IMHO, it is not just price but the extent to which companies and governments will go to keep the price of their labor low. If it was just the free market at work, wages would raise, and all boats would rise together. Tieing large anchors to the labor force, will cause everyone dependent on wages to sink.
Related to the experience question: Many US business pundits claim that the US is only outsourcing the low end code monkey and support jobs, and is keeping the higher end, more prestigeous "project management" and architect jobs in the US?
First, is this the case? or is India also excelling in architectural and design work?
If it is the case, is there a resentment for the imperialistic attitude in only giving India the low end projects?
Finally, in a land where there are real monkeys am I making a big cultural blunder by calling people "code monkeys"?
The international reaction to H1-B was the first question on my mind as well. How many people came back from the US with a great deal of resentment?
On the other hand, I suspect that a good number of people came back from the US with a black book full of contacts, a project or two and perhaps a little seed money.
I am not sure about the products advertised in the spam. But, reading through all the different forums on the internet, it seems clear that something is successfully turning men into dicks and women into boobs.
If this had happened in a third world country many in USA would have called it corruption or unacceptable.
That is completely absurd. If an appointment like this happened in the third world, the adminstration would assess the impact on US business (especially on campaign contributors). If they found a negative impact, then they would call it corruption based on their findings.
This blanket statement that the US condemns all third world corruption is absurd. We are highly selective.
I like the model of a company called Music Muse in Provo of all places. Apparently the idea of a CD/Music venue was based on similar venues in Southern California.
It is amazing. Since the Olympics, there has been an explosion of interest in local music along the Wasatch Front. The are often bands playing downtown in the streets, and more and more people recording CDs. It is a trend I hope continues. Limited print CDs bring some much needed cash to local musicians.
I've come across some new mixed concept shops which are geared entirely around local music. The store had a stage for bands to play, sells and promotes local musicians, helps local musicians with recording, etc.. Difficulties in the megastore record store concept might open the door for more local and independent music scene.
In the US, schools are trying to get rid of a thing called Classical Logic that has Aristotlenian roots (Artistotle was a clown in ancient Greece who couldn't count the teeth of a horse). We are replacing it with Hegelian logic via John Dewey (John Dewey is famed for the Dewey decimal system...which is odd because the Dewey decimal system was invented by Melvil Dewey.). Having been educated in the US, I did not know about Classical Logic or Grammar until I met someone who was upset about the change...anyway, I got it wrong in my first post. Classical Grammar taught that sentences had a subject and predicate. This classical grammar fit into Classical logic in a thing called a syllogism. A syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. It looks something like:
Men die. (major premise)
Socrates is a man. (minor premise)
Socrates will die. (conclusion)
People used to study the difference between a valid and invalid syllogism, which is silly.
We needed to get rid of this so that we could use the new and improved logic invented by Hegel. In Hegel's system words and sentences are always changing. One of the other replies to my post talks about how grammars are all artificial constructs, and the grammar itself and the meaning of all the words change according to political ebbs and tides. So there is no valid or invalid reasoning.
One of Hegel's greatest interest was the master slave relation. A Master/Slave reversal happens when the master grows weak and becomes dependent on the slave. The slave is now the master. Slavery might look bad at the offset, but its meaning changes, and slavery becomes freedom.
It is easy to show that freedom is slavery, because people who are free have to suffer the consequences of their actions. Slaves do not.
Classical logic was part of the failed old world order. Getting rid of the classical logic frees us from the false sense of order, allowing us to arrive at the new world order. Today, we would say that this is a paradigm shift. We now have lots of different grammars and words that change meanings. There is more room for the butterflies to flutter.
I'm learning more about sentence construction in my German class than I have in English over the past 13 years.
The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.
To make matters worse, the new style grammars that have been place for the last half century rejected teaching sentence structure. For important philosophical reasons, you are not supposed to know about the predicate and object in a sentence. Me, I learned about helper words and action words, and am clueless about real English grammar.
the more educated one is, the less likely they are to believe in things like creationism. It's a fact.
That depends on where you were educated. In a society that holds to a secular education, you are probably correct. I happen to know many people with substantially more education than me who hold fervently to biblical creationism.
As for the myth argument, the statement begs the question of whether or not evolution is a myth. Many parts of evolution have been shown to be myth...such as the gradual change myths. Then there is the possibility that an omipotent being created the earth using an "evolution in a box" kit that he got from the cosmic equivalent of Walmart.
BTW, I hold to the evolution myth and the Linux is for real myth, but know I could be wrong on both. I do know that others have different points of view.
The fact that the paint is trying to address environmental problems will probably make people have even greater worries about what chemicals it puts into the ground water etc..
People should realize that all paints and coatings end up in the environment.
I admit this is intriguing science. The most interesting thing about pollution reducing coatings to work, there will need to be a unique formula for each city. I live in a city where the worst pollution days happen in the dead of winter with temperature around 30 degrees farenheit. Other cities get bad during the heat.
It is an interesting science, but not a one size fits all science.
I recently went to an open house for a new school called Northface University. They have an extremely interesting bachelor of science degree in computer science where you will spend 28 weeks working on state of the art IT. The teachers include Terry Halpin and Joe Celko. The school is in its first year of existence. That actually means you would be working directly with the professors as they establish curriculum. The idea is to pack a full bachelors degree in a 28 month intense programming fest.
what gives you the gall to assume that Utahn's are susceptiple to this type of argument?
Being educated does not mean you will not fall for myths. Education sometimes makes people more apt to fall for myths. For example, it really could be the that large portions of Linux were willfully copied from SCO, and all the highly educated people on slashdot fell for it. We all believe in the myth of Linus Torvolds. He is too pure to allow the copying of another's code into Linux without consent. Very few linux users have read and or verified the source of all the code in the program.
Look at the number of educated people who fell for the myth that if enough people were copying music via P2P that the courts would roll over and nullify the copyright laws.
As for the image of the common man fighting against corporate interests and the liberal elite of the East. Utah's #2 hero is Philo Farnsworth who stood against RCA. And currently the Utah Legislature is passing legislation to withdraw from the United Nations.
If SCO can position this to the jurers as a fight between a small company and IBM...then it is a completely different beast than if it is positioned as a company buying up property rights then suing on shaky ground.
It would be possible to pick a jury in Salt Lake who have never heard of Santa Cruz Operations, but have heard of IBM.
The Salt Lake Tribune has an article positioning this as a David v. Goliath suit of SCO against IBM...IBM stealing the assets developed by a small Provo firm. Utahns are extremely susceptiple to this type of argument.
Personally, I suspect that in a few hundred years, people will look at wage labor with the same horror that we currently look on slavery. Personally, I think the center of the economic world is people pursuing their own values. The free market gives people that chance.
The wage labor market, however, traps the majority of the population into these absolutely horrid 9-5 jobs. To break the tension, we become highly destructive during our vacations and our personal consumption.
Hopefully, some day in the future we will break form the prison of big business and get back to a free market centered on people.
While the machine code generated might be the same, there are lots of ways to get there.
Thanks for reminding the forum that Assembler is already one step removed from the actual machine language. I threw myself against several assembler lanuages and never got the result I desired. I loved the logic but hated the syntax.
Personally, I wish that, in the evolution of computer languages, we spent a little bit more time evolving a somewhat more intuitive set of languages at the assembler level. As there is still a great deal of programming that really should be done at the machine level, an assembler rival might help spur on the use of linux.
You do have a good point, the fact that a 1932 font is still copyrighted is absurd. The law is also a bit narrow if it limits to the process that generates the font and not simply the appearance. At least there is a chance that in the next 50 years, the copyright will expire...unless Congress decides to extend copyright durations again.
If you rely on another business so much that it can make or break you, it's time to find a new business model.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when there are only a few dominant players in an industry. Auto shops are generally dependent on the decisions of auto manufacturers. Look at the hassles created by the little onboard computers. Mechanics have to pay big time to get diagnostic equipment. A lot of independent software firms were wiped out when MS managed to get a monopoly on the OS.
All the independent manufacturers who are dependent on Walmart have no choice about the their fate. Walmart controls the customer base.
In health care, the big insurance companies make or break private practices.
If you wish to ridicule everyone in the web design business because they are dependent on Google, I wish you would at least name a few industries where the small players on not dependent on the whims of an empowered elite.
From a web site designer perspective, Google often seems to be a random traffic generator. I often find my sites scoring high for irrelevant keywords. There is really no good way, on the free side of the board, to say that my site fits this set of keywords and doesn't fit that set of keywords. I really dislike the idea that I have to change the content for the search engine.
This type of problem gets magnified when there is one primary search engine with one primary result set.
Font selection and standardization is a big deal. People read through the process of pattern recognition. Using standard fonts substantially increases the speed at which people read and their comprehension of what they read.
Times New Roman is not a Microsoft v. the world thing. The font was developed by The Timesin 1932. It is a relatively compact font. It was used by papers as they were able to get a large number of words per page and was easy to read.
A standardized font improves quality. It makes documents uniform, etc..
Microsoft included Times New Roman because it was a common, standardized font, not the other way around.
And how are we going to know if something is illegal is done if we never look at cyber cafes or discuss what they are doing?
The problem isn't that cyber cafes are more prone to illegal activities than other businesses, but if you adopt the stance that cyber cafes are off limits and anything goes when you dub it a "cyber cafe", then people looking for a front for illegal activities will start cyber cafes.
I agree that we need to avoid the government fiat. However, the first time we get a report of a pornographer using a "cyber cafe" as a front for his real operation...kiddie pr0n, then we will get beat to pieces by the moral majority.
Cyber cafes are still in their infancy; however, since you can run just about any type of business you want in the guise of a cyber cafe, the cyber cafe will be under a great deal of scrutiny. As cyber cafes can be anything, the worst scenario is that they can quickly become the source of everything illegal in a community.
One of the obvious uses of cyber cafe's is for conducting ecommerce. The cyber cafe could easily be used as a place for ordering and even shipping items. In this regards, cyber cafe/mail center combo could be a great service to the homeless or to travelers.
With a good screen and sound system, the cyber cafe can quickly become a quasi theatre where the owners are essentially selling tickets to whatever is displayed on the 72" plasma display.
Imagine a cyber cafe promoting an adult dating service...where you essentially order from the women waiting in the back room of the cafe.
I've checked out cyber cafes dedicated 100% to gaming. This cafe was essentially an arcade game. The ease with which cyber cafes can quickly drift into other forms of business brings up questions beyond an individual wanting to browse porn in public.
Of course, public accessible computers aren't just limited to cafes. Stores of all sorts are starting to have publicly accessible computers that do things like price checks, allow for customized products, etc..
I think these cases and rulings are simply part of the evolution of a new type of business. Unfortunately, since a cyber cafe can be anything, there needs to be public scrutiny and debate.
People need to realize that the move to India is not just outsourcing. The US market is saturated. US companies need to get into India, Pakistan and other booming markets because that is where the growth will occur.
As for the jobs issues. There is not a net loss of jobs when you think of the world as a whole. This outsourcing is actually creating a big boom in job growth.
The one big question, though, is if the jobs will result in salary increases in the third world, or just hasten the transfer of wealth to the wealthiest of the world?
To make the database even more interesting, the prophet (whoever that happens to be at the moment) can reassign wives at will. If you (assuming you are a guy) get out of line (question the prophet, etc.) then you lose your wives, your house, your kids, your shiny little thrown in heaven, your planet (apparently you get a planet full of people to worship you if you are sufficiently "righteous".). Krakhauer's book indicates that kids might switch owners several times in their lives.
To straighten the wives out in heaven, apparently women are built with a cool password encryption device. When you get sealed (which is different from getting married) the bishop assigns the girl a password. Having the password is more powerful than being married. Of course, the bishop knows all the passwords, which is scary...but I guess heaven needs sysadmins too. Joseph Smith had the secret password to a lot of other men's wives. He will get to take the wives in heaven. Joseph Smith will have one of the biggest harems. Not quite as big as Jesus' harem, but it will be a mighty impressive collection.
There is a baptizing the dead game that goes on. I am not sure what rights you get over the people who you baptize in proxy.
Back to the government database. The other really interesting trick in Utah's colorful culture is that people are taught to hate and mistrust the government. Meaning they often don't fill out any paperwork on kids. (I wouldn't be surprised if the ones on the dole don't occasionally fill out paper work on kids twice to double their take from the evil government).
BTW: When you look at all the funkiness going on with the wives, you can see why, in Utah, company's think you can contribute to an GNU project and keep their copyright too.
There has actually been some rather profound changes in our attitude to calculus and some big advancement in teaching Calculus in the last several decades.
The biggest change in mathematics is computers. In 1900 people were using continuous equations to estimate values for large discrete events. Today, it is really easy to add a column of a million numbers. In fact, we are tending to the opposite extreme. Today we are apt to use discrete mathematics to estimate continuous events. This change might best be called a de-emphasis of Calculus (so it would not warrant a big jump in text book prices). I met Joe Celko at Northface University who says they are using a technique of finite differences to teach calculus. He mentioned other schools are using a technique with nested sets to teach calculus. I dislike transfinite theory because it overemphasizes paradoxes, but I would like to see this new technique.
Personally, however, I believe there is a great deal of merit in the traditional approach to Calculus, and really couldn't see a value in any new technique unless it greatly improved the ability to learn the subject, or otherwise cut the cost of learning Calculus. Northface wanted to use the method of differences as they are focusing on CS. They had a good reason for their approach. I would not use the technique for engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, it is not just price but the extent to which companies and governments will go to keep the price of their labor low. If it was just the free market at work, wages would raise, and all boats would rise together. Tieing large anchors to the labor force, will cause everyone dependent on wages to sink.
Related to the experience question: Many US business pundits claim that the US is only outsourcing the low end code monkey and support jobs, and is keeping the higher end, more prestigeous "project management" and architect jobs in the US?
First, is this the case? or is India also excelling in architectural and design work?
If it is the case, is there a resentment for the imperialistic attitude in only giving India the low end projects?
Finally, in a land where there are real monkeys am I making a big cultural blunder by calling people "code monkeys"?
The international reaction to H1-B was the first question on my mind as well. How many people came back from the US with a great deal of resentment?
On the other hand, I suspect that a good number of people came back from the US with a black book full of contacts, a project or two and perhaps a little seed money.
I am not sure about the products advertised in the spam. But, reading through all the different forums on the internet, it seems clear that something is successfully turning men into dicks and women into boobs.
That is completely absurd. If an appointment like this happened in the third world, the adminstration would assess the impact on US business (especially on campaign contributors). If they found a negative impact, then they would call it corruption based on their findings.
This blanket statement that the US condemns all third world corruption is absurd. We are highly selective.
I like the model of a company called Music Muse in Provo of all places. Apparently the idea of a CD/Music venue was based on similar venues in Southern California.
It is amazing. Since the Olympics, there has been an explosion of interest in local music along the Wasatch Front. The are often bands playing downtown in the streets, and more and more people recording CDs. It is a trend I hope continues. Limited print CDs bring some much needed cash to local musicians.
I've come across some new mixed concept shops which are geared entirely around local music. The store had a stage for bands to play, sells and promotes local musicians, helps local musicians with recording, etc.. Difficulties in the megastore record store concept might open the door for more local and independent music scene.
In the US, schools are trying to get rid of a thing called Classical Logic that has Aristotlenian roots (Artistotle was a clown in ancient Greece who couldn't count the teeth of a horse). We are replacing it with Hegelian logic via John Dewey (John Dewey is famed for the Dewey decimal system...which is odd because the Dewey decimal system was invented by Melvil Dewey.). Having been educated in the US, I did not know about Classical Logic or Grammar until I met someone who was upset about the change...anyway, I got it wrong in my first post. Classical Grammar taught that sentences had a subject and predicate. This classical grammar fit into Classical logic in a thing called a syllogism. A syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. It looks something like:
Men die. (major premise)
Socrates is a man. (minor premise)
Socrates will die. (conclusion)
People used to study the difference between a valid and invalid syllogism, which is silly.
We needed to get rid of this so that we could use the new and improved logic invented by Hegel. In Hegel's system words and sentences are always changing. One of the other replies to my post talks about how grammars are all artificial constructs, and the grammar itself and the meaning of all the words change according to political ebbs and tides. So there is no valid or invalid reasoning.
One of Hegel's greatest interest was the master slave relation. A Master/Slave reversal happens when the master grows weak and becomes dependent on the slave. The slave is now the master. Slavery might look bad at the offset, but its meaning changes, and slavery becomes freedom.
It is easy to show that freedom is slavery, because people who are free have to suffer the consequences of their actions. Slaves do not.
Classical logic was part of the failed old world order. Getting rid of the classical logic frees us from the false sense of order, allowing us to arrive at the new world order. Today, we would say that this is a paradigm shift. We now have lots of different grammars and words that change meanings. There is more room for the butterflies to flutter.
The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.
To make matters worse, the new style grammars that have been place for the last half century rejected teaching sentence structure. For important philosophical reasons, you are not supposed to know about the predicate and object in a sentence. Me, I learned about helper words and action words, and am clueless about real English grammar.
That depends on where you were educated. In a society that holds to a secular education, you are probably correct. I happen to know many people with substantially more education than me who hold fervently to biblical creationism.
As for the myth argument, the statement begs the question of whether or not evolution is a myth. Many parts of evolution have been shown to be myth...such as the gradual change myths. Then there is the possibility that an omipotent being created the earth using an "evolution in a box" kit that he got from the cosmic equivalent of Walmart.
BTW, I hold to the evolution myth and the Linux is for real myth, but know I could be wrong on both. I do know that others have different points of view.
The fact that the paint is trying to address environmental problems will probably make people have even greater worries about what chemicals it puts into the ground water etc..
People should realize that all paints and coatings end up in the environment.
I admit this is intriguing science. The most interesting thing about pollution reducing coatings to work, there will need to be a unique formula for each city. I live in a city where the worst pollution days happen in the dead of winter with temperature around 30 degrees farenheit. Other cities get bad during the heat.
It is an interesting science, but not a one size fits all science.
I recently went to an open house for a new school called Northface University. They have an extremely interesting bachelor of science degree in computer science where you will spend 28 weeks working on state of the art IT. The teachers include Terry Halpin and Joe Celko. The school is in its first year of existence. That actually means you would be working directly with the professors as they establish curriculum. The idea is to pack a full bachelors degree in a 28 month intense programming fest.
Being educated does not mean you will not fall for myths. Education sometimes makes people more apt to fall for myths. For example, it really could be the that large portions of Linux were willfully copied from SCO, and all the highly educated people on slashdot fell for it. We all believe in the myth of Linus Torvolds. He is too pure to allow the copying of another's code into Linux without consent. Very few linux users have read and or verified the source of all the code in the program.
Look at the number of educated people who fell for the myth that if enough people were copying music via P2P that the courts would roll over and nullify the copyright laws.
As for the image of the common man fighting against corporate interests and the liberal elite of the East. Utah's #2 hero is Philo Farnsworth who stood against RCA. And currently the Utah Legislature is passing legislation to withdraw from the United Nations.
If SCO can position this to the jurers as a fight between a small company and IBM...then it is a completely different beast than if it is positioned as a company buying up property rights then suing on shaky ground.
It would be possible to pick a jury in Salt Lake who have never heard of Santa Cruz Operations, but have heard of IBM.
The Salt Lake Tribune has an article positioning this as a David v. Goliath suit of SCO against IBM...IBM stealing the assets developed by a small Provo firm. Utahns are extremely susceptiple to this type of argument.
Personally, I suspect that in a few hundred years, people will look at wage labor with the same horror that we currently look on slavery. Personally, I think the center of the economic world is people pursuing their own values. The free market gives people that chance.
The wage labor market, however, traps the majority of the population into these absolutely horrid 9-5 jobs. To break the tension, we become highly destructive during our vacations and our personal consumption.
Hopefully, some day in the future we will break form the prison of big business and get back to a free market centered on people.
Thanks for reminding the forum that Assembler is already one step removed from the actual machine language. I threw myself against several assembler lanuages and never got the result I desired. I loved the logic but hated the syntax.
Personally, I wish that, in the evolution of computer languages, we spent a little bit more time evolving a somewhat more intuitive set of languages at the assembler level. As there is still a great deal of programming that really should be done at the machine level, an assembler rival might help spur on the use of linux.
The book is going into my wish list.
You do have a good point, the fact that a 1932 font is still copyrighted is absurd. The law is also a bit narrow if it limits to the process that generates the font and not simply the appearance. At least there is a chance that in the next 50 years, the copyright will expire...unless Congress decides to extend copyright durations again.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when there are only a few dominant players in an industry. Auto shops are generally dependent on the decisions of auto manufacturers. Look at the hassles created by the little onboard computers. Mechanics have to pay big time to get diagnostic equipment. A lot of independent software firms were wiped out when MS managed to get a monopoly on the OS.
All the independent manufacturers who are dependent on Walmart have no choice about the their fate. Walmart controls the customer base.
In health care, the big insurance companies make or break private practices.
If you wish to ridicule everyone in the web design business because they are dependent on Google, I wish you would at least name a few industries where the small players on not dependent on the whims of an empowered elite.
From a web site designer perspective, Google often seems to be a random traffic generator. I often find my sites scoring high for irrelevant keywords. There is really no good way, on the free side of the board, to say that my site fits this set of keywords and doesn't fit that set of keywords. I really dislike the idea that I have to change the content for the search engine.
This type of problem gets magnified when there is one primary search engine with one primary result set.
Font selection and standardization is a big deal. People read through the process of pattern recognition. Using standard fonts substantially increases the speed at which people read and their comprehension of what they read.
Times New Roman is not a Microsoft v. the world thing. The font was developed by The Times in 1932. It is a relatively compact font. It was used by papers as they were able to get a large number of words per page and was easy to read.
A standardized font improves quality. It makes documents uniform, etc..
Microsoft included Times New Roman because it was a common, standardized font, not the other way around.
And how are we going to know if something is illegal is done if we never look at cyber cafes or discuss what they are doing?
The problem isn't that cyber cafes are more prone to illegal activities than other businesses, but if you adopt the stance that cyber cafes are off limits and anything goes when you dub it a "cyber cafe", then people looking for a front for illegal activities will start cyber cafes.
I agree that we need to avoid the government fiat. However, the first time we get a report of a pornographer using a "cyber cafe" as a front for his real operation...kiddie pr0n, then we will get beat to pieces by the moral majority.
Cyber cafes are still in their infancy; however, since you can run just about any type of business you want in the guise of a cyber cafe, the cyber cafe will be under a great deal of scrutiny. As cyber cafes can be anything, the worst scenario is that they can quickly become the source of everything illegal in a community.
One of the obvious uses of cyber cafe's is for conducting ecommerce. The cyber cafe could easily be used as a place for ordering and even shipping items. In this regards, cyber cafe/mail center combo could be a great service to the homeless or to travelers.
With a good screen and sound system, the cyber cafe can quickly become a quasi theatre where the owners are essentially selling tickets to whatever is displayed on the 72" plasma display.
Imagine a cyber cafe promoting an adult dating service...where you essentially order from the women waiting in the back room of the cafe.
I've checked out cyber cafes dedicated 100% to gaming. This cafe was essentially an arcade game. The ease with which cyber cafes can quickly drift into other forms of business brings up questions beyond an individual wanting to browse porn in public.
Of course, public accessible computers aren't just limited to cafes. Stores of all sorts are starting to have publicly accessible computers that do things like price checks, allow for customized products, etc..
I think these cases and rulings are simply part of the evolution of a new type of business. Unfortunately, since a cyber cafe can be anything, there needs to be public scrutiny and debate.
People need to realize that the move to India is not just outsourcing. The US market is saturated. US companies need to get into India, Pakistan and other booming markets because that is where the growth will occur.
As for the jobs issues. There is not a net loss of jobs when you think of the world as a whole. This outsourcing is actually creating a big boom in job growth.
The one big question, though, is if the jobs will result in salary increases in the third world, or just hasten the transfer of wealth to the wealthiest of the world?
To make the database even more interesting, the prophet (whoever that happens to be at the moment) can reassign wives at will. If you (assuming you are a guy) get out of line (question the prophet, etc.) then you lose your wives, your house, your kids, your shiny little thrown in heaven, your planet (apparently you get a planet full of people to worship you if you are sufficiently "righteous".). Krakhauer's book indicates that kids might switch owners several times in their lives.
To straighten the wives out in heaven, apparently women are built with a cool password encryption device. When you get sealed (which is different from getting married) the bishop assigns the girl a password. Having the password is more powerful than being married. Of course, the bishop knows all the passwords, which is scary...but I guess heaven needs sysadmins too. Joseph Smith had the secret password to a lot of other men's wives. He will get to take the wives in heaven. Joseph Smith will have one of the biggest harems. Not quite as big as Jesus' harem, but it will be a mighty impressive collection.
There is a baptizing the dead game that goes on. I am not sure what rights you get over the people who you baptize in proxy.
Back to the government database. The other really interesting trick in Utah's colorful culture is that people are taught to hate and mistrust the government. Meaning they often don't fill out any paperwork on kids. (I wouldn't be surprised if the ones on the dole don't occasionally fill out paper work on kids twice to double their take from the evil government).
BTW: When you look at all the funkiness going on with the wives, you can see why, in Utah, company's think you can contribute to an GNU project and keep their copyright too.
There has actually been some rather profound changes in our attitude to calculus and some big advancement in teaching Calculus in the last several decades.
The biggest change in mathematics is computers. In 1900 people were using continuous equations to estimate values for large discrete events. Today, it is really easy to add a column of a million numbers. In fact, we are tending to the opposite extreme. Today we are apt to use discrete mathematics to estimate continuous events. This change might best be called a de-emphasis of Calculus (so it would not warrant a big jump in text book prices). I met Joe Celko at Northface University who says they are using a technique of finite differences to teach calculus. He mentioned other schools are using a technique with nested sets to teach calculus. I dislike transfinite theory because it overemphasizes paradoxes, but I would like to see this new technique.
Personally, however, I believe there is a great deal of merit in the traditional approach to Calculus, and really couldn't see a value in any new technique unless it greatly improved the ability to learn the subject, or otherwise cut the cost of learning Calculus. Northface wanted to use the method of differences as they are focusing on CS. They had a good reason for their approach. I would not use the technique for engineers.