I think you are conflating belief in no god with no belief in god.
Atheists have no belief in god given the unlikeliness of god's existence. However, I do not believe the English language has a term for someone who believes in "no god".
As an atheist, I have no belief in god, or any religions. That is not the same as believing with certainty that there is no god.
I do not believe in flying green monsters or fairies, either. That does not mean I am in denial about their existence. It merely means that debating their existence merits little effort, and for all intents and purposes, it is unlikely that they exist.
Similarly, god in the traditional, religious sense of the word is also quite likely a human fantasy, and merits little debate. That's not to say there isn't a miniscule probability of god's existence -- sure, anything is possible. But it's just pretty unlikely, and for all intents and purposes, I will treat it as a non-entity unless proven otherwise.
Atheism, by definition is non-belief, and agnostics, unless they believe, are also atheists. The distinction is important.
The burden of proof is upon those who make extraordinary claims.
I am happy to pay for these publications because they are well written, well edited, and have content that is not easily available elsewhere.
Sure, except that they're all available online or in a digital format (e.g. eBook).
You seem to be equating elsewhere with not online. I made no such distinction. I merely meant that I am happy to pay for the content, immaterial of where it is published (online or in print).
Similar quality publications are not available for, say, free, or easily accessible on someone's blog. Elsewhere includes the realm of both online and print media.
So, it is rather impossible to find the same quality and type of content elsewhere (online or otherwise) consistently, which was my point.
Although I do prefer the print editions because I am less distracted, and more likely to finish my magazines cover-to-cover.
Indeed. I couldn't agree more. There are some magazines that I continue to read regularly.
The Economist, National Geographic, Harper's, Paris Review, NY Review of Books, Granta, and Foreign Affairs to name a few.
The content in some of these magazines are unique and not available online. More importantly, it keeps these publishers and writers in business, which to me is a great incentive.
I am happy to pay for these publications because they are well written, well edited, and have content that is not easily available elsewhere. They are not just sensationalism and raw data that's poorly written by a 20 year old (e.g. cnn.com) -- they are well written pieces with commentary, insights, and opinions that I value.
Once you start hitting real science and math, typically in junior high/middle school, people start to fall by the wayside.
I would chalk it up to educational methodology and the one-size-fits-all pedagogy that we seem to practice when it comes to education. People have unique skills, and people learn differently.
There are some things that come easily to me, without expending any significant effort (math, language, music) but there are things that I have to struggle with (e.g. visual arts).
Those things I am good at, I learn pretty much on my own. Take math, for instance. I can very easily pick up even sophisticated topics (e.g. topological manifolds) by picking up a book and immersing myself for a few weekends. Ditto for music -- I can usually translate my musical knowledge to any musical instrument once I've established the scale and technique. I may not be very good at it (not without practice, anyway), but I will make music.
But those things that aren't my strong suit? I need a lot of practice and the freedom (not to mention time) to make the connections on my own.
Foreign languages is another one of those -- I grew up in a tri-lingual household, and I can usually pick up languages pretty easily. But I find it easier to pick it up by immersion than by reading a book or going through a course. Letting me spend two weeks immersed in a language will be significantly more productive than subjecting me to a traditional class on languages for two months.
So, in my opinion, most people perform poorly because the educational system is designed for scale and issuing rubber-stamps -- not real education. If our goal is to genuinely educate the masses, we would have an educational system that's catered to people's strengths and learning capabilities.
As an immigrant who was once on an H1B, I completely agree with you. Here's the deal: I went to grad school in the U.S., and took up a job in R&D after graduating. My goal, after graduating, was to be part of this country, contribute to its economy and its culture.
It is hard to say this without sounding elitist, but on some level, painting those who have pursued advanced degrees in this country and for those who are nothing more than warm bodies from IT body shops as being unfair.
Since then, I have started three companies, one of which was reasonably successful. I married an American girl, bought a house and settled down, and I would like to believe that I have genuinely contributed positively to this economy.
However, here is the irony of it all: it is far easier for a guy from Infosys or Tata to get an H1B than it would be if I graduated from Stanford with a Ph.D. and wanted to start my own company. The system is so flawed that if I do not have the sponsorship of a big corporation, it is harder for me to get an H1B than a poor Cobol code monkey from India, despite having graduated with an advanced degree from here.
In contrast, most of those people get low paying jobs pumping out mediocre code, and often end up going back to India with substantial savings. While I can certainly understand their position, they live in their own cultural bubbles and are often not interested in full integrating culturally because they know they aren't settling down here.
And is IT the only area that really needs people? What about other areas, where people with advanced degrees from the universities of this country can get jobs? Biotech, chem engineering, manufacturing, aeronautical -- you name it. Either limit the program so that it is easier for people to immigrate and integrate, or make the program truly be for talented people who should be part of this country's economy./rant
In International Relations, we call this "audience cost". American population is pretty much war-weary at this point, and no sane politician would ever start a war or risk aggression and conflict.
North Korea is counting on this. The chances of them attacking are pretty slim, and they are just posturing in an attempt to force us to give them better terms (be nice, or else...) -- except that we are calling their bluff.
And the more we call their bluff, the more aggressive their posturing becomes. Eventually, one of our allies will either step in or ask for help, and that's when we will head to the negotiating tables.
Either way, this is nothing new. The US goes through cycles of war and war-weariness. In about a decade, we'll be back, carpet bombing some random country for imagined slights.
I wish I could mod this comment up. I couldn't agree more, and to me, that's my fundamental bone to pick with CS as it stands today.
Even in the context of the industry, there is an assumption that if you graduated with a degree in CS, you must be a coder or a code monkey. And then, there's the other side of the equation where just because someone is a good coder, they must be good at CS. I have seen some fantastic programmers who know a language inside out, can utilize all kinds of frameworks, and are proficient at what they do. However, they lack critical "CS" skills.
Ask them to do eigen-faces or write a ray-tracer and they are lost. Even relatively simple things, like optimizing a search algorithm, becomes difficult and the question I get asked is, "Isn't there a library I can use?".
In the pursuit of coding over computer science, we are being myopic. Coding is not a difficult skill to pick up. Sure, it's not easy, but compared to, say, computational fluid dynamics or other physical sciences, it is pretty run of the mill. What we need is more people who are equipped with both these skills, because that's what's needed for building the future.
While iPhone apps and websites may be popular, sophisticated and disruptive technologies require a much better understanding of the fundamentals.
Even so, it continues to amaze me that people conflate computer science with coding. I am pretty decent at a few areas of computer science (graphics algorithms, machine learning, theoretical c.s., especially around complexity and optimization) but I am a pretty mediocre coder at best.
I "get" software engineering from a systems optimization perspective (more of an operations research perspective) and from a complexity standpoint, but I find most coding and APIs to be just arcane ways of accomplishing a task.
So, I think as long as kids are taught the basics -- vector and linear algebra and physics (for graphics), statistical analysis (for machine learning), operations research and discrete mathematics (for computational complexity), and a smattering of other areas like basic calculus, combinatorics etc, you *are* teaching them computer science.
The ability to code is incidental, and while it is valuable in getting a job, it is not to be conflated with the ability to pursue computer science.
HTML may be nothing more than a markup language. But in a similar vein, computer science has as much to do with coding as astronomy has to do with telescopes (channeling Dijkstra).
Get the basics and the foundations right and the rest will follow.
Meritocracy sounds great on paper but is terrible in terms of social consequences. It allows entrenched elites to stay entrenched and over time, removed generational mobility. It's a term thrown around so casually in the US that people think of it as a positive trait. It's anything but.
Once again, you are conflating corruption (in the financial and legal sense, such as embezzlement and fraud) with being unethical in the moral sense. Goldman Sachs has never sold a "bogus" security. Securities, by their very nature, are financial instruments whose value is based on the investments that they hold. Ironically, if there's anyone to blame for that, it's the ratings agencies. Even Credit Default Swaps, for all that they are portrayed to be evil, are nothing more than complex financial instruments -- when supported by asset backed securities, they are quite benign; when unsecured without any collateral backing, you run the risk of default. Even so, this is reflected in the rate of return and cost of the financial instrument that you buy. true, Now, you may blame the lack transparency and the fact that the insurance companies backed securities without sufficient collateral or understanding, but that's a systemic issue.
What they did to the developers of Dragon is no different than what happens to millions of entrepreneurs worldwide, when investors step in. Once again, not corrupt -- GS did nothing illegal, and there was no embezzlement or fraud. It may not sit well with your worldview, but that doesn't make them "corrupt".
But the point is having catastrophic collapses of the banking system every couple years for the sake of shaking out the corrupt banks is not the most efficient way to run a capitalist economy...
Where did I say that? I was responding to the assertion that free markets lead to fraud and monopolies. And if you notice, the very first thing that I mentioned at the beginning of it all was that I was a Keynesian adherent. Look it up if you do not know what it means.
Who said Goldman Sachs isn't trustworthy? GS is an audited and publicly traded company with pretty clean books -- at least compared to some of their competitors.
Being unethical is not the same as being corrupt -- there's a difference.
Even so, remember what happened during the credit crunch? The banks lost access to capital markets because the markets did not believe in them. Remember when even GS was trading at 46 or even lower? What do you think people were doing then?
The only reason they survived was because the *government* propped up GS and pretty much most other banks (remember when Lehman crashed?). In a real free market, that would not have happened. If investors had lost confidence in a given bank (either because of bad debt or because of unavailable credit), then that bank would have fallen. However, the state stepped in and lent them all money, as a stopgap (remember TARP?).
Ditto for the insurance companies (who, btw, are some of the biggest asset managers in the world). Had we let the market take its toll, these banks and insurance companies (e.g. AIG) would have crashed and burned.
"Free" markets do not lead to competition. They consistently and repeatedly lead to fraud and monopolies.
I'm at best Keynsian, but the result that you speak of is often the result of collusion with politicians and a consequence of political influence, and not an economic one. It is important to distinguish between the two.
There have been several case studies conduct on both corrupt corporations and monopolies -- corrupt corporations almost always fail in the long run, either due to mismanagement or because the market realizes that the management is not trustworthy, and everyone shorts the hell out of them. And monopolies only stay in power for so long, but a good many of them continue to stay in power because they buy legislation.
Remember, civic freedom (e.g. right to own and protect property) is necessary for economic freedom but economic freedom is not necessary for civic freedom. That's a very, very fundamental difference. So, economic systems are always at the mercy of political systems, and will therefore try and control the political systems that "own" them.
That's far from the complete truth. The unsaid fact is that Mosaddegh was trying to nationalize British and American owned oil operations, which was what prompted our actions.
Ironically, Shah was a very modernizing influence in terms of rights for women and minorities. Yes, the man was batshit crazy, but he was aimed to create a secular state. Unfortunately, when the people revolted against him, Khomenei and his Islamic fundamentalist ilk essentially stole the revolution from the left liberals and established a theocracy in its place.
Much like what's happening in Egypt today, where the Islamists have taken over a revolution from the left liberals.
So, blaming the US for part of it is fair, but this is a classic example of unintended consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, the Calvinistic work ethic.
I think you are conflating belief in no god with no belief in god.
Atheists have no belief in god given the unlikeliness of god's existence. However, I do not believe the English language has a term for someone who believes in "no god".
As an atheist, I have no belief in god, or any religions. That is not the same as believing with certainty that there is no god.
I do not believe in flying green monsters or fairies, either. That does not mean I am in denial about their existence. It merely means that debating their existence merits little effort, and for all intents and purposes, it is unlikely that they exist.
Similarly, god in the traditional, religious sense of the word is also quite likely a human fantasy, and merits little debate. That's not to say there isn't a miniscule probability of god's existence -- sure, anything is possible. But it's just pretty unlikely, and for all intents and purposes, I will treat it as a non-entity unless proven otherwise.
Atheism, by definition is non-belief, and agnostics, unless they believe, are also atheists. The distinction is important.
The burden of proof is upon those who make extraordinary claims.
You seem to be equating elsewhere with not online. I made no such distinction. I merely meant that I am happy to pay for the content, immaterial of where it is published (online or in print).
Similar quality publications are not available for, say, free, or easily accessible on someone's blog. Elsewhere includes the realm of both online and print media.
So, it is rather impossible to find the same quality and type of content elsewhere (online or otherwise) consistently, which was my point.
Although I do prefer the print editions because I am less distracted, and more likely to finish my magazines cover-to-cover.
Indeed. I couldn't agree more. There are some magazines that I continue to read regularly.
The Economist, National Geographic, Harper's, Paris Review, NY Review of Books, Granta, and Foreign Affairs to name a few.
The content in some of these magazines are unique and not available online. More importantly, it keeps these publishers and writers in business, which to me is a great incentive.
I am happy to pay for these publications because they are well written, well edited, and have content that is not easily available elsewhere. They are not just sensationalism and raw data that's poorly written by a 20 year old (e.g. cnn.com) -- they are well written pieces with commentary, insights, and opinions that I value.
Well said.
I would chalk it up to educational methodology and the one-size-fits-all pedagogy that we seem to practice when it comes to education. People have unique skills, and people learn differently.
There are some things that come easily to me, without expending any significant effort (math, language, music) but there are things that I have to struggle with (e.g. visual arts).
Those things I am good at, I learn pretty much on my own. Take math, for instance. I can very easily pick up even sophisticated topics (e.g. topological manifolds) by picking up a book and immersing myself for a few weekends. Ditto for music -- I can usually translate my musical knowledge to any musical instrument once I've established the scale and technique. I may not be very good at it (not without practice, anyway), but I will make music.
But those things that aren't my strong suit? I need a lot of practice and the freedom (not to mention time) to make the connections on my own.
Foreign languages is another one of those -- I grew up in a tri-lingual household, and I can usually pick up languages pretty easily. But I find it easier to pick it up by immersion than by reading a book or going through a course. Letting me spend two weeks immersed in a language will be significantly more productive than subjecting me to a traditional class on languages for two months.
So, in my opinion, most people perform poorly because the educational system is designed for scale and issuing rubber-stamps -- not real education. If our goal is to genuinely educate the masses, we would have an educational system that's catered to people's strengths and learning capabilities.
You should watch Stefan Sagmeister's "The Power of Time Off" -- great TED talk on the value of taking a break.
As an immigrant who was once on an H1B, I completely agree with you. Here's the deal: I went to grad school in the U.S., and took up a job in R&D after graduating. My goal, after graduating, was to be part of this country, contribute to its economy and its culture.
It is hard to say this without sounding elitist, but on some level, painting those who have pursued advanced degrees in this country and for those who are nothing more than warm bodies from IT body shops as being unfair.
Since then, I have started three companies, one of which was reasonably successful. I married an American girl, bought a house and settled down, and I would like to believe that I have genuinely contributed positively to this economy.
However, here is the irony of it all: it is far easier for a guy from Infosys or Tata to get an H1B than it would be if I graduated from Stanford with a Ph.D. and wanted to start my own company. The system is so flawed that if I do not have the sponsorship of a big corporation, it is harder for me to get an H1B than a poor Cobol code monkey from India, despite having graduated with an advanced degree from here.
In contrast, most of those people get low paying jobs pumping out mediocre code, and often end up going back to India with substantial savings. While I can certainly understand their position, they live in their own cultural bubbles and are often not interested in full integrating culturally because they know they aren't settling down here.
And is IT the only area that really needs people? What about other areas, where people with advanced degrees from the universities of this country can get jobs? Biotech, chem engineering, manufacturing, aeronautical -- you name it. Either limit the program so that it is easier for people to immigrate and integrate, or make the program truly be for talented people who should be part of this country's economy. /rant
In International Relations, we call this "audience cost". American population is pretty much war-weary at this point, and no sane politician would ever start a war or risk aggression and conflict.
North Korea is counting on this. The chances of them attacking are pretty slim, and they are just posturing in an attempt to force us to give them better terms (be nice, or else...) -- except that we are calling their bluff.
And the more we call their bluff, the more aggressive their posturing becomes. Eventually, one of our allies will either step in or ask for help, and that's when we will head to the negotiating tables.
Either way, this is nothing new. The US goes through cycles of war and war-weariness. In about a decade, we'll be back, carpet bombing some random country for imagined slights.
Yeah, just like the OP who was too busy "pecking" and forgot to include the link to the actual article on the decommissioning: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417271,00.asp
I wish I could mod this comment up. I couldn't agree more, and to me, that's my fundamental bone to pick with CS as it stands today.
Even in the context of the industry, there is an assumption that if you graduated with a degree in CS, you must be a coder or a code monkey. And then, there's the other side of the equation where just because someone is a good coder, they must be good at CS. I have seen some fantastic programmers who know a language inside out, can utilize all kinds of frameworks, and are proficient at what they do. However, they lack critical "CS" skills.
Ask them to do eigen-faces or write a ray-tracer and they are lost. Even relatively simple things, like optimizing a search algorithm, becomes difficult and the question I get asked is, "Isn't there a library I can use?".
In the pursuit of coding over computer science, we are being myopic. Coding is not a difficult skill to pick up. Sure, it's not easy, but compared to, say, computational fluid dynamics or other physical sciences, it is pretty run of the mill. What we need is more people who are equipped with both these skills, because that's what's needed for building the future.
While iPhone apps and websites may be popular, sophisticated and disruptive technologies require a much better understanding of the fundamentals.
Even so, it continues to amaze me that people conflate computer science with coding. I am pretty decent at a few areas of computer science (graphics algorithms, machine learning, theoretical c.s., especially around complexity and optimization) but I am a pretty mediocre coder at best.
I "get" software engineering from a systems optimization perspective (more of an operations research perspective) and from a complexity standpoint, but I find most coding and APIs to be just arcane ways of accomplishing a task.
So, I think as long as kids are taught the basics -- vector and linear algebra and physics (for graphics), statistical analysis (for machine learning), operations research and discrete mathematics (for computational complexity), and a smattering of other areas like basic calculus, combinatorics etc, you *are* teaching them computer science.
The ability to code is incidental, and while it is valuable in getting a job, it is not to be conflated with the ability to pursue computer science.
HTML may be nothing more than a markup language. But in a similar vein, computer science has as much to do with coding as astronomy has to do with telescopes (channeling Dijkstra).
Get the basics and the foundations right and the rest will follow.
Even by American standards, Obama is at best center-right.
Look up Joseph Schumpeter and his take on "Creative Destruction". His book "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" talks about just that.
All those who scream meritocracy do not know any better, or the fact that the guy who coined the term meant it as a derogatory phrase for the scary future we're headed into.
Meritocracy sounds great on paper but is terrible in terms of social consequences. It allows entrenched elites to stay entrenched and over time, removed generational mobility. It's a term thrown around so casually in the US that people think of it as a positive trait. It's anything but.
I do not know what the question is, but the answer is clearly more pr0n.
But that's not how the Electoral Colleges work, though.
Indeed. The Indian President is essentially a figurehead.
How old are you, twelve?
Once again, you are conflating corruption (in the financial and legal sense, such as embezzlement and fraud) with being unethical in the moral sense. Goldman Sachs has never sold a "bogus" security. Securities, by their very nature, are financial instruments whose value is based on the investments that they hold. Ironically, if there's anyone to blame for that, it's the ratings agencies. Even Credit Default Swaps, for all that they are portrayed to be evil, are nothing more than complex financial instruments -- when supported by asset backed securities, they are quite benign; when unsecured without any collateral backing, you run the risk of default. Even so, this is reflected in the rate of return and cost of the financial instrument that you buy. true, Now, you may blame the lack transparency and the fact that the insurance companies backed securities without sufficient collateral or understanding, but that's a systemic issue.
What they did to the developers of Dragon is no different than what happens to millions of entrepreneurs worldwide, when investors step in. Once again, not corrupt -- GS did nothing illegal, and there was no embezzlement or fraud. It may not sit well with your worldview, but that doesn't make them "corrupt".
Where did I say that? I was responding to the assertion that free markets lead to fraud and monopolies. And if you notice, the very first thing that I mentioned at the beginning of it all was that I was a Keynesian adherent. Look it up if you do not know what it means.
Your argument is fallacious.
Who said Goldman Sachs isn't trustworthy? GS is an audited and publicly traded company with pretty clean books -- at least compared to some of their competitors.
Being unethical is not the same as being corrupt -- there's a difference.
Even so, remember what happened during the credit crunch? The banks lost access to capital markets because the markets did not believe in them. Remember when even GS was trading at 46 or even lower? What do you think people were doing then?
The only reason they survived was because the *government* propped up GS and pretty much most other banks (remember when Lehman crashed?). In a real free market, that would not have happened. If investors had lost confidence in a given bank (either because of bad debt or because of unavailable credit), then that bank would have fallen. However, the state stepped in and lent them all money, as a stopgap (remember TARP?).
Ditto for the insurance companies (who, btw, are some of the biggest asset managers in the world). Had we let the market take its toll, these banks and insurance companies (e.g. AIG) would have crashed and burned.
I'm at best Keynsian, but the result that you speak of is often the result of collusion with politicians and a consequence of political influence, and not an economic one. It is important to distinguish between the two.
There have been several case studies conduct on both corrupt corporations and monopolies -- corrupt corporations almost always fail in the long run, either due to mismanagement or because the market realizes that the management is not trustworthy, and everyone shorts the hell out of them. And monopolies only stay in power for so long, but a good many of them continue to stay in power because they buy legislation.
Remember, civic freedom (e.g. right to own and protect property) is necessary for economic freedom but economic freedom is not necessary for civic freedom. That's a very, very fundamental difference. So, economic systems are always at the mercy of political systems, and will therefore try and control the political systems that "own" them.
Did I say it was acceptable? You must remember that this was during the Cold War. Both sides did some pretty nasty things.
That's far from the complete truth. The unsaid fact is that Mosaddegh was trying to nationalize British and American owned oil operations, which was what prompted our actions.
Ironically, Shah was a very modernizing influence in terms of rights for women and minorities. Yes, the man was batshit crazy, but he was aimed to create a secular state. Unfortunately, when the people revolted against him, Khomenei and his Islamic fundamentalist ilk essentially stole the revolution from the left liberals and established a theocracy in its place.
Much like what's happening in Egypt today, where the Islamists have taken over a revolution from the left liberals.
So, blaming the US for part of it is fair, but this is a classic example of unintended consequences.
Written, not wrote. It's rather important to be grammatically correct when you're talking about... writing.