The list on the linked page that's most relevant to the issue Graham is referring to is "Top universities worldwide by research impact". Those are the kind of institutions that people think of when asked what the "most admired" universities are, and it's also very relevant in terms of the connection to startups.
On that list, only 1 out of the 10 top universities is outside of the U.S.
It's funny to watch how if someone doesn't like what someone else is saying, but can't refute it, they pick on his rhetorical devices instead of addressing the point. Which "great" European universities would you like to propose as candidates to compete with the ones Graham is referring to? This essay isn't trying to convince you of anything about U.S. universities, it's assuming something that's fairly widely acknowledged, and illustrating it with an anecdote.
RTFA. Paul Graham wrote some paragraphs in that piece just for you (and me). It's worth repeating here:
US immigration policy is particularly ill-suited to startups, because it reflects a model of work from the 1970s. It assumes good technical people have college degrees, and that work means working for a big company.
If you don't have a college degree you can't get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers. But a test that excludes Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a good one. Plus you can't get a visa for working on your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else's. And if you want to apply for citizenship you daren't work for a startup at all, because if your sponsor goes out of business, you have to start over.
American immigration policy keeps out most smart people, and channels the rest into unproductive jobs. It would be easy to do better. Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting-- if you made a conscious effort to seek out the smartest people and get them to come to your country.
A country that got immigration right would have a huge advantage. At this point you could become a mecca for smart people simply by having an immigration system that let them in.
The survey itself isn't the proof of the claim, it's merely a kind of illustration, which requires that you already recognize the underlying point. So, what are the European universities most admired in computer science, anyway? Graham has a point, although I'm not sure he's fully explored all the reasons: a big one is simply the size of the U.S. as a homogeneous market which mostly communicates in a single language.
For some reason, most people will read a sentence like "America has many of the world's top universities" and think it said "No country but America has a top university."
This is mostly a sign of the abject level of the teaching of basic logic at schools around the world. In America, too, because most Americans will misread things in the same way.
You can't really teach this out of people. It's a cognitive heuristic which saves on brainpower, which is deeply embedded in the human psyche. The only way to escape it is with large doses of intelligence: larger than most people possess. The core issue is about compression as a way to aid comprehension: to make a sentence like "America has many of the world's top universities" tractable - easier to reason about and remember - it has to be translated into something simpler. The most obvious example is "America == top universities". There's an obvious loss of information here, but arguably, the main point has been retained. A lot of human silliness is explained by this trick.
Companies who run wires through towns to your doorstep need all sorts of permission from the local citizens to do so. In exchange for that permission, they have to play by certain rules, i.e. "regulations". In addition, since only some companies are allowed to run wires, it creates an oligopoly (at best) and a monopoly (at worst). So additional regulation is needed to ensure that companies don't abuse that.
One example of a particular kind of abuse is where a company leverages their monopoly or semi-monopoly power in one area (the cabling, i.e. the transport layer) to profit in another area, e.g. in services that are available over the cabling, by discriminating against competitors for those services -- competitors who don't have the government-granted benefit of being able to run cables to people's houses. Trust me, you really don't want to be on the receiving end of this kind of discrimination.
Net neutrality regulation is trying to head off this sort of discrimination before it starts (whether it does so in the right way is another question). Some people say that this hasn't been a problem yet, and we can deal with it if and when it arises. The problem is that dealing with abusive monopolies after they've arisen is much more difficult: witness Microsoft.
That's pre-6/6/06 thinking. What you fail to take into account is that the neocons who rule Earth believe in preemptive enforcement of interplanetary law. This may be all happening on Jupiter right now, but once Big Red has eaten Little Red, we're obviously gonna be next! Pictures of these storms, along with a little vial of the same gases that make up Jupiter's atmosphere, are being shown to the U.N. Security Council at this very moment. In the interests of peace, we must declare war on Jupiter!
Look, it's not enough to go "aw, poor thing", whether you're talking about the planet, forests, cute endangered species, or embryos. You have to at least apply some frickin' logic and rational thought! Otherwise, even a batshit insane nutcase like Ann Coulter is going to eat you for breakfast when it comes to demolishing your positions. If you want to make a difference, be able to back up your ideas with reason. Otherwise, you're just hurting the cause.
So you'd rather use a totally inappropriate term than an appropriate one because... wait, why exactly? Clearly, that convict heritage expresses itself more strongly in some Aussies than others.
True. My comment was much more because it was clear from his terminology that the OP wasn't familiar with telescopes, and since I was pointing to a $3000 instrument I wanted to make it clear that you wouldn't get full value from such an instrument if you live in, say, the New York metro area.
Regardless of whether he's right, Goerzen made it a control issue when he wrote:
> I am becoming increasingly concerned at the unilateral method in which
> you and/or the archive maintainers have taken this decision.
>
> The ability to enter into a legal contract to indemnify a third party
> should be, and arguably IS, reserved solely for the SPI Board of
> Directors.
It seems that part of the problem, at least, is that Towns may not fully understand the nature of the Debian/SPI relationship. Goerzen could have been much more diplomatic about it, but the way he put it, he highlights the control issue in an extreme way, i.e. essentially saying "you have no authority to do what you're doing". Regardless of whether that's true, Goerzen could be more diplomatic about it. In fact, he has an obligation to be more diplomatic about it, as President and Chairman of SPI, in the interests of serving the organizations which SPI exists to serve.
Let's hope Big Jup doesn't find out, because he is really really big and strong.
I have used an OOP simulation to determine that Big Jup won't be able to hurt our probe. You probably didn't notice that because you tried to do it with SQL.:-P
Dude, you're on Slashdot. If you were some bimbo news anchor on MSNBC you could get away with saying intergalactic. But this isn't even interstellar! It's in our own solar system, for crying out loud. The word you want is "interplanetary". Hey, and don't thank me - I kill jokes for free.
The answer is in the article - the photo was taken with an 11-inch telescope. If you're flush with cash, just go get one of these (Meade 12"), although you'll need to use it well outside of any big urban area, light pollution around cities kills viewing conditions. (You can get a similar scope for less money if you take more of a DIY approach, but then you have to learn much more about it. Scopes like Meade and Celestron are for people who just want to spend the money and get the results.)
Well, the wormole reference was obvious, but actually I had no idea that Ancientese was supposed to be related to Latin. I just figured the writers weren't very original in coming up with alien-sounding words!;)
Yeah, but what if humanity is spread throughout the galaxy via a network of wormholes, and they all once spoke Latin and named their star "Sol"? It's kind of like how every town has a Main Street (and in the U.S., a Maple Street too).
There aren't any serious suggestions, at least in modern times, that Pluto came from outside the solar system. There are many more objects like Pluto in the Kuiper Belt and beyond, in the "scattered disk", and perhaps even in the Oort cloud. But all of this is still part of our solar system. Pluto falls within the Kuiper Belt and is classified as a Kuiper Belt Object. Its orbit might have changed since the solar system was formed, perhaps as a result of gravitational interaction with Neptune, but that's about it.
The mystery around Pluto dates from before it was found that the Kuiper Belt is full of similar objects which range in size up to Pluto's size, and in one known case, larger. The Wikipedia link in the parent post has links to pages which describe all of this.
The parent post gives the most important reason that Slashdot isn't offering user-selected themes.
The other reason is that ensuring that all themes work creates maintenance overhead, which might seem insignificant until you're actually the one responsible for doing it. It doesn't make sense to have five different looks for the same product unless you're going to somehow sell more of it as a result. The calculation is that people won't read Slashdot significantly more just because they can also get it in Pastel OMG Ponies! Pink.
I understand what you're getting at, but usually, the term "incite" implies a much more direct call to action than is present in that thread. At best, that thread could be said to be "fomenting" something. Perhaps for homework, we should both read Mein Kampf - my guess is that it's nowhere near as neutral as the thread we're discussing.
Legal definitions of "incite" are pretty explicit about this, e.g. U.S. Criminal Code (Title 18) defines inciting a riot as "Urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts." Without actual advocacy of some violent act (e.g. "let's kill..."), it's not incitement.
Of course, legal definitions and English definitions aren't the same thing. The m-w.com definition says that incite "stresses a stirring up and urging on, and may or may not imply initiating". Arguing about whether that precise definition applies to the thread in question won't get us far. But at least we know that none of the participants in that thread can be arrested for incitement under U.S. law. Viva la Revolucion!;)
I'm not the person you were talking to, but it seems to me that the thread you referenced is much more of a discussion of violent overthrow than an incitement to overthrow. It started by someone essentially paraphrasing the U.S. Constitution, and many people pointed out that a reliance on guns was no longer good enough. The urban terrorism practiced by the IRA was mentioned, and roadside bombs were mentioned as an effective alternative to guns in the context of Iraq. But nowhere was anyone saying "let's take up arms against our government" or "let's assassinate Mayor Bloomberg to send a message". That would be a pretty extreme response that would say more about the reader than about the discussion. Which particular messages made you feel incited?
What you're describing is a form of social censorship, which is a normal and natural part of human interaction - it happens all the time. It's very different from the government censorship that Amnesty is concerned with. I replied to someone else about this here.
Hard to tell if this is supposed to be a joke - if so, I didn't even hear the WHOOSH. But in case you really did miss the point, the kind of censorship that Amnesty cares about is government censorship. Your issues with Wikipedia are easily resolved: post your material somewhere else, start a competing site, whatever. "Freedom of speech" doesn't translate to a right to have others publish your speech, or agree with it, or take it seriously.
The sort of "censorship" that Wikipedia does happens all the time in even the most free societies: some ideas won't be popular, or will be ignored, or actively suppressed, for whatever reasons. For example, Slashdot quite effectively censors unwanted material via its moderation system. The reasons for such censorship are often benign, e.g. designed to improve the quality of discussion; or they may be less benign, in the case of the kind of "groupthink" which can be quite repressive for members of the affected group. But even when good intentions fail, or in cases which are deliberately not benign, the fact that the censorship is not enforced by a government backed up by the power of weapons and imprisonment means that the victims have alternatives.
For example, if you're a Scientologist or an Opus Dei member who's being repressed within those organizations, you can still publish whatever you want to say about the offending organization, and in free countries the law will protect your right to do so. You may have to deal with thugs who try to make you regret your choice (especially in the case of Scientology) -- speech which is critical of others still carries risks. But as long as your government isn't helping to suppress your free speech, and will help protect you against illegal attacks on your reputation or person that result from your reasonable free speech, then things are working pretty much the way they should.
Serious, hard-to-fix problems begin when governments turn against their citizens and impose unreasonable constraints on their speech. That's when things start to go badly wrong for citizens, and those are the cases that Amnesty cares about.
I would buy one of those on one condition: that there was some reasonably convenient way to dial numbers other than the presets. Either support using the twister to enter numbers, or have it use voice recognition, which is probably good enough for dialing phone numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
The list on the linked page that's most relevant to the issue Graham is referring to is "Top universities worldwide by research impact". Those are the kind of institutions that people think of when asked what the "most admired" universities are, and it's also very relevant in terms of the connection to startups.
On that list, only 1 out of the 10 top universities is outside of the U.S.
It's funny to watch how if someone doesn't like what someone else is saying, but can't refute it, they pick on his rhetorical devices instead of addressing the point. Which "great" European universities would you like to propose as candidates to compete with the ones Graham is referring to? This essay isn't trying to convince you of anything about U.S. universities, it's assuming something that's fairly widely acknowledged, and illustrating it with an anecdote.
The survey itself isn't the proof of the claim, it's merely a kind of illustration, which requires that you already recognize the underlying point. So, what are the European universities most admired in computer science, anyway? Graham has a point, although I'm not sure he's fully explored all the reasons: a big one is simply the size of the U.S. as a homogeneous market which mostly communicates in a single language.
You can't really teach this out of people. It's a cognitive heuristic which saves on brainpower, which is deeply embedded in the human psyche. The only way to escape it is with large doses of intelligence: larger than most people possess. The core issue is about compression as a way to aid comprehension: to make a sentence like "America has many of the world's top universities" tractable - easier to reason about and remember - it has to be translated into something simpler. The most obvious example is "America == top universities". There's an obvious loss of information here, but arguably, the main point has been retained. A lot of human silliness is explained by this trick.
Companies who run wires through towns to your doorstep need all sorts of permission from the local citizens to do so. In exchange for that permission, they have to play by certain rules, i.e. "regulations". In addition, since only some companies are allowed to run wires, it creates an oligopoly (at best) and a monopoly (at worst). So additional regulation is needed to ensure that companies don't abuse that.
One example of a particular kind of abuse is where a company leverages their monopoly or semi-monopoly power in one area (the cabling, i.e. the transport layer) to profit in another area, e.g. in services that are available over the cabling, by discriminating against competitors for those services -- competitors who don't have the government-granted benefit of being able to run cables to people's houses. Trust me, you really don't want to be on the receiving end of this kind of discrimination.
Net neutrality regulation is trying to head off this sort of discrimination before it starts (whether it does so in the right way is another question). Some people say that this hasn't been a problem yet, and we can deal with it if and when it arises. The problem is that dealing with abusive monopolies after they've arisen is much more difficult: witness Microsoft.
That's pre-6/6/06 thinking. What you fail to take into account is that the neocons who rule Earth believe in preemptive enforcement of interplanetary law. This may be all happening on Jupiter right now, but once Big Red has eaten Little Red, we're obviously gonna be next! Pictures of these storms, along with a little vial of the same gases that make up Jupiter's atmosphere, are being shown to the U.N. Security Council at this very moment. In the interests of peace, we must declare war on Jupiter!
Look, it's not enough to go "aw, poor thing", whether you're talking about the planet, forests, cute endangered species, or embryos. You have to at least apply some frickin' logic and rational thought! Otherwise, even a batshit insane nutcase like Ann Coulter is going to eat you for breakfast when it comes to demolishing your positions. If you want to make a difference, be able to back up your ideas with reason. Otherwise, you're just hurting the cause.
So you'd rather use a totally inappropriate term than an appropriate one because... wait, why exactly? Clearly, that convict heritage expresses itself more strongly in some Aussies than others.
...your men are already dead.
True. My comment was much more because it was clear from his terminology that the OP wasn't familiar with telescopes, and since I was pointing to a $3000 instrument I wanted to make it clear that you wouldn't get full value from such an instrument if you live in, say, the New York metro area.
And then Jack Bauer would torture Chuck Norris until he confessed to whatever it is Jack wants him to confess to.
Dude, you're on Slashdot. If you were some bimbo news anchor on MSNBC you could get away with saying intergalactic. But this isn't even interstellar! It's in our own solar system, for crying out loud. The word you want is "interplanetary". Hey, and don't thank me - I kill jokes for free.
The answer is in the article - the photo was taken with an 11-inch telescope. If you're flush with cash, just go get one of these (Meade 12"), although you'll need to use it well outside of any big urban area, light pollution around cities kills viewing conditions. (You can get a similar scope for less money if you take more of a DIY approach, but then you have to learn much more about it. Scopes like Meade and Celestron are for people who just want to spend the money and get the results.)
Well, the wormole reference was obvious, but actually I had no idea that Ancientese was supposed to be related to Latin. I just figured the writers weren't very original in coming up with alien-sounding words! ;)
Yeah, but what if humanity is spread throughout the galaxy via a network of wormholes, and they all once spoke Latin and named their star "Sol"? It's kind of like how every town has a Main Street (and in the U.S., a Maple Street too).
There aren't any serious suggestions, at least in modern times, that Pluto came from outside the solar system. There are many more objects like Pluto in the Kuiper Belt and beyond, in the "scattered disk", and perhaps even in the Oort cloud. But all of this is still part of our solar system. Pluto falls within the Kuiper Belt and is classified as a Kuiper Belt Object. Its orbit might have changed since the solar system was formed, perhaps as a result of gravitational interaction with Neptune, but that's about it.
The mystery around Pluto dates from before it was found that the Kuiper Belt is full of similar objects which range in size up to Pluto's size, and in one known case, larger. The Wikipedia link in the parent post has links to pages which describe all of this.
The parent post gives the most important reason that Slashdot isn't offering user-selected themes.
The other reason is that ensuring that all themes work creates maintenance overhead, which might seem insignificant until you're actually the one responsible for doing it. It doesn't make sense to have five different looks for the same product unless you're going to somehow sell more of it as a result. The calculation is that people won't read Slashdot significantly more just because they can also get it in Pastel OMG Ponies! Pink.
I understand what you're getting at, but usually, the term "incite" implies a much more direct call to action than is present in that thread. At best, that thread could be said to be "fomenting" something. Perhaps for homework, we should both read Mein Kampf - my guess is that it's nowhere near as neutral as the thread we're discussing.
;)
Legal definitions of "incite" are pretty explicit about this, e.g. U.S. Criminal Code (Title 18) defines inciting a riot as "Urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts." Without actual advocacy of some violent act (e.g. "let's kill..."), it's not incitement.
Of course, legal definitions and English definitions aren't the same thing. The m-w.com definition says that incite "stresses a stirring up and urging on, and may or may not imply initiating". Arguing about whether that precise definition applies to the thread in question won't get us far. But at least we know that none of the participants in that thread can be arrested for incitement under U.S. law. Viva la Revolucion!
I'm not the person you were talking to, but it seems to me that the thread you referenced is much more of a discussion of violent overthrow than an incitement to overthrow. It started by someone essentially paraphrasing the U.S. Constitution, and many people pointed out that a reliance on guns was no longer good enough. The urban terrorism practiced by the IRA was mentioned, and roadside bombs were mentioned as an effective alternative to guns in the context of Iraq. But nowhere was anyone saying "let's take up arms against our government" or "let's assassinate Mayor Bloomberg to send a message". That would be a pretty extreme response that would say more about the reader than about the discussion. Which particular messages made you feel incited?
What you're describing is a form of social censorship, which is a normal and natural part of human interaction - it happens all the time. It's very different from the government censorship that Amnesty is concerned with. I replied to someone else about this here.
Hard to tell if this is supposed to be a joke - if so, I didn't even hear the WHOOSH. But in case you really did miss the point, the kind of censorship that Amnesty cares about is government censorship. Your issues with Wikipedia are easily resolved: post your material somewhere else, start a competing site, whatever. "Freedom of speech" doesn't translate to a right to have others publish your speech, or agree with it, or take it seriously.
The sort of "censorship" that Wikipedia does happens all the time in even the most free societies: some ideas won't be popular, or will be ignored, or actively suppressed, for whatever reasons. For example, Slashdot quite effectively censors unwanted material via its moderation system. The reasons for such censorship are often benign, e.g. designed to improve the quality of discussion; or they may be less benign, in the case of the kind of "groupthink" which can be quite repressive for members of the affected group. But even when good intentions fail, or in cases which are deliberately not benign, the fact that the censorship is not enforced by a government backed up by the power of weapons and imprisonment means that the victims have alternatives.
For example, if you're a Scientologist or an Opus Dei member who's being repressed within those organizations, you can still publish whatever you want to say about the offending organization, and in free countries the law will protect your right to do so. You may have to deal with thugs who try to make you regret your choice (especially in the case of Scientology) -- speech which is critical of others still carries risks. But as long as your government isn't helping to suppress your free speech, and will help protect you against illegal attacks on your reputation or person that result from your reasonable free speech, then things are working pretty much the way they should.
Serious, hard-to-fix problems begin when governments turn against their citizens and impose unreasonable constraints on their speech. That's when things start to go badly wrong for citizens, and those are the cases that Amnesty cares about.
I would buy one of those on one condition: that there was some reasonably convenient way to dial numbers other than the presets. Either support using the twister to enter numbers, or have it use voice recognition, which is probably good enough for dialing phone numbers.