For those various vassal states like Canada and Australia, that money would be far better spent on turning infantry and armoured units into mechanised combat engineers with full infrastructure building skills.
I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but if you believe current political rhetoric, Australia's biggest military threat is 16 year olds in leaky fishing boats running aground on Ashmore Island.
Lord knows as a US citizen I would have a very hard time with coping with cognitive dissonance if I blamed myself for our Politicians wrong doing.
Heh, if you want to talk about separating yourself from politician wrongdoing, I share an office with two people from Iran and one from Pakistan. The Iranians in particular seem to spend a lot of time apologising (though to be fair, that's mostly t'aarof).
Just to be clear, I'm going to say it one more time in a slightly different way: "The Queen of Britain" is not the same entity as "Britain". Understand that, and you understand the point I was trying to make.
If you're saying that Britain and Australia have a cosier relationship than with non-Commonwealth countries, that is probably true.
However, it's still the case that Britain has no legal influence over Australia. Australia is not a realm of Britain. They are both realms and/or territories of the Queen.
Suppose that a member of the board of Goldman Sachs also happened to be the on the board of Morgan Stanley. You reasonably could ask the question of whether Goldman Sachs the company has disproportionate influence over Morgan Stanley the company (compared with, say, other companies. The truth is probably that it's more like a cosy mutual relationship, and the degree of influence is probably more determined by the relative market power of the companies rather than which city the board member lives in.
Are you really trying to claim that the Queen has no influence in Australia, or Canada?
No. As I have tried to say several times, I am claiming that Britain has no influence in Australia or Canada (or, at least, no more influence than any other similarly-placed country).
Where I think you are confused is that just because Britain, Australia, and Canada share a head of state who lives most of the time in only one of these countries, it does not follow that that country has influence over any other countries where she is also head of state.
I did not say subject to, I said subjective. I realize the term is not the best, [...]
I still don't know what you mean by that, so probably not.:-)
The Royal family has direct representation into the governments. Those representatives act on the British Royal families behalf, not the behalf of the Canadian or Australian citizens.
No. The representative in Australia (which I will use as my example, since I'm Australian) does not act on any family's behalf, or of anyone who is acting in their capacity as being British. He (it currently is a "he") acts on behalf of the head of state of Australia, no more and no less. That the person in question also happens to be the head of state of a bunch of other countries and lives in another country is not relevant.
It's a bizarre arrangement if you've not been brought up with it (and, of course, Australia has a notable republican movement advocating that it change because it is a bit bizarre). But there is nothing that says that two independent nations can't share a head of state.
That is not the only example of how these countries are tied to Britain, but an easy one to find.
Once again, by that measure, Australia is "tied to" The Bahamas in precisely the same way.
And lets not forget what was already pointed out. There were hundreds of years of violence that resulted in the Brits giving up direct control of colonies.
And, as I pointed out, in the vast majority of cases it wasn't violence by colonists demanding independence. Most of the decolonisation that happened on the current monarch's tenure was completely mutual, democratic, and peaceful (at least the separation part was peaceful) and resulted in a mixed bag of nations as far as "freedom" goes (India isn't too bad, Burma/Myanmar is). The few separations that weren't peaceful resulted in nations which nobody could reasonably call "free", Rhodesia being the most obvious example.
Canada and Australia, while not truly British colonies still are subjective to Britain.
They are not. As of 1982 and 1986 respectively (look up the Canada Act and Australia Act if you're curious), neither Canada nor Australia are in any way subject to Britain. There is nothing that Britain can do that will affect Australia any more than any other country with similar trade relationships.
What the link that you posted alludes to is that the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Jamaica, Barbados, and so on all happen to have the same person as their monarch. Canada is no more subject to Britain than it is subject to Belize.
By the way, a little-known fact: When Papua New Guinea became (peacefully!) independent from Australia in 1975, it democratically voted to become a monarchy. I'm pretty sure that it's the only country in living memory to have done so.
Show me a free country that did not become free by violence, many of which were revolutions.
There's a definitional problem here, as to what constitutes "free" and what constitutes "violence", and how close the two are causally connected. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand all had conflict between colonists and indigenous people, and all started off as far-less-free nations and they are today, but none of those countries gained freedom or independence by violence. It would also be extremely difficult to argue that the Irish Free State (now Republic of Ireland) became "free by violence" in any meaningful sense.
For the vast majority of free countries in the world, freedom was a gradual process. This is, incidentally, also true of the United States; see how long it took for women to get the right to vote, or for the last vestiges of slavery to be repealed. There is typically no single conflict where before it the country was "unfree", and after (or in the fallout from) the conflict "freedom" was gained. It's rarely that simple.
The sexual revolution wasn't violent. Most of the revolutions of 1989 that overthrew Communist regimes weren't violent. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that when the Fourth Amendment is (partially) restored, it won't be by violence. There may be widespread protests, and some of them may become a bit violent, but you won't be able to honestly say that freedom came from violence.
The point was not that Washington was a "good" or "bad" commander, but that the person I responded to said that "Army guys make great dictators".
Fair point. I did misread what you said. Nonetheless, I do think that Washington was at heart a "flexible politician type", albeit one with a backbone.
I said it was silly to discuss the "problem" in the absence of any evidence that the "problem" actually exists. These discussions always start with the presumption that nerds are all a bunch of women haters, yet base that presumption on an anecdote about a woman that was groped a few years ago by some jerk at a game conference.
Nobody, I repeat nobody, is claiming that "nerds are all a bunch of women haters". Only a tiny number of nerds are women haters.
See, it's not just "a woman" who had a bad experience at a conference. It's that most women have had bad experiences (not all of them as bad as being groped, admittedly) at these events. It's a tiny proportion, but it only takes a tiny proportion.
A few act like floppy clumsy puppies and make obvious blunders which can make an environment uncomfortable for someone who doesn't fit the nerd stereotype. This is just ignorance, and it's nothing that a little bit of pointing-out can't fix.
But the real problem is this, and this is what most people don't get: Many nerds do not step in and stop their fellow nerds if they are creating a hostile environment, or otherwise make it clear to the few that certain behaviours are unacceptable, and most nerds are oblivious to what women and other minorities face in the community from the actions of the few.
Hopefully, the claim that "nerds are oblivious" is not a controversial statement...
You're absolutely right that it's not specific to nerds or nerd culture. However, we pride ourselves on being typically smarter than the average bear. We are natural problem solvers, if only that we can see a problem to be solved.
My personal experience has been the smarter(in the practical sense) someone is, the fewer stereotypical biases they have.
That's also my experience, but I've also found it to be true that the few who do have biases (or, more likely, an unrealistic picture of what constitutes "normal") are far more likely to argue that they don't and make excuses as to why their behaviour should be considered acceptable, than admit it and change their ways. Intelligence cuts both ways.
However the ones who were not professional were so far past appropriate it was cringe inducing as they self rationalized their behavior as being perfectly acceptable.
I think you've hit the nail completely on the head here. Geekery has more intelligent people in it than the average, and more of a history of being "outsiders" (say, in high school), and more autism. This is a volatile mix, and the result seems to be that there is no "middle ground".
I concur that almost all of the guys I've worked with have been perfectly professional and respectful to women in a professional capacity. We all make mistakes (and given what mainstream culture teaches us, it's unsurprising that we make mistakes in gender relations), but I've noticed that when male geeks have it pointed out to them that they did make a mistake (be it a joke which could be seen as sexist, or something else), they either completely get it or completely don't get it, to the point of coming up with elaborate excuses as to why the bad behaviour is acceptable.
You can see both extremes here in this very thread. In the thread, it seems to be pretty much evenly split between guys who get it and guys who don't, but I don't believe that these proportions are indicative of the industry as a whole.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that I agree with the GP, but there are a few things here that I think are wrong.
The US was founded by armed revolt, as were many "democratic" countries we currently see in the world (like India).
The US is one of the very few which succeeded, although looking around today that's a debatable point. India isn't the most corruption-free place on the planet (though it's better than it was), and it's difficult to see how life is better for a member of a religious minority in Pakistan or pretty much anyone in Myanmar than it was under British rule, undemocratic though it was.
In fact you hint at the same thing in your closing sentence.
The closing sentence is pretty much what happened in Britain in the period of the Victorian era to the mid-war period.
Washington was a Military commander who did an exceptional job serving as the President after the war.
This actually supports the GP's point. Washington was a terrible military strategist who lost the majority of the battles that he commanded both during the Revolution and the French-Indian wars. He never lost a retreat, though.
In a deep sense, he was only good at military command because he was a born politician. You had to be good at managing people, when your army has no legal force requiring them to stay.
Actually, it would help if you did. Aren't they part of the problem? If they all voted for a third or minor party candidate, even if they were different candidates, the effluent would hit the air conditioning.
Re:Programming language vs. statistical computing
on
R Throwdown Challenge
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· Score: 1
It is perfect for what it is meant to do, namely, load data, do statistical analysis on it, and produce graphics summarizing the results.
And that's also its biggest problem. It's perfect for what it's meant to do, but it's distinctly imperfect for many of the uses that it does do, and poorly designed for the uses that it could do.
An example of the former is maintaining large codebases. People do maintain large R codebases, but this is despite the language, not because of it.
An example of the latter is parallelism. Many statistical problems could naturally parallelise on large data sets in a well-designed R-like language. A clean core language (perhaps with craploads of syntactic sugar) could allow this parallelism to happen mostly automatically. But it can't, because R started leaking implementation details into the language very early on. Now it's impossible, and anyone who wants parallelism had better hope that their native-language library writer knows what they're doing.
Statisticians are no different from any other software customer. They don't always know what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
For those various vassal states like Canada and Australia, that money would be far better spent on turning infantry and armoured units into mechanised combat engineers with full infrastructure building skills.
I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but if you believe current political rhetoric, Australia's biggest military threat is 16 year olds in leaky fishing boats running aground on Ashmore Island.
Heh, if you want to talk about separating yourself from politician wrongdoing, I share an office with two people from Iran and one from Pakistan. The Iranians in particular seem to spend a lot of time apologising (though to be fair, that's mostly t'aarof).
Maybe the FTC could better spend their time, I don't know, jailing the traders that broke the economy?
There's an idea. They certainly couldn't do a worse job of it than the SEC, right?
And thank you for the discussion.
Just to be clear, I'm going to say it one more time in a slightly different way: "The Queen of Britain" is not the same entity as "Britain". Understand that, and you understand the point I was trying to make.
Great stuff, well done! Don't use it all up before you talk to the FCC now...
Yes, that's exactly the sort of thing! Have at it, sir and/or madam!
Unless the call to arms is from Anonymous. That's considered acceptable.
Yes, that's the sort of thing we need! Have at it!
(Aside to moderators: Trolling is completely on topic on this thread.)
If you're saying that Britain and Australia have a cosier relationship than with non-Commonwealth countries, that is probably true.
However, it's still the case that Britain has no legal influence over Australia. Australia is not a realm of Britain. They are both realms and/or territories of the Queen.
Suppose that a member of the board of Goldman Sachs also happened to be the on the board of Morgan Stanley. You reasonably could ask the question of whether Goldman Sachs the company has disproportionate influence over Morgan Stanley the company (compared with, say, other companies. The truth is probably that it's more like a cosy mutual relationship, and the degree of influence is probably more determined by the relative market power of the companies rather than which city the board member lives in.
Are you really trying to claim that the Queen has no influence in Australia, or Canada?
No. As I have tried to say several times, I am claiming that Britain has no influence in Australia or Canada (or, at least, no more influence than any other similarly-placed country).
Where I think you are confused is that just because Britain, Australia, and Canada share a head of state who lives most of the time in only one of these countries, it does not follow that that country has influence over any other countries where she is also head of state.
While certain former colonies of Britain (Canada/Australia) are mostly autonomous, Britain retains legal influence in those Governments.
That's still not true. Britain has no more influence in the Australian government than Canada does.
We share a head of state. That is the extent of it.
I did not say subject to, I said subjective. I realize the term is not the best, [...]
I still don't know what you mean by that, so probably not. :-)
The Royal family has direct representation into the governments. Those representatives act on the British Royal families behalf, not the behalf of the Canadian or Australian citizens.
No. The representative in Australia (which I will use as my example, since I'm Australian) does not act on any family's behalf, or of anyone who is acting in their capacity as being British. He (it currently is a "he") acts on behalf of the head of state of Australia, no more and no less. That the person in question also happens to be the head of state of a bunch of other countries and lives in another country is not relevant.
It's a bizarre arrangement if you've not been brought up with it (and, of course, Australia has a notable republican movement advocating that it change because it is a bit bizarre). But there is nothing that says that two independent nations can't share a head of state.
That is not the only example of how these countries are tied to Britain, but an easy one to find.
Once again, by that measure, Australia is "tied to" The Bahamas in precisely the same way.
And lets not forget what was already pointed out. There were hundreds of years of violence that resulted in the Brits giving up direct control of colonies.
And, as I pointed out, in the vast majority of cases it wasn't violence by colonists demanding independence. Most of the decolonisation that happened on the current monarch's tenure was completely mutual, democratic, and peaceful (at least the separation part was peaceful) and resulted in a mixed bag of nations as far as "freedom" goes (India isn't too bad, Burma/Myanmar is). The few separations that weren't peaceful resulted in nations which nobody could reasonably call "free", Rhodesia being the most obvious example.
They are not. As of 1982 and 1986 respectively (look up the Canada Act and Australia Act if you're curious), neither Canada nor Australia are in any way subject to Britain. There is nothing that Britain can do that will affect Australia any more than any other country with similar trade relationships.
What the link that you posted alludes to is that the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Jamaica, Barbados, and so on all happen to have the same person as their monarch. Canada is no more subject to Britain than it is subject to Belize.
By the way, a little-known fact: When Papua New Guinea became (peacefully!) independent from Australia in 1975, it democratically voted to become a monarchy. I'm pretty sure that it's the only country in living memory to have done so.
There's a definitional problem here, as to what constitutes "free" and what constitutes "violence", and how close the two are causally connected. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand all had conflict between colonists and indigenous people, and all started off as far-less-free nations and they are today, but none of those countries gained freedom or independence by violence. It would also be extremely difficult to argue that the Irish Free State (now Republic of Ireland) became "free by violence" in any meaningful sense.
For the vast majority of free countries in the world, freedom was a gradual process. This is, incidentally, also true of the United States; see how long it took for women to get the right to vote, or for the last vestiges of slavery to be repealed. There is typically no single conflict where before it the country was "unfree", and after (or in the fallout from) the conflict "freedom" was gained. It's rarely that simple.
The sexual revolution wasn't violent. Most of the revolutions of 1989 that overthrew Communist regimes weren't violent. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that when the Fourth Amendment is (partially) restored, it won't be by violence. There may be widespread protests, and some of them may become a bit violent, but you won't be able to honestly say that freedom came from violence.
Fair point. I did misread what you said. Nonetheless, I do think that Washington was at heart a "flexible politician type", albeit one with a backbone.
My first thought when I saw this is that a "smart" roadway is ripe for hacking.
Nobody, I repeat nobody, is claiming that "nerds are all a bunch of women haters". Only a tiny number of nerds are women haters.
See, it's not just "a woman" who had a bad experience at a conference. It's that most women have had bad experiences (not all of them as bad as being groped, admittedly) at these events. It's a tiny proportion, but it only takes a tiny proportion.
A few act like floppy clumsy puppies and make obvious blunders which can make an environment uncomfortable for someone who doesn't fit the nerd stereotype. This is just ignorance, and it's nothing that a little bit of pointing-out can't fix.
But the real problem is this, and this is what most people don't get: Many nerds do not step in and stop their fellow nerds if they are creating a hostile environment, or otherwise make it clear to the few that certain behaviours are unacceptable, and most nerds are oblivious to what women and other minorities face in the community from the actions of the few.
Hopefully, the claim that "nerds are oblivious" is not a controversial statement...
You're absolutely right that it's not specific to nerds or nerd culture. However, we pride ourselves on being typically smarter than the average bear. We are natural problem solvers, if only that we can see a problem to be solved.
That's also my experience, but I've also found it to be true that the few who do have biases (or, more likely, an unrealistic picture of what constitutes "normal") are far more likely to argue that they don't and make excuses as to why their behaviour should be considered acceptable, than admit it and change their ways. Intelligence cuts both ways.
I think you've hit the nail completely on the head here. Geekery has more intelligent people in it than the average, and more of a history of being "outsiders" (say, in high school), and more autism. This is a volatile mix, and the result seems to be that there is no "middle ground".
I concur that almost all of the guys I've worked with have been perfectly professional and respectful to women in a professional capacity. We all make mistakes (and given what mainstream culture teaches us, it's unsurprising that we make mistakes in gender relations), but I've noticed that when male geeks have it pointed out to them that they did make a mistake (be it a joke which could be seen as sexist, or something else), they either completely get it or completely don't get it, to the point of coming up with elaborate excuses as to why the bad behaviour is acceptable.
You can see both extremes here in this very thread. In the thread, it seems to be pretty much evenly split between guys who get it and guys who don't, but I don't believe that these proportions are indicative of the industry as a whole.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that I agree with the GP, but there are a few things here that I think are wrong.
The US was founded by armed revolt, as were many "democratic" countries we currently see in the world (like India).
The US is one of the very few which succeeded, although looking around today that's a debatable point. India isn't the most corruption-free place on the planet (though it's better than it was), and it's difficult to see how life is better for a member of a religious minority in Pakistan or pretty much anyone in Myanmar than it was under British rule, undemocratic though it was.
In fact you hint at the same thing in your closing sentence.
The closing sentence is pretty much what happened in Britain in the period of the Victorian era to the mid-war period.
Washington was a Military commander who did an exceptional job serving as the President after the war.
This actually supports the GP's point. Washington was a terrible military strategist who lost the majority of the battles that he commanded both during the Revolution and the French-Indian wars. He never lost a retreat, though.
In a deep sense, he was only good at military command because he was a born politician. You had to be good at managing people, when your army has no legal force requiring them to stay.
Actually, it would help if you did. Aren't they part of the problem? If they all voted for a third or minor party candidate, even if they were different candidates, the effluent would hit the air conditioning.
It's more like 56% who vote for major party candidates. You didn't factor in the 43% who don't bother to vote at all.
You said it, not me.
And that's also its biggest problem. It's perfect for what it's meant to do, but it's distinctly imperfect for many of the uses that it does do, and poorly designed for the uses that it could do.
An example of the former is maintaining large codebases. People do maintain large R codebases, but this is despite the language, not because of it.
An example of the latter is parallelism. Many statistical problems could naturally parallelise on large data sets in a well-designed R-like language. A clean core language (perhaps with craploads of syntactic sugar) could allow this parallelism to happen mostly automatically. But it can't, because R started leaking implementation details into the language very early on. Now it's impossible, and anyone who wants parallelism had better hope that their native-language library writer knows what they're doing.
Statisticians are no different from any other software customer. They don't always know what they want.
On the contrary, R is written for people who don't know they're programming. That's why it's such a pain to write maintainable programs in.