I didn't really notice a bias. It sounds like you are describing a pattern of bias which may not be easy to see by listening to only one interview.
It's hard to pick out a single representative show. Like I say, overall Tom Ashbrook tries to do a thoughtful show, so in that way he is very good. He doesn't just yell into the mic the way Rush Limbaugh does, but there is a bias there. I think I noticed it more over the last year because he was having more political shows for a while. The bias is subtle, because it is more in the ways he asks questions and directs the conversation, or in how he responds to comments by viewers than it is in the subject matter itself. Sometimes it is a show like this one, http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/20...
where he is not saying anything explicit to indicate bias, but you can tell the subject was picked to pull on liberal heart strings and draw listeners to the show. But I guess most shows that cover politics are that way. When he stays away from politics, he is generally quite good.
But I'm kind of curious if there are any notable people with specific thoughtful counterarguments to this authors claims (e.g. an author that has challenged him). If there is, I'm not aware of them.
Yes, this is true. Tom Ashbrook, usually, only invites guests to debate a subject if they have written about it in some thoughtful way. In this case there isn't another guest because there isn't an opponent, which is fine. My objection is mostly that he doesn't really challenge his guest. He just kind of accepts what his guest is saying.
A little background for me: I have been arguing the point that the guest was making for years (especially about the mortgage interest deduction and school districts being unfair and keeping people poor), and I did read an article about this book already and found myself basically agreeing with it.
Also I think this claim is sort of unique in that it doesn't really seem like a typical left or right wing position. It's advocating for social justice which seems sort of lefty, but it is also kind of undermining the whole 99% vs. 1% paradigm pushed by the left. I personally find these sorts of claims that aren't clearly partisan to be more interesting, but I think it makes it harder to determine what *the* counterpoint is.
Well, I do agree that it is not a typical partisan talking point, which is good. But I disagree with the characterization of people seeking good communities for their families as being "hoarders". It's easy to bin people into groups like "the 20%" without recognizing that they have their own struggles. I live in a community with very good schools. I know quite a few families who are only just able to afford to live here. They (and we) do it for the schools. Making housing even more unaffordable for us, just because we happen to be in the top 20% income bracket nationally, is not social justice.
I certainly welcome people from other less well-off communities sending their kids to school here, even if it means I have to pay more in property taxes for that. But the more broad-reaching and sustainable solution is to work toward improving all schools, so you don't have to live in a top 5% or 10% neighborhood to be able to send your kids to good schools. Unfortunately, while the pattern is that good schools correlate with property values, the underlying causes are more systemic. The easy policy decision is to just infuse cash, but real social justice requires much more than that.
Sometimes it's a difference in narrative. "AGW is real and backed by science" vs. "The political solutions to combat any environmental impact of humans and the costs involved". There will always be loudmouth idiots on both sides and using only the idiots to represent a position is as much a strawman as lighting hay effigies on fire.
Agreed. Some (or a lot) of this has to do with the headline-grabbing nature needed to advertise a news story. But I think the real issue is that every policy decision, at least in the short-term, creates winners and losers, even if the winners become less so over time and the losers eventually recover. Nobody wants to be the loser. Everybody wants to be the winner. So those that stand to "lose" by the establishment of some kind of energy policy will argue either that AGW is not a significant problem, or if it is, there is nothing we can really do about it. Those that "lose" by letting things be will argue that the costs to individual companies might hurt in the short-term, but the costs to society will be devastating in the long-term. These two viewpoints are destined to be stonewalled, because nobody wants to be the loser. Compromise is not possible if you are not willing to take a hit some of the time.
There is no problem teaching creationism in school so long as it is not in the science classroom.
Agreed. However, in the cases where this has been brought up (like a challenge in court, for example), it is usually the opposite situation. It is the Creationists that don't want evolution taught "as a fact" in biology classes, not the Evolutionists opposing Creationism being taught in a religion or philosophy class.
People should be able to influence the education their children receive.
And they do. They usually send them to a private religious school.
Not the OP, but it's probably Tom Ashbrook's On Point, or the Diane Rehm Show that he is thinking of. Don't listen much to the latter, but Tom Ashbrook has a clear bias for most of the stories he covers. That doesn't (usually) stop him from trying to challenge his guest(s), but it does often set the frame of the discussion. So if you are sensitive to that, you might come away thinking it was fairly one-sided. For example, listen to this one, http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/20...
His guest is attempting a thoughtful argument, which is definitely one of the strengths of the show (it's never a Sean Hannity yell fest), but it is fairly one-sided coverage of the issue. And he doesn't have another guest presenting a counterview in this case, either.
That said, the "actual news" to quote Chris Wallace, which is "All Things Considered", is a pretty dry run-down of the facts 99% of the time. And there are a lot of other shows, like Planet Money and Marketplace, that don't have any discernible bias (to me at least). So I agree with your main point, which is that NPR is miles above the likes of CNN or MSNBC.
so the propeller heads who brought us awk(1) improved awk's regular expression handler and you could accomplish everything with awk/sed/grep that perl could do.
I use all four on a regular basis and I can assure you this statement is not true at all. Awk is certainly nice, don't get me wrong, especially when you need just a quick one-liner to do some filtering, but there isn't much out there that can meet Perl in regexp support.
I recall the first version of MS Word for the Mac. It had rotatable fonts
I'm pretty sure it didn't, but I was more of WordPerfect user back in those days. It might have seemed like it had the ability to render rotated text because it generated a pixmap and then rotated it. But today text is managed as a vector graphic, and rotation is done on each font glyph individually. Font/text handling is one of those things that has just become incredibly sophisticated over the last couple of decades. Just browse through the Pango library sometime to see what it is doing under the hood, https://developer.gnome.org/pa...
It is 3 MB, just for font/text handling, and yes it is written in C. And it still requires Glib, and a 2D graphics backend to do the actual rendering, so it is not capable of standing completely on its own. It is hard to appreciate sometimes, because if you only use the ISO-8859-1 character set (Western Europe) and don't need things like RTL, you don't necessarily notice all of the new features, but I'm willing to bet your eyes are thankful for the reduced eye strain.
it had a-lot of functionality - it had everything that I personally use today when I use MS Word
Yeah, it probably did. And this is another crux of the problem. There is a lot of stuff it does today that you probably don't use, or only use very rarely, but other people use all the time. I was a fan of Abiword once upon a time, because it was nice small stripped down word processor that did everything I needed to write papers, short documents, etc. But it couldn't handle even moderately complex documents, so I found myself turning to StarOffice (now LibreOffice), which was a bloated monolith, more and more. Eventually, it just didn't make sense to be switching between two different word processors, so I gave up and now I use LibreOffice, or Microsoft Office on my Mac, exclusively. Abiword could have been extended to add the needed functionality, but eventually it would have ended up just like LibreOffice, because feature+feature+feature (however rarely used) is what turns these applications into monoliths.
However, I _suspect_ (don't actually know) is that it is due to the large libraries that get linked with apps.
The answer is yes. That is exactly right. Libraries are huge. But they are huge because they incorporate a lot of features. There is some amount of sloppy programming, but mostly it is because of the large number of features. On top of that, Windows and OS X, the two most mainstream operating systems, have basically given up on shared libraries. So every application is bundled with its own set of libraries. And if it is a Java application, it is a very large number of libraries, sometime even bundling the JVM itself, but people want cross-platform and that is unfortunately probably the easiest way to get that at the moment.
I believe that we _could_ have instantaneous apps, but no one is asking for it.
Demand often parallels need. People will demand low resource utilizing applications when they need them. But if they have 4 cores and 16 GB RAM readily available, they just don't really care. And given the option of a less capable and more expensive (due to increased development costs), but slightly faster and more responsive application, most people will opt for the cheaper bloated monolith that has more features, even if they don't use all of them all of the time.
Sort of. Websites can control it to some extent, but the browser does most of the work. Part of the problem is that the browser has to layout the page as if all of the assets are present, even if they haven't been downloaded/rendered yet. Because redrawing the page ends up being much slower and more glitchy. It is generally good for websites to do as much asynchronous loading as possible, though, yes.
Sorry, my bad. You are right. Other parts of Servo are written in Rust, but not the scripting engine. I think I was mixing that up with the work being done on things like WebAssembly, which is still very much an experimental playground.
That's what I want for software. I would give up a-lot features to have instantaneous response. Maybe it's just me, though.
Ah, yeah, well that's the inexorable march of "progress", or so they say. When you have more resources available, you tend to use them. I too remember when lots of applications could get by with 16 MB RAM, and today similar seeming applications require 1 GB or more. It is a bit hard to fathom, and some of it is probably due to convenience/sloppy programming no doubt, but it is mostly due to the small things that you probably don't notice. Your modern graphical desktop environment, in addition to just looking nicer, has double-buffering to eliminate tearing, sub-pixel rendering for better font appearance, internationalized font support, rotatable fonts (sounds useless, but think charts and tables), alpha channel support, multiple screen and automatic resolution setting support, and probably a bunch of other things that don't immediately come to mind. Think of your old Nintendo games vs. modern adventure games. Low resolution graphics, sprites, simple animation cycles, no shadows, no 3D, 8-bit sound files...yeah, you can do a lot to save space and resources, and the game can still be a lot of fun. But when you have the resources available, the game can be a lot better.
HOWEVER.... it seems to load content more on a first come first shown basis. Chrome seems to wait till it has loaded nearly everything to display it on the screen.
Arguably that's what you want, right? Why do I have to wait until all of the advertisements load before being able to scroll down to the content that I'm interested in? It might be one or two seconds slower in the final rendering on some pages, but that is probably irrelevant to most users.
it's nothing to write home about.... at least compared to other browsers
I think we will see as it gets more adoption. Being at least on par with Chrome (and in some cases better) is a pretty good achievement in my opinion. Safari and IE don't really compete in this space, so Chrome can use some real competition. Also, I kind of view this as the opening salvo. Once WebRender is more mature, that's going to bring additional improvements. And hopefully Mozilla will be able to bring back some of its more traditional strengths: customizability, security, developer-friendly, etc. Speed is important, but it is only one of many usability metrics.
This is the sort of work that Mozilla should have done ~5-7 years ago, back when Chrome was just starting to take off.
Mozilla has always been a bit on the slow side in development. The original Firefox took ages before it was finally released. Meanwhile the Netscape4/MSIE6 browser hell was going strong. I think Mozilla tends to spend a lot of time trying to design a good architecture and implement it. Hence their adoption of Rust, and using it to completely rewrite the ECMAScript engine. I don't think it has so much to do with not being arsed. Quick hackish workarounds are just not something they have historically done well, and yes, much of Chrome's early performance work were ugly hacks.
I know it's not usable today, but I wish that it had been kept the same, but merely updated.
Well, that's kind of what happened. Remember, Netscape 3/4 was originally based on Mosaic, and did not even fully support the HTML standard. There was very limited CSS support. The predominant method for page layout was the table-in-a-table method <shudder>. The only way for them to move forward was to use a different layout engine, which became known as Gecko. It was independently developed by Mozilla, but Netscape ended up adopting it. Getting proper CSS support was a big deal. Nobody talks about the ACID tests anymore, but passing them was a major goal (and challenge) for most of the competing engines at the time, including Opera's, IE's, and KHTML.
And then, of course, overall web content consumption was also increasing a ton. More assets, more complex layouts, more session management. Firefox didn't invent but greatly popularized tabbed browsing, which effectively meant people were keeping tens of pages open at the same time. The content had to remain accessible even if the tab was in the background, so multiply all of those assets/layouts/sessions by the number of tabs open. And the later problem then becomes that all of this background page loading/maintenance is happening in a single monolithic process (because Gecko was written long before multi-core processors were introduced). Chrome solved the problem by basically just spawning a new instance for every tab opened, which allowed it to take advantage of multiple cores earlier, but caused it to be a lot less efficient with resource usage. Mozilla didn't want to do it this way, and instead focused on rewriting their layout engine again. Turns out one of the biggest problems was XUL, which had been designed to be a better ActiveX (and was) back when that was a thing, but had to be replaced entirely to move forward.
Point is, when gazing into the past, just remember that the modern features we take for granted today come with a cost. It takes hundreds of Mb to write a layout engine capable of doing all of the things we expect a modern browser to be able to do.
> and start up so slowly
That part I'm not so sure. Firefox/Chrome start pretty fast to me. It seems at the very least that they have been able to keep par with startup times of old. Netscape 3 on old hardware probably started slower than Firefox does now on current hardware. Yes, it could be faster if they just stripped out all of the new features, but I guarantee that is not what you really want from your web browser. That said, there certainly are some stripped-down web browsers you could use if you really wanted to. They will have rendering glitches with many websites, though.
Another way to think about this is that standard drug pharmacokinetics studies are performed as part of determining dosage and clinical efficacy during clinical trials for (nearly) every pharmaceutical past and present on the market. The metabolic studies are usually performed using tissue cells, liver extracts, and mouse models, which covers the majority of degradation pathways that your drug is likely to encounter...from mammals. What's generally missing is any consideration for commensal or pathogenic microorganisms that might be present. Perhaps this is yet another avenue for the development of personalized therapies.
It's not a surprising degradation pathway for the drug. It's been known for several decades at least, but because it is a bacterial pathway, it was not included in any of the testing phases.
Intelligence is determined at least 50% by genetics and the rest by environmental factors
While there is a genetic factor to be sure, I doubt that number you have cited. It is very hard to quantify these things, and it depends to a large extent on how you do the measurement. It also depends on how heavily you rely on correlation to imply heritability. For example, it was once believed that trade skills, like shipbuilding, were heritable traits because one could clearly observe a hereditary correlation among the shipbuilding trade: sons of shipbuilders often went on to become shipbuilders themselves. What was overlooked, of course, was that sons were more likely to learn the family trade and stick with that then they were to strike out and try to do something different. It is very difficult to reduce complex human behaviors to genetic loci. The eugenics crowd relied heavily on correlation as their source of evidence, but it is not sufficient for demonstrating heritability.
those environmental factors are what are called "non-shared" environment
Not necessarily. First, what you need to do is put the same person in two different environments and measure that. But of course you can't actually do that, so instead current research does what you describe where they attempt to normalize environment and look at probabilistic distributions among individuals, but in reality that is a very problematic setting to do science. Whatever you conclude from your study has to take into account that your control and study groups have multiple, probably dependent, non-random and non-uniformly distributed variables. Second, whichever method may be relevant in academic circles, but is fairly useless in a practical sense. You can define intelligence in some arbitrary way and then devise a test for it, but what is more important is understanding the implications. What we call intelligence in practice and ascribe to a person's success or ability rarely has anything to do with IQ as it is measured academically.
where for example identical twins raised together don't have exactly the same environment and it is the "non-shared" environment that contributes to their difference in IQ
This is a good example. You are assuming that identical twins, nominally genetically identical although that is known to not actually be the case, are the appropriate benchmark for determining the role of genetics. They are not. Aside from obvious statistical problems--a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant--the relevant metric to determine whether there is a genetic basis for something is heritability. The question you need to be asking is, "What is the IQ of the parents?" and "Is that IQ heritable"? The answer to that last question is no. IQ between parent and child may be correlated, but that does not equate to heritability. True heritability means we can identify specific genetic loci that determine IQ. So far, while there have been many attempts (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/science/52-genes-human-intelligence.html?_r=0), nobody has succeeded in finding truly deterministic genetic factors for IQ.
Moreover, there is no evidence that any environmental effect can raise a person's intelligence in the long term, only prevent them from achieving their genetic potential.
There is also no evidence that anybody anywhere has come close to reaching their genetic potential, so it is really hard to draw any conclusions from this alone.
I think your definition misses that tabula rasa denies that people have innate tendencies and that different people have different innate tendencies
No, really it doesn't. Tabula rasa, as written by John Locke, means one specific thing: that knowledge is learned. That is it. It has nothing to with innate tendencies or abilities or aptitudes. The philosophy was conceived to rebut the then popular belief in predestina
Not sure, haven't read the textbook. But let's also not be over-simplistic and recognize that economics (and the world at large) is a complex space. Saying inequality = good/bad as a binary is as useless as saying shampoo = good/bad. There are clearly situations where inequality is good and necessary, and situations where it is harmful and stifling.
Anyway, that was the point GL was making. Both Karl Marx and Adam Smith made substantial contributions to the field of economics, which is highly nuanced. So when somebody says "government should be limited to the point that it only does the things that Adam Smith said", what does that actually mean in implementation? What is limited government? And before you say "the Constitution", remember that the Founders concept of limited government is very different from Adam Smith's vision, so how and where do you reconcile those two viewpoints? And how does everything change now that we have a largely global economy? Those are the sophisticated discussions we need to be having.
While msmash did successfully pull three sentences out of the actual paper to make his sensationalist headline, he really glossed over the main point, which is that overall productivity gains are steadily getting harder to achieve across a broad range of industries, which seems to be in line with most of the comments I have read so far on/. The authors use the term "ideas" which is a bit confusing at first but is meant to share terminology with older studies. Later on they clarify that in modern parlance the term "research effort" is probably a more appropriate label.
When you move from a 10 ft cliff to a 20 ft cliff, and it takes you twice as long, it does NOT mean we are moving half as fast.
Yes, in fact it does (+1 for pedantry).
Getting back to your real point, though, simply observing it does not mean you necessarily know why you are moving half as fast. It could be because you have become lazier or weaker, or it could be because the next cliff is harder. So yeah, generally agree that the article's statement is stupid, but I would be willing to bet that is NOT what the actual research paper says at all.
It would help first to understand that "tabula rasa" translates to "blank slate", literally. It is used in reference to the notion that all knowledge is acquired, not innately possessed. It has nothing to do with rationalism or ability, and it is certainly not a myth unless you are a crazy person. Second,
Today, we know that ability is entirely genetic and that it follows a bell curve distribution.
Nevermind, you are a crazy person. This idea while once, let's say circulated because popular isn't quite the right word, has been thoroughly discredited by pretty much all biological and neuroscience research of the last five decades (at least).
Most likely, this article is not about that subject however.
Indeed, you are correct about that. Maybe you should try reading it.
a federal government whose primary function is the 'fair' redistribution of wealth and social justice would indeed make Smith spin in his grave.
Who made that argument? I'm sure you can find a Marxist hippie somewhere in California who says that, but nowhere in this thread is anyone saying that. Not in the textbook. Not in the mainstream media. Not by any elected politician anywhere in the United States in the last 50 years (at least). Seriously, this is a big problem when talking to many conservatives. You start to question/debate the role of government in regulating the free market and suddenly they jump to extremist and absurd viewpoints that no reasonable person is talking about at all. If you pay close attention, you will notice that the majority of right- AND left-leaning folks both AGREE in limited government AND in regulation of the free market. The differences of opinion lie in details that are not easily captured in headlines and 10 second sound bites.
The USDA food pyramid was not conceived or supported by nutritionists. The original food pyramid actually contradicted the nutrition science of that time. The USDA does a lot of good things, but they have never accurately represented the nutrition content of food.
A good language allows you to discover features and is enjoyable to use and allows you to be productive quickly. JavaScript's nuances constantly stab the inexperienced developer in the eyeball. Any language is learnable - but the fact that you can eventually get to the point of building software isn't enough to make a language good.
It's just my opinion, but I don't find JS nuances to be any more numerous or onerous than those found in other languages.
I can call [mozilla.org] any function you write and pass it anything I want for "this".
Yes you can do that, but there are only a handful of common cases where you should do that. If you are deviating from known best practices and design patterns, then you are probably not writing good code. If your point is that JS is not good for writing abstract interfaces, I agree with that. That is not the purpose for which it was intended, though.
C#'s implementation is better because one look at a line of C# that has "this" in in tells me what it does. In JS, I have to read documentation and/or experiment if I didn't write the code that makes the call (and even if I wrote it, assuming I still remember). This is a major source of errors.
You should not. You should know that 1) You are working on an object method, and therefore "this" is the current object instance OR 2) You are working in an event handler, in which case "this" is the DOM element that triggered the event OR 3) You are working with a bare function, in which case "this" is the global/window/call() context. #3 is very rare and should not be done in common practice, so you are really only needing to consider #1 or #2 the vast majority of the time, and in both cases the meaning of "this" is straightforward and intuitive. The most common "this" errors come from not realizing that you have changed context when entering a closure, but that is just elementary JS and is easy to learn.
It breaks the "principal of least surprise" and is considered bad by many people with better reputations in this field than you or I.
I disagree. Whether or not something is a "good" or "bad" language is mostly a matter of subjective and biased opinion regardless of reputation. There are plenty of people with good reputations who say C is a bad language. They might be right, but I think it depends more on what you intend to use it for. I would never use JS for backend code. There are much better languages to use for that (my personal favorite is Perl), but for DOM/event-driven GUI stuff, I think it is at least as respectable as other languages out there. I certainly would prefer it over something like Java/Swing.
You do realize that I said that JS is not a variant of Java, right?
Yes, you did. The point is, nobody should ever think that, so I don't know why you even mentioned it.
The rest of your post is simply you saying how to work around the badness of JS.
What badness? You have not mentioned any badness aside from the fact that you don't like it. JavaScript is a different language, so it will behave differently from other languages. JavaScript does not have block-level scope, it has function-level scope. That is not inherently bad. It's just different, and as long as you are aware of it, it works just fine. Same with prototype-based inheritance vs class-based inheritance. Not bad, just different.
You are simply listing all of the skills that need to be acquired to be a competent JS programmer
I'm listing language features. Newsflash: you have to know a language and be aware of its features to use it effectively. There are quite a few differences between C and C++ as well.
and that is a longer list than most other languages. That's precisely why it's a bad language.
Nonsense. The ease with which you can pick up a language based on its similarity to other languages has nothing to do with goodness or badness.
Also, if you think "this" is perfectly well defined, you are wrong. A caller can passes literally anything for "this". That means that, by language spec, "this" is completely undefined. The caller will have a definition, but it may or may not be sane and it may or may not be consistent.
Again, you are basing your complaint on similarity to other languages. If you don't do that, you won't have problems. "this", by definition in JavaScript, refers to the current execution context of your function. The execution context, naturally, is not fixed and can change. That is the whole point and there are very good uses for it (ex: event handlers). If you need static arguments, use static arguments. Don't use "this" as a static argument, because that is not what it is. For object methods, "this" behaves 99% like implementations in other languages (ie: it refers to the current object instance). The 1% difference is that you can change the object instance, which is useful because, among other uses, it is the JavaScript way of implementing super inheritance. Not bad, just different.
I seriously doubt they have ever had to ensure that the application works even in adverse situations
You do realize that most JavaScript runs in the most untrusted client ever known, the web browser, right? I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of people making stupid mistakes, but there are also plenty of people who know what they are doing, thank you very much.
It also helps to know that it's not a variant of Java;
If you think that, you are just ignorant. It was never true, and while it may have been an understandable mistake 15 years ago due to the similarity in naming and the push to use Java applets in the browser, it isn't anymore.
it's a variant of Forth made to resemble Java
Also not true.
That help to reduce the temptation to try to use it like Java.
I don't even know how you would do that. They are so different it seems like you would notice within the first 10 seconds. Go ahead and try to use closures in Java.
variable scope
Variable scope is pretty straightforward if you understand how it works (hint: don't do everything in one monolithic function). And if you're smart, you use strict mode, which will stop you from making 99% of scoping mistakes. https://developer.mozilla.org/...
type coersion
First, you can prevent type coercion where it matters if you don't want to use it. Second, type coercion is very useful in certain situations, especially involving HTML forms.
undefined
Why? Distinguishing between null and undefined seems pretty basic to me. If you want a test for null that includes undefined, this is an example of a situation where type coercion can be handy.
this
"this" is perfectly fine as long as you know what it does. Use prototypical inheritance properly and it will never be a problem for you.
global
Many scripting languages support them (ex: Perl), and most recommend the same thing, don't use globals.
Now, if you had said Array-Like Objects, there we could agree about some stupidness in JavaScript that is unnecessary and annoying.
You bring up an interesting point...the government clearly has a desire to see jobs brought to their state and wants to invest the money, but then why don't they take an equity stake? It seems to make a lot of sense and could go a long way toward making these sorts of investments more palatable to taxpayers. The company can of course buy back their equity in the future if they desire, but that's the way investment works in the business world, so why not the government world? Furthermore, the equity share can be earmarked in some way...say to offset health care costs for the workers, or something like that.
FWIW, I work for a government contractor, and I can assure you the feds don't just give us handouts. When they give us money for R&D, they then own that R&D.
When my son says he doesn't like math (and gets a C+), what should I do? I know, I'll start looking for some failing of society to blame it on.
No need to blame society, but you should probably do something, don't you think? Specifically what depends on the situation. Did you read the rest of that paragraph? Or I guess you can do nothing and let him fail saying he just couldn't cut it in "the real world". Yeah, that would be great parenting.
Yeah, and let me repeat: I never said that. I don't think that. I don't know anyone that thinks that. I've never met anyone that thinks that. I've never seen anyone act on that.
Great, then what are you saying? Because it doesn't seem like you are saying much of anything meaningful.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't really notice a bias. It sounds like you are describing a pattern of bias which may not be easy to see by listening to only one interview.
It's hard to pick out a single representative show. Like I say, overall Tom Ashbrook tries to do a thoughtful show, so in that way he is very good. He doesn't just yell into the mic the way Rush Limbaugh does, but there is a bias there. I think I noticed it more over the last year because he was having more political shows for a while. The bias is subtle, because it is more in the ways he asks questions and directs the conversation, or in how he responds to comments by viewers than it is in the subject matter itself. Sometimes it is a show like this one,
http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/20...
where he is not saying anything explicit to indicate bias, but you can tell the subject was picked to pull on liberal heart strings and draw listeners to the show. But I guess most shows that cover politics are that way. When he stays away from politics, he is generally quite good.
But I'm kind of curious if there are any notable people with specific thoughtful counterarguments to this authors claims (e.g. an author that has challenged him). If there is, I'm not aware of them.
Yes, this is true. Tom Ashbrook, usually, only invites guests to debate a subject if they have written about it in some thoughtful way. In this case there isn't another guest because there isn't an opponent, which is fine. My objection is mostly that he doesn't really challenge his guest. He just kind of accepts what his guest is saying.
A little background for me: I have been arguing the point that the guest was making for years (especially about the mortgage interest deduction and school districts being unfair and keeping people poor), and I did read an article about this book already and found myself basically agreeing with it.
Also I think this claim is sort of unique in that it doesn't really seem like a typical left or right wing position. It's advocating for social justice which seems sort of lefty, but it is also kind of undermining the whole 99% vs. 1% paradigm pushed by the left. I personally find these sorts of claims that aren't clearly partisan to be more interesting, but I think it makes it harder to determine what *the* counterpoint is.
Well, I do agree that it is not a typical partisan talking point, which is good. But I disagree with the characterization of people seeking good communities for their families as being "hoarders". It's easy to bin people into groups like "the 20%" without recognizing that they have their own struggles. I live in a community with very good schools. I know quite a few families who are only just able to afford to live here. They (and we) do it for the schools. Making housing even more unaffordable for us, just because we happen to be in the top 20% income bracket nationally, is not social justice.
I certainly welcome people from other less well-off communities sending their kids to school here, even if it means I have to pay more in property taxes for that. But the more broad-reaching and sustainable solution is to work toward improving all schools, so you don't have to live in a top 5% or 10% neighborhood to be able to send your kids to good schools. Unfortunately, while the pattern is that good schools correlate with property values, the underlying causes are more systemic. The easy policy decision is to just infuse cash, but real social justice requires much more than that.
Sometimes it's a difference in narrative. "AGW is real and backed by science" vs. "The political solutions to combat any environmental impact of humans and the costs involved". There will always be loudmouth idiots on both sides and using only the idiots to represent a position is as much a strawman as lighting hay effigies on fire.
Agreed. Some (or a lot) of this has to do with the headline-grabbing nature needed to advertise a news story. But I think the real issue is that every policy decision, at least in the short-term, creates winners and losers, even if the winners become less so over time and the losers eventually recover. Nobody wants to be the loser. Everybody wants to be the winner. So those that stand to "lose" by the establishment of some kind of energy policy will argue either that AGW is not a significant problem, or if it is, there is nothing we can really do about it. Those that "lose" by letting things be will argue that the costs to individual companies might hurt in the short-term, but the costs to society will be devastating in the long-term. These two viewpoints are destined to be stonewalled, because nobody wants to be the loser. Compromise is not possible if you are not willing to take a hit some of the time.
There is no problem teaching creationism in school so long as it is not in the science classroom.
Agreed. However, in the cases where this has been brought up (like a challenge in court, for example), it is usually the opposite situation. It is the Creationists that don't want evolution taught "as a fact" in biology classes, not the Evolutionists opposing Creationism being taught in a religion or philosophy class.
People should be able to influence the education their children receive.
And they do. They usually send them to a private religious school.
Not the OP, but it's probably Tom Ashbrook's On Point, or the Diane Rehm Show that he is thinking of. Don't listen much to the latter, but Tom Ashbrook has a clear bias for most of the stories he covers. That doesn't (usually) stop him from trying to challenge his guest(s), but it does often set the frame of the discussion. So if you are sensitive to that, you might come away thinking it was fairly one-sided. For example, listen to this one,
http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/20...
His guest is attempting a thoughtful argument, which is definitely one of the strengths of the show (it's never a Sean Hannity yell fest), but it is fairly one-sided coverage of the issue. And he doesn't have another guest presenting a counterview in this case, either.
That said, the "actual news" to quote Chris Wallace, which is "All Things Considered", is a pretty dry run-down of the facts 99% of the time. And there are a lot of other shows, like Planet Money and Marketplace, that don't have any discernible bias (to me at least). So I agree with your main point, which is that NPR is miles above the likes of CNN or MSNBC.
so the propeller heads who brought us awk(1) improved awk's regular expression handler and you could accomplish everything with awk/sed/grep that perl could do.
I use all four on a regular basis and I can assure you this statement is not true at all. Awk is certainly nice, don't get me wrong, especially when you need just a quick one-liner to do some filtering, but there isn't much out there that can meet Perl in regexp support.
I recall the first version of MS Word for the Mac. It had rotatable fonts
I'm pretty sure it didn't, but I was more of WordPerfect user back in those days. It might have seemed like it had the ability to render rotated text because it generated a pixmap and then rotated it. But today text is managed as a vector graphic, and rotation is done on each font glyph individually. Font/text handling is one of those things that has just become incredibly sophisticated over the last couple of decades. Just browse through the Pango library sometime to see what it is doing under the hood,
https://developer.gnome.org/pa...
It is 3 MB, just for font/text handling, and yes it is written in C. And it still requires Glib, and a 2D graphics backend to do the actual rendering, so it is not capable of standing completely on its own. It is hard to appreciate sometimes, because if you only use the ISO-8859-1 character set (Western Europe) and don't need things like RTL, you don't necessarily notice all of the new features, but I'm willing to bet your eyes are thankful for the reduced eye strain.
it had a-lot of functionality - it had everything that I personally use today when I use MS Word
Yeah, it probably did. And this is another crux of the problem. There is a lot of stuff it does today that you probably don't use, or only use very rarely, but other people use all the time. I was a fan of Abiword once upon a time, because it was nice small stripped down word processor that did everything I needed to write papers, short documents, etc. But it couldn't handle even moderately complex documents, so I found myself turning to StarOffice (now LibreOffice), which was a bloated monolith, more and more. Eventually, it just didn't make sense to be switching between two different word processors, so I gave up and now I use LibreOffice, or Microsoft Office on my Mac, exclusively. Abiword could have been extended to add the needed functionality, but eventually it would have ended up just like LibreOffice, because feature+feature+feature (however rarely used) is what turns these applications into monoliths.
However, I _suspect_ (don't actually know) is that it is due to the large libraries that get linked with apps.
The answer is yes. That is exactly right. Libraries are huge. But they are huge because they incorporate a lot of features. There is some amount of sloppy programming, but mostly it is because of the large number of features. On top of that, Windows and OS X, the two most mainstream operating systems, have basically given up on shared libraries. So every application is bundled with its own set of libraries. And if it is a Java application, it is a very large number of libraries, sometime even bundling the JVM itself, but people want cross-platform and that is unfortunately probably the easiest way to get that at the moment.
I believe that we _could_ have instantaneous apps, but no one is asking for it.
Demand often parallels need. People will demand low resource utilizing applications when they need them. But if they have 4 cores and 16 GB RAM readily available, they just don't really care. And given the option of a less capable and more expensive (due to increased development costs), but slightly faster and more responsive application, most people will opt for the cheaper bloated monolith that has more features, even if they don't use all of them all of the time.
Sort of. Websites can control it to some extent, but the browser does most of the work. Part of the problem is that the browser has to layout the page as if all of the assets are present, even if they haven't been downloaded/rendered yet. Because redrawing the page ends up being much slower and more glitchy. It is generally good for websites to do as much asynchronous loading as possible, though, yes.
Sorry, my bad. You are right. Other parts of Servo are written in Rust, but not the scripting engine. I think I was mixing that up with the work being done on things like WebAssembly, which is still very much an experimental playground.
That's what I want for software. I would give up a-lot features to have instantaneous response. Maybe it's just me, though.
Ah, yeah, well that's the inexorable march of "progress", or so they say. When you have more resources available, you tend to use them. I too remember when lots of applications could get by with 16 MB RAM, and today similar seeming applications require 1 GB or more. It is a bit hard to fathom, and some of it is probably due to convenience/sloppy programming no doubt, but it is mostly due to the small things that you probably don't notice. Your modern graphical desktop environment, in addition to just looking nicer, has double-buffering to eliminate tearing, sub-pixel rendering for better font appearance, internationalized font support, rotatable fonts (sounds useless, but think charts and tables), alpha channel support, multiple screen and automatic resolution setting support, and probably a bunch of other things that don't immediately come to mind. Think of your old Nintendo games vs. modern adventure games. Low resolution graphics, sprites, simple animation cycles, no shadows, no 3D, 8-bit sound files...yeah, you can do a lot to save space and resources, and the game can still be a lot of fun. But when you have the resources available, the game can be a lot better.
HOWEVER.... it seems to load content more on a first come first shown basis. Chrome seems to wait till it has loaded nearly everything to display it on the screen.
Arguably that's what you want, right? Why do I have to wait until all of the advertisements load before being able to scroll down to the content that I'm interested in? It might be one or two seconds slower in the final rendering on some pages, but that is probably irrelevant to most users.
it's nothing to write home about.... at least compared to other browsers
I think we will see as it gets more adoption. Being at least on par with Chrome (and in some cases better) is a pretty good achievement in my opinion. Safari and IE don't really compete in this space, so Chrome can use some real competition. Also, I kind of view this as the opening salvo. Once WebRender is more mature, that's going to bring additional improvements. And hopefully Mozilla will be able to bring back some of its more traditional strengths: customizability, security, developer-friendly, etc. Speed is important, but it is only one of many usability metrics.
This is the sort of work that Mozilla should have done ~5-7 years ago, back when Chrome was just starting to take off.
Mozilla has always been a bit on the slow side in development. The original Firefox took ages before it was finally released. Meanwhile the Netscape4/MSIE6 browser hell was going strong. I think Mozilla tends to spend a lot of time trying to design a good architecture and implement it. Hence their adoption of Rust, and using it to completely rewrite the ECMAScript engine. I don't think it has so much to do with not being arsed. Quick hackish workarounds are just not something they have historically done well, and yes, much of Chrome's early performance work were ugly hacks.
I know it's not usable today, but I wish that it had been kept the same, but merely updated.
Well, that's kind of what happened. Remember, Netscape 3/4 was originally based on Mosaic, and did not even fully support the HTML standard. There was very limited CSS support. The predominant method for page layout was the table-in-a-table method <shudder>. The only way for them to move forward was to use a different layout engine, which became known as Gecko. It was independently developed by Mozilla, but Netscape ended up adopting it. Getting proper CSS support was a big deal. Nobody talks about the ACID tests anymore, but passing them was a major goal (and challenge) for most of the competing engines at the time, including Opera's, IE's, and KHTML.
And then, of course, overall web content consumption was also increasing a ton. More assets, more complex layouts, more session management. Firefox didn't invent but greatly popularized tabbed browsing, which effectively meant people were keeping tens of pages open at the same time. The content had to remain accessible even if the tab was in the background, so multiply all of those assets/layouts/sessions by the number of tabs open. And the later problem then becomes that all of this background page loading/maintenance is happening in a single monolithic process (because Gecko was written long before multi-core processors were introduced). Chrome solved the problem by basically just spawning a new instance for every tab opened, which allowed it to take advantage of multiple cores earlier, but caused it to be a lot less efficient with resource usage. Mozilla didn't want to do it this way, and instead focused on rewriting their layout engine again. Turns out one of the biggest problems was XUL, which had been designed to be a better ActiveX (and was) back when that was a thing, but had to be replaced entirely to move forward.
Point is, when gazing into the past, just remember that the modern features we take for granted today come with a cost. It takes hundreds of Mb to write a layout engine capable of doing all of the things we expect a modern browser to be able to do.
> and start up so slowly
That part I'm not so sure. Firefox/Chrome start pretty fast to me. It seems at the very least that they have been able to keep par with startup times of old. Netscape 3 on old hardware probably started slower than Firefox does now on current hardware. Yes, it could be faster if they just stripped out all of the new features, but I guarantee that is not what you really want from your web browser. That said, there certainly are some stripped-down web browsers you could use if you really wanted to. They will have rendering glitches with many websites, though.
It's interesting...
Another way to think about this is that standard drug pharmacokinetics studies are performed as part of determining dosage and clinical efficacy during clinical trials for (nearly) every pharmaceutical past and present on the market. The metabolic studies are usually performed using tissue cells, liver extracts, and mouse models, which covers the majority of degradation pathways that your drug is likely to encounter...from mammals. What's generally missing is any consideration for commensal or pathogenic microorganisms that might be present. Perhaps this is yet another avenue for the development of personalized therapies.
It's not a surprising degradation pathway for the drug. It's been known for several decades at least, but because it is a bacterial pathway, it was not included in any of the testing phases.
Intelligence is determined at least 50% by genetics and the rest by environmental factors
While there is a genetic factor to be sure, I doubt that number you have cited. It is very hard to quantify these things, and it depends to a large extent on how you do the measurement. It also depends on how heavily you rely on correlation to imply heritability. For example, it was once believed that trade skills, like shipbuilding, were heritable traits because one could clearly observe a hereditary correlation among the shipbuilding trade: sons of shipbuilders often went on to become shipbuilders themselves. What was overlooked, of course, was that sons were more likely to learn the family trade and stick with that then they were to strike out and try to do something different. It is very difficult to reduce complex human behaviors to genetic loci. The eugenics crowd relied heavily on correlation as their source of evidence, but it is not sufficient for demonstrating heritability.
those environmental factors are what are called "non-shared" environment
Not necessarily. First, what you need to do is put the same person in two different environments and measure that. But of course you can't actually do that, so instead current research does what you describe where they attempt to normalize environment and look at probabilistic distributions among individuals, but in reality that is a very problematic setting to do science. Whatever you conclude from your study has to take into account that your control and study groups have multiple, probably dependent, non-random and non-uniformly distributed variables. Second, whichever method may be relevant in academic circles, but is fairly useless in a practical sense. You can define intelligence in some arbitrary way and then devise a test for it, but what is more important is understanding the implications. What we call intelligence in practice and ascribe to a person's success or ability rarely has anything to do with IQ as it is measured academically.
where for example identical twins raised together don't have exactly the same environment and it is the "non-shared" environment that contributes to their difference in IQ
This is a good example. You are assuming that identical twins, nominally genetically identical although that is known to not actually be the case, are the appropriate benchmark for determining the role of genetics. They are not. Aside from obvious statistical problems--a sample size of 2 is not statistically significant--the relevant metric to determine whether there is a genetic basis for something is heritability. The question you need to be asking is, "What is the IQ of the parents?" and "Is that IQ heritable"? The answer to that last question is no. IQ between parent and child may be correlated, but that does not equate to heritability. True heritability means we can identify specific genetic loci that determine IQ. So far, while there have been many attempts (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/science/52-genes-human-intelligence.html?_r=0), nobody has succeeded in finding truly deterministic genetic factors for IQ.
Moreover, there is no evidence that any environmental effect can raise a person's intelligence in the long term, only prevent them from achieving their genetic potential.
There is also no evidence that anybody anywhere has come close to reaching their genetic potential, so it is really hard to draw any conclusions from this alone.
I think your definition misses that tabula rasa denies that people have innate tendencies and that different people have different innate tendencies
No, really it doesn't. Tabula rasa, as written by John Locke, means one specific thing: that knowledge is learned. That is it. It has nothing to with innate tendencies or abilities or aptitudes. The philosophy was conceived to rebut the then popular belief in predestina
Not sure, haven't read the textbook. But let's also not be over-simplistic and recognize that economics (and the world at large) is a complex space. Saying inequality = good/bad as a binary is as useless as saying shampoo = good/bad. There are clearly situations where inequality is good and necessary, and situations where it is harmful and stifling.
Anyway, that was the point GL was making. Both Karl Marx and Adam Smith made substantial contributions to the field of economics, which is highly nuanced. So when somebody says "government should be limited to the point that it only does the things that Adam Smith said", what does that actually mean in implementation? What is limited government? And before you say "the Constitution", remember that the Founders concept of limited government is very different from Adam Smith's vision, so how and where do you reconcile those two viewpoints? And how does everything change now that we have a largely global economy? Those are the sophisticated discussions we need to be having.
Skip the stupid adclick op-ed summary and go straight to the source,
https://web.stanford.edu/~chad...
While msmash did successfully pull three sentences out of the actual paper to make his sensationalist headline, he really glossed over the main point, which is that overall productivity gains are steadily getting harder to achieve across a broad range of industries, which seems to be in line with most of the comments I have read so far on /. The authors use the term "ideas" which is a bit confusing at first but is meant to share terminology with older studies. Later on they clarify that in modern parlance the term "research effort" is probably a more appropriate label.
When you move from a 10 ft cliff to a 20 ft cliff, and it takes you twice as long, it does NOT mean we are moving half as fast.
Yes, in fact it does (+1 for pedantry).
Getting back to your real point, though, simply observing it does not mean you necessarily know why you are moving half as fast. It could be because you have become lazier or weaker, or it could be because the next cliff is harder. So yeah, generally agree that the article's statement is stupid, but I would be willing to bet that is NOT what the actual research paper says at all.
Reference,
http://phdcomics.com/comics/ar...
It would help first to understand that "tabula rasa" translates to "blank slate", literally. It is used in reference to the notion that all knowledge is acquired, not innately possessed. It has nothing to do with rationalism or ability, and it is certainly not a myth unless you are a crazy person. Second,
Today, we know that ability is entirely genetic and that it follows a bell curve distribution.
Nevermind, you are a crazy person. This idea while once, let's say circulated because popular isn't quite the right word, has been thoroughly discredited by pretty much all biological and neuroscience research of the last five decades (at least).
Most likely, this article is not about that subject however.
Indeed, you are correct about that. Maybe you should try reading it.
a federal government whose primary function is the 'fair' redistribution of wealth and social justice would indeed make Smith spin in his grave.
Who made that argument? I'm sure you can find a Marxist hippie somewhere in California who says that, but nowhere in this thread is anyone saying that. Not in the textbook. Not in the mainstream media. Not by any elected politician anywhere in the United States in the last 50 years (at least). Seriously, this is a big problem when talking to many conservatives. You start to question/debate the role of government in regulating the free market and suddenly they jump to extremist and absurd viewpoints that no reasonable person is talking about at all. If you pay close attention, you will notice that the majority of right- AND left-leaning folks both AGREE in limited government AND in regulation of the free market. The differences of opinion lie in details that are not easily captured in headlines and 10 second sound bites.
The USDA food pyramid was not conceived or supported by nutritionists. The original food pyramid actually contradicted the nutrition science of that time. The USDA does a lot of good things, but they have never accurately represented the nutrition content of food.
A good language allows you to discover features and is enjoyable to use and allows you to be productive quickly. JavaScript's nuances constantly stab the inexperienced developer in the eyeball. Any language is learnable - but the fact that you can eventually get to the point of building software isn't enough to make a language good.
It's just my opinion, but I don't find JS nuances to be any more numerous or onerous than those found in other languages.
I can call [mozilla.org] any function you write and pass it anything I want for "this".
Yes you can do that, but there are only a handful of common cases where you should do that. If you are deviating from known best practices and design patterns, then you are probably not writing good code. If your point is that JS is not good for writing abstract interfaces, I agree with that. That is not the purpose for which it was intended, though.
C#'s implementation is better because one look at a line of C# that has "this" in in tells me what it does. In JS, I have to read documentation and/or experiment if I didn't write the code that makes the call (and even if I wrote it, assuming I still remember). This is a major source of errors.
You should not. You should know that 1) You are working on an object method, and therefore "this" is the current object instance OR 2) You are working in an event handler, in which case "this" is the DOM element that triggered the event OR 3) You are working with a bare function, in which case "this" is the global/window/call() context. #3 is very rare and should not be done in common practice, so you are really only needing to consider #1 or #2 the vast majority of the time, and in both cases the meaning of "this" is straightforward and intuitive. The most common "this" errors come from not realizing that you have changed context when entering a closure, but that is just elementary JS and is easy to learn.
It breaks the "principal of least surprise" and is considered bad by many people with better reputations in this field than you or I.
I disagree. Whether or not something is a "good" or "bad" language is mostly a matter of subjective and biased opinion regardless of reputation. There are plenty of people with good reputations who say C is a bad language. They might be right, but I think it depends more on what you intend to use it for. I would never use JS for backend code. There are much better languages to use for that (my personal favorite is Perl), but for DOM/event-driven GUI stuff, I think it is at least as respectable as other languages out there. I certainly would prefer it over something like Java/Swing.
You do realize that I said that JS is not a variant of Java, right?
Yes, you did. The point is, nobody should ever think that, so I don't know why you even mentioned it.
The rest of your post is simply you saying how to work around the badness of JS.
What badness? You have not mentioned any badness aside from the fact that you don't like it. JavaScript is a different language, so it will behave differently from other languages. JavaScript does not have block-level scope, it has function-level scope. That is not inherently bad. It's just different, and as long as you are aware of it, it works just fine. Same with prototype-based inheritance vs class-based inheritance. Not bad, just different.
You are simply listing all of the skills that need to be acquired to be a competent JS programmer
I'm listing language features. Newsflash: you have to know a language and be aware of its features to use it effectively. There are quite a few differences between C and C++ as well.
and that is a longer list than most other languages. That's precisely why it's a bad language.
Nonsense. The ease with which you can pick up a language based on its similarity to other languages has nothing to do with goodness or badness.
Also, if you think "this" is perfectly well defined, you are wrong. A caller can passes literally anything for "this". That means that, by language spec, "this" is completely undefined. The caller will have a definition, but it may or may not be sane and it may or may not be consistent.
Again, you are basing your complaint on similarity to other languages. If you don't do that, you won't have problems. "this", by definition in JavaScript, refers to the current execution context of your function. The execution context, naturally, is not fixed and can change. That is the whole point and there are very good uses for it (ex: event handlers). If you need static arguments, use static arguments. Don't use "this" as a static argument, because that is not what it is. For object methods, "this" behaves 99% like implementations in other languages (ie: it refers to the current object instance). The 1% difference is that you can change the object instance, which is useful because, among other uses, it is the JavaScript way of implementing super inheritance. Not bad, just different.
I seriously doubt they have ever had to ensure that the application works even in adverse situations
You do realize that most JavaScript runs in the most untrusted client ever known, the web browser, right? I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of people making stupid mistakes, but there are also plenty of people who know what they are doing, thank you very much.
It also helps to know that it's not a variant of Java;
If you think that, you are just ignorant. It was never true, and while it may have been an understandable mistake 15 years ago due to the similarity in naming and the push to use Java applets in the browser, it isn't anymore.
it's a variant of Forth made to resemble Java
Also not true.
That help to reduce the temptation to try to use it like Java.
I don't even know how you would do that. They are so different it seems like you would notice within the first 10 seconds. Go ahead and try to use closures in Java.
variable scope
Variable scope is pretty straightforward if you understand how it works (hint: don't do everything in one monolithic function). And if you're smart, you use strict mode, which will stop you from making 99% of scoping mistakes.
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
type coersion
First, you can prevent type coercion where it matters if you don't want to use it.
Second, type coercion is very useful in certain situations, especially involving HTML forms.
undefined
Why? Distinguishing between null and undefined seems pretty basic to me. If you want a test for null that includes undefined, this is an example of a situation where type coercion can be handy.
this
"this" is perfectly fine as long as you know what it does. Use prototypical inheritance properly and it will never be a problem for you.
global
Many scripting languages support them (ex: Perl), and most recommend the same thing, don't use globals.
Now, if you had said Array-Like Objects, there we could agree about some stupidness in JavaScript that is unnecessary and annoying.
You bring up an interesting point...the government clearly has a desire to see jobs brought to their state and wants to invest the money, but then why don't they take an equity stake? It seems to make a lot of sense and could go a long way toward making these sorts of investments more palatable to taxpayers. The company can of course buy back their equity in the future if they desire, but that's the way investment works in the business world, so why not the government world? Furthermore, the equity share can be earmarked in some way...say to offset health care costs for the workers, or something like that.
FWIW, I work for a government contractor, and I can assure you the feds don't just give us handouts. When they give us money for R&D, they then own that R&D.
When my son says he doesn't like math (and gets a C+), what should I do? I know, I'll start looking for some failing of society to blame it on.
No need to blame society, but you should probably do something, don't you think? Specifically what depends on the situation. Did you read the rest of that paragraph?
Or I guess you can do nothing and let him fail saying he just couldn't cut it in "the real world". Yeah, that would be great parenting.
Yeah, and let me repeat: I never said that. I don't think that. I don't know anyone that thinks that. I've never met anyone that thinks that. I've never seen anyone act on that.
Great, then what are you saying? Because it doesn't seem like you are saying much of anything meaningful.