder consider automating some of the basic maths they have to perform in the course of their work on their phone for quick access.
However we have a philosophical roadblock which is making you object to all of these arguments with spurious responses, which is that you don't like the idea of any mandatory classes at all. In my opinion mandatory schooling is essential to teach children the value of subjects like maths, and part of that mandatory schooling should be classes on programming, just as we currently impose English and Maths.
In other words, even if what you said is true, I still view mandatory classes as a complete waste of time.
Somehow I thought that might be the case.
I think this little ditty might be more appropriate - I fought the law and, the law won
No pain, no gain, you sissy! - Precisely, if you want to fight a law, unjust or not, and have it overturned, you have to be prepared to suffer for it in the real world, and persuade enough other people to do it too, not try to subvert things from the comfort of your basement, or worse (as anonymous have done in the past) get some other sucker to pay for your actions instead (like the naive LOIC users).
That's an example of what I mean about the messiness inherent in our code ecosystem.
To be fair, it is one point out of many you made in your initial post; all the others were addressed by Ruby.
Trying to interface between languages/libraries is always going to be painful, now and in the future, as languages and requirements change and evolve, and either the interface remains static and the user has to work around the shortcomings, or the interface changes and breaks previous uses. This is a problem common to library design, API design and even language design. I honestly don't think defining a standard for library interfaces would help do anything other than slow down progress - we already have a defacto one with C, and it is hardly elegant.
The best solution to your problem that I have seen is the unix solution of many discreet tools which pass data via files and pipes. So you'd write your processing code in your language of choice, and then call out to that using the platform vendor's language of choice for GUI programming, passing either data in files and/or arguments.
"May not be of immediate practical use" should be changed to, "probably won't ever be of any practical use," in my opinion.
If you're talking about maths and programming, your opinion is entirely wrong in my opinion. Maths has always been incredibly useful in everyday life, from basic algebra to geometry (hypothenuse triangles for checking walls are in square etc), and programming will become more and more useful as more of our lives are taken over by computers. Already our lives are full of them (phones, cars, word-processors, the web etc).
Quite apart from the practical applications, there are good reasons for teaching skills like abstract thinking - those skills are taught via writing essays on subjects which the students may or may not find interesting, tackling geometry problems, analysing literature and perhaps in future writing simple programs. None of these skills are strictly vocational or immediately useful, but they are all very useful in a rounded education, which apparently you don't believe in.
What if everyone needs to be a rocket scientist in the future? Plumbers? Roofers? Why is programming getting special treatment?
You seem to see programming as some sort of purely vocational skill leading to one career path. For a start, the rocket scientists of the future (and of today) rely heavily on maths and programming. Maths is also useful for Plumbers and Roofers, but they probably wouldn't choose to do much of it at school, given the choice. Just as we teach maths to people now as a basic skill, teaching programming might well make it onto the basic curriculum in the future purely because it will spread to be used in so many facets of our life, and it also teaches elements of logic and algorithms which are applicable in many different areas.
If you ask school children what they'd like to learn (as you advocate here), it won't include any of those abstract skills, but that doesn't make them any less essential or useful.
Yes sure Python is similar (though it does have the whole whitespace issue, which some people find difficult). Lua is another popular one which is used a lot and would be a great teaching language. Having extensively used these scripting languages I find it a real trial to go back to working in another C clone and discover that very little has moved on in 20 years. It's time compiled languages took some hints from scripting languages where clarity and concision of syntax are concerned.
Latin used to be the common language of scientists across the world, it was something all educated people would learn and all learned discourse was conducted in the language. I imagine they are harking back to that time as a reminder that sometimes languages can transcend boundaries and become almost universal - presumably they believe programming languages could become a new lingua franca.
Because real code is 1) still full of useless boilerplate that has to be there for the benefit of the compiler/interpreter, not the software engineer, 2) overcomplicates the syntax, again for the benefit of the compiler, and most of all, 3) still stinks up code reuse!
Perhaps in the languages you use. Ruby doesn't actually have most of the problems you have highlighted -
Parenthesis are optional
Semicolons are optional
Begin/End is optional
No pointers
Glyph prefixes are not required for variables (except @ used for class variables)
No header files
No namespaces (a plus in my book as it adds complication)
Embed c etc if you must, though this will never be painless in any language as it deals with legacy issues from other languages.
I'm sure languages will improve as people realise all that syntax is getting in the way more than it helps.
Is it worth making people learn things that they won't need just so they can see slightly higher test scores (if that)?
If this is really what you think education is about, your education has failed you.
The reason for teaching students interesting topics like programming or maths which may not be of immediate practical use are twofold:
It teaches them that learning can be an end in itself - rewarding, and a pleasure (if they are taught well)
Later in life they may find that programming (for example) becomes essential to their daily life, or would at least make it immensely more satisfying.
For example let's say they end up working in a supermarket which becomes fully automated - knowledge of the principles of programming might make the difference between keeping their job and moving into maintenance of the new systems or losing it, knowledge of maths might make their job an awful lot easier, as they'll be able to see shortcuts in calculating stock levels, check their employer's new pension plan is actually going to benefit them, etc, etc.
It's an identifier, not a password. Anyone expecting it to be secret or treating it as a password is wrong. SSNs should be public identifiers as they are in other nations, not some secret code.