I have to agree. Most chaotic systems are only chaotic at certain scales (whether those scales be time or space). For an example look at fluid dynamics. At a small enough scale it tends to be very predicatable (laminar flow), at larger scales (time and space) it become chaotic, at even larger scales it becomes predictable again. After all you don't often see rivers jump out of thier beds and climb cliffs.
> Maybe I'm just stupid (always a possiblity with/. posters;) but I see your statements in direct contradiction to each other.
Ahh the joys of statistics.
Flip a coin once and you have a 50% chance of heads or tails. Flip a coin 1000 times and probability says it is most likely that you will get about 50% heads and 50% tails. It says nothing about the outcome of any individual flip and hence gives you no predictive ability wrt any indiviual flip of the coin. As the number of times you flip the coin tends to infinity the probability of a 50:50 split asymtotically approaches 1.0
The climate is a chaotic system but predictions can be made about chaotic systems (don't know how good they are wrt climate). The climate is most definetly a gamble. The gamble is the cost of doing nothing compared to the cost of doing something or perhaps the gains made by doing nothing v's the gains made by doing something. Study the form and place your bets because the costs/gains could be massive either way or alternatley they could be very small.
If you flip a coin 999 times and it is always heads that gives you no predictive power over what the outcome of a 1000'th flip will be. However if you flip a coin 1000 times the chance of there being about a 50:50 split heads and tails is significantly higher then the chance of there being a 100:0 split (or a 0:100 split). Perform the experiment enough times and draw a graph an you will see that it approximates a Normal/Gaussian distribution.
As I said in another reply to you thread scheduling and garbage collection do not alter the results produced by your code.
The threading model provided by java works as advertised. If you did not take the time to RTFM then its your own fault you got bit.
And as I have said before java can and does take advantage of platform specific optimisations. VM's are capable of compiling bytecode to machine code (after security checks have been performed)
But all of that is pretty much beside the point. Java is popular is areas where you need a language that tries fairly hard to protect developers from themselves. Its not as powerful as C/C++ but with power comes responsibilty and the increased chance of doing something really nasty. It does not matter if you think that java is faster/slower then language x, it has its place.
The code I write is complex (there is lots of it) and using a language that can stop anyone on the development team from making stupid mistakes is a win for us. It is also a win for our customers as they end up with products that are more reliable. Yes they still have bugs but those bugs do not crash the servers (web servers/app servers that is). This means more reliability for them.
C compilers can be written in C because C compiles to machine code which a computer can run. Java is compiled to bytecode which most hardware cannot run (apart from the processors I mentioned which can run bytecode directly). Therefore you have a bootstrap problem. How can you write a VM in java when the hardware cannot run bytecode.
Statically compiling bytecode to machine code is, in general, a waste of time and effort. You loose many of the advantages of java such as its code verification mechanisms and, unless you are very clever, its dynamic loading/linking. You also loose its security model. After you have worked around all those problems you end up with the same optimisation issues languages like C suffer from. Static optimisation of code can only take you so far. Without profiling the code when it is running you cannot reliably tell which optimisations are necessary (you could perform this profiling by hand and modify your code but then you either loose portability or have to support lots of platform specific optimisad code. VM's have an advantage here in that they can (and do) analyse the code while it is running and do compile heavily used sections into machine code.
If you read the specification for java's memory model then you would find that it explicitly does not specify scheduling algorithms and it is correct not to do so as it could heavliy impact performance on some hardware/OS combinations. It provides a minimum set of requirements that must be met. If you code to the specification you will not have any problems related to scheduling. But then again if you don't read the spec and just assume that the threading model is preemptive you have no one to blame but yourself.
Garbage collection is transparent. Its implementation does not affect your code in any way. (apart from the length of time it takes to perform the GC)
As for finalizers the less said about them the better. They are basically a very bad implementation of an occasionally necessary function. And they arn't quite as bad as you make out. They are not gaurenteed to run only because the VM cannot ensure they are run in the presence of a vm error/forced shutdown. My advise is "don't use them" they are nasty.
Yes GC is an old concept but that does not mean it is static. There is a lot of research in GC techniques and optimisations. Its a changing field and producing improvements all the time.
Java is not the be-all end-all of protable programng languages but in general is does allow you to write code that is more portable.
You ahve already touched on one of the differences. Java does guarentee you the same numerical answer on all platforms (if you use strictfp). This can really become a problem if doing simulation where errors have a nasty tendancy to accumulate). Trig functions vary greatly in the accuray of the results they return. In C/C++ this can often be worked around unsing compiler flags but they introduce the same overhead that javas trig functions do (although java does now have two sets of trig functions. One set is guranteed to produce the same results and one set is used for performance).
Another difference is realted to the memeory/threading model that the Java memeory model defines. This is of vital importance if you are writing multi-threaded programs. It provides a baseline of requirements that must be supplied by the VM. In C/C++ this does not exist. Niether spec defines the way that multi-threaded code interacts. It's all left to third party theading libs/OS primatives. Even if you choose the same library its behaviour can often differ on different hardware.
Just a few of the things I noticed when coding C and Java.
Java does have some performance problems related to numerical computing. Primarily this is due to its cross platfrom nature. In java you are guarenteed to get the same answer on every platform, irrespective of the hardware FP unit. C, C++, Fortran do dot make that gauratee. FP units do produce different results for the same operation (especially trig functions) (The major one is how much accuracy is used for intermediate results in the hardware) and because of this java often has to emulate math functions to get the result you expect.
If you are not interested in cross platform usage and you know exactly what your processor does for all fp operations then you can do without java. (Note many hardware platforms are now complying to international standards for fp (properly rather then the half arsed attempts made in the past))
In general JVM's are not optimized to compile byte code to processor extensions such as MMX/SIMD/Altevec. They could, to a limited degree, be implemented to do this. They currently are not.
Most languages cannot compete (performance wise) with fortran for numerical routines. Much of this is due to the structure of the language which allows compilers to optimise well and produce very performant machine code. Also this is partly due to the sheer amount of time the routines ahve been around and the amount of manual optimization put into them. This is good if you want the ultimate in performance.
Right thats some of the arguments. Figure out what your need and make your choice. (preferably after researching even more before making your decision)
Automatic garbage collection, in normal situations where many small short lived objects are created on the heap, is often faster then OS level memory allocation. However the cost tends to come in lumps rather then be amortized over the entire runtime of the application.
Javac is written in java. The java runtime is not normally written injava but thats due to a fundamental bootstrap problem on most hardware/OS.
However some hardware can run java byte code directly and in those cases the VM (or at least the management parts such as memory managmenet) can be written in java.
No it was not the "dark ages". The prim cultural morals in the west primarily derive from the Victorians.
However the morals of our societies do change, in cycles, over time. Cromwell, as Lord Protector, imposed puritanical behaviour patterns on Engaland in the 1650's. After his death the country solwly returned to normal only to become very moralistic again. The last time this happened (in the UK) was with the Victorians. Much of the world (yes even the US) is still affected by them.
Use of air guns has increased, use of handguns has decreased (after a massive increase the previous year). The number of weapons used in burglery has dropped. The number of homicides committed with fire arms has dropped 17%.
No conclusive oppinions about the mayhem which rising gun crime is supposidely bringing to the Uk is possible as the stats arn't that exciting.
>First rule of owning a cell phone. If it rings, you don't have to answer...
I really wish that more people would learn this very simple rule.
However it is an ingraned habbit that was formed using landlines. I know of so many people who will get up to answer a phone even if they are busy (eating dinner for example) rather then let it ring for the 20 or 30 seconds most callers will wait. If its important people will call again or leave a message.
I have never understood why OO is taught to people as a good mapping of reality. (All those examples of Employers/Managers/Employees. Reality rarely falls into nice neat categories from which class heirarchies can (should) be derived. Reality is too messy and prone to change to warrent inheritence. Design patterns however are wonderful uses of inheritence, polymorphism, et al.
>the US: Rights are given to us be God/Nature >Europe: Rights are given by our government
That is fiction. Under british law (I'm english by the way not french). Anything not illegal is legal. Hence the government/courts can only restrict behaviour. They can not grant you rights. They CAN grant you the guarentee that they will not infringe on your rights. They can prohibit behaviours/actions.
In america. anything not illegal is legal (derived from britsh law). Hence the government/courts can only restrict behaviour. They can not grant you rights. They CAN grant you the guarentee that they will not infringe on your rights. The ammendments that you are so proud of constitute such a guarentee. They can prohibit behaviours/actions.
In both cases you have a right to do/own/be/pratice anything that is not proscribed by your government. Things that are proscribed you cannot do (actually the government cant take away your right to do anything in both countries all they can do is punish you for disobedience) If you don't like it you vote for new representatives and get them to change the law.
Now where is the difference?
By the way I am interested in how you can show legal proof of belonging to a religion. Card carrying christians? RFID implants for jews?
Anyway here are the comments of somone, who is more eloquent then myself, on this subject "...putting the veil on the heads of children and adolescents who have not come of legal age should be prohibited in law," states Mansoor Hekmat in his dissertation in defence of banning the veil for children in 1997, "because it is the imposition of a certain clothing on the child by the followers of a certain religious sect. It so happens that the defence of the civil rights of the child and the child's right to choose (not an absolute in itself) require that this imposition be legally prevented. The child has no religion, tradition and prejudices. She has not joined any religious sect. She is a new human being who, by accident and irrespective of her will has been born into a family with specific religion, tradition, and prejudices. It is indeed the task of society to neuturalise the negative effects of this blind lottery. The society is duty-bound to provide fair and equal living conditions for children, their growth and development, and their active participation in social life. Any body who should try to block the normal social life of a child, exactly like those who would want to physically violate a child according to their own culture, religion, or personal or collective complexes, should be confronted with the firm barrier of the law and the serious reaction of society. No nine year old girl chooses to be married, sexually mutilated, serve as house maid and cook for the male members of the family, and be deprived of exercise, education, and play. The child grows up in the family and in society according to established customs, traditions, and regulations, and automatically learns to accept these ideas and customs as the norms of life. To speak of the choice of the Islamic veil by the child herself is a ridiculous joke. Any one who presents the mechanism of the veiling of a kindergarten-age girl as her own "democratic choice" either comes from outer space, or is a hypocrite who does not deserve to participate in the discussion about children's rights and the fight against discrimination. The condition for defending any form of the freedom of the child to experience life, the condition for defending the child's right to choose, is first and foremost, to prevent these automatic and common imposition."
Now apply that to all religions and religious articles.
>in the US, Freedom OF Religion is an important personal liberty that can not be infringed upon by any laws. In europe we have different charters and consitutions to you in the US. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights: "Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by
>we get around that in the US by keeping a running definition of what are religions (based on the census) and what are cults, so bob's church of jig hopping worship does not qualify as a religion.
So you do keep a list of offical religions then. That implies that the religion is not a personal thing anymore but has to be accepted by the majority/government to be respected. How does that affect the memebers of so called cults? Are they then to be discriminated against because there is no official recognition of thier religion? "One mans cult is another mans religion"
If this is passed into law in France then it WILL BE illegal in french public schools to show religious artifacts. In a similar way to public nudity being illegal in America. It seems that in France the majority will not consent to relious artifacts being worn in school. The bill way passed in the lower house by a massive margin. Note that while you can be imprissoned for being naked you can only be expelled for wearing religious atrifact. Nudity is a crimal offense, religous clothing in schools is not an offense but will have legal foundations (if the law is passed)
>I suspect that most religious groups will open up their own private community schools and take their kids out of the public schools. There is a long tradition of this is the UK and in other parts of europe too (france). Many communities with strong religious beliefs recognise that public schooling does not and will not provide the education that the community desires for its children. Mainly because the communities want some form of theological curriculum. The state has no business providing this education (although the private schools are often government subsidised)
In europe there is, at the moment, a fairly common belief that religion should be kept out of public education. Why? so that the education is NOT biased against any particular religion. (Rather like the concept of a secular government) Classes are provided that teach children about various religions but religous beliefs do not affect the way the schools are run nor do they influence the curriculum.
>I find it actualy quite horrable that a french school would force say an Iranian teenager to remove her Burka or coverings, and dress in a swim suit in the presence of Male students. that is nearly a defilation of her in her religion and will taint her to other men. Schools are farily tollerant and do not force things like this to happen. They do provide dispensations to children for a wide variety of reasons.
The law that may be passed in france has been proposed for a number of reasons. The primary one being to reduce religous and racist hate crimes which have been rising sharply in the past few years. Whether this law will alleviate the problems or not, is part of what the debate is about.
Your seem to have fallen in to the trap that many Americans do. You seem to believe that the American consitution and its ammendments are the best and only way to run a country. Well france has its own constitution and the part of it which deals with religion is this. "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs. It shall be organised on a decentralised basis" From that it is quite easy to claim that all citizens are equal and cannot (should not) be treated differently because of their religion. But that is just one interpretation.
>I mean there is almost a social segrigation of ethnic groups to the point of the extreme where some groups do not have to interact with other groups because the communities I think you need to travel a bit more. Yes there are tight knit communities centered around religions and/or lifestyles. This is true of the states too. However the majority of city dwellers live in very diverse communities. Saying that someone is part of a specific community does not imply
The law in the UK allows you to carry a knife if it is folding and less then three inches long. If you have a knife which is not of this type you need to show reason for carrying it. Some kinds of knife are just illegal (flick knifes (switch blades)).
It is not a particularly oppresive law and is no where near as absoulte as you implied.
>no you don't. the religion belongs to the person wearing the item, and the school should not be >involved except for tolerence education, and defence of a person's individual liberties.
You do. Otherwise anybody can claim that any clothing, or lack thereof, is part of thier personal religion. This defeats the purpose of dress codes in schools (which exist for a number of reasons (whether you agree with those reasons or not))
>the US can't be the only place that has been able to respect an individual's right to self expression in the public space. It may be true that only in the states is it believed that you have a right to wear what you want in public. However it is only BELIEVED to be the case. I know that in most, if not all states, nudity is not allowed in public. Is this a restriction of your personal rights? (religious or otherwise?) Or is it just showing deference to the rights of others, the majority of whom, presumably, do not want public nudity (I say presumably as I do not know why those laws were instituted and perhaps they are now outdated and need changing).
Living in a society is a game of give-and-take. You sacrafice some of your personal freedoms to obtain the benifits that your society provides you in exchange. Choosing the balance between the two is one of the reasons you vote.
The only place where it could be said that you are guarenteed freedom of expression is in private. In public there are many proscriptions on your behaviour (there are many proscriptions on your prvate behaviour also (use of non-legal drugs and your treatment of animals/humans for instance). Most of the prescriptions are not arduous.
Thats what you get for living in a democracy. You end up obaying rules instituted by the majority (idealy but not quite true in practice).
>yes, if the school does not offer an all girls swim class lead by a female teacher. otherwise, that girl will have to take swiming with women. Who will pay for it?
Well the ban targets religous artifacts because currently those are the only things that differentiate the children. In many parts of europe school uniforms are mandatory. The only (partial) exception is religous paraphernalia. If you allow religous garments then you start having to define religions. Then you are in a situation where you have a set of official religions and the garments allowed to be worn in school for each religion. Then you get protests from the unrecognised religions. bla bla bla.
Should a child be excused from swimming lessons as due to religous regions she cannot remove her burka?
Basically it gets messy. But the claim that it is only targeting religious stuff is missleading. It is targeting all clothing/haircuts/piercings etc that are not appropriate, or that interfere with teaching in schools. Its just that nobody complains about the non-religous aspects.
I have to agree. A couple of degree warming of a river can cause quite large changes to its flora and fawna. This is a large problem with power plants that just use water from near by rivers for cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree. Most chaotic systems are only chaotic at certain scales (whether those scales be time or space). For an example look at fluid dynamics. At a small enough scale it tends to be very predicatable (laminar flow), at larger scales (time and space) it become chaotic, at even larger scales it becomes predictable again. After all you don't often see rivers jump out of thier beds and climb cliffs.
matfud
> Maybe I'm just stupid (always a possiblity with /. posters ;) but I see your statements in direct contradiction to each other.
Ahh the joys of statistics.
Flip a coin once and you have a 50% chance of heads or tails. Flip a coin 1000 times and probability says it is most likely that you will get about 50% heads and 50% tails. It says nothing about the outcome of any individual flip and hence gives you no predictive ability wrt any indiviual flip of the coin. As the number of times you flip the coin tends to infinity the probability of a 50:50 split asymtotically approaches 1.0
The climate is a chaotic system but predictions can be made about chaotic systems (don't know how good they are wrt climate). The climate is most definetly a gamble. The gamble is the cost of doing nothing compared to the cost of doing something or perhaps the gains made by doing nothing v's the gains made by doing something. Study the form and place your bets because the costs/gains could be massive either way or alternatley they could be very small.
matfud
I think you misunderstand statistics.
If you flip a coin 999 times and it is always heads that gives you no predictive power over what the outcome of a 1000'th flip will be. However if you
flip a coin 1000 times the chance of there being about a 50:50 split heads and tails is significantly higher then the chance of there being a 100:0 split
(or a 0:100 split). Perform the experiment enough times and draw a graph an you will see that it approximates a Normal/Gaussian distribution.
As I said in another reply to you thread scheduling and garbage collection do not alter the results produced by your code.
The threading model provided by java works as advertised. If you did not take the time to RTFM then its your own fault you got bit.
And as I have said before java can and does take advantage of platform specific optimisations. VM's are capable of compiling bytecode to machine code (after security checks have been performed)
But all of that is pretty much beside the point. Java is popular is areas where you need a language that tries fairly hard to protect developers from themselves. Its not as powerful as C/C++ but with power comes responsibilty and the increased chance of doing something really nasty. It does not matter if you think that java is faster/slower then language x, it has its place.
The code I write is complex (there is lots of it) and using a language that can stop anyone on the development team from making stupid mistakes is a win for us. It is also a win for our customers as they end up with products that are more reliable. Yes they still have bugs but those bugs do not crash the servers (web servers/app servers that is). This means more reliability for them.
C compilers can be written in C because C compiles to machine code which a computer can run. Java is compiled to bytecode which most hardware cannot run (apart from the processors I mentioned which can run bytecode directly). Therefore you have a bootstrap problem. How can you write a VM in java when the hardware cannot run bytecode.
Statically compiling bytecode to machine code is, in general, a waste of time and effort. You loose many of the advantages of java such as its code verification mechanisms and, unless you are very clever, its dynamic loading/linking. You also loose its security model. After you have worked around all those problems you end up with the same optimisation issues languages like C suffer from. Static optimisation of code can only take you so far. Without profiling the code when it is running you cannot reliably tell which optimisations are necessary (you could perform this profiling by hand and modify your code but then you either loose portability or have to support lots of platform specific optimisad code. VM's have an advantage here in that they can (and do) analyse the code while it is running and do compile heavily used sections into machine code.
If you read the specification for java's memory model then you would find that it explicitly does not specify scheduling algorithms and it is correct not to do so as it could heavliy impact performance on some hardware/OS combinations. It provides a minimum set of requirements that must be met. If you code to the specification you will not have any problems related to scheduling. But then again if you don't read the spec and just assume that the threading model is preemptive you have no one to blame but yourself.
Garbage collection is transparent. Its implementation does not affect your code in any way. (apart from the length of time it takes to perform the GC)
As for finalizers the less said about them the better. They are basically a very bad implementation of an occasionally necessary function. And they arn't quite as bad as you make out. They are not gaurenteed to run only because the VM cannot ensure they are run in the presence of a vm error/forced shutdown. My advise is "don't use them" they are nasty.
matfud
Yes GC is an old concept but that does not mean it is static. There is a lot of research in GC techniques and optimisations. Its a changing field and producing improvements all the time.
Java is not the be-all end-all of protable programng languages but in general is does allow you to write code that is more portable.
You ahve already touched on one of the differences. Java does guarentee you the same numerical answer on all platforms (if you use strictfp). This can really become a problem if doing simulation where errors have a nasty tendancy to accumulate). Trig functions vary greatly in the accuray of the results they return. In C/C++ this can often be worked around unsing compiler flags but they introduce the same overhead that javas trig functions do (although java does now have two sets of trig functions. One set is guranteed to produce the same results and one set is used for performance).
Another difference is realted to the memeory/threading model that the Java memeory model defines. This is of vital importance if you are writing multi-threaded programs. It provides a baseline of requirements that must be supplied by the VM. In C/C++ this does not exist. Niether spec defines the way that multi-threaded code interacts. It's all left to third party theading libs/OS primatives. Even if you choose the same library its behaviour can often differ on different hardware.
Just a few of the things I noticed when coding C and Java.
matfud
Java does have some performance problems related to numerical computing. Primarily this is due to its cross platfrom nature. In java you are guarenteed to get the same answer on every platform, irrespective of the hardware FP unit. C, C++, Fortran do dot make that gauratee. FP units do produce different results for the same operation (especially trig functions) (The major one is how much accuracy is used for intermediate results in the hardware) and because of this java often has to emulate math functions to get the result you expect.
If you are not interested in cross platform usage and you know exactly what your processor does for all fp operations then you can do without java. (Note many hardware platforms are now complying to international standards for fp (properly rather then the half arsed attempts made in the past))
In general JVM's are not optimized to compile byte code to processor extensions such as MMX/SIMD/Altevec. They could, to a limited degree, be implemented to do this. They currently are not.
Most languages cannot compete (performance wise) with fortran for numerical routines. Much of this is due to the structure of the language which allows compilers to optimise well and produce very performant machine code. Also this is partly due to the sheer amount of time the routines ahve been around and the amount of manual optimization put into them. This is good if you want the ultimate in performance.
Right thats some of the arguments. Figure out what your need and make your choice. (preferably after researching even more before making your decision)
matfud
Just a minor point:
Automatic garbage collection, in normal situations where many small short lived objects are created on the heap, is often faster then OS level memory allocation. However the cost tends to come in lumps rather then be amortized over the entire runtime of the application.
Javac is written in java. The java runtime is not normally written injava but thats due to a fundamental bootstrap problem on most hardware/OS.
However some hardware can run java byte code directly and in those cases the VM (or at least the management parts such as memory managmenet) can be written in java.
No it was not the "dark ages". The prim cultural morals in the west primarily derive from the Victorians.
However the morals of our societies do change, in cycles, over time. Cromwell, as Lord Protector, imposed puritanical behaviour patterns on Engaland in the 1650's. After his death the country solwly returned to normal only to become very moralistic again. The last time this happened (in the UK) was with the Victorians. Much of the world (yes even the US) is still affected by them.
Look at the actual statistics (well 2003, the rest are available as quaterly updates)
s .hosb0104pdf&ns_type=pdf&ns_url=%5Bhttp://www.home office.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb0104.pdf
here http://uk.sitestat.com/homeoffice/homeoffice/s?rd
page 25
Notice that stats on gun crime also include replicas, air riles and use of some other devices.
Use of air guns has increased, use of handguns has decreased (after a massive increase the previous year). The number of weapons used in burglery has dropped. The number of homicides committed with fire arms has dropped 17%.
No conclusive oppinions about the mayhem which rising gun crime is supposidely bringing to the Uk is possible as the stats arn't that exciting.
matfud
>First rule of owning a cell phone. If it rings, you don't have to answer...
I really wish that more people would learn this very simple rule.
However it is an ingraned habbit that was formed using landlines. I know of so many people who will get up to answer a phone even if they are busy (eating dinner for example) rather then let it ring for the 20 or 30 seconds most callers will wait. If its important people will call again or leave a message.
matfud
I have never understood why OO is taught to people as a good mapping of reality. (All those examples of Employers/Managers/Employees. Reality rarely falls into nice neat categories from which class heirarchies can (should) be derived. Reality is too messy and prone to change to warrent inheritence. Design patterns however are wonderful uses of inheritence, polymorphism, et al.
matfud
The joys of internationalisation mean that char[]
is often not sufficient.
matfud
Hardware that directly runs bytecode has and still is being used in a number of areas.
B oo k/Part3/Chapter23/javaConcreteMachines.html
http://www.particle.kth.se/~lindsey/JavaCourse/
matfud
Oh yeh, Forgot to ask you. Where exactly was I generalising? How and why do you think that it caused the numerous points I made to be invalid.
Your last comment seemed to be.
I don't believe you cos I think you are generlising. America is the best Ra Ra Ra.
You did not address most of the views I presented.
matfud
>the US: Rights are given to us be God/Nature
>Europe: Rights are given by our government
That is fiction.
Under british law (I'm english by the way not french). Anything not illegal is legal. Hence the government/courts can only restrict behaviour. They can not grant you rights. They CAN grant you the guarentee that they will not infringe on your rights. They can prohibit behaviours/actions.
In america. anything not illegal is legal (derived from britsh law). Hence the government/courts can only restrict behaviour. They can not grant you rights. They CAN grant you the guarentee that they will not infringe on your rights. The ammendments that you are so proud of constitute such a guarentee. They can prohibit behaviours/actions.
In both cases you have a right to do/own/be/pratice anything that is not proscribed by your government. Things that are proscribed you cannot do (actually the government cant take away your right to do anything in both countries all they can do is punish you for disobedience) If you don't like it you vote for new representatives and get them to change the law.
Now where is the difference?
By the way I am interested in how you can show legal proof of belonging to a religion. Card carrying christians? RFID implants for jews?
Anyway here are the comments of somone, who is more eloquent then myself, on this subject
"...putting the veil on the heads of children and adolescents who have not come of legal age should be prohibited in law," states Mansoor Hekmat in his dissertation in defence of banning the veil for children in 1997, "because it is the imposition of a certain clothing on the child by the followers of a certain religious sect. It so happens that the defence of the civil rights of the child and the child's right to choose (not an absolute in itself) require that this imposition be legally prevented. The child has no religion, tradition and prejudices. She has not joined any religious sect. She is a new human being who, by accident and irrespective of her will has been born into a family with specific religion, tradition, and prejudices. It is indeed the task of society to neuturalise the negative effects of this blind lottery. The society is duty-bound to provide fair and equal living conditions for children, their growth and development, and their active participation in social life. Any body who should try to block the normal social life of a child, exactly like those who would want to physically violate a child according to their own culture, religion, or personal or collective complexes, should be confronted with the firm barrier of the law and the serious reaction of society. No nine year old girl chooses to be married, sexually mutilated, serve as house maid and cook for the male members of the family, and be deprived of exercise, education, and play. The child grows up in the family and in society according to established customs, traditions, and regulations, and automatically learns to accept these ideas and customs as the norms of life. To speak of the choice of the Islamic veil by the child herself is a ridiculous joke. Any one who presents the mechanism of the veiling of a kindergarten-age girl as her own "democratic choice" either comes from outer space, or is a hypocrite who does not deserve to participate in the discussion about children's rights and the fight against discrimination. The condition for defending any form of the freedom of the child to experience life, the condition for defending the child's right to choose, is first and foremost, to prevent these automatic and common imposition."
Now apply that to all religions and religious articles.
>in the US, Freedom OF Religion is an important personal liberty that can not be infringed upon by any laws.
In europe we have different charters and consitutions to you in the US.
Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
"Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by
>we get around that in the US by keeping a running definition of what are religions (based on the census) and what are cults, so bob's church of jig hopping worship does not qualify as a religion.
So you do keep a list of offical religions then. That implies that the religion is not a personal thing anymore but has to be accepted by the majority/government to be respected. How does that affect the memebers of so called cults? Are they then to be discriminated against because there is no official recognition of thier religion?
"One mans cult is another mans religion"
If this is passed into law in France then it WILL BE illegal in french public schools to show religious artifacts. In a similar way to public nudity being illegal in America. It seems that in France the majority will not consent to relious artifacts being worn in school. The bill way passed in the lower house by a massive margin. Note that while you can be imprissoned for being naked you can only be expelled for wearing religious atrifact. Nudity is a crimal offense, religous clothing in schools is not an offense but will have legal foundations (if the law is passed)
>I suspect that most religious groups will open up their own private community schools and take their kids out of the public schools.
There is a long tradition of this is the UK and in other parts of europe too (france). Many communities with strong religious beliefs recognise that public schooling does not and will not provide the education that the community desires for its children. Mainly because the communities want some form of theological curriculum. The state has no business providing this education (although the private schools are often government subsidised)
In europe there is, at the moment, a fairly common belief that religion should be kept out of public education. Why? so that the education is NOT biased against any particular religion. (Rather like the concept of a secular government)
Classes are provided that teach children about various religions but religous beliefs do not affect the way the schools are run nor do they influence the curriculum.
>I find it actualy quite horrable that a french school would force say an Iranian teenager to remove her Burka or coverings, and dress in a swim suit in the presence of Male students. that is nearly a defilation of her in her religion and will taint her to other men.
Schools are farily tollerant and do not force things like this to happen. They do provide dispensations to children for a wide variety of reasons.
The law that may be passed in france has been proposed for a number of reasons. The primary one being to reduce religous and racist hate crimes which have been rising sharply in the past few years. Whether this law will alleviate the problems or not, is part of what the debate is about.
Your seem to have fallen in to the trap that many Americans do. You seem to believe that the American consitution and its ammendments are the best and only way to run a country. Well france has its own constitution and the part of it which deals with religion is this.
"France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs. It shall be organised on a decentralised basis"
From that it is quite easy to claim that all citizens are equal and cannot (should not) be treated differently because of their religion. But that is just one interpretation.
>I mean there is almost a social segrigation of ethnic groups to the point of the extreme where some groups do not have to interact with other groups because the communities
I think you need to travel a bit more. Yes there are tight knit communities centered around religions and/or lifestyles. This is true of the states too. However the majority of city dwellers live in very diverse communities. Saying that someone is part of a specific community does not imply
The law in the UK allows you to carry a knife if it is folding and less then three inches long. If you have a knife which is not of this type you need to show reason for carrying it. Some kinds of knife are just illegal (flick knifes (switch blades)).
It is not a particularly oppresive law and is no where near as absoulte as you implied.
matfud
>no you don't. the religion belongs to the person wearing the item, and the school should not be
>involved except for tolerence education, and defence of a person's individual liberties.
You do. Otherwise anybody can claim that any clothing, or lack thereof, is part of thier personal religion. This defeats the purpose of dress codes in schools (which exist for a number of reasons (whether you agree with those reasons or not))
>the US can't be the only place that has been able to respect an individual's right to self expression in the public space.
It may be true that only in the states is it believed that you have a right to wear what you want in public. However it is only BELIEVED to be the case. I know that in most, if not all states, nudity is not allowed in public. Is this a restriction of your personal rights? (religious or otherwise?) Or is it just showing deference to the rights of others, the majority of whom, presumably, do not want public nudity (I say presumably as I do not know why those laws were instituted and perhaps they are now outdated and need changing).
Living in a society is a game of give-and-take. You sacrafice some of your personal freedoms to obtain the benifits that your society provides you in exchange. Choosing the balance between the two is one of the reasons you vote.
The only place where it could be said that you are guarenteed freedom of expression is in private. In public there are many proscriptions on your behaviour (there are many proscriptions on your prvate behaviour also (use of non-legal drugs and your treatment of animals/humans for instance). Most of the prescriptions are not arduous.
Thats what you get for living in a democracy. You end up obaying rules instituted by the majority (idealy but not quite true in practice).
>yes, if the school does not offer an all girls swim class lead by a female teacher. otherwise, that girl will have to take swiming with women.
Who will pay for it?
matfud
Well the ban targets religous artifacts because currently those are the only things that differentiate the children. In many parts of europe school uniforms are mandatory. The only (partial) exception is religous paraphernalia. If you allow religous garments then you start having to define religions. Then you are in a situation where you have a set of official religions and the garments allowed to be worn in school for each religion. Then you get protests from the unrecognised religions. bla bla bla.
Should a child be excused from swimming lessons as due to religous regions she cannot remove her burka?
Basically it gets messy. But the claim that it is only targeting religious stuff is missleading. It is targeting all clothing/haircuts/piercings etc that are not appropriate, or that interfere with teaching in schools. Its just that nobody complains about the non-religous aspects.
matfud
Next time I suggest you read what the parent ACTUALLY said before you comment.
I have to agree. A couple of degree warming of a river can cause quite large changes to its flora and fawna. This is a large problem with power plants that just use water from near by rivers for cooling.