But what is the breakdown within those percentages of engineering degrees. I suspect as a whole, that Europe's percentage will be higher than in the US and the Arab and Asian nations even higher still. The reason the numbers are so inflated in the west is all the liberal arts degrees that people take so that they can "get a degree".
Possibly true, I don't have the data, but the O.P. implied that engineering degrees in the 3rd world are a dime a dozen.
I'm pretty sure there isn't an equivalent of MIT in Cairo, but then what percentage of engineers in "the West" have studied there, vs the number that graduated from Average State University? I went to one of those, and remember post grads from some very poor countries complaining that the level was not as high as they had been used to back home.
Blame the widespread acceptance of altruism, by far the unquestionable default morality of the world, which promotes a "greater good" or "brother's keeper" value that supersedes one's own life and personal value system.
Could it be that engineering degrees are a dime-a-dozen in oil-rich countries where middle-eastern terrorists usually originate? How many people in these countries don't have engineering degrees?
Hmm... some googling:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got his engineering degree in North Carolina. Mohammed Atta got an engineering degree in Cairo (and studied English and German there), but his PhD in Hamburg, Germany. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied mechanical engineering in London, UK. It's unclear whether he graduated.
Speaking of degrees being a dime a dozen: In the United States, almost 30% of the population has at a Bachelors degree or higher, and again that many have attended university but only have an associates degree or nothing. In other words, unless wikipedia is wrong, two thirds of the population has attended college. According to the Unesco website, the situation is similar in Western Europe. According to that same website, "23% attended college in the Arab States, 11% in South and West Asia and, despite rapid growth, only 6% in Africa"
Google is refusing to specify these statistics to engineering degrees, but the numbers above suggest that degrees are actually a dime a dozen in "the west", and not in the oil rich countries where middle eastern terrorists usually originate.
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
Personally, I disagree. Flash works flawlessly on chrome. More features can be added later, you have to remember it is a beta. finally, as a person who had compiled Chrome OS, It works great. My only problem with it is lack of wireless card support, but once again BETA.
I thought one idea of games was to escape various aspects of the real world, by pretending to be somebody we aren't (like a would-be ruler of the world)?. Why do we want to be dragged as ourselves into the game enviornment????
Just as we were starting to think that the art of bullying was stagnant, old fashioned, stuck in the 80's here comes microsoft with a patent on fully automated online bullying. There may yet be a future for bullies after all! Maybe the xbox could come with a rolled up towel implement too, or take your glasses and break them.
Not exactly, as you send it to your bank, not to the recipient of the money, and it can only be used to send money from one bank account to another.
If someone else got hold of your transfer cards, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it, unless they don't mind the bank and thus the police knowing the thief's bank account number.
Bank transfers, Mr. Conspiracy Theorist. Cheques have been obsolete in much of Europe for years, yet there's no crushing dictatorship preventing people from giving money to one another.
Continental Europe here. Haven't used checks since the 80's, I didn't know they still existed. You used to put a bank transfer order in your bank's mailbox or mail it to them, but even that is something I haven't done this century, as it's so much more convenient to just enter a bank transfer order on your online banking web site.
That's assuming email addresses are random sequences of letters, digits and dots.
If you're a spammer and don't mind missing the email of mr. q9x7.3f.1zzp@hotmail.com, a phone book would probably provide an effective dictionary for narrowing that keyspace considerably
It's not about what's easily fixed, it's about what is. The market for PC software is huge, but the market for 3D graphics heavy PC games is not as huge as you might expect. The current generation of consoles really are more powerful than most PC's when it comes to running modern games.
Not sure all the mods understand what a 'troll' is. Hint: it's not a synonym for 'i disagree with this'
2. Consoles obviously aren't as powerful as PCs, but again, 1 seems far from happening.
I don't really agree with this statement.
My PC at work is far more powerful than my gaming PC at home in terms of memory, processor, disk transfer speed, but it doesn't have a 3D accelerated gfx card, so it couldn't be used for playing modern games. The latter is true for nearly all PC's in existence.
It is a bit strong for Americans to accuse the French of being cowards considering that USA never gets involved in a war that you don't are completely and massively military superior in. France fought brave and well in WW2 but still lost. USA wouldn't know anything about fighting such a war where you risk losing your country. I guess you know that since you keep repeating that lame meme about France. It was old years ago and now it is just embarrassing so watch.
/Not French
</RantMode>
Actually, they did fight one such war, the civil war, and even today, a century and a half later, that conflict is still an enormously big deal, especially in the south, which was defeated. This makes it all the more annoying that knowing this, they still can't grasp the concept of being defeated. There is no fighting on after your army has been defeated and your country occupied.
That said, maybe the French fought bravely, but certainly not well in WW2. Fearing a repeat of WW1 where a whole generation of french boys died in the trenches, their army was now heavily fortified and excellently prepared for a repeat of the previous war. As the new war was mobile, they were simply bypassed, surrounded and completely defeated in a matter of weeks.
That is possibly correct, I don't know an awful lot about it, but that's not what that graph you linked to says. It says there are about 70 stars at a distance of 80 light years. If you want to know the number of stars within 80 light years, then you need to look at the area below the curve. Looks like about (80 * 65) / 2, about 2600 stars.
so hopefully we will see LED bulbs that trounce CFL efficiency pretty soon.
Good, because CFL bulbs have been a major disappointment for me. In practice, the 10x longer lifespan compared to ordinary light bulbs turned out to be a lie. In my home they've lasted about equally long as ordinary light bulbs. They also weren't as bright as advertised; a bulb that was advertised as being as bright as a 100W incandescent bulb actually looks remarkably less bright.
They should not have promised lifespans and levels of brightness that they couldn't make good on. The bulky size, the ugly color and to a lesser extent the warm up time have gotten better over the years, but because I will not compromise on truth in advertisement(*), there isn't a brand of CFL bulbs left that I'm willing to buy.
From what I understand, it is. It's shown to those who have a high Karma, moderate, and meta-moderate. So, the good users.:)
I don't moderate or meta-moderate, and I don't think I have high karma, but I do get the check box for disabling ads. I think it might be related to the age of your account.
The EU Council doesn't give a shit about European Parliament. Seriously, Iran is probably a better democracy than the EU. Most if not all democratic elements of the EU organization do not have any real power.
People keep repeating this, but it's like saying NAFTA isn't a democracy. The EU is not a country, it's a group of independent countries that have agreed to stop protecting their internal market from each other. The EC is chosen by governments of the member countries, all of which are democracies. Ambassadors and diplomats are not elected representatives either.
Giving the European Parliament actual power and making the EU Council an actual government would amount to turning the EU into a federation, a single country. This is a concept that doesn't have popular support anywhere. It won't happen, it's ridiculous.
I'm American and I've traveled overseas quite a bit. I didn't run into a lot of hate.
I'm a euro and I spend a lot of time in the US. While staying there can be absolutely delightful on a superficial level (good food, wild nature, lots of space, polite yet informal people, clean cities), I've learned to keep my mouth shut, and just zone out whenever a discussion takes place. When asked for my opinion, I've learned to answer only in variations on 'dunno', 'uhm' and 'you're right'. When people ask where I'm from, I'll make up a word that may sound like a real place to avoid everything I do, say or think reflecting on an entire country. Anything short of blind devotion to all things American, and in fact disagreeing with an American may be taken as anti-American, ungrateful and arrogant and a reason to put you right back in your place. I don't encounter 'hate' much, but a lot of contempt. The sudden darkening of people's moods when the realization hits them 'wait a minute, this euro thinks he's an equal'.
Anyway, it can be avoided by playing the quiet type, sticking to superficial and / or work related subjects and let them blame your apparent lack of an opinion or ego on the years of communism in your native Molvania.
And, it's quite surprising how few people can really do that. Most people think that much of what programmers and computers do really is just so much hand-waving, and while they crave the power of a programmer, they don't crave the attention to detail that something so simple as transposing two numbers can destroy.
I don't mean to be nasty, but in what universe do "people crave the power of a programmer" but alas, do not possess the attention to detail ?
Ask your average lawyer, military officer, brain surgeon, business person or artist whether they decided against a career in programming because they simply didn't crave the attention to detail?
If many people craved this "power", many more people would be taking programming classes. Programming is considered a very menial job, on a similar level as the tech support guy who comes to install your new office PC. There is a good reason why it is work largely done by kids and immigrants. The pay is poor compared to others with a college degree, the hours are poor, and on a first date you have be 'vague' about what you do for a living (my own favorite is 'engineer', my apologies to real engineers).
They weren't forced to split up like ING and Royal Bank of Scotland, and those banks weren't even guilty of violating anti trust laws, it was their punishment for receiving government bailouts.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that I believe the perception of bias against American companies is an artefact of selective reporting. If evidence to the contrary were to come up, I suspect retaliations in the form of sanctions and/or WTO would follow.
As I understand it, the EC anti trust office acts when it receives complaints rather than going out searching for violations. I suppose it's possible they acted on a complaint filed by SAP, but that doesn't necessarily mean the EC had an anti American or pro SAP bias.
This is nothing more than the EU protecting a European company from stiffer competition.
Selection bias. When the EC recently ordered the breakup of two of the world's largest financial institutions (one of which was the largest in the world), you didn't hear about it, because they are based in the Netherlands and the UK and don't make gadgets. As such it's not news that's relevant to slashdot or any other American media, or so you will never hear about it.
The same story with european grocery giants, beer giants, engineering giants and petroleum companies that have been investigated or sanctioned by the EC. By definition, you will never hear about it unless the target is a multinational based in the US, because you have no reason to read foreign media.
I actually do think the EC anti trust office has overused its power under the current commissioner, especially when it comes to dismantling banks, but there is no evidence for any bias based on countries; the harshest measures have been against European companies.
I don't personally have a problem with them continuing to have copyright protection, but really the moment the last of them is dead, it should go to the public pretty soon after.
If you're going to tie copyright to the death of the artist, please make it a couple of decades after the artist's death, otherwise it would be a strong incentive for exploiting an artist's death, or even for murder.
I'll gladly pay for legal ways to watch TV shows online. I don't want to wait 2 years for it to be released on DVD, I don't want to drive to the video store to get a scratched piece of plastic covered in suspicious stains and I don't want to have to return said piece of plastic. For this convenience, I'm even willing to pay as much as for a DVD rental despite the vastly lower overhead costs.
Alas, the studios will not allow services like that outside the US, Canada and sometimes the UK.
Licensing content by region doesn't make sense on the internet. License it by number of users instead, perhaps?
If you think calculus was your main stumbling block, you could have always taken it at a community college where the coursework would be easier...
Calculus is usually taught in high school here from ~14 yr old iirc. Does calculus mean something fundamentally different in the US? It's difficult to imagine someone considering it a stumbling block...
I don't recall math getting complicated until we were required to derive proofs, 1st year of college.
Slashdot Mirror
But what is the breakdown within those percentages of engineering degrees. I suspect as a whole, that Europe's percentage will be higher than in the US and the Arab and Asian nations even higher still. The reason the numbers are so inflated in the west is all the liberal arts degrees that people take so that they can "get a degree".
Possibly true, I don't have the data, but the O.P. implied that engineering degrees in the 3rd world are a dime a dozen.
I'm pretty sure there isn't an equivalent of MIT in Cairo, but then what percentage of engineers in "the West" have studied there, vs the number that graduated from Average State University? I went to one of those, and remember post grads from some very poor countries complaining that the level was not as high as they had been used to back home.
Blame the widespread acceptance of altruism, by far the unquestionable default morality of the world, which promotes a "greater good" or "brother's keeper" value that supersedes one's own life and personal value system.
Ayn Rand, you're alive and posting on slashdot!
Could it be that engineering degrees are a dime-a-dozen in oil-rich countries where middle-eastern terrorists usually originate? How many people in these countries don't have engineering degrees?
Hmm... some googling:
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got his engineering degree in North Carolina.
Mohammed Atta got an engineering degree in Cairo (and studied English and German there), but his PhD in Hamburg, Germany.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied mechanical engineering in London, UK. It's unclear whether he graduated.
Speaking of degrees being a dime a dozen: In the United States, almost 30% of the population has at a Bachelors degree or higher, and again that many have attended university but only have an associates degree or nothing. In other words, unless wikipedia is wrong, two thirds of the population has attended college. According to the Unesco website, the situation is similar in Western Europe. According to that same website, "23% attended college in the Arab States, 11% in South and West Asia and, despite rapid growth, only 6% in Africa"
Google is refusing to specify these statistics to engineering degrees, but the numbers above suggest that degrees are actually a dime a dozen in "the west", and not in the oil rich countries where middle eastern terrorists usually originate.
Over the years it has gotten more and more clear to me that (counter-intuitively perhaps) it is entirelty possible for very intelligent, learned and hard working men to be religious fanatics, homicidal maniacs, perverts, terrorists, psychopaths, all-round assholes or all of the above. Moral outlook and intelligence don't seem to be very strongly related at all.
Personally, I disagree. Flash works flawlessly on chrome. More features can be added later, you have to remember it is a beta. finally, as a person who had compiled Chrome OS, It works great. My only problem with it is lack of wireless card support, but once again BETA.
Gmail was in beta for more than 5 years,
I thought one idea of games was to escape various aspects of the real world, by pretending to be somebody we aren't (like a would-be ruler of the world)?.
Why do we want to be dragged as ourselves into the game enviornment????
Just as we were starting to think that the art of bullying was stagnant, old fashioned, stuck in the 80's here comes microsoft with a patent on fully automated online bullying. There may yet be a future for bullies after all! Maybe the xbox could come with a rolled up towel implement too, or take your glasses and break them.
Try getting a 60+ year old grandparent to do that instead of sending a cheque to their grandchild in their birthday card ;)
Oddly, the 60+ yr old grandparents of my kids don't seem to have any trouble with it.
Not exactly, as you send it to your bank, not to the recipient of the money, and it can only be used to send money from one bank account to another.
If someone else got hold of your transfer cards, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it, unless they don't mind the bank and thus the police knowing the thief's bank account number.
it's so much more convenient to just enter a bank transfer order on your online banking web site.
And what do you do if you aren't near a trustworthy, network-connected computer?
Then you make the payment later, when they send you an invoice
Bank transfers, Mr. Conspiracy Theorist. Cheques have been obsolete in much of Europe for years, yet there's no crushing dictatorship preventing people from giving money to one another.
Continental Europe here. Haven't used checks since the 80's, I didn't know they still existed. You used to put a bank transfer order in your bank's mailbox or mail it to them, but even that is something I haven't done this century, as it's so much more convenient to just enter a bank transfer order on your online banking web site.
That's assuming email addresses are random sequences of letters, digits and dots.
If you're a spammer and don't mind missing the email of mr. q9x7.3f.1zzp@hotmail.com, a phone book would probably provide an effective dictionary for narrowing that keyspace considerably
It's not about what's easily fixed, it's about what is. The market for PC software is huge, but the market for 3D graphics heavy PC games is not as huge as you might expect. The current generation of consoles really are more powerful than most PC's when it comes to running modern games.
Not sure all the mods understand what a 'troll' is. Hint: it's not a synonym for 'i disagree with this'
2. Consoles obviously aren't as powerful as PCs, but again, 1 seems far from happening.
I don't really agree with this statement.
My PC at work is far more powerful than my gaming PC at home in terms of memory, processor, disk transfer speed, but it doesn't have a 3D accelerated gfx card, so it couldn't be used for playing modern games. The latter is true for nearly all PC's in existence.
It is a bit strong for Americans to accuse the French of being cowards considering that USA never gets involved in a war that you don't are completely and massively military superior in. France fought brave and well in WW2 but still lost. USA wouldn't know anything about fighting such a war where you risk losing your country. I guess you know that since you keep repeating that lame meme about France. It was old years ago and now it is just embarrassing so watch.
/Not French
</RantMode>
Actually, they did fight one such war, the civil war, and even today, a century and a half later, that conflict is still an enormously big deal, especially in the south, which was defeated. This makes it all the more annoying that knowing this, they still can't grasp the concept of being defeated. There is no fighting on after your army has been defeated and your country occupied.
That said, maybe the French fought bravely, but certainly not well in WW2. Fearing a repeat of WW1 where a whole generation of french boys died in the trenches, their army was now heavily fortified and excellently prepared for a repeat of the previous war. As the new war was mobile, they were simply bypassed, surrounded and completely defeated in a matter of weeks.
Surprising indeed. There are only about 70 stars within 80 light years of us
That is possibly correct, I don't know an awful lot about it, but that's not what that graph you linked to says. It says there are about 70 stars at a distance of 80 light years. If you want to know the number of stars within 80 light years, then you need to look at the area below the curve. Looks like about (80 * 65) / 2, about 2600 stars.
And why would EBCDIC make audio any harder to implement than on an ASCII or UNICODE based OS/machine?
Because audio files usually come in a human readable, XML based format, of course.
Is your Phil Collins greatest hits collection sounding a bit like a German industrial band? Probably chose the wrong code page for the conversion!
Going after people who push drugs on children?
And then sending it by DCC or posting it to their facebook account? Or simply emailing the drugs?
That is great, nobody would be against that
Seriously, under current laws, it's already illegal to sell drugs to people, including to children.
so hopefully we will see LED bulbs that trounce CFL efficiency pretty soon.
Good, because CFL bulbs have been a major disappointment for me. In practice, the 10x longer lifespan compared to ordinary light bulbs turned out to be a lie. In my home they've lasted about equally long as ordinary light bulbs. They also weren't as bright as advertised; a bulb that was advertised as being as bright as a 100W incandescent bulb actually looks remarkably less bright.
They should not have promised lifespans and levels of brightness that they couldn't make good on. The bulky size, the ugly color and to a lesser extent the warm up time have gotten better over the years, but because I will not compromise on truth in advertisement(*), there isn't a brand of CFL bulbs left that I'm willing to buy.
(*) well, a decent approximation
From what I understand, it is. It's shown to those who have a high Karma, moderate, and meta-moderate. So, the good users. :)
I don't moderate or meta-moderate, and I don't think I have high karma, but I do get the check box for disabling ads. I think it might be related to the age of your account.
The EU Council doesn't give a shit about European Parliament. Seriously, Iran is probably a better democracy than the EU. Most if not all democratic elements of the EU organization do not have any real power.
People keep repeating this, but it's like saying NAFTA isn't a democracy. The EU is not a country, it's a group of independent countries that have agreed to stop protecting their internal market from each other. The EC is chosen by governments of the member countries, all of which are democracies. Ambassadors and diplomats are not elected representatives either.
Giving the European Parliament actual power and making the EU Council an actual government would amount to turning the EU into a federation, a single country. This is a concept that doesn't have popular support anywhere. It won't happen, it's ridiculous.
I'm American and I've traveled overseas quite a bit. I didn't run into a lot of hate.
I'm a euro and I spend a lot of time in the US. While staying there can be absolutely delightful on a superficial level (good food, wild nature, lots of space, polite yet informal people, clean cities), I've learned to keep my mouth shut, and just zone out whenever a discussion takes place. When asked for my opinion, I've learned to answer only in variations on 'dunno', 'uhm' and 'you're right'. When people ask where I'm from, I'll make up a word that may sound like a real place to avoid everything I do, say or think reflecting on an entire country. Anything short of blind devotion to all things American, and in fact disagreeing with an American may be taken as anti-American, ungrateful and arrogant and a reason to put you right back in your place. I don't encounter 'hate' much, but a lot of contempt. The sudden darkening of people's moods when the realization hits them 'wait a minute, this euro thinks he's an equal'.
Anyway, it can be avoided by playing the quiet type, sticking to superficial and / or work related subjects and let them blame your apparent lack of an opinion or ego on the years of communism in your native Molvania.
And, it's quite surprising how few people can really do that. Most people think that much of what programmers and computers do really is just so much hand-waving, and while they crave the power of a programmer, they don't crave the attention to detail that something so simple as transposing two numbers can destroy.
I don't mean to be nasty, but in what universe do "people crave the power of a programmer" but alas, do not possess the attention to detail ?
Ask your average lawyer, military officer, brain surgeon, business person or artist whether they decided against a career in programming because they simply didn't crave the attention to detail?
If many people craved this "power", many more people would be taking programming classes. Programming is considered a very menial job, on a similar level as the tech support guy who comes to install your new office PC. There is a good reason why it is work largely done by kids and immigrants. The pay is poor compared to others with a college degree, the hours are poor, and on a first date you have be 'vague' about what you do for a living (my own favorite is 'engineer', my apologies to real engineers).
Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?
They weren't forced to split up like ING and Royal Bank of Scotland, and those banks weren't even guilty of violating anti trust laws, it was their punishment for receiving government bailouts.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that I believe the perception of bias against American companies is an artefact of selective reporting. If evidence to the contrary were to come up, I suspect retaliations in the form of sanctions and/or WTO would follow.
As I understand it, the EC anti trust office acts when it receives complaints rather than going out searching for violations. I suppose it's possible they acted on a complaint filed by SAP, but that doesn't necessarily mean the EC had an anti American or pro SAP bias.
This is nothing more than the EU protecting a European company from stiffer competition.
Selection bias. When the EC recently ordered the breakup of two of the world's largest financial institutions (one of which was the largest in the world), you didn't hear about it, because they are based in the Netherlands and the UK and don't make gadgets. As such it's not news that's relevant to slashdot or any other American media, or so you will never hear about it.
The same story with european grocery giants, beer giants, engineering giants and petroleum companies that have been investigated or sanctioned by the EC. By definition, you will never hear about it unless the target is a multinational based in the US, because you have no reason to read foreign media.
I actually do think the EC anti trust office has overused its power under the current commissioner, especially when it comes to dismantling banks, but there is no evidence for any bias based on countries; the harshest measures have been against European companies.
I don't personally have a problem with them continuing to have copyright protection, but really the moment the last of them is dead, it should go to the public pretty soon after.
If you're going to tie copyright to the death of the artist, please make it a couple of decades after the artist's death, otherwise it would be a strong incentive for exploiting an artist's death, or even for murder.
I'll gladly pay for legal ways to watch TV shows online. I don't want to wait 2 years for it to be released on DVD, I don't want to drive to the video store to get a scratched piece of plastic covered in suspicious stains and I don't want to have to return said piece of plastic. For this convenience, I'm even willing to pay as much as for a DVD rental despite the vastly lower overhead costs.
Alas, the studios will not allow services like that outside the US, Canada and sometimes the UK.
Licensing content by region doesn't make sense on the internet. License it by number of users instead, perhaps?
Calculus??? CALCULUS??? Dear lord...
If you think calculus was your main stumbling block, you could have always taken it at a community college where the coursework would be easier...
Calculus is usually taught in high school here from ~14 yr old iirc. Does calculus mean something fundamentally different in the US? It's difficult to imagine someone considering it a stumbling block...
I don't recall math getting complicated until we were required to derive proofs, 1st year of college.