I have a contract with O2 Germany and every time that I travel to a new country, EU or otherwise, where I have service, I receive a text message telling me the price of calls and text messages in that country.
Not to downplay Cuba's problems, but for the record, it ranks 7th (out of 32 countries) on the UN's Human Development Index for Latin America and the Caribbean. If communism / capitalism were the deciding factor in the quality of life in Latin America, statistically one would have to conclude that communism is preferable. Reality, however, is a little more complicated than that.
Your statement makes the presumptuous assumption that cheap books provide more societal benefit than local book stores. The laws of France (as well as every other Western country, in varying degrees) obviously assume that in some cases protectionism benefits society. I'm sure once they figure out that they're silly they're change their ways, or wait, did you actually have some argument you forgot to give?
I don't know what the situation is like in Japan, but in many countries most people don't have driver's licenses -- moreso in places of high population density.
That's a bit naive. Here's something people don't seem to notice that (a) aren't immigrants and (b) aren't fluent in another lanugage:
It's hard.
I'm an American immigrant. No, I didn't move to the US; I moved away from it. I've been in Germany for 5 years, I don't have time to take a few months off for intensive language training, since like most immigrants I have to work and as such I've had to pick it up as I go along. And I have, but my grammer is still incorrect at places, I still prefer to read in my native language, I speak English with a few of my friends. These are exactly the things that people complain about the Turkish people doing. What's the big difference? Well, I'm blonde, white and come from a rich Western country. Here's another one:
It's tiring.
I spend more time speaking German than English, but even after five years, I still get tired after speaking German for an extended period of time. When I go to the cafe down the street that is owned by an American and serves up American cuisine, we speak English. We both speak German, but it's a nice break to have some American food and speak English. It's no big shocker that when speaking with another ex-pat from the same country that we speak our native language. When I'm in mixed company, I speak German, but if there are people that have moved over more recently and don't speak German yet, I fall back to English with them.
I moved here because I like the values, the work environment and the culture and I'm fairly well integrated, but I'm not from here. At the end of the day, yes, there is progress to be made on integrating immigrants into the native cultures, but more often than not, "integration" is just a euphamism for racism.
Well, it's a lot older than IDM (and a lot of IDM is synthesized rather than sampled). Really this got started as early as the 1940s with Musique concrète and at this point sampling is spread across every genre.
Your first post very much read as "These are cultural problems with the US that those of us over in the enlightened world don't have. See! You have Fox News and we have the BBC." For counterpoint I wanted to point out that you have Sun and "we" have The Wallstreet Journal.
Are things better in Europe? Perhaps marginally, but it's only a different strain of the same disease.
The problem is living with nominal democracy and a steady supply of entertainment is enough for most people. There's a historical precedent there that goes back to the pax romana. No amount of screaming and arm-waving tends to cause democratic revival until things get suffeciently bad for the citizens, at which point a pro-democratic subculture gains momentum.
In American culture that's happened a few times, most recently McCarthy-ism and the Vietnam war. Things got ugly enough to entergize the 60s and 70s subculture and press the country towards democratic renewel. The sucess of that subculture in affecting real change has been the stuff of golden eras and toppled empires.
I haven't given up by any means. I'm just cynical enough to assume that history is repeating itself and that disgruntledness rather than enlightenment (through media restructuring or otherwise) is usually the key to democratic renaissance.
Another one really is that the countries have flipped junk media formats. In the UK it's tabloids; in the US it's TV. 4 of the top 5 newspapers in the UK are rubbish tabloids. In the US they're all legitimate newpapers, with 4 of the top 5 (USA Today being the exception) decent publications.
You can carry the cultural surperiority thing as far as you'd like, but don't forget 3.5 million Brit's pick up a copy of Sun everyday, which is probably worse than Fox News. Germany's in the same bag; the most popular newspaper here (I'm an American that's been in Germany for about 5 years) is Bild Zeitung ("Picture Times") which makes Fox News look like an academic triumph.
Wait, could it be that there are idiots everywhere? Nah.
Sure, the US is in democratic straights and the media's intelectually offensive, but Britain's scarcely a shade better.
On the first it'd be really nice to just sit my laptop down and be able to just start using my real mouse keyboard and everything without plugging and unplugging. With as many USB things as I use (camera, external hard disk, MIDI keyboard, mouse, external sound card, keyboard, flash drive) it'd be cool to just move my laptop over to my desk and poof, everything works. This can naturally be done with a hub, which is fine and well if you only use your devices with one computer, but...
I have a laptop and a desktop. It's not terribly uncommon these days to have multiple computers in a household. It'd be nice to be able to virtually "grab" a device without moving or unplugging it. Want to use my desktop monitor / keyboard / mouse to control my laptop? Just click to switch device profiles. Want to have my external sound interface send the data to my laptop instead of my desktop? Also easy. Then if I want to move my laptop over to my couch to use Skype I don't have to repeat the un- and re-plugging ritual.
So for me it's only halfway about getting rid of cables; increasing flexibility is the main factor.
...is an interesting read on the topic of a potential war in Iran. Not so because it's a great book or particularly well written, but because it comes from one of the policy folks that helped influence the Bush administration to invade Iraq (which he now admits was a mistake).
The crux of the book: Iran is a completely different ballgame. All of the stuff that he thought would work in Iraq doesn't have a chance in Iran. In comparison with Iraq, Iran has a much more legitimate government, at least an outline of democracy, they're much richer, more organized, populous, stronger militarily and have stronger anti-American sentiments (there's a national paranoia, on semi-reasonable grounds, about American interventionalism). Iran is not another Iraq and the US has botched the Iraq situation terribly. Not to mention that if they moved into Iran they would still need a significant amount of their forces in Iraq.
Also, the Shah was great for the rich and cultured, but the society was much more split along class lines as is typical in third world countries under the Shah. He didn't enjoy widespread popularity.
The property of this corporation is irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes and no part of the net income or assets of this corporation shall ever inure to the benefit of any director, officer or members thereof or to the benefit of any private individual.
In general you can't just buy a non-profit organization and if you could you can't turn around and make them a profit center.
Latching onto subcultures is pretty typical human nature. The corporate softball team is a subculture; the PTA is a subculture; the local church is a subculture. It gives people a sense of belonging and generally, looking at social structure you see that views on appearance, subsets of morality and so on are quite flexible and usually are readily adaptable to belonging to a given subculture. Actually, the ones that you really need to worry about are the ones that can't find a social group to latch on to. Believe it or not, relating to goths or ravers or punks isn't nearly as fundamentally different to relating to suits as the guy that wears polo shirts, but can't talk to other humans.
I personally think the European underground techno scene is a lot of fun. I really enjoy dancing all night on weekends. To an extent I look the part. But this doesn't keep me from being one of the lead developers in the LinuxLab at one of Europe's largest software companies.
Why don't I take on the appearance that's typical for the European IT industry? Well, honestly, I'm not that far from the default, though I do have hair down past my shoulders and tend to have kind of a grunge-nouveau look. But the more important thing is that I'm established within my field. I feel like my accomplishments speak for themselves and if you're not the sort of employer that's willing to look past my long hair to the long list of cool things on my resume, then you're not the sort of company that I want to work for. It is in a sense a statement -- it's a statement saying, "I'm good at what I do. I'm not going to be a cookie cutter cog in the corporate environment. You do need to have some flexibility, but if you're cool with that, then I can probably do good things for you."
Sorry, but this is a very wrong view of what computer science or programming really are. There are three things being mixed up here which are largely separate bodies of knowledge and any decent computer science program separates them out as such.
Algorithms - This is the core of Computer Science; learning to think like a programmer and to break problems down into logical chunks is tantamount to becoming a computer scientist. With this at the core, a language should then be chosen that most facilitates this. When I started college 10 years ago we used Pascal in our lab for our algorithms courses (which notably were just about implementing the theory we covered in the course), and that at the time was a very sane choice. Java's a pretty sane choice these days. Lots of things are really, but something like C forces people trying to learn how to think in algorithms to be side tracked by all of the tedious low level junk. (For reference, I'm a low-level C systems programmer at a large software company, so this isn't some "C sucks" wankery.)
Computer Organization - This is usually cross listed in electrical or computer engineering, and for good reason. This is where you figure out how hardware works. C and assembler (RISC works fine here) are appropriate in such a course. As this course naturally follows introductory algorithms courses, you can here put the theoretical constructs learned there in context.
Operating Systems - Memory management doesn't belong in either of the above and certainly saying that you learn "memory management" with C is pretty silly. You learn how to malloc and free stuff. Whoopee. "Memory management", in any sort of interesting way, is better treated in an Operating Systems course where you can track what exactly is happening down from the programming language, into the OS and finally at the hardware side. It can be put in context of what actually happens when you call malloc and what that means. Fundamentally, you don't understand anything more about memory management from a basic C course than if somebody tells you in a Java course "When you use 'new' some memory will be allocated, and when you're done with that object there's a thing called a garbage collector that will eventually come and give that memory back." Memory management is a non-trivial topic and one that certainly goes deeper than simple allocation.
So, is VB suitable for any of this? Not really. VB is kind of orthogonal. Like you said, it's fine for someone who needs to solve certain sets of tasks, but doesn't want or need to bother with really understanding deeper concepts.
Actually Texas didn't give you Bush. Connecticut gave you Bush. He lived in Texas for a bit before moving back to New England for high school, college and then graduate school. His mom is from New York and his dad is from Massachusetts. I'm half-way convinced that the accent is faked.
Texas did however produce Ann Richards, the democrat governor of Texas prior Bush and David Cobb, 2004's Green Party candidate.
Sorry -- I know the above was an attempt at humor, but I do get sick of the assumption that everyone in Texas is far-flung Bush-lovin' right wingers.
I end up saying this every time this comes up on Slashdot, but...
I submitted my first talk on this topic a couple weeks before Spotlight was announced. I'm not sure that Beagle had ceased to be part of Dashboard at that time and become Beagle, but at the very least it was far from functional.
And standard mantra -- Tenor is more about relationships between data than content. "Contextual Linkage" vs. "Searching", so to say. Granted, at this point both Beagle and Spotlight are looking in that direction, but they're building context on top of indexing rather than indexing on top of context.
Translation of the bible into local languages was a major issue pre-reformation; specifically John Wycliff translated the bible into English before Martin Luther was born.
The Catholic church wasn't working with the original Hebrew and Greek texts; it was working with the Latin vulgate. Ironically "vulgate" is the word for "the common language", which Latin was at the time of the rise of the Latin bible in the Christian area in the 5th century.
Well, the problem is that the things that Bush is most unpopular for are the things that he's done outside of the region of the world where people get to vote for him.
How many Iraqis got to vote for the US president? Don't you think the outcome of the last election affected them on an individual level more than you?
Ignoring whether or not the war was good or bad, it doesn't make a lot of sense to crowd behind democracy when people are most critical of a leaders forein policy. It's pretty wacky to assume that the will of 4% (about 1.5% if we're just counting those that actually voted) of the world's population should be juggling the fate of much of the remaining 96% under the banner of democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how in a thread about killing one sort of mammal in bulk, the discussion has turned to how it'd be inhumane to have a neglected pet.
You will be assimilated.
Bah. 10002008 is the year of the Linux desktop!
I have a contract with O2 Germany and every time that I travel to a new country, EU or otherwise, where I have service, I receive a text message telling me the price of calls and text messages in that country.
Novell employees around a dozen core KDE developers.
...thinking of those poor, unfortunate billionaires.
Not to downplay Cuba's problems, but for the record, it ranks 7th (out of 32 countries) on the UN's Human Development Index for Latin America and the Caribbean. If communism / capitalism were the deciding factor in the quality of life in Latin America, statistically one would have to conclude that communism is preferable. Reality, however, is a little more complicated than that.
Your statement makes the presumptuous assumption that cheap books provide more societal benefit than local book stores. The laws of France (as well as every other Western country, in varying degrees) obviously assume that in some cases protectionism benefits society. I'm sure once they figure out that they're silly they're change their ways, or wait, did you actually have some argument you forgot to give?
I don't know what the situation is like in Japan, but in many countries most people don't have driver's licenses -- moreso in places of high population density.
Well, mostly because it's a wonderful chance to play The Polarization Game where they could peg the other side as idiots / heathens.
That's a bit naive. Here's something people don't seem to notice that (a) aren't immigrants and (b) aren't fluent in another lanugage:
It's hard.
I'm an American immigrant. No, I didn't move to the US; I moved away from it. I've been in Germany for 5 years, I don't have time to take a few months off for intensive language training, since like most immigrants I have to work and as such I've had to pick it up as I go along. And I have, but my grammer is still incorrect at places, I still prefer to read in my native language, I speak English with a few of my friends. These are exactly the things that people complain about the Turkish people doing. What's the big difference? Well, I'm blonde, white and come from a rich Western country. Here's another one:
It's tiring.
I spend more time speaking German than English, but even after five years, I still get tired after speaking German for an extended period of time. When I go to the cafe down the street that is owned by an American and serves up American cuisine, we speak English. We both speak German, but it's a nice break to have some American food and speak English. It's no big shocker that when speaking with another ex-pat from the same country that we speak our native language. When I'm in mixed company, I speak German, but if there are people that have moved over more recently and don't speak German yet, I fall back to English with them.
I moved here because I like the values, the work environment and the culture and I'm fairly well integrated, but I'm not from here. At the end of the day, yes, there is progress to be made on integrating immigrants into the native cultures, but more often than not, "integration" is just a euphamism for racism.
Except that Konqueror (as KFM) predates Explorer. In fact, KDE was the first desktop that combined a file browser and web browser.
Well, it's a lot older than IDM (and a lot of IDM is synthesized rather than sampled). Really this got started as early as the 1940s with Musique concrète and at this point sampling is spread across every genre.
Your first post very much read as "These are cultural problems with the US that those of us over in the enlightened world don't have. See! You have Fox News and we have the BBC." For counterpoint I wanted to point out that you have Sun and "we" have The Wallstreet Journal.
Are things better in Europe? Perhaps marginally, but it's only a different strain of the same disease.
The problem is living with nominal democracy and a steady supply of entertainment is enough for most people. There's a historical precedent there that goes back to the pax romana. No amount of screaming and arm-waving tends to cause democratic revival until things get suffeciently bad for the citizens, at which point a pro-democratic subculture gains momentum.
In American culture that's happened a few times, most recently McCarthy-ism and the Vietnam war. Things got ugly enough to entergize the 60s and 70s subculture and press the country towards democratic renewel. The sucess of that subculture in affecting real change has been the stuff of golden eras and toppled empires.
I haven't given up by any means. I'm just cynical enough to assume that history is repeating itself and that disgruntledness rather than enlightenment (through media restructuring or otherwise) is usually the key to democratic renaissance.
Another one really is that the countries have flipped junk media formats. In the UK it's tabloids; in the US it's TV. 4 of the top 5 newspapers in the UK are rubbish tabloids. In the US they're all legitimate newpapers, with 4 of the top 5 (USA Today being the exception) decent publications.
You can carry the cultural surperiority thing as far as you'd like, but don't forget 3.5 million Brit's pick up a copy of Sun everyday, which is probably worse than Fox News. Germany's in the same bag; the most popular newspaper here (I'm an American that's been in Germany for about 5 years) is Bild Zeitung ("Picture Times") which makes Fox News look like an academic triumph.
Wait, could it be that there are idiots everywhere? Nah.
Sure, the US is in democratic straights and the media's intelectually offensive, but Britain's scarcely a shade better.
On the first it'd be really nice to just sit my laptop down and be able to just start using my real mouse keyboard and everything without plugging and unplugging. With as many USB things as I use (camera, external hard disk, MIDI keyboard, mouse, external sound card, keyboard, flash drive) it'd be cool to just move my laptop over to my desk and poof, everything works. This can naturally be done with a hub, which is fine and well if you only use your devices with one computer, but...
I have a laptop and a desktop. It's not terribly uncommon these days to have multiple computers in a household. It'd be nice to be able to virtually "grab" a device without moving or unplugging it. Want to use my desktop monitor / keyboard / mouse to control my laptop? Just click to switch device profiles. Want to have my external sound interface send the data to my laptop instead of my desktop? Also easy. Then if I want to move my laptop over to my couch to use Skype I don't have to repeat the un- and re-plugging ritual.
So for me it's only halfway about getting rid of cables; increasing flexibility is the main factor.
...is an interesting read on the topic of a potential war in Iran. Not so because it's a great book or particularly well written, but because it comes from one of the policy folks that helped influence the Bush administration to invade Iraq (which he now admits was a mistake).
The crux of the book: Iran is a completely different ballgame. All of the stuff that he thought would work in Iraq doesn't have a chance in Iran. In comparison with Iraq, Iran has a much more legitimate government, at least an outline of democracy, they're much richer, more organized, populous, stronger militarily and have stronger anti-American sentiments (there's a national paranoia, on semi-reasonable grounds, about American interventionalism). Iran is not another Iraq and the US has botched the Iraq situation terribly. Not to mention that if they moved into Iran they would still need a significant amount of their forces in Iraq.
Also, the Shah was great for the rich and cultured, but the society was much more split along class lines as is typical in third world countries under the Shah. He didn't enjoy widespread popularity.
Latching onto subcultures is pretty typical human nature. The corporate softball team is a subculture; the PTA is a subculture; the local church is a subculture. It gives people a sense of belonging and generally, looking at social structure you see that views on appearance, subsets of morality and so on are quite flexible and usually are readily adaptable to belonging to a given subculture. Actually, the ones that you really need to worry about are the ones that can't find a social group to latch on to. Believe it or not, relating to goths or ravers or punks isn't nearly as fundamentally different to relating to suits as the guy that wears polo shirts, but can't talk to other humans.
I personally think the European underground techno scene is a lot of fun. I really enjoy dancing all night on weekends. To an extent I look the part. But this doesn't keep me from being one of the lead developers in the LinuxLab at one of Europe's largest software companies.
Why don't I take on the appearance that's typical for the European IT industry? Well, honestly, I'm not that far from the default, though I do have hair down past my shoulders and tend to have kind of a grunge-nouveau look. But the more important thing is that I'm established within my field. I feel like my accomplishments speak for themselves and if you're not the sort of employer that's willing to look past my long hair to the long list of cool things on my resume, then you're not the sort of company that I want to work for. It is in a sense a statement -- it's a statement saying, "I'm good at what I do. I'm not going to be a cookie cutter cog in the corporate environment. You do need to have some flexibility, but if you're cool with that, then I can probably do good things for you."
Sorry, but this is a very wrong view of what computer science or programming really are. There are three things being mixed up here which are largely separate bodies of knowledge and any decent computer science program separates them out as such.
Algorithms - This is the core of Computer Science; learning to think like a programmer and to break problems down into logical chunks is tantamount to becoming a computer scientist. With this at the core, a language should then be chosen that most facilitates this. When I started college 10 years ago we used Pascal in our lab for our algorithms courses (which notably were just about implementing the theory we covered in the course), and that at the time was a very sane choice. Java's a pretty sane choice these days. Lots of things are really, but something like C forces people trying to learn how to think in algorithms to be side tracked by all of the tedious low level junk. (For reference, I'm a low-level C systems programmer at a large software company, so this isn't some "C sucks" wankery.)
Computer Organization - This is usually cross listed in electrical or computer engineering, and for good reason. This is where you figure out how hardware works. C and assembler (RISC works fine here) are appropriate in such a course. As this course naturally follows introductory algorithms courses, you can here put the theoretical constructs learned there in context.
Operating Systems - Memory management doesn't belong in either of the above and certainly saying that you learn "memory management" with C is pretty silly. You learn how to malloc and free stuff. Whoopee. "Memory management", in any sort of interesting way, is better treated in an Operating Systems course where you can track what exactly is happening down from the programming language, into the OS and finally at the hardware side. It can be put in context of what actually happens when you call malloc and what that means. Fundamentally, you don't understand anything more about memory management from a basic C course than if somebody tells you in a Java course "When you use 'new' some memory will be allocated, and when you're done with that object there's a thing called a garbage collector that will eventually come and give that memory back." Memory management is a non-trivial topic and one that certainly goes deeper than simple allocation.
So, is VB suitable for any of this? Not really. VB is kind of orthogonal. Like you said, it's fine for someone who needs to solve certain sets of tasks, but doesn't want or need to bother with really understanding deeper concepts.
Actually Texas didn't give you Bush. Connecticut gave you Bush. He lived in Texas for a bit before moving back to New England for high school, college and then graduate school. His mom is from New York and his dad is from Massachusetts. I'm half-way convinced that the accent is faked.
Texas did however produce Ann Richards, the democrat governor of Texas prior Bush and David Cobb, 2004's Green Party candidate.
Sorry -- I know the above was an attempt at humor, but I do get sick of the assumption that everyone in Texas is far-flung Bush-lovin' right wingers.
I end up saying this every time this comes up on Slashdot, but...
I submitted my first talk on this topic a couple weeks before Spotlight was announced. I'm not sure that Beagle had ceased to be part of Dashboard at that time and become Beagle, but at the very least it was far from functional.
And standard mantra -- Tenor is more about relationships between data than content. "Contextual Linkage" vs. "Searching", so to say. Granted, at this point both Beagle and Spotlight are looking in that direction, but they're building context on top of indexing rather than indexing on top of context.
And he also predicts that the semantic web will take off Real Soon Now. ;-) (Where real soon is t + 5 years for continuously evaluated t.)
Well, the problem is that the things that Bush is most unpopular for are the things that he's done outside of the region of the world where people get to vote for him.
How many Iraqis got to vote for the US president? Don't you think the outcome of the last election affected them on an individual level more than you?
Ignoring whether or not the war was good or bad, it doesn't make a lot of sense to crowd behind democracy when people are most critical of a leaders forein policy. It's pretty wacky to assume that the will of 4% (about 1.5% if we're just counting those that actually voted) of the world's population should be juggling the fate of much of the remaining 96% under the banner of democracy.