I agree that students should not be promoted to the next grade if they don't understand their current grade's material. That does no favors to the child.
Unfortunately that scenario has been all too common well before NCLB came along.
The interesting thing about the SATs and GREs is that they are supposedly very highly correlated with class scores in high school or college. On the one hand, ETS will argue this makes it a good test, because someone who scores well is likely to do well in their next phase of schooling. On the other hand, if they're so highly correlated, the test doesn't add much information that prior academic achievement doesn't already provide. So why have those tests at all, in the context of college admissions, if you can just use academic achievement instead?
I think there is a better case to be made for some sort of standardized test in the context of comparing schools to each other, and comparing a school's past performance to present. Of course, then you have to make a test which provides a broad measure of all the things you think are important in formal education. That's a difficult task, not least because there's a wide range of viewpoints on what schooling is supposed to provide.
NCLB does not divert resources away from teaching. It influences what is taught. If one happens to think the standardized tests actually test what we want students to learn, then this is a good thing. If one happens to think the standardized tests fail to measure what we want students to learn, then it's a bad thing.
In either case, however, the solution is to make sure the tests are measuring the right things. There are a lot of people who feel the tests aren't doing that - so let's fix the tests.
What we should NOT do is abandon the whole premise of measuring progress just because the tests could be better. (I'm not saying you did or did not advocate this. But a lot of anti-NCLB folks do just that). The only real way to know where a school needs improvement, and whether attempts at improvement are actually working, is to get some sort of empirical evidence, which pretty much boils down to testing.
I think you're right that there are a lot of potentially unhealthy things one can do, and we certainly don't want to have to enumerate every minor detail of our personal lives to our insurance company. That would be too much privacy cost for too little gain.
I guess where I disagree is with the idea that it is unfair to stop subsidizing any dangerous activity if you don't stop subsidizing them all. That is making the perfect the enemy of the good. While in a perfect world nobody would subsidize anyone else's risky behavior, in practice some risks are either so small or so difficult to measure that it would cost us more to measure them than it would to just bear the costs of those risks. In those cases, I think the most prudent thing to do is admit they're not worth pursuing.
For those few risks that are, as you said, "easily spotted" and highly expensive to us all, we should make people bear the cost of their own decisions. To me, removing some very large subsidies reduces the overall unfairness of the system, even if it isn't perfect. Discouraging smoking or overeating is just a nice side benefit of making the system more fair.
With health care we don't have anything resembling a true market. If you have health "insurance", you typically pay some nominal copay but you don't see the actual cost of the various treatment options available. You don't get to decide whether you're willing to pay extra for a better treatment, or save money using a more cost-effective treatment. That's all handled by some bureaucrat somewhere at an HMO who knows nothing about what you value in any given circumstance. Instead you get the care and (hidden) cost the insurer and the doctor can agree upon, and in general it's in their interests to pursue more expensive options (hence more profit). They try to keep the cost down somewhat for competitiveness, but it's hard to do that after the fact rather than as part of the doctor-patient relationship. I suspect this is why we have double-digit percentage increases each year in health care costs.
One can agree that everyone should have cradle-to-grave medical insurance, but still believe that it can be accomplished through a capitalist system with a social safety net, rather than an outright government-run health system. We do it for necessities like food (you buy your own groceries, but may receive food stamps); surely we could get it working with medicine.
The reason we don't have fire and police services based on ability to pay is because they're communal services - a fire at your house is likely to spread to your neighbor's, and crime too.
Besides, if you have a medical emergency and can't pay, by law you will not be turned away from the hospital either. But insurance is a different beast. You buy homeowner's insurance so you can recover if your house burns down, and you (or your employer) buy health insurance to help you get better when you're sick.
The argument is not that someone overweight should not receive medical care. The point is that each individual should bear the cost of his or her own lifestyle choices. If I decide to pound down three Big Macs and a gigantic soda every day for lunch, and become obese, then that's my right. But I'm not entitled to make someone else pay for my poor decisions.
If the "bad guys" knew we were wiretapping, then surely the "good guys" knew at least as much. Unless you're suggesting that the US government was not aware of its own surveillance activities, yet somehow the targets of that surveillance were.
And in any case, my point was not that this particular leak was damaging. Maybe it wasn't. My point was just that leaks of classified information often are damaging, which is why we have the laws against such leaks, and it's generally the Justice Department's responsibility to enforce the law. The DoJ is just doing its job by investigating the incident.
As for Bush being "severely embarrassed if news of their corruption and incompetence were to become known", I would suggest that A) Bush has demonstrated little ability to feel embarrassed by his administration's mistakes, and B) the administration's level of competence is already fairly well known. Just go search the words "Bush" and "incompetence" and see how many hits you get.
One can believe that the leaker was acting heroically and still believe that the leak investigation is a correct action for the Justice Department to take.
We have laws against disclosure of classified information for a very important reason: such leaks can severely endanger national security. Our agents can die and our ability to collect vital information can be squandered. "Loose lips sink ships" didn't originate with Bush. That's not fascism, it's a republic's perfectly reasonable national security law as created by its democratically elected representatives.
Furthermore, you don't want people to start thinking they can leak any classified secret they want with impunity, just because the program may be controversial. Also realize that a leak may not give the full story, and a public defense by a President to set the record straight could require disclosure of yet more classified information that could itself damage our security interests. We *need* people to expect consequences for leaking this sort of information.
Arguably it's the leaker's decision to proceed *despite the personal risk* that makes the action heroic. If he had nothing to lose then the act would be nothing more than a disagreement with the President.
That said, it's disturbing that it took a leak like this to get the President and Congress to have a real discussion about protections for Americans subject to eavesdropping. We should be able to protect our fundamental freedoms while pursuing terrorists, rather than simply discarding them because the President finds checks and balances too inconvenient.
Twins are only a problem if A) you're relying on the facial recognition as the sole identifying factor, or B) one of the twins is trying to steal from the other.
Case A is probably not going to happen, i.e. you still have a physical token (the ATM card) that will be different between them. All the recognition system has to do (which makes it sound easier than it is) is to say "the face in front of me matches what's on file for this ATM card". If 20 ATM cards/accounts have the same associated face, that's OK.
Case B is hopefully rare, but would be a weakness.
It has nothing to do with American programmers being incompetent (as a group they're certainly not). It's a numbers game. The unemployment rate for programmers is amazingly low - 2.4%. (As a comparison, the overall population's unemployment rate is double that, and is still considered to be low by historical standards.)
There simply aren't as many talented developers actively looking for jobs as there are jobs to be filled.
The quid (or the quo, I suppose) is that America gets the labor of bright foreigners it otherwise would not. And since they're moving to this country to work, they're also spending money in our economy.
With no disrespect to India, I doubt there are very many Americans who would want to move to India, compared to Indians who want to move to America. The United States is fortunate to have one of the best economies and standards of living in the world. India is not there yet. Hence the complete lack of concern among the American population at large about how hard or easy it may be for Americans to get jobs in India.
The opposition to H1Bs or immigration in general often seems to center on this idea that there is some fixed number of jobs, and if a foreigner comes here and gets one, then there would be one fewer jobs for Americans. But when you think about it that's clearly false; otherwise our natural population growth would have long ago led to us all being unemployed. More people means more demand for goods and services, which means more jobs to go around. And when you're talking about immigrants who can qualify for H1Bs, you're talking about the type of people who are more likely than the average Joe to start new companies that will employ even more people.
As for the more general question of trade barriers versus free trade: any agreed-upon trade benefits both parties, otherwise they wouldn't agree to the trade. Thus artificial trade barriers impose a cost, most often to the nation as a whole, to benefit whatever special interest lobbied for them.
Security isn't just the responsibility of a "security team". Security is something you have to build in throughout the software. Which means docking pay from the security folks will probably just mean less security folks at your company, which means less oversight of the code, which means even less secure software than you've got now.
For the above policy to even have a chance at working, you'd have to apply it to every developer. And suppose you did that - now you've created an incentive for the developers themselves not to disclose vulnerabilities internally, which seems rather backwards.
If you wanted to go down the road of financial impact per vulnerability, you'd probably be better off establishing a "bonus pool" for every (smallish) team. If your team's code can take a beating from penetration testers and the public at large, the team gets the bonus based on how well they did. Now you've got peer pressure and competitive spirit working in your favor. And the bonus just has to be large enough to feel significant - but even a decent bonus is probably next to nothing compared to the developer's base salary.
Actually, rereading the article, I think National Security Letters were covered. They're not signed by a judge, so answering Yes to the following question:
"Is it your policy to alert the user to the presence of any spyware or keystroke logger, even if it is installed by a police or intelligence agency in the absence of a lawful court order signed by a judge?"
In which case a non-answer could actually be considered more honest than the truthful but misleading statement that they'd never received a court order.
Exactly. We can probably make the reasonable assumption that the vendor goes with a cheap "solution", which is installing a backdoor into their software. Supposedly only the vendor will know the password or whatever authentication mechanism they use, but once you have a backdoor like that you've opened yourself up to the criminals too. And you have to trust that the vendor (including any disgruntled employees) will never allow access to anyone without a warrant.
I have no problem with law enforcement using their authority under a search warrant to install eavesdropping devices. But I certainly object to some supposed "security" vendor installing such eavesdropping capability without my knowledge or consent, prior to any warrant, on the *off chance* that I might turn out to be a criminal.
Assuming Microsoft does indeed implement ODF poorly as a strategy to undermine ODF (which is an assumption, even if a reasonable one):
Most people won't think to themselves "Microsoft must have made a crappy implementation of the standard", they'll think that either your document sucks or that the ODF format sucks. The reality of the MS implementation being intentionally poor probably won't occur to them. And most people don't happen to have OpenOffice installed alongside their copy of MS Office to easily compare.
The only way I see to avoid that fate is to get a critical mass of ODF producers (and thus consumers). That will force Microsoft to come up with a tolerably decent implementation or risk pushing people to OpenOffice, which could undermine their whole Office monopoly. But getting the critical mass is the hardest part, since MS already has the incumbent's benefit of huge network effects.
What kind of cost, even multiplied 9 times, is going to outweigh the cost of being dead?
In fact, if it wasn't for a certain level of fearlessness improving your odds of reproductive success (in spite of the obvious risks to your life), evolution would probably have made us far more fearful than we naturally are.
I believe the author's point isn't that you don't need to know any mathematics, or that it doesn't have an important role to play in CS. He's simply arguing that some of the main issues in computer science are not fundamentally mathematical problems (even if they require some mathematics).
If you buy that argument, then treating CS as if it were merely simply another branch of mathematics will not help solve those problems.
Of course, this also takes us into the perennial debate between where to draw the line between "computer science" and "software engineering". One could certainly define away the author's problem by saying that his examples are software engineering issues rather than computer science issues. And it's true that it's software engineering has been driving a lot of the theory with respect to expressiveness (design patterns and the like). But that view also seems to really impoverish computer science - if all you leave the field of computer science is the stereotypical mathematics, why not just become an applied mathematics major?
I believe part of the problem is that nobody can even seem to agree on what the heck "net neutrality" is supposed to mean.
You've got some (like the article) that make the term basically about QoS - whether you can treat streaming video differently than email. I don't really see what there is to get upset about if service providers prioritize real-time applications over non-realtime applications.
On the other hand, you've got others who make the term about business relationships. I.e. is a service provider obligated to provide service to Company A on the same terms as Company B? There it's a lot more murky. If it's just a matter of volume discounts, then I have a hard time seeing what's different about internet providers providing discounts versus, say, FedEx or UPS providing volume discounts for package deliveries. The one potential area of concern, IMO, is the antitrust angle - is a service provider allowed to discriminate against a customer in order to benefit its other businesses in separate markets?
The devil is in the details with these proposals, and the "network neutrality" slogan doesn't really clue you in about what specifically is meant to be neutral. So I agree that caution is very much warranted here.
As an abstract ideal/goal the term has a meaning, i.e. "everyone should have health care". And you're right that there is a distinction between the goal and how it may be accomplished. But I would argue that terms like these take on connotations beyond their strictest meaning, but which nonetheless are part of their meaning in a policy/political context.
It's like freedom of speech. Practically everyone in the US will claim to support "freedom of speech". But that means different things to different people. When you ask them more specifically what they support - whether we should allow or ban flag burning, hate speech, certain organizationally-funded political ads, etc., you discover there's a wide spectrum of what people consider to qualify as "free speech". So knowing that someone supports the ideal of "free speech" doesn't tell you a whole lot.
So it is with "universal health care", "protecting children", "fighting crime", "eliminating waste", or any of a dozen other slogans out there. We all agree on them only because they're so generic that they give us no information about the tradeoffs involved in achieving them. To me, that is a very weak sort of meaning. Maybe not quite "meaningless", but close.
It's meaningless in the sense that the term states a goal everyone can agree upon (everyone should have health care) without saying a darn thing about how to achieve it. "Universal health care" could mean everyone buying their own health insurance in a free market, or it could mean the federal government buying it for everyone through your taxes, or anything in-between.
Given that the debate is not whether or not everyone should have access to health care, but rather how to fund that health care and how much of it, the term IS meaningless. It does nothing to advance anyone's understanding of the competing proposals.
There's a difference between respecting somebody, and behaving properly towards them. I was taught (and properly so) that you should behave courteously and with civility towards everyone. I was also taught that respect is something to be earned - and crucially, that this earning of respect is a two-way street.
The problem is not that people believe respect must be earned. We've had plenty of examples in history and in each of our lives of people in positions of authority whose actions showed they were not particularly worthy of respect. The problem is not people recognizing that. The problem is that some apply the respect-must-be-earned rule only to others. These are the folks who expect respect for themselves but don't act respectably. That, IMO, is what has opened to door to the nonsense you described.
I'm assuming from your 3-digit subscriber ID that you probably graduated college well before Facebook and Myspace took off. My (completely unscientific and anecdotal) observation has been that the Facebook/Myspace skew tends to be less pronounced for folks in that category.
I myself graduated in 2001/2002 (B.S. and M.S. respectively) and have found that my (slightly) younger friends skew heavily towards Facebook, while those the same age or older tend to be more evenly split.
Bush is hardly the only American who believes that immigrants to America should learn our common language. Knowing English has never been a prerequisite to living here, nor should it be, but it has long been generally expected (and largely practiced) that immigrants try to learn at least minimal English once they're here.
Being able to communicate with one's fellow residents/citizens is a fairly fundamental part of being any community. And the fact that we've had generations of immigrants do exactly that is, I believe, a large part of why we've been successful as a nation at integrating people from all over the world into our society. And that integration is the fundamental ideal behind the "melting pot" and "salad" analogies - we all have different backgrounds but are part of one unified nation.
The expectation to learn English doesn't mean one shouldn't have tolerance and patience with folks who are early in the learning process. There's no need to be a jerk. Making fun of a newcomer to our country simply because they don't speak English definitely counts as being a jerk. But the existence of a few jerks doesn't mean we should give up on having folks learn English.
Yeah, but that's the point - having to adjust the volume whenever a track from Band X comes up in your playlist is seen as an inconvenience. You want to be able to just set the volume knob to a reasonable level and go do something else while the music plays in the background.
Sure people will adjust the volume, but it's an interruption, and they'll think "why does Band X make their music so much quieter than normal... what a pain". 99.9% of the population has no idea what dynamic range is, and don't realize that most of their music collection has sacrificed quality for out-of-the-box loudness. The band would really have to educate the population before people would recognize that they're getting better music, not worse. And that's beyond the ability of most bands to do, so they just go with the herd.
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I agree that students should not be promoted to the next grade if they don't understand their current grade's material. That does no favors to the child.
Unfortunately that scenario has been all too common well before NCLB came along.
The interesting thing about the SATs and GREs is that they are supposedly very highly correlated with class scores in high school or college. On the one hand, ETS will argue this makes it a good test, because someone who scores well is likely to do well in their next phase of schooling. On the other hand, if they're so highly correlated, the test doesn't add much information that prior academic achievement doesn't already provide. So why have those tests at all, in the context of college admissions, if you can just use academic achievement instead?
I think there is a better case to be made for some sort of standardized test in the context of comparing schools to each other, and comparing a school's past performance to present. Of course, then you have to make a test which provides a broad measure of all the things you think are important in formal education. That's a difficult task, not least because there's a wide range of viewpoints on what schooling is supposed to provide.
NCLB does not divert resources away from teaching. It influences what is taught. If one happens to think the standardized tests actually test what we want students to learn, then this is a good thing. If one happens to think the standardized tests fail to measure what we want students to learn, then it's a bad thing.
In either case, however, the solution is to make sure the tests are measuring the right things. There are a lot of people who feel the tests aren't doing that - so let's fix the tests.
What we should NOT do is abandon the whole premise of measuring progress just because the tests could be better. (I'm not saying you did or did not advocate this. But a lot of anti-NCLB folks do just that). The only real way to know where a school needs improvement, and whether attempts at improvement are actually working, is to get some sort of empirical evidence, which pretty much boils down to testing.
I think you're right that there are a lot of potentially unhealthy things one can do, and we certainly don't want to have to enumerate every minor detail of our personal lives to our insurance company. That would be too much privacy cost for too little gain.
I guess where I disagree is with the idea that it is unfair to stop subsidizing any dangerous activity if you don't stop subsidizing them all. That is making the perfect the enemy of the good. While in a perfect world nobody would subsidize anyone else's risky behavior, in practice some risks are either so small or so difficult to measure that it would cost us more to measure them than it would to just bear the costs of those risks. In those cases, I think the most prudent thing to do is admit they're not worth pursuing.
For those few risks that are, as you said, "easily spotted" and highly expensive to us all, we should make people bear the cost of their own decisions. To me, removing some very large subsidies reduces the overall unfairness of the system, even if it isn't perfect. Discouraging smoking or overeating is just a nice side benefit of making the system more fair.
With health care we don't have anything resembling a true market. If you have health "insurance", you typically pay some nominal copay but you don't see the actual cost of the various treatment options available. You don't get to decide whether you're willing to pay extra for a better treatment, or save money using a more cost-effective treatment. That's all handled by some bureaucrat somewhere at an HMO who knows nothing about what you value in any given circumstance. Instead you get the care and (hidden) cost the insurer and the doctor can agree upon, and in general it's in their interests to pursue more expensive options (hence more profit). They try to keep the cost down somewhat for competitiveness, but it's hard to do that after the fact rather than as part of the doctor-patient relationship. I suspect this is why we have double-digit percentage increases each year in health care costs.
One can agree that everyone should have cradle-to-grave medical insurance, but still believe that it can be accomplished through a capitalist system with a social safety net, rather than an outright government-run health system. We do it for necessities like food (you buy your own groceries, but may receive food stamps); surely we could get it working with medicine.
The reason we don't have fire and police services based on ability to pay is because they're communal services - a fire at your house is likely to spread to your neighbor's, and crime too.
Besides, if you have a medical emergency and can't pay, by law you will not be turned away from the hospital either. But insurance is a different beast. You buy homeowner's insurance so you can recover if your house burns down, and you (or your employer) buy health insurance to help you get better when you're sick.
The argument is not that someone overweight should not receive medical care. The point is that each individual should bear the cost of his or her own lifestyle choices. If I decide to pound down three Big Macs and a gigantic soda every day for lunch, and become obese, then that's my right. But I'm not entitled to make someone else pay for my poor decisions.
You also need to compare what you get for that X percent of GDP in each nation, not just the total cost.
If the "bad guys" knew we were wiretapping, then surely the "good guys" knew at least as much. Unless you're suggesting that the US government was not aware of its own surveillance activities, yet somehow the targets of that surveillance were.
And in any case, my point was not that this particular leak was damaging. Maybe it wasn't. My point was just that leaks of classified information often are damaging, which is why we have the laws against such leaks, and it's generally the Justice Department's responsibility to enforce the law. The DoJ is just doing its job by investigating the incident.
As for Bush being "severely embarrassed if news of their corruption and incompetence were to become known", I would suggest that A) Bush has demonstrated little ability to feel embarrassed by his administration's mistakes, and B) the administration's level of competence is already fairly well known. Just go search the words "Bush" and "incompetence" and see how many hits you get.
One can believe that the leaker was acting heroically and still believe that the leak investigation is a correct action for the Justice Department to take.
We have laws against disclosure of classified information for a very important reason: such leaks can severely endanger national security. Our agents can die and our ability to collect vital information can be squandered. "Loose lips sink ships" didn't originate with Bush. That's not fascism, it's a republic's perfectly reasonable national security law as created by its democratically elected representatives.
Furthermore, you don't want people to start thinking they can leak any classified secret they want with impunity, just because the program may be controversial. Also realize that a leak may not give the full story, and a public defense by a President to set the record straight could require disclosure of yet more classified information that could itself damage our security interests. We *need* people to expect consequences for leaking this sort of information.
Arguably it's the leaker's decision to proceed *despite the personal risk* that makes the action heroic. If he had nothing to lose then the act would be nothing more than a disagreement with the President.
That said, it's disturbing that it took a leak like this to get the President and Congress to have a real discussion about protections for Americans subject to eavesdropping. We should be able to protect our fundamental freedoms while pursuing terrorists, rather than simply discarding them because the President finds checks and balances too inconvenient.
Twins are only a problem if A) you're relying on the facial recognition as the sole identifying factor, or B) one of the twins is trying to steal from the other.
Case A is probably not going to happen, i.e. you still have a physical token (the ATM card) that will be different between them. All the recognition system has to do (which makes it sound easier than it is) is to say "the face in front of me matches what's on file for this ATM card". If 20 ATM cards/accounts have the same associated face, that's OK.
Case B is hopefully rare, but would be a weakness.
It has nothing to do with American programmers being incompetent (as a group they're certainly not). It's a numbers game. The unemployment rate for programmers is amazingly low - 2.4%. (As a comparison, the overall population's unemployment rate is double that, and is still considered to be low by historical standards.)
There simply aren't as many talented developers actively looking for jobs as there are jobs to be filled.
The quid (or the quo, I suppose) is that America gets the labor of bright foreigners it otherwise would not. And since they're moving to this country to work, they're also spending money in our economy.
With no disrespect to India, I doubt there are very many Americans who would want to move to India, compared to Indians who want to move to America. The United States is fortunate to have one of the best economies and standards of living in the world. India is not there yet. Hence the complete lack of concern among the American population at large about how hard or easy it may be for Americans to get jobs in India.
The opposition to H1Bs or immigration in general often seems to center on this idea that there is some fixed number of jobs, and if a foreigner comes here and gets one, then there would be one fewer jobs for Americans. But when you think about it that's clearly false; otherwise our natural population growth would have long ago led to us all being unemployed. More people means more demand for goods and services, which means more jobs to go around. And when you're talking about immigrants who can qualify for H1Bs, you're talking about the type of people who are more likely than the average Joe to start new companies that will employ even more people.
As for the more general question of trade barriers versus free trade: any agreed-upon trade benefits both parties, otherwise they wouldn't agree to the trade. Thus artificial trade barriers impose a cost, most often to the nation as a whole, to benefit whatever special interest lobbied for them.
Security isn't just the responsibility of a "security team". Security is something you have to build in throughout the software. Which means docking pay from the security folks will probably just mean less security folks at your company, which means less oversight of the code, which means even less secure software than you've got now.
For the above policy to even have a chance at working, you'd have to apply it to every developer. And suppose you did that - now you've created an incentive for the developers themselves not to disclose vulnerabilities internally, which seems rather backwards.
If you wanted to go down the road of financial impact per vulnerability, you'd probably be better off establishing a "bonus pool" for every (smallish) team. If your team's code can take a beating from penetration testers and the public at large, the team gets the bonus based on how well they did. Now you've got peer pressure and competitive spirit working in your favor. And the bonus just has to be large enough to feel significant - but even a decent bonus is probably next to nothing compared to the developer's base salary.
Actually, rereading the article, I think National Security Letters were covered. They're not signed by a judge, so answering Yes to the following question:
"Is it your policy to alert the user to the presence of any spyware or
keystroke logger, even if it is installed by a police or intelligence
agency in the absence of a lawful court order signed by a judge?"
means that their software would still alert you.
In which case a non-answer could actually be considered more honest than the truthful but misleading statement that they'd never received a court order.
Exactly. We can probably make the reasonable assumption that the vendor goes with a cheap "solution", which is installing a backdoor into their software. Supposedly only the vendor will know the password or whatever authentication mechanism they use, but once you have a backdoor like that you've opened yourself up to the criminals too. And you have to trust that the vendor (including any disgruntled employees) will never allow access to anyone without a warrant.
I have no problem with law enforcement using their authority under a search warrant to install eavesdropping devices. But I certainly object to some supposed "security" vendor installing such eavesdropping capability without my knowledge or consent, prior to any warrant, on the *off chance* that I might turn out to be a criminal.
Assuming Microsoft does indeed implement ODF poorly as a strategy to undermine ODF (which is an assumption, even if a reasonable one):
Most people won't think to themselves "Microsoft must have made a crappy implementation of the standard", they'll think that either your document sucks or that the ODF format sucks. The reality of the MS implementation being intentionally poor probably won't occur to them. And most people don't happen to have OpenOffice installed alongside their copy of MS Office to easily compare.
The only way I see to avoid that fate is to get a critical mass of ODF producers (and thus consumers). That will force Microsoft to come up with a tolerably decent implementation or risk pushing people to OpenOffice, which could undermine their whole Office monopoly. But getting the critical mass is the hardest part, since MS already has the incumbent's benefit of huge network effects.
What kind of cost, even multiplied 9 times, is going to outweigh the cost of being dead?
In fact, if it wasn't for a certain level of fearlessness improving your odds of reproductive success (in spite of the obvious risks to your life), evolution would probably have made us far more fearful than we naturally are.
I believe the author's point isn't that you don't need to know any mathematics, or that it doesn't have an important role to play in CS. He's simply arguing that some of the main issues in computer science are not fundamentally mathematical problems (even if they require some mathematics).
If you buy that argument, then treating CS as if it were merely simply another branch of mathematics will not help solve those problems.
Of course, this also takes us into the perennial debate between where to draw the line between "computer science" and "software engineering". One could certainly define away the author's problem by saying that his examples are software engineering issues rather than computer science issues. And it's true that it's software engineering has been driving a lot of the theory with respect to expressiveness (design patterns and the like). But that view also seems to really impoverish computer science - if all you leave the field of computer science is the stereotypical mathematics, why not just become an applied mathematics major?
I believe part of the problem is that nobody can even seem to agree on what the heck "net neutrality" is supposed to mean.
You've got some (like the article) that make the term basically about QoS - whether you can treat streaming video differently than email. I don't really see what there is to get upset about if service providers prioritize real-time applications over non-realtime applications.
On the other hand, you've got others who make the term about business relationships. I.e. is a service provider obligated to provide service to Company A on the same terms as Company B? There it's a lot more murky. If it's just a matter of volume discounts, then I have a hard time seeing what's different about internet providers providing discounts versus, say, FedEx or UPS providing volume discounts for package deliveries. The one potential area of concern, IMO, is the antitrust angle - is a service provider allowed to discriminate against a customer in order to benefit its other businesses in separate markets?
The devil is in the details with these proposals, and the "network neutrality" slogan doesn't really clue you in about what specifically is meant to be neutral. So I agree that caution is very much warranted here.
As an abstract ideal/goal the term has a meaning, i.e. "everyone should have health care". And you're right that there is a distinction between the goal and how it may be accomplished. But I would argue that terms like these take on connotations beyond their strictest meaning, but which nonetheless are part of their meaning in a policy/political context.
It's like freedom of speech. Practically everyone in the US will claim to support "freedom of speech". But that means different things to different people. When you ask them more specifically what they support - whether we should allow or ban flag burning, hate speech, certain organizationally-funded political ads, etc., you discover there's a wide spectrum of what people consider to qualify as "free speech". So knowing that someone supports the ideal of "free speech" doesn't tell you a whole lot.
So it is with "universal health care", "protecting children", "fighting crime", "eliminating waste", or any of a dozen other slogans out there. We all agree on them only because they're so generic that they give us no information about the tradeoffs involved in achieving them. To me, that is a very weak sort of meaning. Maybe not quite "meaningless", but close.
It's meaningless in the sense that the term states a goal everyone can agree upon (everyone should have health care) without saying a darn thing about how to achieve it. "Universal health care" could mean everyone buying their own health insurance in a free market, or it could mean the federal government buying it for everyone through your taxes, or anything in-between.
Given that the debate is not whether or not everyone should have access to health care, but rather how to fund that health care and how much of it, the term IS meaningless. It does nothing to advance anyone's understanding of the competing proposals.
There's a difference between respecting somebody, and behaving properly towards them. I was taught (and properly so) that you should behave courteously and
with civility towards everyone. I was also taught that respect is something to be earned - and crucially, that this earning of respect is a two-way street.
The problem is not that people believe respect must be earned. We've had plenty of examples in history and in each of our lives of people in positions of authority whose actions showed they were not particularly worthy of respect. The problem is not people recognizing that. The problem is that some apply the respect-must-be-earned rule only to others. These are the folks who expect respect for themselves but don't act respectably. That, IMO, is what has opened to door to the nonsense you described.
I'm assuming from your 3-digit subscriber ID that you probably graduated college well before Facebook and Myspace took off. My (completely unscientific and anecdotal) observation has been that the Facebook/Myspace skew tends to be less pronounced for folks in that category.
I myself graduated in 2001/2002 (B.S. and M.S. respectively) and have found that my (slightly) younger friends skew heavily towards Facebook, while those the same age or older tend to be more evenly split.
Bush is hardly the only American who believes that immigrants to America should learn our common language. Knowing English has never been a prerequisite to living here, nor should it be, but it has long been generally expected (and largely practiced) that immigrants try to learn at least minimal English once they're here.
Being able to communicate with one's fellow residents/citizens is a fairly fundamental part of being any community. And the fact that we've had generations of immigrants do exactly that is, I believe, a large part of why we've been successful as a nation at integrating people from all over the world into our society. And that integration is the fundamental ideal behind the "melting pot" and "salad" analogies - we all have different backgrounds but are part of one unified nation.
The expectation to learn English doesn't mean one shouldn't have tolerance and patience with folks who are early in the learning process. There's no need to be a jerk. Making fun of a newcomer to our country simply because they don't speak English definitely counts as being a jerk. But the existence of a few jerks doesn't mean we should give up on having folks learn English.
Yeah, but that's the point - having to adjust the volume whenever a track from Band X comes up in your playlist is seen as an inconvenience. You want to be able to just set the volume knob to a reasonable level and go do something else while the music plays in the background.
Sure people will adjust the volume, but it's an interruption, and they'll think "why does Band X make their music so much quieter than normal... what a pain". 99.9% of the population has no idea what dynamic range is, and don't realize that most of their music collection has sacrificed quality for out-of-the-box loudness. The band would really have to educate the population before people would recognize that they're getting better music, not worse. And that's beyond the ability of most bands to do, so they just go with the herd.