Well, we haven't had slave labor in a while. My point is simply that we shouldn't use the Chinese or the Russians as an example for giant public projects, because they usually manage to bankrupt themselves in the process.
I vote for someone who I think will do a good job leading the country and making sure it continues to be the best nation on earth, independent of whether he panders to my personal beliefs. I despise single-issue politics. Is manned space flight so important to you that it would override any doubts you had about Bush's qualifications? Given the way the economy is going, you still think blowing billions of tax dollars on Mars is a good idea?
I guess I shouldn't sound so shocked, though. The fact that abortion continues to be an issue in virtually every campaign is proof enough that the American electorate is thoroughly stupid.
You'd have to be high to really believe that it will cost exactly what the estimate is once the government gets through. Go read about ISS cost overruns.
Russia had the same attitude- after all, they had a manned space station working for years and a military that rivalled ours. Look where their economy and superpower status ended up. I know the Chinese have the motivation and intelligence to make this succeed, but their government also has the arrogance to push a project like this even when it's not in their best interests, just because it's an image-builder.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. If I'd known he was going to announce this I'd have voted for him.
That kind of attitude is exactly why Bush won:
I don't care how dumb Bush is. He's cutting taxes.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. He's raising steel tariffs.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. He's anti-abortion.
Personally, I don't think Bush is dumb, but rather an intellectual lightweight- there's a world of difference. And I don't think he's a very good president, but I do support some of his positions. The people who are dumb are the ones who will vote for a guy because he tells them what they want to hear. "Ooooh, spaceflight! He'll make a great commander-in-chief!"
As a young (23) scientist myself, I would find far more motivation and inspiration in being refunded my share of the tax dollars that will be blown on this project. A large-screen TV and surround sound would be far more inspiring than reading about manned spaceflight in the paper. They're not putting *me* in space, so why should I give a fuck?
I'm not anti-tax or libertarian; I like big government, and it pays my salary. But I think the future of spaceflight will continue to be unmanned missions for some time, and do not like the thought of the government spending my money for the benefit of defense contracters and because it's "cool". Besides, we can find extraterrestrial life, if it exists, just as well without splurging on sending people.
I think the government has better things to do with our tax dollars than "entertainment". Why not concentrate on making sure our own planet is habitable before we waste billions trying to put people on another one? If you think terraforming is cool, find a way to halt desertification in Africa.
Seems like anyone looking to draw attention to their organism of choice simply announces a new genome project. You'd think they'd wait to see how useful the human sequence is first- after all, many millions more dollars are being spent researching and analyzing that, and it's still taking a while for people to produce anything useful from it. It's a valuable reference, but I doubt banana research is as intensive and sophisticated as research in human genetics. (Just a hunch.)
In other news, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws announced plans to sequence the Cannabis sativa genome. A group spokesman said, "We're hoping this project will lead to. . . um. . . shit, I think I ate my notes."
I actually started programming for real in Awk. The postdoc I was working for knew Awk and C, but not Perl (which, since I'm in bioinformatics, is the de facto standard). So I began learning Awk, and used that until I had to start doing CGI scripts. I still go back to it occasionally; I've written entire BLAST parsers in Awk alone. When I need a very simple, small text-processing script, Awk is usually my first choice, even though I write virtually all my code in Perl.
Good point. Jack Valenti has always been worse than Hilary Rosen, and has been making life miserable for the consumer ever since the Betamax case, when he compared home video technology to the Boston Strangler. Obviously the MPAA's rating system has been proven to be absurd many times over. Keep in mind, however, that in today's marketplace many of the largest media companies have huge investments in *both* recordings and movies. I'm suspicious at how this will actually play out; remember, the RIAA is only a trade group and there's nothing to prevent Disney (which owns Virgin Records, does it not?) or Time-Warner (which produces recordings as well) from continuing to pursue legislation on their own.
Um, yeah, "Biomedical Engineering". I think you missed the point of my post. Harvard is one of the best in the world at pure research. Not the best, but among the top.
Certainly there's a theoretical argument that patents encourage research
They don't do much for research, but they do quite a bit for invention. If you take biotechnology, most of the basic research is done in academia. However, for the benefits of this research to reach consumers, someone has to go through the trouble of commercializing the results. Academics are paid simply to produce results, but companies need financial security. Thus, exclusivity on a product is given to promote bringing it to market in the first place. For the most part, this works well (at least in theory).
The problem now is that patents aren't just being applied to actual inventions. Companies (and universities!) now expect to get patents for simple old research results regardless of whether there's actually a commercially viable product in there. In the old days (~1985), Leroy Hood and his coworkers- all academics- invented the DNA sequencer, among other things. This was considered very risky research to be doing at a university back then. They immediately patented it, and Applied Biosystems has been selling them like crazy ever since. It's exactly how the system should work. Now, however, professors isolate some gene and immediately patent it. There's no beneficial product involved; they simply control all future research done with it. Hence Myriad Genetics and its BRCA1 patent. I imagine quite a few biotechs will never actually produce anything useful but will leech off others purely by litigation of their bullshit patents. That's legal, but it's not how the system is *supposed* to work.
(A former coworker is now working on a project that's of direct interest to us- we're both academic researchers. For reasons I can't begin to comprehend, his university is patenting the method, which is simply an algorithm. He's been a real asshole about this, and our response has pretty much been to ignore him. We're not going to reward that sort of crap, and frankly we think we can do a better job. FUCK his patent.)
Actually, there was a Forbes article earlier this year (linked to from Slashdot) that detailed how in the early days of Sun Microsystems, IBM's lawyers showed up with some software patent and shook Sun down for a cool $25 million. When Sun's engineers quickly proved that they weren't infringing, the IBM lawyers simply said "That's okay, we'll find ten more that you are infringing." Sun paid up - this is exactly what SCO is doing now.
That's a very different IBM, obviously, but they have a long way to go before they atone for their past behavior.
Harvard's science departments are some of the best in the world (I'm a Yale alumn, so it hurts to admit this). Their medical school is among the very best in the country, and this means that the biomedical sciences there are almost unparalleled. It is not, however, an engineering school. There's a world of difference.
I went to Yale, and I certainly wouldn't rave about the CS department. I was a bio major, but I did a shitload of programming, and I've not been too impressed with either the research that goes on there or the students it produces. Besides, David Gelernter works there- what else do you need to know?
Hmmm. Okay,that makes sense- I already knew the last paragraph, but hadn't really put it into the context of habitat destruction. I was confusing diversity and speciation there; I certainly don't expect to see large grazing animals radiating out, because they'll all get eaten first. What I was thinking is that segmentation of habitats effectively limits the potential for reproductive isolation; most organisms within a patch of rain forest surrounded by clearcut probably aren't going to do much adapting, at least not in 25 years. (Most animals, at least. I don't know how this project will deal with microorganisms- I suspect it won't, at least not very well.)
I guess this relates to Gould's punctuated equilibria; I think the overall hypothesis is that repeated mass extinctions caused by catastrophe were followed by explosions in diversity, or something like that.
Great point. The best distinction that I've seen is simply that of "reproductive isolation", rather than phenotype. It's possible for two different species to mate and bear fertile offspring; however, they almost always don't. External phenotype on the other hand is a very poor marker of speciation.
These nuances are almost always missed in evolution vs. creation debates. An population of organisms does not suddenly *poof* become a new species. There's no good way to measure speciation; it's a combination of environmental and genetic factors that builds up over time.
The best book I've read on this is "The Diversity of Life" by Edward O. Wilson; it has a very clear and non-technical description of exactly how speciation occurs, and is very relevant to this article.
The current rate of discovery is a mere 10,000 a year. With an estimated 100 milion species, it'd take, well, forever.
I think the idea is to identify species based on a genomic fingerprint- the usual marker is actually the sequence of 16S RNA (part of the ribosome). They simply collect as many samples as possible and feed them into the sequencer, and then use computers to determine the relationships.
At least that's what I assume from the article. I don't really think this is worthwhile, because it's easy for two organisms to be nearly identical on the sequence level and still be non-mating. You could have a single polymorphism be the only thing separating two species simply because of change in color, metabolism, etc., coupled with reproductive isolation. In particular, 16S RNA is used for large-scale cladistics because it changes relatively little over time, but this means that the difference between an Amazonian Spotted Yellow Frog and an Amazonian Spotted Green Frog may be nil at that level.
If they're looking at entire genomes, on the other hand, the technology simply won't be powerful enough for some time, particularly if they run into weird or huge genomes. Our genome is small compared to some of the projects underway, and the problem with everything on that scale is figuring out the damn repeats.
It's a safe bet that the rate of speciation has gone down, though, given the shrinkage in available natural habitat. Speciation goes hand in hand with adaptive radiation (it's a part of it, actually), and with the number of unique ecosystems shrinking the potential of organisms to move into new niches decreases.
Um, okay. See, I actually know someone who was in the WTC when it collapsed. Just an acquaintance, really- he was a year ahead of me in college (he had just graduated when he was killed), lived across the courtyard my junior year, and helped me get a good room my senior year even after I fucked up with the forms. Not really a close connection, but it's something. One girl was in tears that afternoon because her dad worked in the WTC and she didn't know if he was okay- fortunately, he'd left the building at about 8:30. A number of our alums were killed, and the school newspaper published biographies of them- one woman had just gotten engaged.
I mention this not because I feel blind revenge is appropriate or that I have more of a right to be enraged than you do, but to point out an essential problem with all you snotty Europeans who spew conspiracy theories about Sept. 11th: you don't give a shit about the people who died, and are incapable of recognizing them as people. This dehumanization is every bit as bad as the nonchalance most Americans have towards foreign civilian casualties and the victims of US-backed dictatorships. Many of us are horrified by some of the things the US has done in the past, and are very worried about what will happen to the poor Afghans. Nonetheless, we're still able to recognize that some things are truly evil and need to be dealt with appropriately, and do not try to make excuses for mass murderers.
Obviously you can argue that the US deliberately provoked bin Laden until you're blue in the face, and there's not really anything I can do to convince you otherwise. Still, there's a case to be made that bin Laden deserves to die just for the embassy bombings alone, in which 200 innocent African civilians were killed (compared to about 20 Americans). Since you seem to have given this issue quite a bit of thought, perhaps you could also suggest the proper course of action for America to take when innocents are butchered? Right now, all I see on your site is typical smug European elitism, and a bunch of "facts" lined up in a way such as to suggest that we simply had it coming, and should bend over and take it like a bitch. Your jealousy over not being a real superpower any more, and the luxury of having nearly zero foreign policy outside of Europe, has led you into the belief that America and Bush are far more evil and murderous than Islamofascism and bin Laden.
I'd suggest that anyone who finds this sort of thinking attractive read Christopher Hitchens, who is both a fierce critic of US foreign policy and an opponent of everything bin Laden stands for.
We can snigger at Bush's pea-sized brain but the fact is, he (and Blair et al) has got the sales pitch going and those against his war-mongering, do not. We can't just say, "don't destroy out civil rights, don't go to war" without offering an alternative, without offering some kind of argument
To give Bush some credit, he's not really that stupid. He's certainly not a deep thinker or a great speaker, and too many people mistake those qualities for good leadership. His gaffes tend to get inflated by the liberal news media, just as Clinton's so-called corruption was inflated by the conservative (and mainstream!) news media. A lot of the rhetoric being tossed about regarding Bush sounds suspiciously like the drivel we heard about Clinton for eight years- driven by partisanship rather than facts, and ignoring the more substantive criticisms.
Anyway, you've pretty much highlighted the current dilemma of the Democratic party, which came across as the Prescription Drug Party this past election. All the campaign updates I receive (I do still vote Dem, reluctantly) sounded exactly the same:
GEORGE W. BUSH WANTS TO PAVE THE RAINFORESTS, AUCTION OFF YOUR UTERUS TO ENRON, AND BOMB STARVING THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES WITH BIBLES.
Obviously the majority of the people who bothered to show up at the polls weren't very impressed. I'm moderately anti-abortion and moderately pro-war, and though I have little love for the GOP I'm finding it very hard to support the Democrats given that their existence seems to rest on being the anti-Bush party right now. They'd do well to stop pandering to NOW, the NAACP, and the AARP, and actually come up with some substantive policy.
Actually, I've heard far too much from whiny Java advocates who seem blind to the language's flaws. I've never heard anyone recommend C because they feel it's the ultimate programming language; they always have some specific reason for it and don't try to be apologists as well. Even the Perl fanboys I've read or talked to don't pretend that it's the only language you'll ever need, though they're far too nonchalant about spaghetti code. Vi and Emacs are usually just things people snipe about for fun.
Java advocates, on the other hand, seem to think that everything other than a kernel should be written in Java. I've had people who didn't even understand the programs I was trying to write tell me I should be using Java. Lots of people recommend Java for high-performance computing now. Sorry, that's religion.
Actually, functional programming seems to inspire the same emotions in many people...
The French Army, who also did a fairly good job of conquering things, marched on croissants, black coffee and Gitanes.
They did a fairly good job of conquering uncivilized natives; they did a pretty half-assed job against anyone with a modern army. I'd say they needed more protein in their diet.
And, of course, farm-raised seafood is almost universally superior to wild seafood.
My dad works with seafood a lot (in the industrial sense), and he mentioned this issue recently. Farm-raised seafood is typically very consistent, in the respect that every salmon (for instance) tastes very good and nearly exactly the same. However, he also said that the best wild salmon will still taste better- quality control is just much harder. This is in Washington state, and the way the fisheries seem to be going farm-raised is probably the superior alternative for a number of reasons, but it's not necessarily the best fish you can buy.
My impression is that FORTRAN is largely limited to legacy systems and some scientific software, and COBOL is almost entirely relegated to legacy systems and companies that insist on staying with mainframes. I work in scientific computing, and FORTRAN is still alive and kicking, but every job I've seen that requires experience in it first lists C/C++ and usually Java as well, and all of these companies have significant products written in FORTRAN that in most cases have been around for years. I don't think many people are starting *new* projects entirely in FORTRAN.
As for COBOL, why??? I can understand why people with COBOL knowledge are valuable, but does anyone actually write new COBOL code rather than using a more, um, modern language? Is there anything that COBOL is better for than PL/SQL and Java? Even IBM is pimping Java now, and I thought they were the only manufacturer whose products were used for COBOL. . . or does DB/2 involve COBOL isntead of some proprietary SQL-based language?
Otherwise, I agree. Anyone competent in C++ or Java ought to be able to pick up Perl or Python in a weekend, and would probably be much better at it than most people who start out in Perl or Python.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we haven't had slave labor in a while. My point is simply that we shouldn't use the Chinese or the Russians as an example for giant public projects, because they usually manage to bankrupt themselves in the process.
I vote for someone who I think will do a good job leading the country and making sure it continues to be the best nation on earth, independent of whether he panders to my personal beliefs. I despise single-issue politics. Is manned space flight so important to you that it would override any doubts you had about Bush's qualifications? Given the way the economy is going, you still think blowing billions of tax dollars on Mars is a good idea?
I guess I shouldn't sound so shocked, though. The fact that abortion continues to be an issue in virtually every campaign is proof enough that the American electorate is thoroughly stupid.
You'd have to be high to really believe that it will cost exactly what the estimate is once the government gets through. Go read about ISS cost overruns.
Russia had the same attitude- after all, they had a manned space station working for years and a military that rivalled ours. Look where their economy and superpower status ended up. I know the Chinese have the motivation and intelligence to make this succeed, but their government also has the arrogance to push a project like this even when it's not in their best interests, just because it's an image-builder.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. If I'd known he was going to announce this I'd have voted for him.
That kind of attitude is exactly why Bush won:
I don't care how dumb Bush is. He's cutting taxes.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. He's raising steel tariffs.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. He's anti-abortion.
Personally, I don't think Bush is dumb, but rather an intellectual lightweight- there's a world of difference. And I don't think he's a very good president, but I do support some of his positions. The people who are dumb are the ones who will vote for a guy because he tells them what they want to hear. "Ooooh, spaceflight! He'll make a great commander-in-chief!"
As a young (23) scientist myself, I would find far more motivation and inspiration in being refunded my share of the tax dollars that will be blown on this project. A large-screen TV and surround sound would be far more inspiring than reading about manned spaceflight in the paper. They're not putting *me* in space, so why should I give a fuck?
I'm not anti-tax or libertarian; I like big government, and it pays my salary. But I think the future of spaceflight will continue to be unmanned missions for some time, and do not like the thought of the government spending my money for the benefit of defense contracters and because it's "cool". Besides, we can find extraterrestrial life, if it exists, just as well without splurging on sending people.
I think the government has better things to do with our tax dollars than "entertainment". Why not concentrate on making sure our own planet is habitable before we waste billions trying to put people on another one? If you think terraforming is cool, find a way to halt desertification in Africa.
Seems like anyone looking to draw attention to their organism of choice simply announces a new genome project. You'd think they'd wait to see how useful the human sequence is first- after all, many millions more dollars are being spent researching and analyzing that, and it's still taking a while for people to produce anything useful from it. It's a valuable reference, but I doubt banana research is as intensive and sophisticated as research in human genetics. (Just a hunch.)
In other news, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws announced plans to sequence the Cannabis sativa genome. A group spokesman said, "We're hoping this project will lead to. . . um. . . shit, I think I ate my notes."
I actually started programming for real in Awk. The postdoc I was working for knew Awk and C, but not Perl (which, since I'm in bioinformatics, is the de facto standard). So I began learning Awk, and used that until I had to start doing CGI scripts. I still go back to it occasionally; I've written entire BLAST parsers in Awk alone. When I need a very simple, small text-processing script, Awk is usually my first choice, even though I write virtually all my code in Perl.
Good point. Jack Valenti has always been worse than Hilary Rosen, and has been making life miserable for the consumer ever since the Betamax case, when he compared home video technology to the Boston Strangler. Obviously the MPAA's rating system has been proven to be absurd many times over. Keep in mind, however, that in today's marketplace many of the largest media companies have huge investments in *both* recordings and movies. I'm suspicious at how this will actually play out; remember, the RIAA is only a trade group and there's nothing to prevent Disney (which owns Virgin Records, does it not?) or Time-Warner (which produces recordings as well) from continuing to pursue legislation on their own.
Um, yeah, "Biomedical Engineering". I think you missed the point of my post. Harvard is one of the best in the world at pure research. Not the best, but among the top.
Certainly there's a theoretical argument that patents encourage research
They don't do much for research, but they do quite a bit for invention. If you take biotechnology, most of the basic research is done in academia. However, for the benefits of this research to reach consumers, someone has to go through the trouble of commercializing the results. Academics are paid simply to produce results, but companies need financial security. Thus, exclusivity on a product is given to promote bringing it to market in the first place. For the most part, this works well (at least in theory).
The problem now is that patents aren't just being applied to actual inventions. Companies (and universities!) now expect to get patents for simple old research results regardless of whether there's actually a commercially viable product in there. In the old days (~1985), Leroy Hood and his coworkers- all academics- invented the DNA sequencer, among other things. This was considered very risky research to be doing at a university back then. They immediately patented it, and Applied Biosystems has been selling them like crazy ever since. It's exactly how the system should work. Now, however, professors isolate some gene and immediately patent it. There's no beneficial product involved; they simply control all future research done with it. Hence Myriad Genetics and its BRCA1 patent. I imagine quite a few biotechs will never actually produce anything useful but will leech off others purely by litigation of their bullshit patents. That's legal, but it's not how the system is *supposed* to work.
(A former coworker is now working on a project that's of direct interest to us- we're both academic researchers. For reasons I can't begin to comprehend, his university is patenting the method, which is simply an algorithm. He's been a real asshole about this, and our response has pretty much been to ignore him. We're not going to reward that sort of crap, and frankly we think we can do a better job. FUCK his patent.)
Actually, there was a Forbes article earlier this year (linked to from Slashdot) that detailed how in the early days of Sun Microsystems, IBM's lawyers showed up with some software patent and shook Sun down for a cool $25 million. When Sun's engineers quickly proved that they weren't infringing, the IBM lawyers simply said "That's okay, we'll find ten more that you are infringing." Sun paid up - this is exactly what SCO is doing now.
That's a very different IBM, obviously, but they have a long way to go before they atone for their past behavior.
Harvard's science departments are some of the best in the world (I'm a Yale alumn, so it hurts to admit this). Their medical school is among the very best in the country, and this means that the biomedical sciences there are almost unparalleled. It is not, however, an engineering school. There's a world of difference.
I went to Yale, and I certainly wouldn't rave about the CS department. I was a bio major, but I did a shitload of programming, and I've not been too impressed with either the research that goes on there or the students it produces. Besides, David Gelernter works there- what else do you need to know?
Hmmm. Okay ,that makes sense- I already knew the last paragraph, but hadn't really put it into the context of habitat destruction. I was confusing diversity and speciation there; I certainly don't expect to see large grazing animals radiating out, because they'll all get eaten first. What I was thinking is that segmentation of habitats effectively limits the potential for reproductive isolation; most organisms within a patch of rain forest surrounded by clearcut probably aren't going to do much adapting, at least not in 25 years. (Most animals, at least. I don't know how this project will deal with microorganisms- I suspect it won't, at least not very well.)
I guess this relates to Gould's punctuated equilibria; I think the overall hypothesis is that repeated mass extinctions caused by catastrophe were followed by explosions in diversity, or something like that.
Great point. The best distinction that I've seen is simply that of "reproductive isolation", rather than phenotype. It's possible for two different species to mate and bear fertile offspring; however, they almost always don't. External phenotype on the other hand is a very poor marker of speciation.
These nuances are almost always missed in evolution vs. creation debates. An population of organisms does not suddenly *poof* become a new species. There's no good way to measure speciation; it's a combination of environmental and genetic factors that builds up over time.
The best book I've read on this is "The Diversity of Life" by Edward O. Wilson; it has a very clear and non-technical description of exactly how speciation occurs, and is very relevant to this article.
The current rate of discovery is a mere 10,000 a year. With an estimated 100 milion species, it'd take, well, forever.
I think the idea is to identify species based on a genomic fingerprint- the usual marker is actually the sequence of 16S RNA (part of the ribosome). They simply collect as many samples as possible and feed them into the sequencer, and then use computers to determine the relationships.
At least that's what I assume from the article. I don't really think this is worthwhile, because it's easy for two organisms to be nearly identical on the sequence level and still be non-mating. You could have a single polymorphism be the only thing separating two species simply because of change in color, metabolism, etc., coupled with reproductive isolation. In particular, 16S RNA is used for large-scale cladistics because it changes relatively little over time, but this means that the difference between an Amazonian Spotted Yellow Frog and an Amazonian Spotted Green Frog may be nil at that level.
If they're looking at entire genomes, on the other hand, the technology simply won't be powerful enough for some time, particularly if they run into weird or huge genomes. Our genome is small compared to some of the projects underway, and the problem with everything on that scale is figuring out the damn repeats.
It's a safe bet that the rate of speciation has gone down, though, given the shrinkage in available natural habitat. Speciation goes hand in hand with adaptive radiation (it's a part of it, actually), and with the number of unique ecosystems shrinking the potential of organisms to move into new niches decreases.
i'd like to hear some slashdotters' opinions
Um, okay. See, I actually know someone who was in the WTC when it collapsed. Just an acquaintance, really- he was a year ahead of me in college (he had just graduated when he was killed), lived across the courtyard my junior year, and helped me get a good room my senior year even after I fucked up with the forms. Not really a close connection, but it's something. One girl was in tears that afternoon because her dad worked in the WTC and she didn't know if he was okay- fortunately, he'd left the building at about 8:30. A number of our alums were killed, and the school newspaper published biographies of them- one woman had just gotten engaged.
I mention this not because I feel blind revenge is appropriate or that I have more of a right to be enraged than you do, but to point out an essential problem with all you snotty Europeans who spew conspiracy theories about Sept. 11th: you don't give a shit about the people who died, and are incapable of recognizing them as people. This dehumanization is every bit as bad as the nonchalance most Americans have towards foreign civilian casualties and the victims of US-backed dictatorships. Many of us are horrified by some of the things the US has done in the past, and are very worried about what will happen to the poor Afghans. Nonetheless, we're still able to recognize that some things are truly evil and need to be dealt with appropriately, and do not try to make excuses for mass murderers.
Obviously you can argue that the US deliberately provoked bin Laden until you're blue in the face, and there's not really anything I can do to convince you otherwise. Still, there's a case to be made that bin Laden deserves to die just for the embassy bombings alone, in which 200 innocent African civilians were killed (compared to about 20 Americans). Since you seem to have given this issue quite a bit of thought, perhaps you could also suggest the proper course of action for America to take when innocents are butchered? Right now, all I see on your site is typical smug European elitism, and a bunch of "facts" lined up in a way such as to suggest that we simply had it coming, and should bend over and take it like a bitch. Your jealousy over not being a real superpower any more, and the luxury of having nearly zero foreign policy outside of Europe, has led you into the belief that America and Bush are far more evil and murderous than Islamofascism and bin Laden.
I'd suggest that anyone who finds this sort of thinking attractive read Christopher Hitchens, who is both a fierce critic of US foreign policy and an opponent of everything bin Laden stands for.
We can snigger at Bush's pea-sized brain but the fact is, he (and Blair et al) has got the sales pitch going and those against his war-mongering, do not. We can't just say, "don't destroy out civil rights, don't go to war" without offering an alternative, without offering some kind of argument
To give Bush some credit, he's not really that stupid. He's certainly not a deep thinker or a great speaker, and too many people mistake those qualities for good leadership. His gaffes tend to get inflated by the liberal news media, just as Clinton's so-called corruption was inflated by the conservative (and mainstream!) news media. A lot of the rhetoric being tossed about regarding Bush sounds suspiciously like the drivel we heard about Clinton for eight years- driven by partisanship rather than facts, and ignoring the more substantive criticisms.
Anyway, you've pretty much highlighted the current dilemma of the Democratic party, which came across as the Prescription Drug Party this past election. All the campaign updates I receive (I do still vote Dem, reluctantly) sounded exactly the same:
GEORGE W. BUSH WANTS TO PAVE THE RAINFORESTS, AUCTION OFF YOUR UTERUS TO ENRON, AND BOMB STARVING THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES WITH BIBLES.
Obviously the majority of the people who bothered to show up at the polls weren't very impressed. I'm moderately anti-abortion and moderately pro-war, and though I have little love for the GOP I'm finding it very hard to support the Democrats given that their existence seems to rest on being the anti-Bush party right now. They'd do well to stop pandering to NOW, the NAACP, and the AARP, and actually come up with some substantive policy.
Actually, I've heard far too much from whiny Java advocates who seem blind to the language's flaws. I've never heard anyone recommend C because they feel it's the ultimate programming language; they always have some specific reason for it and don't try to be apologists as well. Even the Perl fanboys I've read or talked to don't pretend that it's the only language you'll ever need, though they're far too nonchalant about spaghetti code. Vi and Emacs are usually just things people snipe about for fun.
Java advocates, on the other hand, seem to think that everything other than a kernel should be written in Java. I've had people who didn't even understand the programs I was trying to write tell me I should be using Java. Lots of people recommend Java for high-performance computing now. Sorry, that's religion.
Actually, functional programming seems to inspire the same emotions in many people...
The French Army, who also did a fairly good job of conquering things, marched on croissants, black coffee and Gitanes.
They did a fairly good job of conquering uncivilized natives; they did a pretty half-assed job against anyone with a modern army. I'd say they needed more protein in their diet.
And, of course, farm-raised seafood is almost universally superior to wild seafood.
My dad works with seafood a lot (in the industrial sense), and he mentioned this issue recently. Farm-raised seafood is typically very consistent, in the respect that every salmon (for instance) tastes very good and nearly exactly the same. However, he also said that the best wild salmon will still taste better- quality control is just much harder. This is in Washington state, and the way the fisheries seem to be going farm-raised is probably the superior alternative for a number of reasons, but it's not necessarily the best fish you can buy.
My impression is that FORTRAN is largely limited to legacy systems and some scientific software, and COBOL is almost entirely relegated to legacy systems and companies that insist on staying with mainframes. I work in scientific computing, and FORTRAN is still alive and kicking, but every job I've seen that requires experience in it first lists C/C++ and usually Java as well, and all of these companies have significant products written in FORTRAN that in most cases have been around for years. I don't think many people are starting *new* projects entirely in FORTRAN.
As for COBOL, why??? I can understand why people with COBOL knowledge are valuable, but does anyone actually write new COBOL code rather than using a more, um, modern language? Is there anything that COBOL is better for than PL/SQL and Java? Even IBM is pimping Java now, and I thought they were the only manufacturer whose products were used for COBOL. . . or does DB/2 involve COBOL isntead of some proprietary SQL-based language?
Otherwise, I agree. Anyone competent in C++ or Java ought to be able to pick up Perl or Python in a weekend, and would probably be much better at it than most people who start out in Perl or Python.