"I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?"
No. It's not that the smart ones are, in particular, not going into science and engineering. It's that more _people in general_ are going into things like law, the financial sector, etc., which means that statistically more of the really good people will go in those directions as well (although we can, of course, point out that someone who is good at law or finance might not be good at engineering or science, and vice versa). Science and engineering no longer have the draw they used to, particularly after the tech bubble burst.
I don't really know why this is. Could be a lot of things. Could be that we're more materialistic, and that yes, you can ultimately make more money in those sectors (although most of the people I know who graduated from law school are fleeing the practice of law like rats from a sinking ship). Could be that people used to go into science because it was more prestigious and indeed patriotic to do so after Sputnik scared the living shit out of us. Nothing like a hostile nation launching something over your heads for the first time to convince you that falling behind technologically could leave you in the middle of mushroom cloud, momentarily wishing you'd studied more math before you vaporize.
Combine that with the fact that tech is the best way to get out of India and China and come to the US, and maybe that explains the disparity.
Regardless, it says very bad things about our future as a country.
Oh, for god's sake. I don't understand why this is getting so much press. It was stupid when it went up on Digg, and it's stupid that it's showing up here. This isn't substantially different from any of the other parallel architecture and programming work that's been going on for the last two decades. Their benchmarks are against embarrassingly parallelizable algorithms like matrix multiplies and randomized quicksort, things that any half-intelligent lemur (with a math and cs class or two) could get to run quickly. The hard part is speeding up your average desktop application which, I guarantee you, is not spending the majority of its time doing matrix multiplies.
On top of that, their "parallel extension of von Neumann" amounts to adding primitives to start and stop threads into the language. Again, any half-intelligent lemur (with a slightly different skill set from the first) could have done that. And I think a few actually have (at the risk of comparing language researchers to lemurs). It doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Oh, and did we mention no floating point and the lack of any memory bandwidth to get data into and out of this thing?
This is over-hyped research and shameless self-promotion, and for some weird reason the press seems to be buying it. Stop it.
Individual employees, and even whole companies, who refuse to patent software are doing nothing but screwing themselves. One person's refusal to patent is simply another's opportunity to do so, and thus there's no motivation to change the system. There's no way to reform the patent system other than getting the law itself changed, and, in fact, the best way to do that is to drive the system into the ground. The more stupid, pointless, trivial patents there are out there, the sooner the system grinds itself to a halt.
It's meaningless to say the Bill of Rights or the Constitution "says what it says." When the Framers wrote it, they didn't have the internet. Hell, they didn't have electric machines that could create huge numbers of copies of flyers, books, etc. Do you want to argue that freedom of the press means, literally, that presses a la the 18th century should physically be free? Like, they can walk around in the printing shops if they want to?
Come on...these documents are expressing general ideas, and it's the job of the courts to figure out how those ideas apply to the modern day. Advocating a "strict" view of the Constitution is just ducking the issue and arrogantly assuming your interpretation is the only valid one when in fact it is just that: a subjective interpretation.
With regard to campaign finance, you're arguing for Murphy's Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Or, in this case, he who has the gold gets to talk. Fine, but that's fundamentally undemocratic. The whole point of a democracy is equal voice regardless of factors like economic status. And, as another poster pointed out, there are points of view that are anathema to interests with a lot of money and won't in your system be expressed in any kind of visible way. You're de facto censoring those.
I have never understood how any rational person could consider libertarian philosophies justifiable if your goal is promoting the general well-being of the populations they are supposed to cover. If you're simply self-interested and want to hole up in a cave with a shotgun and a bible and have no interest in other people's well-being, and if you want jungle-law and think you can claw your way over the rest of your fellow humans to the top of the pack, then fine. I get that. But don't expect other people, who actually care about fostering an equitable society with equal opportunity for all its members, to go along with your paranoid ramblings.
At the very least, give me something to go on. Stop mumbling incoherently about "freedom" and tell me what you mean by freedom. Do you mean freedom to do anything you want at any time? Like shoot someone you don't like? If not, where do you draw the limits? And if creating your free-for-all, anything goes state eventually results in the formation of warring (economically if not militarily) kingdoms where a few people control most of the resources and dole them out at their whim to the other 99% of the population, do you regard that as a "free" society? Is being "unencumbered" by laws and taxes so tantamount that you're willing to live with the ultimate consequences of not having them, which by most measures would be a far more restrictive and frankly more miserable society for most people than if you put up with them?
>Freedom of speech applies to political speech. Campaign finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional. This ruling is offensive because it implies that only established and recognized "press" entities qualify -- and the government, whose interest is markedly not neutral, gets to decide who is and isn't "press".
This argument is profoundly naive. Follow the bouncing ball, boys and girls:
The point of the first amendment was to allow dissent. Monarchs and other ruling parties had a bad habit of throwing people who disagreed with them in jail and engaging in all manner of insidious methods that attempted to shut them up. The Framers thought this was a bad thing in a democracy where the health of government depends on free debate of the issues, of which dissent is an integral part (you hear that, GW?). So, the very first amendment was designed to protect this right to the end of fostering free discussion.
But there's a problem. Not all speech is created equal. See, in order for people to hear what you're saying, you have to put it in some kind of medium. And media are private, for-profit entities, which means more money=more message. In fact, given that the total amount of effective media is limited (there are only so many channels and only so many primetime hours, for instance), people (or corporations, since the Supreme Court stupidly decided that legally they are people too) with lots and lots of money can drive up the price for media spots high enough that the spots/slots become totally inaccessible to smaller parties. Therefore, you get censoring in effect if not in law.
Point being, if you stick your libertarian little fingers in your ears and warble "LALALALALALALA!!!" as loud as you possibly can and refuse to take economic effects into account when considering free speech, you can end up with exactly the same quelling of dissent in effect as you would have had you outright made a law "abridging the freedom of the press."
I know that Google can do no wrong in the eyes of the Slashdot community, and on the surface the idea of rewarding employees with millions of dollars seems like a good thing, but I think ultimately it's a profoundly bad idea. With the stakes so high, think about how the runners-up will feel. Google is a company with a lot of smart, hard-working people, and the idea that one particular group would get millions while one that didn't do quite as well in some exec's eyes gets nothing is kind of painful.
And indeed, that's another point. There's no possible objective measure to base the decision on. It's somebody's whim. Moreover, any decent project in a company should span several people and likely several groups. How do you decide who to reward? Maybe it was the marketers who made the product a success. Maybe it was the HR person who spent their weekends recruiting the all-star who led the project? Etc. etc. etc.
As Google becomes a larger and larger company, they're going to have severe growing pain. I'll be impressed if they don't implode under their own weight.
Slashdot Mirror
"I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?"
No. It's not that the smart ones are, in particular, not going into science and engineering. It's that more _people in general_ are going into things like law, the financial sector, etc., which means that statistically more of the really good people will go in those directions as well (although we can, of course, point out that someone who is good at law or finance might not be good at engineering or science, and vice versa). Science and engineering no longer have the draw they used to, particularly after the tech bubble burst.
I don't really know why this is. Could be a lot of things. Could be that we're more materialistic, and that yes, you can ultimately make more money in those sectors (although most of the people I know who graduated from law school are fleeing the practice of law like rats from a sinking ship). Could be that people used to go into science because it was more prestigious and indeed patriotic to do so after Sputnik scared the living shit out of us. Nothing like a hostile nation launching something over your heads for the first time to convince you that falling behind technologically could leave you in the middle of mushroom cloud, momentarily wishing you'd studied more math before you vaporize.
Combine that with the fact that tech is the best way to get out of India and China and come to the US, and maybe that explains the disparity.
Regardless, it says very bad things about our future as a country.
Oh, for god's sake. I don't understand why this is getting so much press. It was stupid when it went up on Digg, and it's stupid that it's showing up here. This isn't substantially different from any of the other parallel architecture and programming work that's been going on for the last two decades. Their benchmarks are against embarrassingly parallelizable algorithms like matrix multiplies and randomized quicksort, things that any half-intelligent lemur (with a math and cs class or two) could get to run quickly. The hard part is speeding up your average desktop application which, I guarantee you, is not spending the majority of its time doing matrix multiplies.
On top of that, their "parallel extension of von Neumann" amounts to adding primitives to start and stop threads into the language. Again, any half-intelligent lemur (with a slightly different skill set from the first) could have done that. And I think a few actually have (at the risk of comparing language researchers to lemurs). It doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Oh, and did we mention no floating point and the lack of any memory bandwidth to get data into and out of this thing?
This is over-hyped research and shameless self-promotion, and for some weird reason the press seems to be buying it. Stop it.
Individual employees, and even whole companies, who refuse to patent software are doing nothing but screwing themselves. One person's refusal to patent is simply another's opportunity to do so, and thus there's no motivation to change the system. There's no way to reform the patent system other than getting the law itself changed, and, in fact, the best way to do that is to drive the system into the ground. The more stupid, pointless, trivial patents there are out there, the sooner the system grinds itself to a halt.
It's meaningless to say the Bill of Rights or the Constitution "says what it says." When the Framers wrote it, they didn't have the internet. Hell, they didn't have electric machines that could create huge numbers of copies of flyers, books, etc. Do you want to argue that freedom of the press means, literally, that presses a la the 18th century should physically be free? Like, they can walk around in the printing shops if they want to?
Come on...these documents are expressing general ideas, and it's the job of the courts to figure out how those ideas apply to the modern day. Advocating a "strict" view of the Constitution is just ducking the issue and arrogantly assuming your interpretation is the only valid one when in fact it is just that: a subjective interpretation.
With regard to campaign finance, you're arguing for Murphy's Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Or, in this case, he who has the gold gets to talk. Fine, but that's fundamentally undemocratic. The whole point of a democracy is equal voice regardless of factors like economic status. And, as another poster pointed out, there are points of view that are anathema to interests with a lot of money and won't in your system be expressed in any kind of visible way. You're de facto censoring those.
I have never understood how any rational person could consider libertarian philosophies justifiable if your goal is promoting the general well-being of the populations they are supposed to cover. If you're simply self-interested and want to hole up in a cave with a shotgun and a bible and have no interest in other people's well-being, and if you want jungle-law and think you can claw your way over the rest of your fellow humans to the top of the pack, then fine. I get that. But don't expect other people, who actually care about fostering an equitable society with equal opportunity for all its members, to go along with your paranoid ramblings.
At the very least, give me something to go on. Stop mumbling incoherently about "freedom" and tell me what you mean by freedom. Do you mean freedom to do anything you want at any time? Like shoot someone you don't like? If not, where do you draw the limits? And if creating your free-for-all, anything goes state eventually results in the formation of warring (economically if not militarily) kingdoms where a few people control most of the resources and dole them out at their whim to the other 99% of the population, do you regard that as a "free" society? Is being "unencumbered" by laws and taxes so tantamount that you're willing to live with the ultimate consequences of not having them, which by most measures would be a far more restrictive and frankly more miserable society for most people than if you put up with them?
>Freedom of speech applies to political speech. Campaign finance laws are blatantly unconstitutional. This ruling is offensive because it implies that only established and recognized "press" entities qualify -- and the government, whose interest is markedly not neutral, gets to decide who is and isn't "press".
This argument is profoundly naive. Follow the bouncing ball, boys and girls:
The point of the first amendment was to allow dissent. Monarchs and other ruling parties had a bad habit of throwing people who disagreed with them in jail and engaging in all manner of insidious methods that attempted to shut them up. The Framers thought this was a bad thing in a democracy where the health of government depends on free debate of the issues, of which dissent is an integral part (you hear that, GW?). So, the very first amendment was designed to protect this right to the end of fostering free discussion.
But there's a problem. Not all speech is created equal. See, in order for people to hear what you're saying, you have to put it in some kind of medium. And media are private, for-profit entities, which means more money=more message. In fact, given that the total amount of effective media is limited (there are only so many channels and only so many primetime hours, for instance), people (or corporations, since the Supreme Court stupidly decided that legally they are people too) with lots and lots of money can drive up the price for media spots high enough that the spots/slots become totally inaccessible to smaller parties. Therefore, you get censoring in effect if not in law.
Point being, if you stick your libertarian little fingers in your ears and warble "LALALALALALALA!!!" as loud as you possibly can and refuse to take economic effects into account when considering free speech, you can end up with exactly the same quelling of dissent in effect as you would have had you outright made a law "abridging the freedom of the press."
Quit yer bitchin'.
I know that Google can do no wrong in the eyes of the Slashdot community, and on the surface the idea of rewarding employees with millions of dollars seems like a good thing, but I think ultimately it's a profoundly bad idea. With the stakes so high, think about how the runners-up will feel. Google is a company with a lot of smart, hard-working people, and the idea that one particular group would get millions while one that didn't do quite as well in some exec's eyes gets nothing is kind of painful.
And indeed, that's another point. There's no possible objective measure to base the decision on. It's somebody's whim. Moreover, any decent project in a company should span several people and likely several groups. How do you decide who to reward? Maybe it was the marketers who made the product a success. Maybe it was the HR person who spent their weekends recruiting the all-star who led the project? Etc. etc. etc.
As Google becomes a larger and larger company, they're going to have severe growing pain. I'll be impressed if they don't implode under their own weight.