The only one that I really value above anything else is the freedom of thought. That's also the one that really doesn't mix well with learning values before you get to live somewhere.
That's also one that doesn't mesh well with the cultures many immigrants are trying to bring to the United States. Honestly, how well do you think conservative Catholic (Hispanics), or conservative Islamic (Arabs) culture is going to uphold the ideals of freedom?
I understand the general perspective of liberals on this question, but as a liberal myself, my position is clear. While multiculturalism is important, it is lower in priority than the maintenance of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Ie: I don't have any problem with someone being Muslim, but I view the ferment Muslims raised over the cartoons making fun of Muhammad in the same light as I view all the idiotic protests from Christians regarding the teaching of evolution in schools.
It's really not hypocritical. Ignoring the tricky Native American thing (which is a problem we solved, through, uh, genocide), Europeans established a culture in an area that didn't really have one, on a large scale. However, now that culture is in place, changing it is a different kettle of fish.
If you're a second-generation Muslim with a foreign accent, something is seriously wrong. If you immigrate to a country, you should raise your children to natively speak the language of that country, end of story.
I am myself a first-generation Muslim immigrant to the US. I absolutely cannot stand Muslims who don't realize that in immigrating to a foreign country, they must put the culture of their new country above the culture of the country which they left. Countries should not change to accommodate the culture of immigrants. That is not to say that countries should not evolve their culture, but rather that the culture of a country should be grown at home, through the established processes of cultural change within that country, not imported wholesale from abroad.
I can understand that the liberal tendencies of some Europeans make them hesitant about promoting their own culture above those of others. However, there is nothing wrong with the idea that France should be the home of French culture. Certainly, Algerians believe that Algerian should be the home of Algerian culture, not culture imported from elsewhere!
Moreover, and this is my personal opinionated view, it is vital that European countries maintain their western culture, for the sake of their future prosperity. I don't have any delusions that western culture is perfect, but as someone with a bit of experience with both, western culture is far preferable to modern Islamic culture. It is honestly distressing to me that many liberal-minded individuals that look down upon the worst elements of American culture (religiosity, contempt for science, narrow-mindedness, philosophical absolutism) have no problem modern Islamic culture, which displays many of the same deleterious elements!
The immigration problem in France is a world away from the "problems" we have in the US. By and large, our immigrants either end up working hard in the lower runs of society, and many end up leading productive lives in the professional class (doctors, engineers, etc). Many groups in our immigrant population assimilate (most everyone outside of some hispanics) and even the ones that don't do not go out of their way to resist American culture.
In comparison, the French have to deal with huge waves of lower-class immigrants who clog up their social welfare system. Moreover, not only do they not assimilate, but they actively resist and antagonize the native culture.
We have our problems with immigrants sure (like most poor classes, they commit more crimes, etc), but there is no way to compare our problems to those faced by the French. When we have Hispanics rioting en masse in the streets, like Muslims in France are doing, then maybe your sentiments will be valid.
Uh, it's France. They've gone through almost a dozen governments since we started our first. They've been pretty calm the last fifty years or so, but given historical precedent, it doesn't take a whole lot to get the French marauding through the streets of Paris...
We don't need an ideal solution, we need a good one. It's a relative-cost thing. That's the cost of using nuclear power, versus the cost of using fossil fuels for another 100 years while we engineer the "perfect" solution?
Whenever people complain about the state of affairs in the United States, I hear the excuse "we're still better than such and such country". The argument is absolutely degrading to Americans. We're one of the oldest surviving democracies on the planet. We have no standard against which to measure ourselves but our own ideals. We should never say "we're still better than Cuba", but rather ask ourselves "are we as good as we know we should be?"
I absolutely can't stand the "be thankful you live in America" crowd. It's like the "feel good about ourself no matter what you do" crowd. Self-criticism and self-reflection are the only paths to improvement. Being content with what you have is a recipie for stagnation.
What the above posters are advocating doesn't even deserve to be called "software engineering". Engineers apply theories that they understand. An aerospace engineer is taught aerodynamic theory and structural theory and fluid dynamics theory, and then after graduation spends his efforts applying that theory to practical problems. A software engineer, then, should be taught number theory and graph theory and computational theory, and then spend his efforts applying those theories.
However, the above posters are proposing that "software engineers" have minimal exposure to theory, and more exposure to tools and design methods. It would be like teaching an aerospace engineer about CAD programs and the design process, and not about fluid dynamics. You do not want to fly in an airplane designed by such an engineer!
Addendum: my jet engine example is a bit misleading. It's engineering that helsp you wring out that 1% each year, but its theory that tells you what direction to apply your engineering efforts to. ie: engineering tells you how to make the temperature 5% higher in this or that location, but its theory that tells you that the temperature being 5% higher there will give you 0.5% lower fuel usage.
1) The lack of emphasis on theory is why we have such crappy software. Instead of writing 100 lines of code that implements a well-specified and analyzable algorithm, programmers will write 1000 lines of code that try to solve the problem in an ad-hoc and underspecified manner.
2) Engineering is 80-90% theory. My degree is in aerospace, and the majority of the instruction was the mathematical theories governing the various sub-fields. For example, I took a class on finite element methods. The vast majority of the time was spent developing the general theory of finite element formulations, and deriving the equations for each element type from first principles. Only the last two projects actually had us using a commercial finite elements tool, the rest had us actually implement various bits of one. The same is true for electrical engineering too. You take a signal processing class here, and what you learn is fourier theory and sampling theory and filtering theory. You do some concrete work in Matlab too, but mostly so you can see the results of applying the theory.
Theory is tremendously important to modern engineering, because modern engineering has gotten to the point where a lot of the low-hanging fruit you could get through ad-hoc methods are gone. Jet engines improve at 1% per year, and its theory that helps you identify what bits of performance are left to wring out and how to go about doing it. You mention engineers building satellites, but how do you think they do it? Take a look at the GPS system sometime: there are some very good applications of theory (in various fields) in the design of NAVSTAR.
What you're advocating is not making CS more like engineering, but making it more like a psychology or a social science. At least the social science folks have an excuse for using ad-hoc methods to analyze their problems. Currently, there are no particularly rigorous theories governing social systems, certainly not anything as mature as the theories of fluids or structures that engineers can depend on. On the other hand, there are very nice theoretical systems for CS, programmers just choose to ignore them.
Your assertion that historical origins are the only source of meaning in language is ridiculous. You claim that if being gay was not on some level bad in North American (worldwide, actually) culture, "gay" would not be a pejorative. Its true that "gay" would not have become a pejorative without the negative attitudes towards homosexuals, but at this point, "gay" could continue as a pejorative even if all negative feelings towards homosexuals had disappeared. The word itself has meaning beyond its origins.
Consider a word like "fuck". What is the origin of the word "fuck"? Wikipedia suggests that the precise entomology of the word isn't even clear, meaning the original historical structures to which it refers has essentially been lost. Yet, its meaning is perfectly clear to an English-speaking person. Words continue to have meaning even when their historical context has been forgotten! They are independent entities. They have connotations, yes, but they are not defined by their connotations.
Oh please, save me your diatribe about ideological assumptions. I'm completely aware of my ideological assumptions, and hatred of gay people isn't one of them. I dislike many groups of people (rural people, stereotypical young urban black or white males, student activists, old people), but gays aren't one of them. Politically, I'm pro-gay, for the simple reason that they are by and large far more wholesome than the majority of political groups (lawyers, rich people, teachers), etc.
That said, the word "gay" no longer refers exclusively to homosexual people. When someone says that a movie is "gay", does he mean that the movie is "ineffective"? No, gay has come to have its own meaning, independent of its origins.
It's the same as the other words you mentioned. Words like "cunt" and "asshole" might have originally derived their meaning from cultural associations with negative concepts, but they have been used so much that they now derive their meaning from nothing other than their own usage in our culture. When I hear "that movie is gay", do I derive meaning from it because I have a subconscious dislike of gay people, or because I've seen South Park and that's what Cartman always uses to refer to something bad?
Common words derive meaning from their use, not only their origin. Otherwise, people would always have to consider the etymology of a word for anything to make sense! From where does the word "lunch" derive its meaning? I couldn't tell you the origin of the word off the top of my head, but I immediately understand the meaning when I hear it, because I've heard it used to refer to the middle meal of the day for my entire life. That's the neat thing about symbolic communications, symbols don't just refer to other concepts, but are concepts in and of themselves!
Gay is commonly used as a pejorative, and doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with homosexuals. I'm sorry if homosexuals find the usage offensive, but guess what, nobody really cares. I mean jesus christ, if arabs were as thin-skinned as some groups of people, they'd be crying themselves to sleep every night about their depiction in the media! At least when white people look at a gay guy suspiciously, they're just worried he might pull out his penis for sport, not blow them up...
And now that you mention it, gamers does sound a lot like "gaymer". And after all gaming is pretty gay, I mean what's up with wasting all that time when you could be doing real work?
Do you see how this works here? Calling something "gay" does not necessarily refer to homosexuals. After all, what in the above insult implies that gamers like to have sex with men? Hell, in my book, if you're a practicing gay, at least you're getting some. If you're gamer...
A pidgin language is one that's a mixture of other languages, often used in places colonized by other nations or in places were extensive trade makes contact between speakers of two languages common.
I should also point out that your example of Sweden is a poor one. Sweden is arguably less dominated by the interests of the upper and middle classes, but the lower classes in Sweden are quite well-off in the grand scheme of things. Sweden achieved this condition by instituting a welfare state long after it had become economically prosperous, so the resulting income redistribution had the effect of leaving everybody pretty well-off and lifting up the poor. However, we're not talking about Sweden, we're talking about China, a country where the sheer volume of poverty is staggering. An income redistribution system in China would hardly effect the level of poverty at all, while decimating the economically productive middle and upper classes.
The idea of developing nations emphasizing economic productivity before social equality is a sound one. It's no great comfort to be an equal in a land of paupers. As sad as it is, social justice is largely a luxury enjoyed by those countries whose prosperity guarantees their basic survival. Empirically, there is an extreme correlation between economically prosperous countries and those with just (relatively) societies. Almost all of the western nations had highly-developed economies long before they implemented modern democratic systems. Indeed, it was their prosperity that provided the impetus for democratic reform. Expecting China to be any different in this regard is foolish.
Democracy has a traditionally very well-defined meaning, and economic equality isn't part of it. Democracy is a *political* system designed to ensure *political* freedom.
As for classism, that has nothing to do with it. I don't hate poor people, that would be irrational. However, I don't have the ridiculous inclination to hold them up as paragons of virtue as so many people tend to do.
Poverty (I mean real poverty --- remember we're talking about China here) deadens any higher faculties of the mind. When 100% of your daily effort is spent merely on survival, there is no time to develop the social consciousness necessary to uphold a free society. Now, one could argue that your average American doesn't have much of a social consciousness, its not as if they spend their leisure time studying history and philosophy, and you would be correct in saying that. However, your average American is a intellectual giant compared to most truly poor people. American school children spend at least a dozen years being properly socialized, learning about history, writing, etc. Even if most Americans can't tell you exactly what Thomas Jefferson wrote about, they remember the basic ideas he espoused (even if only as a result of twelve years of socialization in school!) and that understanding shared cultural history does impact the way they think and act.
I originally come from Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country where almost 60% of the population cannot read. If you think that those people have any democratic ideals, your comfortable position in life has blinded your judgement. When someone cannot so much as read, how can one be expected to hold any high-minded democratic ideals? As ignorant as your average American (or westerner in general) may be, he's a fundamentally different creature as an element of a democratic society. If you're wondering why democracy has completely floundered in poor countries, you have your reason.
Democracy is not an inborn instinct in human beings. Westerners like to say that all people desire to be free, but that's not really true. All people desire to be treated with a certain minimum dignity (and that minimum can be very low indeed), but that's not what democracy is. Democratic ideals imply not just freedom for oneself, but ensuring the (social, religious, etc) freedom of those around you. If you think villagers in Bangladesh who cannot read have any ideas about ensuring the religious freedom of individuals in their community, you're deluded. The entire mindset of such communities is rooted, often out of necessity, in a strict social and religious conformity completely at odds with democratic ideals. So no, democracy is not an ingrained element of human thinking --- it's a social construction of successful societies that have achieved a level of prosperity where the security and stability of a rigid communal social structure is no longer necessary for survival. Members of democratic societies must be socialized into the required mode of thinking, and the root of the problem with the poor is that they generally lack this socialization. Though the more successful classes of society may make poor stewards of democracy, their socialization and desire to protect the social system that makes their economic success possible make them far better at the job than the poor.
He didn't say open source projects are immune to IP litigation. He said that they are immune to what happened to BeOS (and tons of other cool software) --- having a company sit on perfectly good code without any intention of either continuing it as a product or freeing it so the community can continue development.
The poor have never contributed anything to any society, and they never will. The poor are the biggest danger to democracy, precisely because they have nothing to lose. They are easily appeased by corrupt governments that will give them temporary handouts by taking away from more productive elements of society. I don't disagree that the upper classes in wealthy countries can get apathetic, but at the same time there are very few examples of truely free societies which are not dominated by the interests of the middle and upper class.
Name a single society in history where the lower classes were the driving force for democracy? The democratic revolutions in the West (the United States, Britain, France) were driven by the interests of the commercial elite. Now, list the countries where corrupt governments came to power by making empty promises to the poor, who were only too happy to believe whatever they heard? Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa are full of examples.
I fail to see where human rights, freedom of the press, or political pluralism factor in to (technical!) open discourse, accountability, and merit. While the western world created the scientific process concurrently with certain beliefs about social justice, there is no evidence to suggest that science as a process is reliant on those beliefs.
And of course, I should note that a large percentage of the scientists in the US are working in fields that we'd like to sweep under the rug from a social justice point of view. The field of aerospace engineering, for example, is completely beholden to the American war machine (DOD). As an aerospace engineer myself, I'd be perfectly content to work on something like a cruise missile, which my philosophical side considers to be a horrible and cowardly weapon, for the simple reason that social justice doesn't pay for expensive research, but weapons of mass destruction do.
So don't think for a second that social justice is necessary for science to be effective. Heck, in this day and age where science has become tremendously expensive, a lot of really good science is done by organizations (pharmecutical companies, oil companies, chemical companies, defense contractors, etc) whose overall contributation to social justice is not... positive.
An 8-core 2.67 GHz model from Dell runs $4907 with no monitor. For roughly the same price, you can get a Mac Pro with 8-cores at 3.0 GHz, 4 GB of FB-DIMM RAM (4x as much as on the Dell), 500 GB SATA disk (2x as much as on the Dell), and a pair of 7300GT graphics cards.
It would be imprudent to say that Macs never need fixing, but in my experience they need fixing a lot less often than PCs. I'm de-facto tech support for four computers in my family: my dad's destkop and notebook (PCs), my brother's desktop (PC), and my mom's desktop (iMac). When I get a long-distance tech support call from one of them, guess which computer the call isn't about? In the year since I got my mom her iMac, I've had a grand total of two issues. The first time our neighbor's wifi network was interfering with ours, and the iMac happened to get affected because it was the furthest from the router. The second time my mom dragged Safari off the dock by accident and couldn't figure out how to get it back.
In comparison, I get about one call a month for the PCs. This month I got two: my brother called complaining that his computer was being slow for no reason. I had him reboot it, check the fans, check the case temp, check for CPU throttling, check for a CPU hog, nothing fixed it. After about an hour, the problem just went away. Before that my dad called complaining some piece of spyware kept popping up (ironically it was posing as a "PC protector" utility). That one actually had to wait until I visited the house about a month later, and involved reinstalling the OS (which was faster than running all the spyware removal tools I would've had to).
PC's are fine if its your own machine. They're a little high maintainence, but reasonable if you're a knowledgeable user. However, if I'm going to end up doing tech support for a neophyte*, I want to put something in front of them that can take some serious abuse (that sometimes borders on active sabatoge). A Windows machine is just not suitable for that.
*) I use the term "neophyte" broadly. My dad first started using computers when WordPerfect for DOS was a hot new product. However the maintainence requirements of a modern Windows machine are completely alien to him. My brother knows a decent bit about computers, can program a bit in Java, but mostly he's a gamer and so anything complicated is over his head. And my mom --- she thinks Google is the internet.
I'm wondering how long Americans will ride along on things their parents did in the last century. Are we going to be like the French a hundred years from now? Still rich, but on the larger scale irrelevent, talking about how great we were back then?
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The only one that I really value above anything else is the freedom of thought. That's also the one that really doesn't mix well with learning values before you get to live somewhere.
That's also one that doesn't mesh well with the cultures many immigrants are trying to bring to the United States. Honestly, how well do you think conservative Catholic (Hispanics), or conservative Islamic (Arabs) culture is going to uphold the ideals of freedom?
I understand the general perspective of liberals on this question, but as a liberal myself, my position is clear. While multiculturalism is important, it is lower in priority than the maintenance of freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Ie: I don't have any problem with someone being Muslim, but I view the ferment Muslims raised over the cartoons making fun of Muhammad in the same light as I view all the idiotic protests from Christians regarding the teaching of evolution in schools.
It's really not hypocritical. Ignoring the tricky Native American thing (which is a problem we solved, through, uh, genocide), Europeans established a culture in an area that didn't really have one, on a large scale. However, now that culture is in place, changing it is a different kettle of fish.
If you're a second-generation Muslim with a foreign accent, something is seriously wrong. If you immigrate to a country, you should raise your children to natively speak the language of that country, end of story.
I am myself a first-generation Muslim immigrant to the US. I absolutely cannot stand Muslims who don't realize that in immigrating to a foreign country, they must put the culture of their new country above the culture of the country which they left. Countries should not change to accommodate the culture of immigrants. That is not to say that countries should not evolve their culture, but rather that the culture of a country should be grown at home, through the established processes of cultural change within that country, not imported wholesale from abroad.
I can understand that the liberal tendencies of some Europeans make them hesitant about promoting their own culture above those of others. However, there is nothing wrong with the idea that France should be the home of French culture. Certainly, Algerians believe that Algerian should be the home of Algerian culture, not culture imported from elsewhere!
Moreover, and this is my personal opinionated view, it is vital that European countries maintain their western culture, for the sake of their future prosperity. I don't have any delusions that western culture is perfect, but as someone with a bit of experience with both, western culture is far preferable to modern Islamic culture. It is honestly distressing to me that many liberal-minded individuals that look down upon the worst elements of American culture (religiosity, contempt for science, narrow-mindedness, philosophical absolutism) have no problem modern Islamic culture, which displays many of the same deleterious elements!
The immigration problem in France is a world away from the "problems" we have in the US. By and large, our immigrants either end up working hard in the lower runs of society, and many end up leading productive lives in the professional class (doctors, engineers, etc). Many groups in our immigrant population assimilate (most everyone outside of some hispanics) and even the ones that don't do not go out of their way to resist American culture.
In comparison, the French have to deal with huge waves of lower-class immigrants who clog up their social welfare system. Moreover, not only do they not assimilate, but they actively resist and antagonize the native culture.
We have our problems with immigrants sure (like most poor classes, they commit more crimes, etc), but there is no way to compare our problems to those faced by the French. When we have Hispanics rioting en masse in the streets, like Muslims in France are doing, then maybe your sentiments will be valid.
Uh, it's France. They've gone through almost a dozen governments since we started our first. They've been pretty calm the last fifty years or so, but given historical precedent, it doesn't take a whole lot to get the French marauding through the streets of Paris...
Holy balls, I hope you're not married.
We don't need an ideal solution, we need a good one. It's a relative-cost thing. That's the cost of using nuclear power, versus the cost of using fossil fuels for another 100 years while we engineer the "perfect" solution?
Whenever people complain about the state of affairs in the United States, I hear the excuse "we're still better than such and such country". The argument is absolutely degrading to Americans. We're one of the oldest surviving democracies on the planet. We have no standard against which to measure ourselves but our own ideals. We should never say "we're still better than Cuba", but rather ask ourselves "are we as good as we know we should be?"
I absolutely can't stand the "be thankful you live in America" crowd. It's like the "feel good about ourself no matter what you do" crowd. Self-criticism and self-reflection are the only paths to improvement. Being content with what you have is a recipie for stagnation.
What the above posters are advocating doesn't even deserve to be called "software engineering". Engineers apply theories that they understand. An aerospace engineer is taught aerodynamic theory and structural theory and fluid dynamics theory, and then after graduation spends his efforts applying that theory to practical problems. A software engineer, then, should be taught number theory and graph theory and computational theory, and then spend his efforts applying those theories.
However, the above posters are proposing that "software engineers" have minimal exposure to theory, and more exposure to tools and design methods. It would be like teaching an aerospace engineer about CAD programs and the design process, and not about fluid dynamics. You do not want to fly in an airplane designed by such an engineer!
Addendum: my jet engine example is a bit misleading. It's engineering that helsp you wring out that 1% each year, but its theory that tells you what direction to apply your engineering efforts to. ie: engineering tells you how to make the temperature 5% higher in this or that location, but its theory that tells you that the temperature being 5% higher there will give you 0.5% lower fuel usage.
1) The lack of emphasis on theory is why we have such crappy software. Instead of writing 100 lines of code that implements a well-specified and analyzable algorithm, programmers will write 1000 lines of code that try to solve the problem in an ad-hoc and underspecified manner.
2) Engineering is 80-90% theory. My degree is in aerospace, and the majority of the instruction was the mathematical theories governing the various sub-fields. For example, I took a class on finite element methods. The vast majority of the time was spent developing the general theory of finite element formulations, and deriving the equations for each element type from first principles. Only the last two projects actually had us using a commercial finite elements tool, the rest had us actually implement various bits of one. The same is true for electrical engineering too. You take a signal processing class here, and what you learn is fourier theory and sampling theory and filtering theory. You do some concrete work in Matlab too, but mostly so you can see the results of applying the theory.
Theory is tremendously important to modern engineering, because modern engineering has gotten to the point where a lot of the low-hanging fruit you could get through ad-hoc methods are gone. Jet engines improve at 1% per year, and its theory that helps you identify what bits of performance are left to wring out and how to go about doing it. You mention engineers building satellites, but how do you think they do it? Take a look at the GPS system sometime: there are some very good applications of theory (in various fields) in the design of NAVSTAR.
What you're advocating is not making CS more like engineering, but making it more like a psychology or a social science. At least the social science folks have an excuse for using ad-hoc methods to analyze their problems. Currently, there are no particularly rigorous theories governing social systems, certainly not anything as mature as the theories of fluids or structures that engineers can depend on. On the other hand, there are very nice theoretical systems for CS, programmers just choose to ignore them.
Your assertion that historical origins are the only source of meaning in language is ridiculous. You claim that if being gay was not on some level bad in North American (worldwide, actually) culture, "gay" would not be a pejorative. Its true that "gay" would not have become a pejorative without the negative attitudes towards homosexuals, but at this point, "gay" could continue as a pejorative even if all negative feelings towards homosexuals had disappeared. The word itself has meaning beyond its origins.
Consider a word like "fuck". What is the origin of the word "fuck"? Wikipedia suggests that the precise entomology of the word isn't even clear, meaning the original historical structures to which it refers has essentially been lost. Yet, its meaning is perfectly clear to an English-speaking person. Words continue to have meaning even when their historical context has been forgotten! They are independent entities. They have connotations, yes, but they are not defined by their connotations.
Oh please, save me your diatribe about ideological assumptions. I'm completely aware of my ideological assumptions, and hatred of gay people isn't one of them. I dislike many groups of people (rural people, stereotypical young urban black or white males, student activists, old people), but gays aren't one of them. Politically, I'm pro-gay, for the simple reason that they are by and large far more wholesome than the majority of political groups (lawyers, rich people, teachers), etc.
That said, the word "gay" no longer refers exclusively to homosexual people. When someone says that a movie is "gay", does he mean that the movie is "ineffective"? No, gay has come to have its own meaning, independent of its origins.
It's the same as the other words you mentioned. Words like "cunt" and "asshole" might have originally derived their meaning from cultural associations with negative concepts, but they have been used so much that they now derive their meaning from nothing other than their own usage in our culture. When I hear "that movie is gay", do I derive meaning from it because I have a subconscious dislike of gay people, or because I've seen South Park and that's what Cartman always uses to refer to something bad?
Common words derive meaning from their use, not only their origin. Otherwise, people would always have to consider the etymology of a word for anything to make sense! From where does the word "lunch" derive its meaning? I couldn't tell you the origin of the word off the top of my head, but I immediately understand the meaning when I hear it, because I've heard it used to refer to the middle meal of the day for my entire life. That's the neat thing about symbolic communications, symbols don't just refer to other concepts, but are concepts in and of themselves!
Gay is commonly used as a pejorative, and doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with homosexuals. I'm sorry if homosexuals find the usage offensive, but guess what, nobody really cares. I mean jesus christ, if arabs were as thin-skinned as some groups of people, they'd be crying themselves to sleep every night about their depiction in the media! At least when white people look at a gay guy suspiciously, they're just worried he might pull out his penis for sport, not blow them up...
And now that you mention it, gamers does sound a lot like "gaymer". And after all gaming is pretty gay, I mean what's up with wasting all that time when you could be doing real work?
Do you see how this works here? Calling something "gay" does not necessarily refer to homosexuals. After all, what in the above insult implies that gamers like to have sex with men? Hell, in my book, if you're a practicing gay, at least you're getting some. If you're gamer...
I like the name. It's simple, short, and (if you're not an uneducated rube) the reference makes perfect sense.
Seriously, Gaim was a terrible name. Nothing against homosexuals, but Gaim -> Gay IM?
A pidgin language is one that's a mixture of other languages, often used in places colonized by other nations or in places were extensive trade makes contact between speakers of two languages common.
Seriously, you didn't know that?
I should also point out that your example of Sweden is a poor one. Sweden is arguably less dominated by the interests of the upper and middle classes, but the lower classes in Sweden are quite well-off in the grand scheme of things. Sweden achieved this condition by instituting a welfare state long after it had become economically prosperous, so the resulting income redistribution had the effect of leaving everybody pretty well-off and lifting up the poor. However, we're not talking about Sweden, we're talking about China, a country where the sheer volume of poverty is staggering. An income redistribution system in China would hardly effect the level of poverty at all, while decimating the economically productive middle and upper classes.
The idea of developing nations emphasizing economic productivity before social equality is a sound one. It's no great comfort to be an equal in a land of paupers. As sad as it is, social justice is largely a luxury enjoyed by those countries whose prosperity guarantees their basic survival. Empirically, there is an extreme correlation between economically prosperous countries and those with just (relatively) societies. Almost all of the western nations had highly-developed economies long before they implemented modern democratic systems. Indeed, it was their prosperity that provided the impetus for democratic reform. Expecting China to be any different in this regard is foolish.
Democracy has a traditionally very well-defined meaning, and economic equality isn't part of it. Democracy is a *political* system designed to ensure *political* freedom.
As for classism, that has nothing to do with it. I don't hate poor people, that would be irrational. However, I don't have the ridiculous inclination to hold them up as paragons of virtue as so many people tend to do.
Poverty (I mean real poverty --- remember we're talking about China here) deadens any higher faculties of the mind. When 100% of your daily effort is spent merely on survival, there is no time to develop the social consciousness necessary to uphold a free society. Now, one could argue that your average American doesn't have much of a social consciousness, its not as if they spend their leisure time studying history and philosophy, and you would be correct in saying that. However, your average American is a intellectual giant compared to most truly poor people. American school children spend at least a dozen years being properly socialized, learning about history, writing, etc. Even if most Americans can't tell you exactly what Thomas Jefferson wrote about, they remember the basic ideas he espoused (even if only as a result of twelve years of socialization in school!) and that understanding shared cultural history does impact the way they think and act.
I originally come from Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country where almost 60% of the population cannot read. If you think that those people have any democratic ideals, your comfortable position in life has blinded your judgement. When someone cannot so much as read, how can one be expected to hold any high-minded democratic ideals? As ignorant as your average American (or westerner in general) may be, he's a fundamentally different creature as an element of a democratic society. If you're wondering why democracy has completely floundered in poor countries, you have your reason.
Democracy is not an inborn instinct in human beings. Westerners like to say that all people desire to be free, but that's not really true. All people desire to be treated with a certain minimum dignity (and that minimum can be very low indeed), but that's not what democracy is. Democratic ideals imply not just freedom for oneself, but ensuring the (social, religious, etc) freedom of those around you. If you think villagers in Bangladesh who cannot read have any ideas about ensuring the religious freedom of individuals in their community, you're deluded. The entire mindset of such communities is rooted, often out of necessity, in a strict social and religious conformity completely at odds with democratic ideals. So no, democracy is not an ingrained element of human thinking --- it's a social construction of successful societies that have achieved a level of prosperity where the security and stability of a rigid communal social structure is no longer necessary for survival. Members of democratic societies must be socialized into the required mode of thinking, and the root of the problem with the poor is that they generally lack this socialization. Though the more successful classes of society may make poor stewards of democracy, their socialization and desire to protect the social system that makes their economic success possible make them far better at the job than the poor.
He didn't say open source projects are immune to IP litigation. He said that they are immune to what happened to BeOS (and tons of other cool software) --- having a company sit on perfectly good code without any intention of either continuing it as a product or freeing it so the community can continue development.
The poor have never contributed anything to any society, and they never will. The poor are the biggest danger to democracy, precisely because they have nothing to lose. They are easily appeased by corrupt governments that will give them temporary handouts by taking away from more productive elements of society. I don't disagree that the upper classes in wealthy countries can get apathetic, but at the same time there are very few examples of truely free societies which are not dominated by the interests of the middle and upper class.
Name a single society in history where the lower classes were the driving force for democracy? The democratic revolutions in the West (the United States, Britain, France) were driven by the interests of the commercial elite. Now, list the countries where corrupt governments came to power by making empty promises to the poor, who were only too happy to believe whatever they heard? Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa are full of examples.
I fail to see where human rights, freedom of the press, or political pluralism factor in to (technical!) open discourse, accountability, and merit. While the western world created the scientific process concurrently with certain beliefs about social justice, there is no evidence to suggest that science as a process is reliant on those beliefs.
And of course, I should note that a large percentage of the scientists in the US are working in fields that we'd like to sweep under the rug from a social justice point of view. The field of aerospace engineering, for example, is completely beholden to the American war machine (DOD). As an aerospace engineer myself, I'd be perfectly content to work on something like a cruise missile, which my philosophical side considers to be a horrible and cowardly weapon, for the simple reason that social justice doesn't pay for expensive research, but weapons of mass destruction do.
So don't think for a second that social justice is necessary for science to be effective. Heck, in this day and age where science has become tremendously expensive, a lot of really good science is done by organizations (pharmecutical companies, oil companies, chemical companies, defense contractors, etc) whose overall contributation to social justice is not... positive.
An 8-core 2.67 GHz model from Dell runs $4907 with no monitor. For roughly the same price, you can get a Mac Pro with 8-cores at 3.0 GHz, 4 GB of FB-DIMM RAM (4x as much as on the Dell), 500 GB SATA disk (2x as much as on the Dell), and a pair of 7300GT graphics cards.
It would be imprudent to say that Macs never need fixing, but in my experience they need fixing a lot less often than PCs. I'm de-facto tech support for four computers in my family: my dad's destkop and notebook (PCs), my brother's desktop (PC), and my mom's desktop (iMac). When I get a long-distance tech support call from one of them, guess which computer the call isn't about? In the year since I got my mom her iMac, I've had a grand total of two issues. The first time our neighbor's wifi network was interfering with ours, and the iMac happened to get affected because it was the furthest from the router. The second time my mom dragged Safari off the dock by accident and couldn't figure out how to get it back.
In comparison, I get about one call a month for the PCs. This month I got two: my brother called complaining that his computer was being slow for no reason. I had him reboot it, check the fans, check the case temp, check for CPU throttling, check for a CPU hog, nothing fixed it. After about an hour, the problem just went away. Before that my dad called complaining some piece of spyware kept popping up (ironically it was posing as a "PC protector" utility). That one actually had to wait until I visited the house about a month later, and involved reinstalling the OS (which was faster than running all the spyware removal tools I would've had to).
PC's are fine if its your own machine. They're a little high maintainence, but reasonable if you're a knowledgeable user. However, if I'm going to end up doing tech support for a neophyte*, I want to put something in front of them that can take some serious abuse (that sometimes borders on active sabatoge). A Windows machine is just not suitable for that.
*) I use the term "neophyte" broadly. My dad first started using computers when WordPerfect for DOS was a hot new product. However the maintainence requirements of a modern Windows machine are completely alien to him. My brother knows a decent bit about computers, can program a bit in Java, but mostly he's a gamer and so anything complicated is over his head. And my mom --- she thinks Google is the internet.
You realize now that IP is an unreliable protocol? I'd hate to be involved in a packet collision in such a system, or worse, be a dropped packet!
I'm wondering how long Americans will ride along on things their parents did in the last century. Are we going to be like the French a hundred years from now? Still rich, but on the larger scale irrelevent, talking about how great we were back then?