I am from Germany and I too think many government-provided health care systems are vastly superior to what the US currently has. I have lived in the US for 22 years and always had an employer that, by US standards, provided me with an excellent health insurance and yet I'd trade that in for many European government insurance plans. In fact, from what I heard on BBC once, so would many Americans that have lived in Europe for a while. The problem here is ideology! People here just "know" that the private market provides "better" solutions and yet, for someone like me, it is obvious that the solutions here are far worse. They cost more per capita and they provide far worse results in a statistical sense. And yes, in Germany we also have private insurance companies and private doctors. But, if I got sick there and had to stay in a hospital for 6 months it would not cost me one red cent! In fact this just happened to my dad and he got excellent care. People here are brainwashed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox "News." And no, I do *not* think that the government does everything better but I am convinced that it can, as demonstrated in various countries, provide a far better health safety net than the for-profit health insurance companies in the US. After all they are not in the business of helping people but in the business of making money! And, for most Americans there is no real choice. If they are lucky, they are stuck with whatever their employer picked for them, if they are not so lucky they are definitely bankrupt if a major illness should affect them.
I am German and live in the United States. Unfortunately I can't give you any numbers but I would guess that the percentage of avid readers is much higher in Germany than the US. Reading is extremely popular in Germany while it seems fairly rare in the US. I have only highly educated geeks as friends here and they tend to read a lot but as far as the general US population is concerned I don't think it is a very popular pastime. I only found that there are around 80,000 new titles being released every year in Germany and this very depressing article about US readership. I know that my experience is not necessarily statistically relevant, but I do go back to Germany every year and I see quite a few bookstores and people reading while using public transportation. My parents did not have college degrees, yet my mom strongly encouraged book reading through financial incentives when I was a kid growing up in Germany and virtually all my friends were reading. But, that was 30 years ago. From the articles that I did find through google.de it seems that reading is as popular as ever in Germany and making good money for German publishers. I had read well over 1,000 books by the time that I graduated from high school in Germany! Apart from leaving my human friends behind when I came to the US to study physics, leaving my book "friends" behind was the hardest!:)
I don't know about most people, but I prefer non-targeted ads. I think they are far less likely to trick me into buying stuff. And, I really don't want to buy more stuff than what I come up with on my own. In fact, I would prefer to live in an ad-free world. I would even be willing to pay more for this better world. I find 99% of all ads insulting to my intelligence and mind-numbingly boring. I also view advertising in general as psychological warfare directed at me and have long ago conditioned myself to view all advertising and advertisers as personal enemies! In fact, I am less likely to buy something after having an ad about it shoved in my face or blared into my ears. If I made a major purchase I'd prefer a consumer magazine comparing different products and I always perform extensive research on the 'net before buying an expensive geek toy. I then tend to pay more attention to negative reviews.
Freedom of expression is a good idea irrespective of the fact that the US and its WW2 allies are its main proponents. Saying that it isn't is an ad hominem.
I completely agree with you regarding this point!:) Maybe I should have been clearer. I suspected the poster was US American and he attacked Germany for not having entirely unrestricted freedom of speech/expression. I merely pointed out that the US was instrumental in that restriction being implemented in Germany. My aside was meant to be ironic. What I probably should have said is: "Look, isn't it ironic that these, the US that is, proponents of freedom of expression, apparently do not think it should be granted to others outside of their country. Now don't get me wrong, I realise that Germany and what it had done during the 2nd World War, was not very popular and trusted at the time. Still, unless you think that Germans are somehow genetically unfit to deal with completely unrestricted freedom of speech, it is ironic that an American should attack Germany for this. But as Alan Cox, a famous Welsh Linux developer once said, irony is virtually unknown between the southern and northern borders of the USA. (I'm paraphrasing here.) And to be complete: since you accused me of an ad hominem attack, I would like to point out that I think it is hard to construe what you accused me of, based on what I actually said!
You are incredibly naive! Not only was outlawing Naziism pretty much imposed on our government by your government and its allies, (so much for your "Freedom of Expression"), but you seem to think that putting some nice sounding principles into a constitution guarantees citizens rights. We have a saying in Germany: "Paper is patient." This means that you can write whatever you like down on paper but it doesn't necessarily mean anything! Communist East Germany had a beautiful constitution granting its citizens all kinds of rights which they didn't actually have in practice! Also it seems to me that what your constitution means changes with the composition of your Supreme Court judges. Furthermore it is extremely easy to ignore or misinterpret constitutions and countries ideals as witnessed by the many US citizens that firmly believe that the US started out and was intended to be a Christian state.
One the one hand you accuse Joe Sixpack of being too ignorant to estimate the life-time costs of running an appliance while at the same time neglecting to mention that government interference in the electricity market (especially in California), by fixing the price too low for example, encourages wasteful use while at the same time discouraging greater efficiency by minimizing the gains that can be realized from purchasing more efficient appliances.
I would be the first person to support higher electricity rates in California and probably almost everywhere else. In Germany rates are much higher and people use energy much more efficiently. The same is true with petrol prices. People in the US are unbelievably spoiled in those areas. If the rates were higher the free market would lead to an optimisation process that would likely help people compensate for much of the difference.
However, why should I go out and buy a new television for several hundred dollars (at least) when, as other posters have pointed out, it will only save me ~$18 per year in electricity costs?
Nobody, including myself, wants to force you to go out and buy a new tv. But, it would be good that when you decide to buy a new one there will only be very energy efficient models available.
Now, some people decide to buy energy efficient appliances anyway because they enjoy doing more for the environment and can afford to do so,
I wouldn't say that I enjoy doing more for the environment. Instead, I consider it to be my responsibility! I don't want to leave this place in worse shape when I die than the shape it was in when I was born. I also believe that most people in first world countries like the US can afford to make significantly more sacrifices for future generations than what they are doing now. I may be an extreme case, but, I decided to have no kids when I turned 19 and realised that global overpopulation was the biggest problem mankind is facing. I also decided not to drive because I believe that the costs to society do outweigh personal benefits. Before some idiot claims that this is not a possible choice for most people, I would like to point out that I have worked and lived the last 23 years in the US and that I am now 50 years old. I am also used to, and quite happy with my life style. I feel that I cannot expect others to do something that I do not practice myself. I just find that people are typically too lazy or unimaginative and conveniently decide that something they do not want to do is "impossible." I have also calculated that, due to the money I save by not having a car, I can retire a whole 2 years earlier than someone with the same financial expectations during retirement and the same income.
It will just be made up by people needing to turn their heating higher to compensate.
I think you're confused! In much of California it will result in additional lower energy consumption due to reduced usage of air conditioners. Also, even if you should live in parts of California where for some part of the year you have significant heating requirements you will still end up with a net gain in energy efficiency because this is not true all year round. Also heating should not be a huge expenditure if you properly insulate your home which will also help with hot summers. In Sweden and Germany, for example, there are strongly enforced rules for how much heat loss per square meter of a buildings outer surface is permissible. This has led to buildings that are nice and cool even in 90F summer weather as long as you close the blinds during the daytime and open the windows at night. And yes, we do have 90F summer days during most summers in Germany. I now live in Southern California and I don't even turn on any lights, if I don't have to, in summer, because every little bit helps in keeping the air conditioner usage to a minimum. I also bought a Philips eco tv to not heat up my place more than necessary when I watch something on my large-screen tv. Unfortunately there are many people that are either too ignorant or lazy to estimate life-time costs of running an appliance and/or they're total idiots and believe conservative talk show hosts rather than the overwhelming majority of climate scientists concerning global warming.
All that for a few thousand carribou, a few hundred foxes and rodents, and some bears.
Either you are very poorly informed or you're intentionally spreading disinformation! According to this there are 195 bird species alone, most of whom nest there to raise their young. You have also left out many of the mammals living there like walrus, spotted seal, ringed seal, bearded seal, beluga whale, gray whale, and bowhead whale. There are also at least 14 species of fish and likely many plants and insects that are below your notice. Most people are woefully uninformed about how rich in species even seemingly harsh environments can be!
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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Physicists don't care about the language design. They are looking for the best tool for the job.
But language design has a huge impact on what the best tool for the job is! Also most programmers, including physicists, spend most of their time writing and debugging and not waiting on their programs to run. So even if FORTRAN is 10% or 20% faster than C++, this is typically irrelevant. What matters is that over the entire lifetime of some code the better language design leads to savings of maybe 50% or much more in the time spent that humans have to write and maintain the code. This is where I had a hard time relating to many other physicists and engineers. Btw., I have a Ph.D. in physics myself. They don't want to learn a proper tool and end up wasting huge amounts of time over the years. I believe thats's called penny-wise and pound-foolish? (English is my 2nd language.) Also you accuse me of thinking in a CS way. Thank you! After all computer scientists spend way more time to think about software development than physicists. I think that therefore it is likely that they know a hell of a lot more about it than your average physicist. I doubt most of them would consider it to be a shortcoming if a computer scientist were trying to solve a physics problem by thinking in a physics way.:)
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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The reason for something being popular may be nothing more than an accident of history, but because it's popular, it's useful in ways that something obscure cannot be.
I don't see how that follows in every case. If you mean, for example, that there is more documentation available and you can ask more people for help with a popular language than an obscure one, you are correct. On the other hand, I believe that using the wrong or at least suboptimal tool for a job will cost you big time long term. And there are certainly well supported and documented alternatives to Perl, like Python for example. For many years I observed colleagues around me flailing around in FORTRAN because they refused to use what was an obscure tool, "C", in their community at the time. That's because FORTRAN "got the job done" and everybody else was using it, too. Today I am convinced that the world of software development would gain an order of magnitude in time-to-product efficiency if most of us programmers used some object-oriented flavour of Lisp.
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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I would agree with you that FORTRAN is significantly simpler than C++. On the other hand, FORTRAN-77 for example was significantly more complex than C, if you take the language descriptions as the measure of comparison. And yet back when I had to deal with these languages almost no scientist nor engineer was willing to give C a chance. C++ is harsh for casual users. One of it's advantages is that you can create classes that make the solution of certain types of numerical problems fairly simple and intuitive. For the casual scientist or engineer programmer, I'd recommend Python. Unless you need very high performance, that is.
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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> They use Fortran because the language is designed and optimized to be the best language at what physicists and > other physical scientists most often need it do: crunch a whole lot of numbers. I wouldn't use Fortran to make > a word processor or web browser, but if you need a program to spend two weeks doing a lot of math, you just > can't beat it.
I'd strongly disagree with your statement. I have written plenty of numerical code in C++ and I claim that it is a better language for writing numerical code. Also I have taught FORTRAN at an engineering school and consulted engineers and scientists in programming (primarily in FORTRAN) at a major university for several years and I would say that any programming language has been "designed" to some degree but FORTRAN is certainly one of the weaker efforts. Every statement type in FORTRAN looks like it is a separate language. Most of its practitioners don't even bother to learn the full language and the language is so weak that every vendor felt compelled to add lots of extensions to the core language. The only really strong reason for using it is the availability of huge numerical libraries that have been thoroughly debugged. I would admit that that is a pretty good reason. Another might be that FORTRAN vendors have put a lot of effort into optimising loops etc. This has nothing to do with the language itself and could equally be done in many other languages.
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing
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If the popularity of a programming language were a sign of it being a "good" language, then how come there is so much COBOL and FORTRAN? This reminds me of an old saying: "Eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong!" I'd also like to point out that most programmers are hacks. I don't doubt that languages like Perl are useful for small scripts but I think it is not a language that scales up very well. Google for example uses C++ and Python and they try really hard to hire only the best programmers they can find. Many languages are culturally assimilated. I come from a physics background and most physicists used to, and may still, program in FORTRAN, yet FORTRAN is a terrible programming language. But guess what, if challenged on this, most physicist programmers might have replied that they can readily solve any problem of interest to them in it. I'm sure the same is true of the armies of Perl programmers. But, using the popularity of anything as a measure of its quality is questionable.
The alternative is the "Silvio Berlusconi" model, where only the super-rich can afford to run.
Not true, at least not in Germany, where I'm from. We don't even have the US situation where Congress and the Senate are controlled by rich people. Our parliament consists primarily of middle class people. In Germany you can only give money to parties and not individuals. The parties then in a democratic party-internal process decide who amongst them gets to run. It is much harder to bribe a political party than an individual politician like in the US. And by party, I mean card-carrying, dues-paying members that participate in the party not like here where you can just register for a party and then dictate to them who their candidate should be.
Rich people, in general, have more of everything than someone with a median income. Those are the breaks. Even in colonial days, a rich person could print up more pamphlets than a poor person. I suggest accepting this fact and working around it rather than fighting it.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, I do not think that this should lead us to abandon all attempts to get closer to the ideal of fairness for all. Getting something 75% right is better then getting it 50% right. I would agree though that it is not always so obvious what constitutes an improvement. I also have a far bigger problem with corporations than with rich people. I don't think that corporations should be allowed to get involved in the political process. The people working at one can already do that on their own anyway. I would also limit individual financial political contribution to 1/20th of the median household income per year.
> about 70% of the people in the US LIKE what they have
As a European living in the United States, I think that is because the people suffering by far the most in the US are so ill-informed about other Western democracies and so brain-washed from an early age, that they actually are proud of the abuse they're suffering in this country! After all they constantly hear they're "no. 1". What they generally don't hear is that the US is "no. 1" in the percentage of uninsured children etc. Even the ability to legally bribe politician here, called "campaign contributions", is called "freedom of speech." I guess corporations and rich people have much more "freedom of speech" than someone with a median income.
You obviously don't know a whole lot about dogs. My sister had a very smart dog that I enjoyed teasing. Whenever I succeeded, he would remember what I did immediately and get angry at me, even if I tried it years later. He always remembered it the first time!
> But it's OK for those same western countries to suppress/fine/jail Christian theologians who preach that homosexuality is a sin?
How would you feel if they preached that being black was a sin? How is this any different? And don't give me any crap about that being different because being homosexual is "a choice!" I am perfectly straight, have zero problems with gays and lesbians yet have not even once been interested in having sex with another man. It's not a choice. It it was I'd be doing it! I probably feel physically attracted to a woman at least 360 days every year and I have never been attracted to a man in my 50 years of life. Yet, I have zero hang-ups about it. So, not a choice at all! Either people are attracted to members of the same sex or not. If they are, I see nothing wrong with it and I hope all those fuckin' homophobes die a painful death!!
A spell-checker would not have caught the "just/gust" mistake, but it would have certainly caught your spelling mistake. "Grammer" is not an English word I have ever encountered. I suspect that you went through the U.S. public educational system. I have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years and they don't seem to believe in education here. In fact I only hear excuses about how inconsistent English is etc. And, apparently far more people here are dyslexic than where I am from. I came here as an adult, and my native language is not English, and yet I don't seem to have any problems with English spelling. I credit the educational system in my country of origin because we were taught to pay attention to spelling, grammar, math etc. Geeks from my country tend to be excellent spellers. Isn't that part of what makes a geek: paying attention to intricate details?
convection [kuhn-vek-shuhn]: -noun 1. Physics. the transfer of heat by the circulation or movement of the heated parts of a liquid or gas. 2. Meteorology. the vertical transport of atmospheric properties, esp. upward (distinguished from advection ). 3. the act of conveying or transmitting.
> The amazing part of the racket they're running is that we have to *pay* OCLC to make these records for us, and then they turn around and require *another* payment from anyone who wants to use the records.
How much do you pay to get these MARC records made? I might be able to do the same thing for the same price but you or your organization would retain all rights to the records!
Slashdot Mirror
I am from Germany and I too think many government-provided health care systems are vastly superior to what the US currently has. I have lived in the US for 22 years and always had an employer that, by US standards, provided me with an excellent health insurance and yet I'd trade that in for many European government insurance plans. In fact, from what I heard on BBC once, so would many Americans that have lived in Europe for a while. The problem here is ideology! People here just "know" that the private market provides "better" solutions and yet, for someone like me, it is obvious that the solutions here are far worse. They cost more per capita and they provide far worse results in a statistical sense. And yes, in Germany we also have private insurance companies and private doctors. But, if I got sick there and had to stay in a hospital for 6 months it would not cost me one red cent! In fact this just happened to my dad and he got excellent care. People here are brainwashed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox "News." And no, I do *not* think that the government does everything better but I am convinced that it can, as demonstrated in various countries, provide a far better health safety net than the for-profit health insurance companies in the US. After all they are not in the business of helping people but in the business of making money! And, for most Americans there is no real choice. If they are lucky, they are stuck with whatever their employer picked for them, if they are not so lucky they are definitely bankrupt if a major illness should affect them.
I want price parity of Microsoft Office 2000 with OOo 3.2. So, now how does Microsoft Office 2000 shape up?
I am German and live in the United States. Unfortunately I can't give you any numbers but I would guess that the percentage of avid readers is much higher in Germany than the US. Reading is extremely popular in Germany while it seems fairly rare in the US. I have only highly educated geeks as friends here and they tend to read a lot but as far as the general US population is concerned I don't think it is a very popular pastime. I only found that there are around 80,000 new titles being released every year in Germany and this very depressing article about US readership. I know that my experience is not necessarily statistically relevant, but I do go back to Germany every year and I see quite a few bookstores and people reading while using public transportation. My parents did not have college degrees, yet my mom strongly encouraged book reading through financial incentives when I was a kid growing up in Germany and virtually all my friends were reading. But, that was 30 years ago. From the articles that I did find through google.de it seems that reading is as popular as ever in Germany and making good money for German publishers. I had read well over 1,000 books by the time that I graduated from high school in Germany! Apart from leaving my human friends behind when I came to the US to study physics, leaving my book "friends" behind was the hardest! :)
most people would take the targeted ads.
I don't know about most people, but I prefer non-targeted ads. I think they are far less likely to trick me into buying stuff. And, I really don't want to buy more stuff than what I come up with on my own. In fact, I would prefer to live in an ad-free world. I would even be willing to pay more for this better world. I find 99% of all ads insulting to my intelligence and mind-numbingly boring. I also view advertising in general as psychological warfare directed at me and have long ago conditioned myself to view all advertising and advertisers as personal enemies! In fact, I am less likely to buy something after having an ad about it shoved in my face or blared into my ears. If I made a major purchase I'd prefer a consumer magazine comparing different products and I always perform extensive research on the 'net before buying an expensive geek toy. I then tend to pay more attention to negative reviews.
Freedom of expression is a good idea irrespective of the fact that the US and its WW2 allies are its main proponents. Saying that it isn't is an ad hominem.
I completely agree with you regarding this point! :) Maybe I should have been clearer. I suspected the poster was US American and he attacked Germany for not having entirely unrestricted freedom of speech/expression. I merely pointed out that the US was instrumental in that restriction being implemented in Germany. My aside was meant to be ironic. What I probably should have said is: "Look, isn't it ironic that these, the US that is, proponents of freedom of expression, apparently do not think it should be granted to others outside of their country. Now don't get me wrong, I realise that Germany and what it had done during the 2nd World War, was not very popular and trusted at the time. Still, unless you think that Germans are somehow genetically unfit to deal with completely unrestricted freedom of speech, it is ironic that an American should attack Germany for this. But as Alan Cox, a famous Welsh Linux developer once said, irony is virtually unknown between the southern and northern borders of the USA. (I'm paraphrasing here.) And to be complete: since you accused me of an ad hominem attack, I would like to point out that I think it is hard to construe what you accused me of, based on what I actually said!
And you think banning swastikas can prevent this from happening? Interesting.
I didn't say that and I don't! Apparently the American government right after the end of the 2nd World War did though.
You are incredibly naive! Not only was outlawing Naziism pretty much imposed on our government by your government and its allies, (so much for your "Freedom of Expression"), but you seem to think that putting some nice sounding principles into a constitution guarantees citizens rights. We have a saying in Germany: "Paper is patient." This means that you can write whatever you like down on paper but it doesn't necessarily mean anything! Communist East Germany had a beautiful constitution granting its citizens all kinds of rights which they didn't actually have in practice! Also it seems to me that what your constitution means changes with the composition of your Supreme Court judges. Furthermore it is extremely easy to ignore or misinterpret constitutions and countries ideals as witnessed by the many US citizens that firmly believe that the US started out and was intended to be a Christian state.
One the one hand you accuse Joe Sixpack of being too ignorant to estimate the life-time costs of running an appliance while at the same time neglecting to mention that government interference in the electricity market (especially in California), by fixing the price too low for example, encourages wasteful use while at the same time discouraging greater efficiency by minimizing the gains that can be realized from purchasing more efficient appliances.
I would be the first person to support higher electricity rates in California and probably almost everywhere else. In Germany rates are much higher and people use energy much more efficiently. The same is true with petrol prices. People in the US are unbelievably spoiled in those areas. If the rates were higher the free market would lead to an optimisation process that would likely help people compensate for much of the difference.
However, why should I go out and buy a new television for several hundred dollars (at least) when, as other posters have pointed out, it will only save me ~$18 per year in electricity costs?
Nobody, including myself, wants to force you to go out and buy a new tv. But, it would be good that when you decide to buy a new one there will only be very energy efficient models available.
Now, some people decide to buy energy efficient appliances anyway because they enjoy doing more for the environment and can afford to do so,
I wouldn't say that I enjoy doing more for the environment. Instead, I consider it to be my responsibility! I don't want to leave this place in worse shape when I die than the shape it was in when I was born. I also believe that most people in first world countries like the US can afford to make significantly more sacrifices for future generations than what they are doing now. I may be an extreme case, but, I decided to have no kids when I turned 19 and realised that global overpopulation was the biggest problem mankind is facing. I also decided not to drive because I believe that the costs to society do outweigh personal benefits. Before some idiot claims that this is not a possible choice for most people, I would like to point out that I have worked and lived the last 23 years in the US and that I am now 50 years old. I am also used to, and quite happy with my life style. I feel that I cannot expect others to do something that I do not practice myself. I just find that people are typically too lazy or unimaginative and conveniently decide that something they do not want to do is "impossible." I have also calculated that, due to the money I save by not having a car, I can retire a whole 2 years earlier than someone with the same financial expectations during retirement and the same income.
It will just be made up by people needing to turn their heating higher to compensate.
I think you're confused! In much of California it will result in additional lower energy consumption due to reduced usage of air conditioners. Also, even if you should live in parts of California where for some part of the year you have significant heating requirements you will still end up with a net gain in energy efficiency because this is not true all year round. Also heating should not be a huge expenditure if you properly insulate your home which will also help with hot summers. In Sweden and Germany, for example, there are strongly enforced rules for how much heat loss per square meter of a buildings outer surface is permissible. This has led to buildings that are nice and cool even in 90F summer weather as long as you close the blinds during the daytime and open the windows at night. And yes, we do have 90F summer days during most summers in Germany. I now live in Southern California and I don't even turn on any lights, if I don't have to, in summer, because every little bit helps in keeping the air conditioner usage to a minimum. I also bought a Philips eco tv to not heat up my place more than necessary when I watch something on my large-screen tv. Unfortunately there are many people that are either too ignorant or lazy to estimate life-time costs of running an appliance and/or they're total idiots and believe conservative talk show hosts rather than the overwhelming majority of climate scientists concerning global warming.
...computer hardware gets faster. Yawn!
All that for a few thousand carribou, a few hundred foxes and rodents, and some bears.
Either you are very poorly informed or you're intentionally spreading disinformation! According to this there are 195 bird species alone, most of whom nest there to raise their young. You have also left out many of the mammals living there like walrus, spotted seal, ringed seal, bearded seal, beluga whale, gray whale, and bowhead whale. There are also at least 14 species of fish and likely many plants and insects that are below your notice. Most people are woefully uninformed about how rich in species even seemingly harsh environments can be!
Physicists don't care about the language design. They are looking for the best tool for the job.
But language design has a huge impact on what the best tool for the job is! Also most programmers, including physicists, spend most of their time writing and debugging and not waiting on their programs to run. So even if FORTRAN is 10% or 20% faster than C++, this is typically irrelevant. What matters is that over the entire lifetime of some code the better language design leads to savings of maybe 50% or much more in the time spent that humans have to write and maintain the code. This is where I had a hard time relating to many other physicists and engineers. Btw., I have a Ph.D. in physics myself. They don't want to learn a proper tool and end up wasting huge amounts of time over the years. I believe thats's called penny-wise and pound-foolish? (English is my 2nd language.) Also you accuse me of thinking in a CS way. Thank you! After all computer scientists spend way more time to think about software development than physicists. I think that therefore it is likely that they know a hell of a lot more about it than your average physicist. I doubt most of them would consider it to be a shortcoming if a computer scientist were trying to solve a physics problem by thinking in a physics way. :)
The reason for something being popular may be nothing more than an accident of history, but because it's popular, it's useful in ways that something obscure cannot be.
I don't see how that follows in every case. If you mean, for example, that there is more documentation available and you can ask more people for help with a popular language than an obscure one, you are correct. On the other hand, I believe that using the wrong or at least suboptimal tool for a job will cost you big time long term. And there are certainly well supported and documented alternatives to Perl, like Python for example. For many years I observed colleagues around me flailing around in FORTRAN because they refused to use what was an obscure tool, "C", in their community at the time. That's because FORTRAN "got the job done" and everybody else was using it, too. Today I am convinced that the world of software development would gain an order of magnitude in time-to-product efficiency if most of us programmers used some object-oriented flavour of Lisp.
I would agree with you that FORTRAN is significantly simpler than C++. On the other hand, FORTRAN-77 for example was significantly more complex than C, if you take the language descriptions as the measure of comparison. And yet back when I had to deal with these languages almost no scientist nor engineer was willing to give C a chance. C++ is harsh for casual users. One of it's advantages is that you can create classes that make the solution of certain types of numerical problems fairly simple and intuitive. For the casual scientist or engineer programmer, I'd recommend Python. Unless you need very high performance, that is.
> They use Fortran because the language is designed and optimized to be the best language at what physicists and > other physical scientists most often need it do: crunch a whole lot of numbers. I wouldn't use Fortran to make > a word processor or web browser, but if you need a program to spend two weeks doing a lot of math, you just
> can't beat it.
I'd strongly disagree with your statement. I have written plenty of numerical code in C++ and I claim that it is a better language for writing numerical code. Also I have taught FORTRAN at an engineering school and consulted engineers and scientists in programming (primarily in FORTRAN) at a major university for several years and I would say that any programming language has been "designed" to some degree but FORTRAN is certainly one of the weaker efforts. Every statement type in FORTRAN looks like it is a separate language. Most of its practitioners don't even bother to learn the full language and the language is so weak that every vendor felt compelled to add lots of extensions to the core language. The only really strong reason for using it is the availability of huge numerical libraries that have been thoroughly debugged. I would admit that that is a pretty good reason. Another might be that FORTRAN vendors have put a lot of effort into optimising loops etc. This has nothing to do with the language itself and could equally be done in many other languages.
If the popularity of a programming language were a sign of it being a "good" language, then how come there is so much COBOL and FORTRAN? This reminds me of an old saying: "Eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong!" I'd also like to point out that most programmers are hacks. I don't doubt that languages like Perl are useful for small scripts but I think it is not a language that scales up very well. Google for example uses C++ and Python and they try really hard to hire only the best programmers they can find. Many languages are culturally assimilated. I come from a physics background and most physicists used to, and may still, program in FORTRAN, yet FORTRAN is a terrible programming language. But guess what, if challenged on this, most physicist programmers might have replied that they can readily solve any problem of interest to them in it. I'm sure the same is true of the armies of Perl programmers. But, using the popularity of anything as a measure of its quality is questionable.
The alternative is the "Silvio Berlusconi" model, where only the super-rich can afford to run.
Not true, at least not in Germany, where I'm from. We don't even have the US situation where Congress and the Senate are controlled by rich people. Our parliament consists primarily of middle class people. In Germany you can only give money to parties and not individuals. The parties then in a democratic party-internal process decide who amongst them gets to run. It is much harder to bribe a political party than an individual politician like in the US. And by party, I mean card-carrying, dues-paying members that participate in the party not like here where you can just register for a party and then dictate to them who their candidate should be.
Rich people, in general, have more of everything than someone with a median income. Those are the breaks. Even in colonial days, a rich person could print up more pamphlets than a poor person. I suggest accepting this fact and working around it rather than fighting it.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, I do not think that this should lead us to abandon all attempts to get closer to the ideal of fairness for all. Getting something 75% right is better then getting it 50% right. I would agree though that it is not always so obvious what constitutes an improvement. I also have a far bigger problem with corporations than with rich people. I don't think that corporations should be allowed to get involved in the political process. The people working at one can already do that on their own anyway. I would also limit individual financial political contribution to 1/20th of the median household income per year.
> about 70% of the people in the US LIKE what they have
As a European living in the United States, I think that is because the people suffering by far the most in the US are so ill-informed about other Western democracies and so brain-washed from an early age, that they actually are proud of the abuse they're suffering in this country! After all they constantly hear they're "no. 1". What they generally don't hear is that the US is "no. 1" in the percentage of uninsured children etc. Even the ability to legally bribe politician here, called "campaign contributions", is called "freedom of speech." I guess corporations and rich people have much more "freedom of speech" than someone with a median income.
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You obviously don't know a whole lot about dogs. My sister had a very smart dog that I enjoyed teasing. Whenever I succeeded, he would remember what I did immediately and get angry at me, even if I tried it years later. He always remembered it the first time!
> But it's OK for those same western countries to suppress/fine/jail Christian theologians who preach that homosexuality is a sin?
How would you feel if they preached that being black was a sin? How is this any different? And don't give me any crap about that being different because being homosexual is "a choice!" I am perfectly straight, have zero problems with gays and lesbians yet have not even once been interested in having sex with another man. It's not a choice. It it was I'd be doing it! I probably feel physically attracted to a woman at least 360 days every year and I have never been attracted to a man in my 50 years of life. Yet, I have zero hang-ups about it. So, not a choice at all! Either people are attracted to members of the same sex or not. If they are, I see nothing wrong with it and I hope all those fuckin' homophobes die a painful death!!
> But it's OK for those same western countries to suppress/fine/jail Christian theologians who preach that homosexuality is a sin?
Yes, yes it is!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins He is my science hero! :)
A spell-checker would not have caught the "just/gust" mistake, but it would have certainly caught your spelling mistake. "Grammer" is not an English word I have ever encountered. I suspect that you went through the U.S. public educational system. I have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years and they don't seem to believe in education here. In fact I only hear excuses about how inconsistent English is etc. And, apparently far more people here are dyslexic than where I am from. I came here as an adult, and my native language is not English, and yet I don't seem to have any problems with English spelling. I credit the educational system in my country of origin because we were taught to pay attention to spelling, grammar, math etc. Geeks from my country tend to be excellent spellers. Isn't that part of what makes a geek: paying attention to intricate details?
> ... percentage of successful convections and I knew I was assigned...
From Dictionary.com:
convection [kuhn-vek-shuhn]:
-noun
1. Physics. the transfer of heat by the circulation or movement of the heated parts of a liquid or gas.
2. Meteorology. the vertical transport of atmospheric properties, esp. upward (distinguished from advection ).
3. the act of conveying or transmitting.
> The amazing part of the racket they're running is that we have to *pay* OCLC to make these records for us, and then they turn around and require *another* payment from anyone who wants to use the records.
How much do you pay to get these MARC records made? I might be able to do the same thing for the same price but you or your organization would retain all rights to the records!