Another way of putting it: A private citizen putting a sign reading "Romanes ite domum" on their front lawn is perfectly fine. The mayor putting "Romanes ite domum" on the lawn of the town hall in a town that's in the middle of a zoning dispute involving the Catholic Church, not so much.
It's legal for neo-Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, according to the US Supreme Court. It's legal for the KKK to exist. It's legal to stand around at funerals holding signs that say "God Hates Fags".
It's legal to hate things, or hate people, or hate groups of people, and to voice those opinions. What's not legal is committing a crime based on those opinions.
What's also quite possible is that the police have overstepped their bounds.
Seriously, if you look at what the 5 media giants (Disney, GE, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom) really want the Internet to become, it's a return to a broadcast-focused system where users can download or stream "content" helpfully provided by those same companies, but can't interact peer-to-peer.
For these kind of jerks, the idea that ordinary people can use the Internet to communicate with each other directly is considered a serious problem. For instance, they might use it to create alternate media sources that aren't tied to the same corporate advertisers as those 5 media companies. Or they might organize political protests that cause problems for these company's allies in Washington DC. Or they might spread information about ideas that these companies would rather suppress. Or they might organize workers in an industry and demand higher wages.
It's all about controlling the information and entertainment that us peons are allowed to experience and use to make decisions. And the danger extends beyond media companies - if regular people have created alternate forms of entertaining and informing each other, then they won't be bombarded with commercials, which means they won't buy the new useless kitchen gadgets and won't vote for the candidate who's picked up the most campaign cash. This ordinary-people-talking-to-each-other thing could be the force that *destroys America* (at least as the corporate and business guys see it).
But of course. We just keep playing stuff like this to them in their early childhood to imprint the right idea in their brains:
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
Girl is good in math/science. Girl gets picked on/teased for being smart. Girl has no parent/role model to provide support for being smart. Girl succumbs to peer pressure to play 'dumb' in math/science. Girl looses interest in math/science.
Your theory has a big problem in not matching up to reality: 1. Girls do about as well as boys in mathematical and scientific subjects, and may even be doing somewhat better. For instance, look at SAT scores by gender, and notice the utter lack of differences.
2. Female students now outnumber male students in most subjects, including some scientific subjects like medicine. That strongly suggests that there's some issues specific to software development that tend to keep the women out.
An alternate theory proposed by my female classmates: They not-infrequently encountered what they perceived as gender-based hostility in the computer labs, mostly from other students. For instance, there were cases of women being pushed to do the simpler UI work rather than the challenging algorithm work on group projects, no matter what their actual preference or skills. And there were a lot of issues with women getting a lot more male attention than they wanted, and in some cases being treated more as a piece of eye candy than as a student on equal footing to the men.
I keep seeing points like these made throughout the Slashdot thread, but aren't those all the common, basic traits of engineering colleges/universities? So where's the difference?
There isn't much of one, and that's one of the reasons I got my CS degree from a liberal arts college instead of an engineering school. Sure, it might mean that I'm not quite as good at advanced algorithms and the like that an engineering student has, but it does mean I can understand where the business I'm working for is going and gear my technical work towards that end.
(Plus the liberal arts school was about 2:1 female:male, and I'm a straight man)
3 big reasons: 1. The last thing a geeky student needs is a school full of nobody but geeks, leaving them completely unprepared to deal with all the non-geeks of the world. Those non-geeks are also known as bosses, possible lovers, friends, family, etc.
2. Education should make someone capable of doing more than just their jobs. A software developer benefits from reading Shakespeare, learning about the American Civil War, or studying Spanish or French or German or another language.
There is no way this can be considered self-defense. Defense by definition is stopping an aggressor.
So, when a SWAT team shoots someone who has already killed people, has said he's going to kill more people, and shows every sign of preparing to do just that, that's self defense (of the inevitable victims), or not?
Unless the SWAT team is being attacked by that guy at that moment, it's not self-defense. If he's not shooting at you (say, it's 3 AM and he's sleeping), the correct procedure in a free country is to slap the cuffs on him, hold him in a cell, charge him with his crimes, try him, and then punish him according to the law. The goal of a police action is to investigate crimes and arrest people so they can be tried by a court of law, not to kill people. If, on the other hand, the SWAT team is being shot at, then by all means shoot back, but that's considered not as good. Among other things, dead terrorists tell you nothing.
How is that different than using lethal force to stop al-Awlaki, who was involved in numerous deaths (and the attempt to kill hundreds in Detroit), swore he's keep doing it, and was hanging out with people training, financing, and arming along those lines?
The Yemeni government is quite friendly to the United States government. You work with the Yemeni government, and either have the Yemeni authorities arrest him and then extradite him, or you get permission to send in a US squad to take him in. If he resists, you use necessary force to subdue him, and if it kills him, oh well. If he doesn't resist or isn't killed during the arrest, you bring him back to the US for trial.
The reason the trial is important is because it forces the US government to demonstrate why they think this guy was a Really Bad Man. For example, you just stated that he attempted to kill hundreds in Detroit, but I've seen no evidence to that effect other than US executive branch officials saying so.
Not true, not true. You have to remember that before the "begat" there's all the raunchy bits, where some patriarch "knew" his wife, or his wife's maid, or his second wife, or in a couple of cases his daughters.
Seriously, if someone did an unexpurgated film version of the Bible, it would be rated NC-17. Especially the Song of Solomon.
Two problems with declaring those to be "moral": 1. It's hard for the US to claim the moral high ground when it comes to foreign aggression, given that it has regularly invaded other countries or overthrown their governments with covert actions for reasons mostly tied to US corporate interests.
2. In the case of the Gulf War, yes, foreign aggression was involved, but the only reason the US cared was that Kuwait had oil. And in case you were thinking it was a fight against totalitarian dictators, you should note that Kuwait's Emir is an absolute ruler.
In addition, most studies on how policing can deter crime have noticed that your chance of getting caught has a much greater deterrent effect that how long your sentence is. Basically, if you have a 95% chance of getting away with it, then crime tends to pay, so people commit crimes. Whereas if you have a 40% chance of getting away with it, crime doesn't pay.
What that means in practical terms is: 1. More police officers, enough to investigate all felonies and many misdemeanors as well. 2. Police officers who are representative of and part of the communities they police, so citizens are more comfortable with the police. 3. Police officers having more limited police powers, and not abusing those powers, so citizens who aren't committing crimes are willing to talk to them about people who are committing crimes.
So if you want to police the ghetto, your goal is to find the most upstanding citizens from the ghetto you can find (which do exist - just because someone was born and raised in a ghetto doesn't mean they're a criminal), and train them to be friendly to the people they've known their whole lives unless they've committed a crime. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the current plan of trying to intimidate people into cooperating.
If the US was fighting the civil war over moral outrage over slavery, why didn't they free all slaves in the Union?
1. You're right that the north's hands weren't entirely clean here. Up until the 1830's or so, there were slave traders in Rhode Island, for instance. But Lincoln was elected on a platform of stopping the expansion of slavery to the American west after decades of agitation (and in some cases violence) by abolitionists who were absolutely motivated by morality and frequently religious belief. That agitation was also why slavery was illegal in most of the north by 1860. 2. They did free all the slaves in the Union, with the Thirteenth Amendment, shortly after the war. The primary reason they didn't during the war is that they didn't want Maryland, Delaware, or Kentucky to secede (Missouri sorta seceded, sorta not), leaving Washington D.C. surrounded.
Don't make the mistake of conflating how we persecute 'war' these days with all out and out military aggression which has not been seen on a large scale since WWII.
You must have missed the "shock and awe" campaign in the first days of the Iraq War, which was all about bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age as a way of trying to convince them to not fight for Saddam Hussein.
There are 2 wars fought by the United States that could reasonably considered to be moral wars: 1. The American Civil War, if you were on the Union side, assuming you believe freeing slaves is a morally good act.
2. World War II. Even if the US didn't know about the Holocaust, they definitely knew about Japanese atrocities in China.
Even then, there were definitely evil acts committed by the US side.
You also need a culture that encourages documentation as well. I've met plenty of developers who are thoroughly convinced that the code is the only documentation that anyone would ever need. Here's the problem with that thinking:
void frob_the_splutnik(int a, int b) {
s = get_splutnik()
s.frob(a, b) }
That's definitely concise, and perfectly clear, but only if you already know what a splutnik is or why you'd want to frob it, and what a and b are supposed to signify. If you're a developer unfamiliar with this code base though, you have no clue what this means, not because you're dumb but because you've never encountered any of the concepts that the original coder had in mind.
More to the point, it's variety and choice on the things that don't matter much for compatibility, and a standards on the things that do matter for compatibility. If I write software for my own machine, with not a lot of extra work I can make it compile and run just fine on any Linux distro and probably BSD as well.
So variety and choice about which desktop widgets you're going to use, but no (non-bug) variations regarding what an fcntl(2) call will do. That's a very effective combination.
Programming is a vocation, like many vocations, that some people are cut out for and other people are not.
Computer science isn't the same thing as programming, first off. One of my CS profs pointed out that you can think of CS as a particular variety of applied math, and that it helps develop logical thinking, breaking down problems into component parts, and analyzing algorithms.
But even programming is something that has applications outside of software development. It arguably benefits anybody working in mathematical or scientifically oriented fields - accountants can make more sense out of spreadsheet macros, physicists can make more sense out of their experimental results, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's non-mutant researchers that are creating a flu that infects mutants, just like the bird flu infects birds.
Hail Thaether! (Yes, I know I screwed up the grammer)
Another way of putting it: A private citizen putting a sign reading "Romanes ite domum" on their front lawn is perfectly fine. The mayor putting "Romanes ite domum" on the lawn of the town hall in a town that's in the middle of a zoning dispute involving the Catholic Church, not so much.
Except that you are in fact completely wrong.
It's legal for neo-Nazis to march through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, according to the US Supreme Court. It's legal for the KKK to exist. It's legal to stand around at funerals holding signs that say "God Hates Fags".
It's legal to hate things, or hate people, or hate groups of people, and to voice those opinions. What's not legal is committing a crime based on those opinions.
What's also quite possible is that the police have overstepped their bounds.
(to the tune of "Drunken Sailor")
What do we do with a washed-up cruise ship, (x3)
Early in the morning?
Suck out the fuel 'til she rolls right over, (x3)
Early in the morning.
Lock up the captain with Big Bubba (x3)
Early in the morning.
Steal all the swag and give to the poor (x3)
Early in the morning.
(There's a few verses, make up some more of your own - it's a folk song after all.)
Seriously, if you look at what the 5 media giants (Disney, GE, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom) really want the Internet to become, it's a return to a broadcast-focused system where users can download or stream "content" helpfully provided by those same companies, but can't interact peer-to-peer.
For these kind of jerks, the idea that ordinary people can use the Internet to communicate with each other directly is considered a serious problem. For instance, they might use it to create alternate media sources that aren't tied to the same corporate advertisers as those 5 media companies. Or they might organize political protests that cause problems for these company's allies in Washington DC. Or they might spread information about ideas that these companies would rather suppress. Or they might organize workers in an industry and demand higher wages.
It's all about controlling the information and entertainment that us peons are allowed to experience and use to make decisions. And the danger extends beyond media companies - if regular people have created alternate forms of entertaining and informing each other, then they won't be bombarded with commercials, which means they won't buy the new useless kitchen gadgets and won't vote for the candidate who's picked up the most campaign cash. This ordinary-people-talking-to-each-other thing could be the force that *destroys America* (at least as the corporate and business guys see it).
But of course. We just keep playing stuff like this to them in their early childhood to imprint the right idea in their brains:
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
(Yes, that's an Aldous Huxley quote)
Girl is good in math/science. Girl gets picked on/teased for being smart. Girl has no parent/role model to provide support for being smart. Girl succumbs to peer pressure to play 'dumb' in math/science. Girl looses interest in math/science.
Your theory has a big problem in not matching up to reality:
1. Girls do about as well as boys in mathematical and scientific subjects, and may even be doing somewhat better. For instance, look at SAT scores by gender, and notice the utter lack of differences.
2. Female students now outnumber male students in most subjects, including some scientific subjects like medicine. That strongly suggests that there's some issues specific to software development that tend to keep the women out.
An alternate theory proposed by my female classmates: They not-infrequently encountered what they perceived as gender-based hostility in the computer labs, mostly from other students. For instance, there were cases of women being pushed to do the simpler UI work rather than the challenging algorithm work on group projects, no matter what their actual preference or skills. And there were a lot of issues with women getting a lot more male attention than they wanted, and in some cases being treated more as a piece of eye candy than as a student on equal footing to the men.
There's also this issue.
I keep seeing points like these made throughout the Slashdot thread, but aren't those all the common, basic traits of engineering colleges/universities? So where's the difference?
There isn't much of one, and that's one of the reasons I got my CS degree from a liberal arts college instead of an engineering school. Sure, it might mean that I'm not quite as good at advanced algorithms and the like that an engineering student has, but it does mean I can understand where the business I'm working for is going and gear my technical work towards that end.
(Plus the liberal arts school was about 2:1 female:male, and I'm a straight man)
3 big reasons:
1. The last thing a geeky student needs is a school full of nobody but geeks, leaving them completely unprepared to deal with all the non-geeks of the world. Those non-geeks are also known as bosses, possible lovers, friends, family, etc.
2. Education should make someone capable of doing more than just their jobs. A software developer benefits from reading Shakespeare, learning about the American Civil War, or studying Spanish or French or German or another language.
3. Massive gender imbalance.
There is no way this can be considered self-defense. Defense by definition is stopping an aggressor.
So, when a SWAT team shoots someone who has already killed people, has said he's going to kill more people, and shows every sign of preparing to do just that, that's self defense (of the inevitable victims), or not?
Unless the SWAT team is being attacked by that guy at that moment, it's not self-defense. If he's not shooting at you (say, it's 3 AM and he's sleeping), the correct procedure in a free country is to slap the cuffs on him, hold him in a cell, charge him with his crimes, try him, and then punish him according to the law. The goal of a police action is to investigate crimes and arrest people so they can be tried by a court of law, not to kill people. If, on the other hand, the SWAT team is being shot at, then by all means shoot back, but that's considered not as good. Among other things, dead terrorists tell you nothing.
How is that different than using lethal force to stop al-Awlaki, who was involved in numerous deaths (and the attempt to kill hundreds in Detroit), swore he's keep doing it, and was hanging out with people training, financing, and arming along those lines?
The Yemeni government is quite friendly to the United States government. You work with the Yemeni government, and either have the Yemeni authorities arrest him and then extradite him, or you get permission to send in a US squad to take him in. If he resists, you use necessary force to subdue him, and if it kills him, oh well. If he doesn't resist or isn't killed during the arrest, you bring him back to the US for trial.
The reason the trial is important is because it forces the US government to demonstrate why they think this guy was a Really Bad Man. For example, you just stated that he attempted to kill hundreds in Detroit, but I've seen no evidence to that effect other than US executive branch officials saying so.
What about all the links from Rick Santorum links to the first Google search result on his name?
Not true, not true. You have to remember that before the "begat" there's all the raunchy bits, where some patriarch "knew" his wife, or his wife's maid, or his second wife, or in a couple of cases his daughters.
Seriously, if someone did an unexpurgated film version of the Bible, it would be rated NC-17. Especially the Song of Solomon.
Two problems with declaring those to be "moral":
1. It's hard for the US to claim the moral high ground when it comes to foreign aggression, given that it has regularly invaded other countries or overthrown their governments with covert actions for reasons mostly tied to US corporate interests.
2. In the case of the Gulf War, yes, foreign aggression was involved, but the only reason the US cared was that Kuwait had oil. And in case you were thinking it was a fight against totalitarian dictators, you should note that Kuwait's Emir is an absolute ruler.
In addition, most studies on how policing can deter crime have noticed that your chance of getting caught has a much greater deterrent effect that how long your sentence is. Basically, if you have a 95% chance of getting away with it, then crime tends to pay, so people commit crimes. Whereas if you have a 40% chance of getting away with it, crime doesn't pay.
What that means in practical terms is:
1. More police officers, enough to investigate all felonies and many misdemeanors as well.
2. Police officers who are representative of and part of the communities they police, so citizens are more comfortable with the police.
3. Police officers having more limited police powers, and not abusing those powers, so citizens who aren't committing crimes are willing to talk to them about people who are committing crimes.
So if you want to police the ghetto, your goal is to find the most upstanding citizens from the ghetto you can find (which do exist - just because someone was born and raised in a ghetto doesn't mean they're a criminal), and train them to be friendly to the people they've known their whole lives unless they've committed a crime. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the current plan of trying to intimidate people into cooperating.
If the US was fighting the civil war over moral outrage over slavery, why didn't they free all slaves in the Union?
1. You're right that the north's hands weren't entirely clean here. Up until the 1830's or so, there were slave traders in Rhode Island, for instance. But Lincoln was elected on a platform of stopping the expansion of slavery to the American west after decades of agitation (and in some cases violence) by abolitionists who were absolutely motivated by morality and frequently religious belief. That agitation was also why slavery was illegal in most of the north by 1860.
2. They did free all the slaves in the Union, with the Thirteenth Amendment, shortly after the war. The primary reason they didn't during the war is that they didn't want Maryland, Delaware, or Kentucky to secede (Missouri sorta seceded, sorta not), leaving Washington D.C. surrounded.
Don't make the mistake of conflating how we persecute 'war' these days with all out and out military aggression which has not been seen on a large scale since WWII.
You must have missed the "shock and awe" campaign in the first days of the Iraq War, which was all about bombing Iraq back into the Stone Age as a way of trying to convince them to not fight for Saddam Hussein.
There are 2 wars fought by the United States that could reasonably considered to be moral wars:
1. The American Civil War, if you were on the Union side, assuming you believe freeing slaves is a morally good act.
2. World War II. Even if the US didn't know about the Holocaust, they definitely knew about Japanese atrocities in China.
Even then, there were definitely evil acts committed by the US side.
You also need a culture that encourages documentation as well. I've met plenty of developers who are thoroughly convinced that the code is the only documentation that anyone would ever need. Here's the problem with that thinking:
void frob_the_splutnik(int a, int b) {
s = get_splutnik()
s.frob(a, b)
}
That's definitely concise, and perfectly clear, but only if you already know what a splutnik is or why you'd want to frob it, and what a and b are supposed to signify. If you're a developer unfamiliar with this code base though, you have no clue what this means, not because you're dumb but because you've never encountered any of the concepts that the original coder had in mind.
More to the point, it's variety and choice on the things that don't matter much for compatibility, and a standards on the things that do matter for compatibility. If I write software for my own machine, with not a lot of extra work I can make it compile and run just fine on any Linux distro and probably BSD as well.
So variety and choice about which desktop widgets you're going to use, but no (non-bug) variations regarding what an fcntl(2) call will do. That's a very effective combination.
And here I was thinking it was their well-known patent on creating computer software out of 1's and 0's.
There's also the GPL-licensed ClamAV, which has a Windows version called Immunet which isn't half-bad.
"A keyboard. ... How quaint."
"We come in peace! (shoot to kill, shoot to kill)" - James T Kirk
(reference for those not in the know: Star Trekkin' by The Firm)
Programming is a vocation, like many vocations, that some people are cut out for and other people are not.
Computer science isn't the same thing as programming, first off. One of my CS profs pointed out that you can think of CS as a particular variety of applied math, and that it helps develop logical thinking, breaking down problems into component parts, and analyzing algorithms.
But even programming is something that has applications outside of software development. It arguably benefits anybody working in mathematical or scientifically oriented fields - accountants can make more sense out of spreadsheet macros, physicists can make more sense out of their experimental results, etc.