I didn't compare it to book burning. Then I misunderstood what you were trying to say - my bad.
The facts were known, to suggest otherwise is deliberately misleading. Misleading maybe, but showing intent is another thing altogether. Especially when it comes to politics, where you have both sides "knowing" contradictory things. Assuming that someone with an opposing viewpoint is malicious rather than misinformed is, IMO, not a good policy. Even if the person ought to know better, oftentimes they don't. If we want to persuade people to reconsider their positions, accusing them of bad intent is likely to undermine that goal.
If a public official or an employee of a public official does something using taxpayer funded equipment, it is completely fair to say, "The government did it." Can you refute that? So if Joe Government Employee visits Overstock.com on his lunch break using his work PC, and uses his personal credit card to buy his wife some diamond jewelry, you would call it fair to say that the government bought his wife diamonds?
You only ever comment on certain types of stories, and only to defend the US government or the status quo. So if someone comments only on one topic, we should dismiss their viewpoint regardless of its merits? I fail to see the logic in that - some people are just going to be more interested in some discussions that others, that doesn't mean they won't have something interesting to say.
Perhaps he comments in defense of the government or status quo because it was those stories where the opposing viewpoint was missing, and thus his views contributed something worthwhile to the comments? Making a "me too" post is rarely satisfying, playing devil's advocate often is.
Now suppose that someone is completely partisan. Total right-wing or left-wing extremist. Why should that cause us to ignore what they say? Even the most partisan of folks occasionally make valid points - nobody has a monopoly on wisdom.
Finally, on a more general topic - I'm dismayed that we as a country seem to have turned disagreements into hatreds. It's one thing to think somebody's wrong, or foolish, because they believe something different or incorrect. It's another to treat people with whom one disagrees with contempt, disrespect, and name-calling. This disease seems to have trickled down from our politicians into the general population, and it's disturbing. IMO we don't need our Vice President telling a Senator to "f*** off", we don't need the junior Senator from NY insinuating that our generals are liars because they report politically inconvenient news, and we don't need more of the "culture wars". What we need is for people to turn down the flames a bit and remember that these are our fellow citizens. A little civility goes a long way.
What the edits did was change some statements from being absolute statements "it was the case that X" to more a more guarded statement of "some claim that it was the case that X". The effect was to give a greater sense of uncertainty to an issue that has been hotly debated.
Now I happen to think that some of the edits went a bit too far in that direction. But to call the edits partisan or manipulative just because they gave the benefit of the doubt to Bush is going too far. And comparing it to book burning is way over the top, given that no information was even removed from the article.
Several months ago I needed to get a laptop on very short notice (i.e. no waiting for a custom-built one). I went to the local Circuit City to see what they had, and while browsing, I eavesdropped on the sales guy helping other customers looking for laptops. Surprisingly, the guy really knew his stuff, and did a good job of explaining things accurately to his clearly non-technical customers. Turns out the guy was the manager of the computer section, but the store did have one competent guy at least. Far better than I've come to expect from the other big-box stores.
It wouldn't invalidate it completely. Worst case, it means the research is only applicable to the subset of people who agree to participate, rather than the user population as a whole. It may still yield useful insight for that subset, and (if the self-selection bias isn't too bad) possibly the larger user population too. So while not perfect, the opt-in data may still be good enough for some uses.
Another important note is that the data gathering itself is not opt-in. It's the publishing of "anonymous" versions of that data that would be opt-in. So, while the public research on the public data may potentially be biased, the entity that gathered the full private dataset can verify any research results against the private data as a sanity check.
Realize too that for cases like our Netflix example, self-selection bias is *already* at work. Traditionally, movies are rented at a store, not online, so you've already got a different, probably not generally representative, population being studied. E.g. online populations tend to be younger and more educated than the population as a whole, even today.
Arguably the data is not truly anonymized if a third party can reconnect your name to the data. So claiming that it's not really "your" data, simply because they did some form of obfuscation, is a bit bogus.
What these companies really should do is just ask people when they sign up for the service "Hey, we might someday want to provide academic researchers with data on our customers' purchase habits. We will do our best to anonymize this data before providing it to the researchers, but if you've provided similar information publicly somewhere, someone may be able to compare the two sets of information to guess that they both came from the same person. Given this condition, would you like to participate in such research?" Then people can opt in or out, and if they opt in then there's little ground for complaints later.
I don't know what the solution is, but to say something like "schools aren't good at handling 'gifted' or special needs kids" without offering any solutions just simply isn't helpful. There are a lot of people in education who are dedicated to... education. Identifying a problem is the first step in solving it. Certainly, saying "schools aren't good at handling 'gifted' or special needs kids" is not a solution. But at least it focuses us on an area where improvement is needed.
IMO, one problem (of many - education is a complex issue) is that we approach schooling as if it were an assembly line. Students are treated as identical, passive recipients of information rather than as people actively trying to hone their abilities. Is it any wonder kids are bored out of their minds in school? And sadly, those areas of schooling in which an ability-improvement role is actually a focus - the arts and athletics - are the same ones being de-emphasized in our attempts to shore up other fundamentals.
Of course, that brings us back to your point of how do you fix it? Well, one idea off the top of my head is this: in special ed (at least in VA), teachers are required to create individualized learning plans for their students. Why don't we do this for every student? There's a wide spectrum of ability in "regular" students, not just in special ed students, and I bet that sort of individual plan could really help students achieve more. The downside is that is a very labor-intensive process, so it'll be costly. But I suspect it'd give you more bang for the buck than a lot of other potential ideas (expensive computer equipment, etc).
Even passive content like a JPEG may be malicious/unsafe. Suppose someone discovers a buffer overflow exploit in how IE processes images. You can bet that you'll start seeing images crafted to trigger the exploit and thus hijack the viewing computer. They may well end up on Doubleclick's network.
When you have (inevitably) imperfect software paired with untrusted content providers, there is no guaranteed way to be safe. Which is what makes Doubleclick such a menace - you can't even trust reputable sites anymore, because they're serving ads from unknown and untrusted sources via Doubleclick.
I believe the root of the problem is that the social norm here is not really defined.
For cars, there is pretty clearly a social norm that leaving your car door unlocked does not equate to permission for someone to drive it.
On the other hand, there is a norm at my workplace that food left on the counter in the kitchen is fair game for all. Nobody puts signs on it saying "free food for your consumption", but it is nonetheless understood. If you didn't want someone to eat the food, you'd put it somewhere else (e.g. the fridge or your office).
So what is the norm for WAPs? Among techies, if it's unsecured it's almost certainly open for use, simply because no techie is going to leave his network unsecured otherwise. Among non-techies, it's harder to tell whether the openness is intentional or due to ignorance. Hence we get into this debate about what constitutes evidence of intent, or whether we should default to assuming intent or ignorance, etc.
Don't be so quick to "rage against the military". A lot of science is done with military funding. Many people who don't understand the value of pure science do see value in having a strong military. Thus the military funds science that will benefit it, and those technologies make their way into the civilian world. A lot of trauma medicine falls into this category, for example.
If you want something to really get concerned about with tax dollars, how about Woodstock museums, bridges to nowhere, or the gazillion other complete wastes of money that don't even pretend to serve a genuine public purpose? At least the war was an attempt to solve a perceived national problem, however badly it was planned and executed. These other things are nothing but pure waste with no national benefit.
Or why not just get over it. Because time spent doing stupid, clearly ineffective things like trying to identify terrorists purely by what food they like is time that could be spent actually protecting the public.
No doubt sometimes rules will be broken due to extenuating circumstances (e.g. your ticking-bomb scenario). That's life. But that does not mean the rules are without merit and should be ignored. It means that people need to use some judgment. And when someone uses poor judgment in breaking the rules, they need to be called out on it, both for their own education and others'.
You're exactly right, and I think a lot of technical people take for granted the benefits of science. But most people do not.
One of my high school social studies classes split students into small groups and had them try to decide on funding levels for the federal government. With the exception of myself, practically everyone was in favor of eliminating most pure-science funding, usually in favor of some sort of social-welfare project. NASA got the boot, for example. To them, putting people in space or sending a robot to take pictures of far-away planet is a gigantic waste of money. The thought didn't really occur to them that research into space communications, the behavior of organisms in microgravity, etc could have terrestrial "real-world" benefits.
IMO people are more likely to try to convert the aliens to their religion than to abandon it just because alien life has been discovered.
First, because alien life doesn't disprove the existence of God, and second because people tend to be fond of their beliefs and resist changing them more than absolutely necessary to deal with the facts (not necessarily a bad thing). Heck, they can also resist changing them even when their beliefs are clearly contradicted by the facts, which IS a bad thing but has been going on for centuries. So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for religion's demise.
I don't think the post was assuming humanistic values - simply some form of social cooperation, such as you find with all sorts of species other than humans. Wolves, for example. Even ants and bees have a surprisingly large degree of social cooperation.
Assuming a social or pack-forming species does not assume egalitarianism, God, or human psychology. Only that certain elements of psychology are likely to be present - a need for cooperation. The GP referred to this as an evolutionary "pressure toward morality". That may be correct in the sense intended - a need to consider "self-preservation, reproduction, social interaction" - but it doesn't mean that the aliens will have anything like the same relative values placed on each of those concerns that we do, nor take the same approaches to solving them.
Re:Natural animals just aren't good enough
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
Just because we don't have the numbers to be a staple of their diet doesn't mean we won't be considered enough of a delicacy (or sport) to be hunted to extinction.
Maybe by writing a bill that can engender widespread support rather than merely a narrow majority. Bipartisanship is something of a lost art these days (on both sides).
I believe the main reason they got some inroads with Republicans on SCHIP is not because Republicans thought it was a good bill, it's because Republicans thought they would look bad voting against any program for children. And since Republicans knew Bush would veto it, they could safely vote for it to cover their butts, knowing that it would never become law.
The effort to debate impeachment was buried not out of sympathy for Bush, but because it would distract from the issues Democrats want to emphasize going into the 2008 elections. Dems need to have issues that will resonate with moderates in 2008, of which healthcare, education, and the war are all far bigger than impeachment.
Perhaps Pelosi and Hoyer are concerned that impeachment would become such a circus that it would prevent them doing the other things that they were elected to do. Things like passing appropriations bills, influencing Iraq policy, and doing something about health care. Or maybe they're concerned that it would be politically damaging to Democrats much like the Clinton impeachment was to Republicans. Most Americans may disagree with Bush and think he's incompetent, but that doesn't mean they see him as warranting impeachment.
Either way, the Dems have an option of trying to impeach Bush and Cheney with the aforementioned serious consequences, or waiting out one last year of the administration. The latter has the political advantage that they don't have to actually accomplish anything before the 2008 elections, because they can blame everything on the administration.
That's why the actions of the Dem leadership don't make any sense: if they were acting in principles, they would challenge Bush to end his corruption and restore our Constitutional rights. If they were acting out of selfish political interest, they would challenge Bush the vast majority of the American public opposes the war in Iraq, supports SCHIP and stem cell research, etc etc. But they do neither, and their approval rating is in the gutter. The conclusion I draw from that is that the Democrats in Congress don't actually believe what they say about quickly or immediately leaving Iraq being in our national interest. Or they at least have enough doubt, such that their political calculation is that it's better to assail Bush for the war's problems, than to force a change in policy that might cause big problems and be hung around *their* necks.
I think this all comes back to the same problem we've had for the past several years, which is a Congress in which both parties are so preoccupied playing politics that they are unable to work together to solve our real problems. And the result is most of our substantial public policy is being driven by Bush (which for those of us who are spectacularly unimpressed with both his leadership and competence, is an extremely bad thing).
The existing Javascript/ECMAScript has a large installed base. Thus if you simply extend the existing spec in a backwards-compatible way, you allow developers to keep using Javascript and upgrade with new features at their convenience. This keeps everyone using Javascript and *should* be a smooth and gradual transition.
However, if you switch to a require a separate mechanism to execute or a incompatible language, you force developers to rewrite their code in order to take advantage of the new features. This may be philosophically cleaner, but doesn't have the continuity benefit of the other approach.
Now if you're Microsoft, which situation do you prefer? The second one, because it fragments the installed base and therefore the influence of the platform you don't control. That gives you an opportunity to sell people on using your technology platform instead, since they'll have to rewrite either way to use new advanced features. But if they don't have to rewrite completely, it makes more economic sense for developers to stick with Javascript.
Now there may very well be other technical arguments too, but the above is why people are suspicious of Microsoft's arguments. After all, Microsoft knows very well the power of an installed base and the benefits of having control over common technology platforms.
The point IEEE makes is valid... but salary is not the right metric. The total amount the company pays you isn't just your salary, it's benefits too. And with double-digit percentage increases in the cost of health care, a lot of money that would have gone to salary increases has gone into providing good benefits.
That said, I don't know what the trend is in total compensation nationally. I do know that in the DC market, software folks are in high demand, especially if you know some signal processing. And the market has been reflecting that.
The other thing is that the field has been growing so fast that there are now numerous subdisciplines. Back when the computer field was new, the body of knowledge was small enough that you could be an expert in many different areas. The field has matured enough that you just can't be an expert in everything - there aren't enough hours in the day to learn it all. So your AI specialist may not know x86 opcodes like the back of his hand. That's actually a sign of progress, not a sign that the new grads are dumber.
Did the students get dumber, or did his expectations go up over time?
It's possible the lecturer has been in the field so long he doesn't remember how much a new engineer simply hasn't had the opportunity to learn.
We sometimes see this phenomenon in industry when interviewing new college grads... your interviewers are often engineers who have spent years in the field, and it's easy to forget just how much you didn't know when you were fresh out of college. So we tell them to try to look for someone who has solid fundamentals and is smart... if they're smart, they can learn the rest of what they need to know quickly. If they're not... you probably don't want them even if they do know a particularly technology X, Y, or Z.
(Somewhere else in the thread someone was complaining about CS grads not knowing x86 assembly. Is that really a surprise? If they've done assembly for any architecture, and are reasonably intelligent as more CS grads probably are, they'll pick up x86 just fine. But to expect that they've been exposed to x86 assembly specifically seems a little unrealistic, especially given that most CS grads will never use any assembly language after graduation)
I don't think so. To me, it's an invitation to consider whether he was just lucky or if perhaps we shouldn't apply the same standards to him as we would the "average driver". It's like Bayes' theorem. Since we know the outcome, we have more information about what went into it. The fact that he didn't have any accidents means there is a good chance that he is a highly skilled driver. One event does not constitute a statistically useful sample, and knowing the outcome of one event does not tell you anything about *why* it occurred. Nonetheless, the drivers are almost certainly very skilled, based on the article. It said that the main driver established a reputation as a fast but safe driver while doing legal races, and both have participated in several such races.
The article also noted the meticulousness of the racers in planning their course and having an airplane spotter for potential construction or other pitfalls. So these folks aren't careless, and they're driving a far more agile vehicle than most on the roads.
So IMO the questions are:
1: How does the undeniably increased risk from high speeds (reaction times, braking times, force in the event of a crash) compare with the decreased risks from the drivers' above-average skill, precautions, and vehicle?
2: If the overall risk increased, by how much? Is it comparable to everyday distractions (cell phones, misbehaving kids in the backseat, etc) we generally deem acceptable, or is it worse?
3: If worse, is it ethically acceptable for these drivers to impose that risk upon others on the roads?
To be honest, I don't see how any of us are in a position to answer these. Questions #1 and #2 are purely factual and statistical problems which require data we don't have from the article. Question #3 requires us to know the answer to #2, unless we want to go down the dubious road of claiming risks from one activity are somehow ethically worse than risks from another activity regardless of relative magnitude.
So basically at this point we're all just reacting emotionally to the event with no actual knowledge of the risks involved.
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Perhaps he comments in defense of the government or status quo because it was those stories where the opposing viewpoint was missing, and thus his views contributed something worthwhile to the comments? Making a "me too" post is rarely satisfying, playing devil's advocate often is.
Now suppose that someone is completely partisan. Total right-wing or left-wing extremist. Why should that cause us to ignore what they say? Even the most partisan of folks occasionally make valid points - nobody has a monopoly on wisdom.
Finally, on a more general topic - I'm dismayed that we as a country seem to have turned disagreements into hatreds. It's one thing to think somebody's wrong, or foolish, because they believe something different or incorrect. It's another to treat people with whom one disagrees with contempt, disrespect, and name-calling. This disease seems to have trickled down from our politicians into the general population, and it's disturbing. IMO we don't need our Vice President telling a Senator to "f*** off", we don't need the junior Senator from NY insinuating that our generals are liars because they report politically inconvenient news, and we don't need more of the "culture wars". What we need is for people to turn down the flames a bit and remember that these are our fellow citizens. A little civility goes a long way.
What the edits did was change some statements from being absolute statements "it was the case that X" to more a more guarded statement of "some claim that it was the case that X". The effect was to give a greater sense of uncertainty to an issue that has been hotly debated.
Now I happen to think that some of the edits went a bit too far in that direction. But to call the edits partisan or manipulative just because they gave the benefit of the doubt to Bush is going too far. And comparing it to book burning is way over the top, given that no information was even removed from the article.
Several months ago I needed to get a laptop on very short notice (i.e. no waiting for a custom-built one). I went to the local Circuit City to see what they had, and while browsing, I eavesdropped on the sales guy helping other customers looking for laptops. Surprisingly, the guy really knew his stuff, and did a good job of explaining things accurately to his clearly non-technical customers. Turns out the guy was the manager of the computer section, but the store did have one competent guy at least. Far better than I've come to expect from the other big-box stores.
It wouldn't invalidate it completely. Worst case, it means the research is only applicable to the subset of people who agree to participate, rather than the user population as a whole. It may still yield useful insight for that subset, and (if the self-selection bias isn't too bad) possibly the larger user population too. So while not perfect, the opt-in data may still be good enough for some uses.
Another important note is that the data gathering itself is not opt-in. It's the publishing of "anonymous" versions of that data that would be opt-in. So, while the public research on the public data may potentially be biased, the entity that gathered the full private dataset can verify any research results against the private data as a sanity check.
Realize too that for cases like our Netflix example, self-selection bias is *already* at work. Traditionally, movies are rented at a store, not online, so you've already got a different, probably not generally representative, population being studied. E.g. online populations tend to be younger and more educated than the population as a whole, even today.
Arguably the data is not truly anonymized if a third party can reconnect your name to the data. So claiming that it's not really "your" data, simply because they did some form of obfuscation, is a bit bogus.
What these companies really should do is just ask people when they sign up for the service "Hey, we might someday want to provide academic researchers with data on our customers' purchase habits. We will do our best to anonymize this data before providing it to the researchers, but if you've provided similar information publicly somewhere, someone may be able to compare the two sets of information to guess that they both came from the same person. Given this condition, would you like to participate in such research?" Then people can opt in or out, and if they opt in then there's little ground for complaints later.
IMO, one problem (of many - education is a complex issue) is that we approach schooling as if it were an assembly line. Students are treated as identical, passive recipients of information rather than as people actively trying to hone their abilities. Is it any wonder kids are bored out of their minds in school? And sadly, those areas of schooling in which an ability-improvement role is actually a focus - the arts and athletics - are the same ones being de-emphasized in our attempts to shore up other fundamentals.
Of course, that brings us back to your point of how do you fix it? Well, one idea off the top of my head is this: in special ed (at least in VA), teachers are required to create individualized learning plans for their students. Why don't we do this for every student? There's a wide spectrum of ability in "regular" students, not just in special ed students, and I bet that sort of individual plan could really help students achieve more. The downside is that is a very labor-intensive process, so it'll be costly. But I suspect it'd give you more bang for the buck than a lot of other potential ideas (expensive computer equipment, etc).
Even passive content like a JPEG may be malicious/unsafe. Suppose someone discovers a buffer overflow exploit in how IE processes images. You can bet that you'll start seeing images crafted to trigger the exploit and thus hijack the viewing computer. They may well end up on Doubleclick's network.
When you have (inevitably) imperfect software paired with untrusted content providers, there is no guaranteed way to be safe. Which is what makes Doubleclick such a menace - you can't even trust reputable sites anymore, because they're serving ads from unknown and untrusted sources via Doubleclick.
I believe the root of the problem is that the social norm here is not really defined.
For cars, there is pretty clearly a social norm that leaving your car door unlocked does not equate to permission for someone to drive it.
On the other hand, there is a norm at my workplace that food left on the counter in the kitchen is fair game for all. Nobody puts signs on it saying "free food for your consumption", but it is nonetheless understood. If you didn't want someone to eat the food, you'd put it somewhere else (e.g. the fridge or your office).
So what is the norm for WAPs? Among techies, if it's unsecured it's almost certainly open for use, simply because no techie is going to leave his network unsecured otherwise. Among non-techies, it's harder to tell whether the openness is intentional or due to ignorance. Hence we get into this debate about what constitutes evidence of intent, or whether we should default to assuming intent or ignorance, etc.
Don't be so quick to "rage against the military". A lot of science is done with military funding. Many people who don't understand the value of pure science do see value in having a strong military. Thus the military funds science that will benefit it, and those technologies make their way into the civilian world. A lot of trauma medicine falls into this category, for example.
If you want something to really get concerned about with tax dollars, how about Woodstock museums, bridges to nowhere, or the gazillion other complete wastes of money that don't even pretend to serve a genuine public purpose? At least the war was an attempt to solve a perceived national problem, however badly it was planned and executed. These other things are nothing but pure waste with no national benefit.
No doubt sometimes rules will be broken due to extenuating circumstances (e.g. your ticking-bomb scenario). That's life. But that does not mean the rules are without merit and should be ignored. It means that people need to use some judgment. And when someone uses poor judgment in breaking the rules, they need to be called out on it, both for their own education and others'.
Because generally speaking the Christian fundamentalists are not trying to kill us.
You're exactly right, and I think a lot of technical people take for granted the benefits of science. But most people do not.
One of my high school social studies classes split students into small groups and had them try to decide on funding levels for the federal government. With the exception of myself, practically everyone was in favor of eliminating most pure-science funding, usually in favor of some sort of social-welfare project. NASA got the boot, for example. To them, putting people in space or sending a robot to take pictures of far-away planet is a gigantic waste of money. The thought didn't really occur to them that research into space communications, the behavior of organisms in microgravity, etc could have terrestrial "real-world" benefits.
IMO people are more likely to try to convert the aliens to their religion than to abandon it just because alien life has been discovered.
First, because alien life doesn't disprove the existence of God, and second because people tend to be fond of their beliefs and resist changing them more than absolutely necessary to deal with the facts (not necessarily a bad thing). Heck, they can also resist changing them even when their beliefs are clearly contradicted by the facts, which IS a bad thing but has been going on for centuries. So I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for religion's demise.
I don't think the post was assuming humanistic values - simply some form of social cooperation, such as you find with all sorts of species other than humans. Wolves, for example. Even ants and bees have a surprisingly large degree of social cooperation.
Assuming a social or pack-forming species does not assume egalitarianism, God, or human psychology. Only that certain elements of psychology are likely to be present - a need for cooperation. The GP referred to this as an evolutionary "pressure toward morality". That may be correct in the sense intended - a need to consider "self-preservation, reproduction, social interaction" - but it doesn't mean that the aliens will have anything like the same relative values placed on each of those concerns that we do, nor take the same approaches to solving them.
Just because we don't have the numbers to be a staple of their diet doesn't mean we won't be considered enough of a delicacy (or sport) to be hunted to extinction.
Maybe by writing a bill that can engender widespread support rather than merely a narrow majority. Bipartisanship is something of a lost art these days (on both sides).
I believe the main reason they got some inroads with Republicans on SCHIP is not because Republicans thought it was a good bill, it's because Republicans thought they would look bad voting against any program for children. And since Republicans knew Bush would veto it, they could safely vote for it to cover their butts, knowing that it would never become law.
The effort to debate impeachment was buried not out of sympathy for Bush, but because it would distract from the issues Democrats want to emphasize going into the 2008 elections. Dems need to have issues that will resonate with moderates in 2008, of which healthcare, education, and the war are all far bigger than impeachment.
Perhaps Pelosi and Hoyer are concerned that impeachment would become such a circus that it would prevent them doing the other things that they were elected to do. Things like passing appropriations bills, influencing Iraq policy, and doing something about health care. Or maybe they're concerned that it would be politically damaging to Democrats much like the Clinton impeachment was to Republicans. Most Americans may disagree with Bush and think he's incompetent, but that doesn't mean they see him as warranting impeachment.
Either way, the Dems have an option of trying to impeach Bush and Cheney with the aforementioned serious consequences, or waiting out one last year of the administration. The latter has the political advantage that they don't have to actually accomplish anything before the 2008 elections, because they can blame everything on the administration.
I think this all comes back to the same problem we've had for the past several years, which is a Congress in which both parties are so preoccupied playing politics that they are unable to work together to solve our real problems. And the result is most of our substantial public policy is being driven by Bush (which for those of us who are spectacularly unimpressed with both his leadership and competence, is an extremely bad thing).
Perhaps one could even call it a series of tubes?
:-)
Sorry, couldn't resist
I think the argument goes like this:
The existing Javascript/ECMAScript has a large installed base. Thus if you simply extend the existing spec in a backwards-compatible way, you allow developers to
keep using Javascript and upgrade with new features at their convenience. This keeps everyone using Javascript and *should* be a smooth and gradual transition.
However, if you switch to a require a separate mechanism to execute or a incompatible language, you force developers to rewrite their code in order to take advantage of the new features. This may be philosophically cleaner, but doesn't have the continuity benefit of the other approach.
Now if you're Microsoft, which situation do you prefer? The second one, because it fragments the installed base and therefore the influence of the platform you don't control. That gives you an opportunity to sell people on using your technology platform instead, since they'll have to rewrite either way to use new advanced features. But if they don't have to rewrite completely, it makes more economic sense for developers to stick with Javascript.
Now there may very well be other technical arguments too, but the above is why people are suspicious of Microsoft's arguments. After all, Microsoft knows very well the power of an installed base and the benefits of having control over common technology platforms.
The point IEEE makes is valid... but salary is not the right metric. The total amount the company pays you isn't just your salary, it's benefits too. And with double-digit percentage increases in the cost of health care, a lot of money that would have gone to salary increases has gone into providing good benefits.
That said, I don't know what the trend is in total compensation nationally. I do know that in the DC market, software folks are in high demand, especially if you know some signal processing. And the market has been reflecting that.
The other thing is that the field has been growing so fast that there are now numerous subdisciplines. Back when the computer field was new, the body of knowledge was small enough that you could be an expert in many different areas. The field has matured enough that you just can't be an expert in everything - there aren't enough hours in the day to learn it all. So your AI specialist may not know x86 opcodes like the back of his hand. That's actually a sign of progress, not a sign that the new grads are dumber.
Did the students get dumber, or did his expectations go up over time?
... your interviewers are often engineers who have spent years in the field, and it's easy to forget just how much you didn't know when you were fresh out of college. So we tell them to try to look for someone who has solid fundamentals and is smart... if they're smart, they can learn the rest of what they need to know quickly. If they're not... you probably don't want them even if they do know a particularly technology X, Y, or Z.
It's possible the lecturer has been in the field so long he doesn't remember how much a new engineer simply hasn't had the opportunity to learn.
We sometimes see this phenomenon in industry when interviewing new college grads
(Somewhere else in the thread someone was complaining about CS grads not knowing x86 assembly. Is that really a surprise? If they've done assembly for any architecture, and are reasonably intelligent as more CS grads probably are, they'll pick up x86 just fine. But to expect that they've been exposed to x86 assembly specifically seems a little unrealistic, especially given that most CS grads will never use any assembly language after graduation)
The article also noted the meticulousness of the racers in planning their course and having an airplane spotter for potential construction or other pitfalls. So these folks aren't careless, and they're driving a far more agile vehicle than most on the roads.
So IMO the questions are:
1: How does the undeniably increased risk from high speeds (reaction times, braking times, force in the event of a crash) compare with the decreased risks from the drivers' above-average skill, precautions, and vehicle?
2: If the overall risk increased, by how much? Is it comparable to everyday distractions (cell phones, misbehaving kids in the backseat, etc) we generally deem acceptable, or is it worse?
3: If worse, is it ethically acceptable for these drivers to impose that risk upon others on the roads?
To be honest, I don't see how any of us are in a position to answer these. Questions #1 and #2 are purely factual and statistical problems which require data we don't have from the article. Question #3 requires us to know the answer to #2, unless we want to go down the dubious road of claiming risks from one activity are somehow ethically worse than risks from another activity regardless of relative magnitude.
So basically at this point we're all just reacting emotionally to the event with no actual knowledge of the risks involved.