Do you really not see the difference between a teacher with a belief, and a teacher teaching a belief, or of a school set up by a group of people with a particular belief compared to a school set up to teach the principles of that belief (to the necessary exclusion of other beliefs)? I wouldn't want an 'atheist faith school' set up any more than I want to see any other, I want schools to give as even and neutral an education as possible, rather than be set up to push any agenda, even one I agree with. Most of the time, belief shouldn't come up at all; when it does, each belief system, and none, should get equal weight, that's all I ask. Of course I don't want to prevent religious groups from setting up schools, and I don't want to shut down the ones that exist, I just want them to operate under exactly the same rules regarding curriculum, pupil intake, and so forth as any other community group - I'm asking for simple equality here, not the pro-atheist campaign you seem to have pinned on me. The concept of faith schools, and, more specifically, of "a Christian school" or "a Muslim school" is very different to "a school run by Muslims" or "a school run by Christians" - we obviously differ widely in our opinions, but do you not see how the former gives the faith groups special status compared to non-faith groups, when all I ask is that they be placed under a single 'community group' heading?
But can you not see that your proposal does explicitly discriminate against religious groups? It's a special law against religion. A teacher can believe and teach anything non-religious -- that Hegelian philosophy is the best thing since sliced bread, or that utilitarianism is the way you should be making every moral decision. But if they have a religious belief, you'll allow them to be present so long as they do not teach it. (And effectively, see next para, that means do not admit to having a religious belief.) Even in your proposal, religion would be the one kind of belief that dare not speak its name. And under your proposal even if the teachers, parents, and students all belong have the same religious belief their school must still be banned from telling students about it (teaching it).
Also, there is no difference between a teacher with a belief and a teacher teaching that belief. Let's look at some real situations. In places where there is a ban on teaching religion, teachers have been sacked for even answering the question "do you believe in God". After all, a teacher expressing a belief in God is teaching religion. So those teachers either had to deny or hide their faith (which is against their faith) or face discrimination and dismissal. In Australia, this sometimes has ridiculous consequences -- the government found that having access to chaplains in schools significantly improves student behaviour and attainment, so they put a program to get more chaplains (of all faiths) into state schools -- but because there's a ban on religious teaching those religious chaplains they just sent in were still banned from talking about or answering questions about their religion! The chaplains have a seriously hard time working around the legislation just to do the job they were employed to do.
You claim that religious teaching is "to the necessary exclusion of other beliefs" (which isn't true -- faith schools do allow teachers and students of other faiths, and do teach other belief systems in RE classes on the curriculum), but it is your proposal that would seek to legislate to exclude particular beliefs (religious ones) from being taught. "Helegian philosophy? Go for it. Christianity? We'll legislate against it." Faith schools don't exist because there is special legislation to say they must exist; they exist because the legislation does not prevent them from existing. So your change is necessarily a special law to ban religious schools -- a special ban on religion that is not there for irreligion, disbelief, or any other matter.
I highly doubt that open source tools are used because they allow themselves to be modified. What percentage of people actually look into the code and modify them?
It doesn't really matter what the percentage is, because there's a strong positive reinforcement loop. If an open source programming tool has a wide audience, then it has a wide audience of programmers -- just what it wants to recruit to improve the codebase! That makes it a little different than, say, an open source spreadsheet attracting a million more accountants. For programming tools there really is a much stronger positive feedback loop between popularity and rate of development.
The precise nature of the legal protections for religion varies, of course, so anything either of us says on that front is going to be local. In the UK, a country far more secular than the US, religions have special status within the education system compared to other non-profit community organisations, and some church leaders receive a measure of automatic political power. That goes far, far beyond freedom of speech and belief, and well into government sponsorship of religion, in my opinion.
You're absolutely correct about people being able to say and believe what they like, and that we have no right to 'freedom from speech'; I actually made a clarification to my original post to that effect.
I strongly disagree with your last paragraph, though. All I ask is that religions be held to precisely the same standard as any other community organisation, no more, no less. People's right to religious belief should be protected as much as their right to political belief; again no more, no less. As for removing a person from his job just because of his religion, I'd be absolutely furious if that happened - just because I strongly disagree with someone's belief, doesn't mean I'm so short sighted as to ignore the importance of protecting freedom for everybody. If his religion happened to be interfering with his ability to teach science effectively then that's a quite different matter, and again I'd apply the simple test of "would it be acceptable for non-religious reasons?"; if he's telling people that God holds molecules together with tiny strands of angel hair, or if he's telling them that the four humours explain all of medical science, he should be fired for incompetence. That's not a matter of belief, though, that's a matter of letting one's belief interfere with the satisfactory performance of one's job.
Wrong in 3 ways:
1. The UK is not "more secular than the US". Secular does not mean "count the atheists and agnostics". (It especially doesn't mean "...and count anyone who hasn't been to church a while as an atheist regardless of whether they say they are Christian on a census form, because we know better than they do what their beliefs are" -- which is the tactic usually used to proclaim how secular the UK is.) Secular society does not depend on how many people believe or do not believe. Secular matters are the contrast from Regular matters -- "regular" matters are subject to ecclesiastical law, whereas "secular" matters are not. Brushing your teeth is "secular"; it is not "atheist". It isn't anything to do with whether or not anybody believes in God. So the US, where there is constitutional separation between church and state, is every bit as secular as the UK regardless of how many believers or non-believers there are in either country. Recently there has been a brazen attempt to co-opt the word "secular" for rhetorical reasons: to pretend that the phrase "secular society" means that the country belongs to atheists not to the religious -- after all, everyone supports "secular society" (strictly meaning the government is not subject to church law) so if we can co-opt the word "secular" to be a synonym for "atheist" then people will think they've already signed up to support "atheist society", right?
2. Your complaint about faith schools suggests you couldn't answer "no" to resisting sacking that Muslim teacher. You'd like to shut the whole school! As you should well know if you're from the UK you can set up a non-religious independent school and receive state funding for it -- such as the "city academies" the last government brought in, but independent government-funded secular schools have been around for a very long time. I went to one when I was a chil
As I mentioned in a post above, if you think their opinions on sharing are ridiculous, then it makes an excellent statement on the problems with allowing religion to be a protected class. Religion is something that a group of people happen to believe - you can't give special treatment to certain types of belief without discriminating against those who do not subscribe to those particular types.
You've predicated this on some false assumptions. First, a lot of jurisdictions do not give the extent of "special treatment to religion" you'd like to claim -- tax breaks in most places I've lived are usually under the charities laws as community and non-profit organisations (in other words, it'd be tax-exempt whether it was a prayer circle or a knitting circle), and if anything many churches are given special penalties in that regular donations (as opposed to one-off donations) are often not tax deductible as they are treated as membership fees by the tax office even if they are not.
In terms of being a "protected class" you need to realise what this means: you are given legal protection to disagree with what people in power tell you you should believe, and to express your belief whether or not they like it. Freedom of religion is identical to freedom of speech -- it is the freedom to say things in public that someone with enough power might want to prevent you from saying. And generally there's not a right to freedom from speech ("Silence that man from stating views I don't like! Cart him off to the political prison for violating my freedom from speech!", or on a smaller scale, "I'm a your boss and I'm a Republican; if you vote democrat then you're fired"). There are some protections that have to be there to prevent abuse -- such as that Republican boss not being allowed to fire his Democrat employees. And there have to be some exemptions just to make things work, but again they are not unique to religion. Churches are indeed allowed to religiously discriminate when employing their priests and say "no, really we do want a Christian priest to lead this Christian congregation, not just a generic religious leader of any religion." But then I'm pretty sure Obama wasn't required by law to interview die hard Republicans to be his policy advisers either.
Calls for "freedom from religion", and there have been plenty on Slashdot, are effectively identical to calls for a command society with institutionalised atheism and punishment for anyone who expresses a view opposed to that of those in power -- effectively, the worst parts of communism without any of that airy fairy looking after the poor. Because without enforcement, punishment, and the loss of liberty, "freedom from religion" couldn't be enforced. The temptation to try and enforce a command society can happen at a community level. Perhaps a good thought experiment on Slashdot would be to ask this: "You see your son's science teacher coming out of a Mosque having just prayed... do you want to have this man removed from his job because he dared disagree with your own religious/irreligious beliefs?" I suspect quite a few on Slashdot would struggle to answer "no".
Take any number of people coming out of high school from your grandfathers time (or heck even our modern time [or double heck grab a bunch of workers from a car factory), I'd like for you to find one that could design an airplane that flies, figure out all the materials required, then form assembly instructions that could be repeated for best results in the fastest way possible.
Actually, that's pretty easy. My uncle on my mother's side. If I recall correctly, he did not attend university. However he most certainly was an engineer who designed aircraft and did just what you say, for British Aerospace. Or to give you another example, Frank Whittle invented and built the jet engine while he was an aircraft apprentice in the RAF. It was only after he invented the engine that aviation now totally relies upon that he attended university.
A WW2 era Toolmaker is not low skill. On the contrary it took great skill and was highly regarded trade back in the day.
Absolutely, and that is precisely my point. But if you look at the other replies to my post, you will see exactly the sort of prejudice ("it was in a factory, therefore it must have been low skill and a dog could do it") that I was complaining about. In your case, you believe that there once were high skill jobs, but you seem to believe that there aren't any more. There is still a whole ecosystem of high-skill labour around setting up and running an efficient manufacturing plant that is also lost when manufacturing is closed down as an industry. People look at manufacturing and see only the low-skill jobs. I see old university friends who are chemical engineers, process engineers, polymer chemists, and many other fields who have to move countries to get a job because we just don't make anything here any more.
It's like everyone clammoring to bail out GM and save a bunch of low skill jobs that are going nowhere but overseas in the future anyway. It's a losing battle with the wrong objective.
Actually that's not true in two ways.
First, I always think it's remarkably arrogant that we label manufacturing jobs "low-skill". My grandfather was a toolmaker in an aeroplane factory in World War 2. Imagine a job swap between us and see think which would be the bigger disaster: him trying to do some academic research and put a paper into a conference, or me trying to actually physically build an aeroplane good enough that your life could depend on it while the luftwaffe try to shoot you down. But for some reason it's his job that would be classified as "blue collar" and "low-skill".
The second is that labour costs are much less of an impetus for moving "low-skill" jobs than they used to be. Wages in China have risen such that many companies have thought about moving manufacturing away to lower-wage countries like Bangladesh, etc. But the skills and infrastructure needed to run serious industrial scale manufacturing are not present there making business to difficult. It's no longer worth the saving. As globalisation equalises costs of living, the factories are going to stop playing musical chairs with countries, and start sticking where the capacity and infrastructure has been built up. And right now, regardless of costs, that is China because the US has been slashing and burning its manufacturing skills and capacity.
I don't think it is accurate to describe an Android win as a Linux win. To say Android based phones indicate Linux's success seems about as logical as saying Mac OS X's success demonstrates FreeBSD's triumph over Linux. As nearly all Mac users don't know or care about the FreeBSD underpinnings, nearly all Android users don't know or care about the Linux underpinnings.
I couldn't disagree more. Linux is not a UI. That users do not "care" about it is part of Linux's victory: Linux has successfully commoditised operating system kernels so much that users are no longer willing to pay a premium to use a particular one. In times gone by, "which operating system does it use" was a serious question; now it's not. Jim Zemelin couldn't care two hoots what UI environment is popular.
Windows is both an operating system kernel and a UI environment. One half of that has now been completely commoditised. The interesting question is whether HTML5 will commoditise the other half.
Really the only people who would have a solid reason to dislike the GPL are those with a strong desire to use someone else's work without ever having to contribute anything in return.
Or anyone writing open source code that wants to use both a GPL library and a library with an incompatible open source licence. Eg, you cannot combine GPLv2 code with GPLv3 code, and there are many more incompatible open source licences.
Why Nokia? Why? Do the management like Microsoft money more than they like staying in business?
Comparatively, MS must look pretty good - in that "very distant third place" (where I'd guess WP7 will be in 2012) is much better than "completely dead" (where Symbian and MeeGo would be in 2012). Already in 2011, I've seen mobile phone stands in shopping centres here effectively categorising their phones to the user as "Here's the iPhone, here's our Android phones, here's some Windows Phone 7 phones on businessy-sounding plans, and here's some assorted crap". Symbian and MeeGo were never going to get the recognition to get out of the "here's some assorted crap" category. Phone 7 will probably have a smallish market share, but with MS doing all the advertising spending, and Nokia having been given billions by MS just for turning up.
There are also a couple of things that might just help Phone 7 eke out a slice of the market. The first is that (where I am anyway) carriers all put iPhones on ridiculously expensive plans, whether or not it actually costs much more as a device. So any other smartphone gets a big price advantage to the consumer just for not being an iPhone. The second is if Google doesn't manage to squash the "rogue apps" problem completely -- people are much more personal about their phones than their computers, and thoughts of rogue apps running up large bills will scare people, especially as (again, where I am) carriers won't help customers stop their data usage from going hundreds of dollars over the limit in their plan -- because they use that fear to sell people bigger data plans than they need. So that'd be an irony of ironies -- security problems pushing people towards Microsoft!
And though it's intended effect is to tarnish Google's image/brand consumers really don't give a shit. They're going to buy an Android phone if they want one despite any copyright issues or what could turn out to be platform propaganda.
"Going to buy an Android phone" doesn't mean "don't give a shit". I'm a Google and Android customer (and a very nice phone it is too) and it irks me when I hear that Google isn't "playing nice" precisely because I am a customer. I'm much more annoyed when I hear that a company that has my support is misbehaving than one I don't do much business with anyway. In this case, there's FUD in that I don't think it affects the apps the way the article claims, but if Google have been stripping the licences off header files and replacing them with different licences the authors did not sign up to then whether or not it's illegal, it's going to make some people grumpy. (Especially academic techies like myself who are prone to grumpiness at the best of times!) If they believe it is not copyrightable, then there's an argument for no licence for those files but applying a different licence suggests to me that they think they have some copyright ownership over those header files to be able to assert the change.
So it's evil when Google mines my data and makes no attempt to hide the fact that they do, but it's ok when congress creates fusion centers that create profiles of average american citizens that have never committed any crimes and places wire taps on phones without proper warrants or just cause. I'm sorry, but I actually feel much safer trusting Google with my information than I do the federal government. Google just wants to make a profit, the federal government wants to control my life.
Don't be so sure. For instance, Google Analytics tracks you on sites before you can even know the site uses Google Analytics (they require sites to include information in their privacy policy, but by the time you've found the link to that it's already to late, you have been tracked). To "opt out" you have to install a special modification (plugin) to your browser and even then they will not delete the data they have already collected on you. Google does not just want to make a profit -- it's explicit mission, as communicated to its employees, is to "organise the world's information" -- particularly to organise all the information it can possibly collect about you. With governments you can vote with your vote; with most companies you can vote with your wallet; but with Google, who collect data on you by so many more means now than just search, you can't even vote with your wallet.
The natural reaction in the tech community is to go "Yeah, but it's Google". They're kind of like our team, we've been supporting them since they were a cool late 90s start-up. But a wiser rule of thumb is not to rely on which companies are "good" or "bad". So not "but it's ok, it's Google not Microsoft" but to think about what a company could do. With Microsoft, you had your data. They tried to tie the world to buying their software, but if you wanted to take your business away you could take your docs to another word processor and you would have your data not MS. But there is no getting the data Google have collected on you away from them -- the analytics and tracking logs will not be given up. And usually they won't even reveal what they've collected; not even (as the WiFi case showed) to the police if it is discovered they have collected it illegally.
At the moment, Google might not be doing much that you strenuously object to with your data. But SCO (Caldera) was a "nice company" before Darl McBride. It is a bad idea to put yourself at the mercy of a company's "niceness". Especially one like Google that has made a number of gaffes recently but still seems to believe it "does no evil" - over time the definition seems to be creeping from "we must only do good things" to "if we're doing it, it must be ok." The time to rein things in and ensure there are appropriate balances is before the company goes SCO on you.
Google is not distributing the software, they are merely providing the Marketplace application infrastructure and server storage space used by the distributor of the software to sell and deploy.
You do realise you're trying to claim "Google aren't the distributor, they just do all the distribution..."
Why are Google to blame here? iOS has violations too.
Because the licences don't have a clause saying: 5.1 Unless Apple's breaking the licence too, in which case do whatever you like. Nor (as Slashdot might like) one saying 5.1 Unless you are Google, in which case of course we all know you "do no evil", so do what you like because by definition we mustn't think it's evil. If Google are distributing it (and they are -- Android Market is owned and operated by Google) then they are most definitely on the hook. The GPL, amongst others, explicitly calls out distributors of software.
1) It's possible that its success is more or less an accident of history -- they put something good enough together at the right time to become the premiere social network, and because of the network effect, it's sticky enough people don't simply defect despite its problems.
You think that's an "accident"?? Almost certainly, that was the business plan! People were starting to turn on to the idea of social networks, and by targeting exclusively universities first, they would hit an early-adopter demographic just at the time they were forming many new social connections (freshers) that they wouldn't want to lose by moving to a different network later, and the network effect would make it grow. That ain't no accident!
Either way, though, the upshot is that it's more or less an abusive platform
Newsflash -- they're all abusive platforms. That's what tech giants do. We all know about trying to break away from the MS monopoly, and the tight hold they've tried to have on the world's doc formats. Good luck trying to stop Google having your data -- even if you eschew their services they'll still track you thanks to Google Analytics on most major sites. (And they really do see it as their data -- if you agree to send your search queries and your URL clicks to Bing, Google will make a merry dance about how that means Bing is copying their data. In other words Google does not believe that you have the right to send your behaviour data to anyone but them.) Facebook wants to own your social interactions, and make as much as possible of your online world depend on your social network ("look, your applications are now part of our network"). And, as has been true since long before Microsoft beat up Netscape, every large technology company wants to break every other large technology company for fear that even if they're not really competitors now they might be soon. Facebook might do search, so Google better kill 'em now if they can...
And it's not conspiracy -- it's explicit. The VCs that fund them in the start always ask the question "How are you going to protect your market?" -- or in other words "How can we achieve lock-in?"
If Google is willing to partner with Facebook for advertising and Facebook thinks having a pissing contest is more important, then to any would-be Facebook developers: doesn't that tell you what their priorities are? Their priorities certainly don't include you. If you have skill and talent and a good work ethic, why not go someplace where your efforts are better appreciated?
Because like most businesses or entrepreneurs, you'd rather go where the customers are.
It'll take you anywhere you want to go, discreetly routed past the shops and billboards that AdSense reckons you should see, while quietly logging your every breath, word, and glance for later analysis. Within a week you'll be wondering why every time you pick the kids up from school, it seems to drive home via the Lego shop!
Wikipedia needs a better moderation system. Articles that are not verified or not notable can go into a second tier where they have to be searched for by specifically requesting second tier access.
Why is anything (any established article) being deleted from Wikipedia? Is the world suddenly running out of bits? Is Jimmy Wales really so hard up for storage that individual text pages will make a difference? It's not as if they have to print and bind books with it like a traditional encyclopaedia.
At the very least, it should be pretty simple to measure notability by access statistics. But that begs the question that if nobody is accessing it, it isn't even costing you in bandwidth to hang onto it, so you might as well not delete it even then.
MOST CERTAINLY NOT. I am unaware of any rival startup that has been squashed, bullied, or suffered a hostile takeover by Google.
Then you should read the news a bit more. Yelp, Foundem, and 1plusV have all made complaints in the last 3 months.
BTW - you may or may not have noticed, but Microsoft's most innovative stuff has always been acquired in one manner or another. Google, on the other hand, innovates day in, and day out.
Like Google Docs... oops, no that was an acquisition (Writely). Or Android... oops, no, an acquisition again. Or Google Maps... blast that was another acquisition... hang on, I'm sure I'll think of an example to back up your case soon.
How do you feel about hiring a guy with a BS in Mathematics and a Minor in CS? Undergrad here taking that route and one year off from grad wondering if it was a good idea haha
As you'll no doubt see from the thread, opinions on the best hiring strategies vary quite a bit! Unless it turns out I'm on your hiring panel (vanishingly unlikely) I'd hesitate before offering anything other than anecdotal advice. But on the anecdotal side, I was on the hiring panel for a part-time-student role a while ago, and on of our top choices had just that combination; I believe he's since taken a graduate entry role at Microsoft (after working here for a year in the last year of his course).
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really not see the difference between a teacher with a belief, and a teacher teaching a belief, or of a school set up by a group of people with a particular belief compared to a school set up to teach the principles of that belief (to the necessary exclusion of other beliefs)? I wouldn't want an 'atheist faith school' set up any more than I want to see any other, I want schools to give as even and neutral an education as possible, rather than be set up to push any agenda, even one I agree with. Most of the time, belief shouldn't come up at all; when it does, each belief system, and none, should get equal weight, that's all I ask. Of course I don't want to prevent religious groups from setting up schools, and I don't want to shut down the ones that exist, I just want them to operate under exactly the same rules regarding curriculum, pupil intake, and so forth as any other community group - I'm asking for simple equality here, not the pro-atheist campaign you seem to have pinned on me. The concept of faith schools, and, more specifically, of "a Christian school" or "a Muslim school" is very different to "a school run by Muslims" or "a school run by Christians" - we obviously differ widely in our opinions, but do you not see how the former gives the faith groups special status compared to non-faith groups, when all I ask is that they be placed under a single 'community group' heading?
But can you not see that your proposal does explicitly discriminate against religious groups? It's a special law against religion. A teacher can believe and teach anything non-religious -- that Hegelian philosophy is the best thing since sliced bread, or that utilitarianism is the way you should be making every moral decision. But if they have a religious belief, you'll allow them to be present so long as they do not teach it. (And effectively, see next para, that means do not admit to having a religious belief.) Even in your proposal, religion would be the one kind of belief that dare not speak its name. And under your proposal even if the teachers, parents, and students all belong have the same religious belief their school must still be banned from telling students about it (teaching it).
Also, there is no difference between a teacher with a belief and a teacher teaching that belief. Let's look at some real situations. In places where there is a ban on teaching religion, teachers have been sacked for even answering the question "do you believe in God". After all, a teacher expressing a belief in God is teaching religion. So those teachers either had to deny or hide their faith (which is against their faith) or face discrimination and dismissal. In Australia, this sometimes has ridiculous consequences -- the government found that having access to chaplains in schools significantly improves student behaviour and attainment, so they put a program to get more chaplains (of all faiths) into state schools -- but because there's a ban on religious teaching those religious chaplains they just sent in were still banned from talking about or answering questions about their religion! The chaplains have a seriously hard time working around the legislation just to do the job they were employed to do.
You claim that religious teaching is "to the necessary exclusion of other beliefs" (which isn't true -- faith schools do allow teachers and students of other faiths, and do teach other belief systems in RE classes on the curriculum), but it is your proposal that would seek to legislate to exclude particular beliefs (religious ones) from being taught. "Helegian philosophy? Go for it. Christianity? We'll legislate against it." Faith schools don't exist because there is special legislation to say they must exist; they exist because the legislation does not prevent them from existing. So your change is necessarily a special law to ban religious schools -- a special ban on religion that is not there for irreligion, disbelief, or any other matter.
I highly doubt that open source tools are used because they allow themselves to be modified. What percentage of people actually look into the code and modify them?
It doesn't really matter what the percentage is, because there's a strong positive reinforcement loop. If an open source programming tool has a wide audience, then it has a wide audience of programmers -- just what it wants to recruit to improve the codebase! That makes it a little different than, say, an open source spreadsheet attracting a million more accountants. For programming tools there really is a much stronger positive feedback loop between popularity and rate of development.
The precise nature of the legal protections for religion varies, of course, so anything either of us says on that front is going to be local. In the UK, a country far more secular than the US, religions have special status within the education system compared to other non-profit community organisations, and some church leaders receive a measure of automatic political power. That goes far, far beyond freedom of speech and belief, and well into government sponsorship of religion, in my opinion.
You're absolutely correct about people being able to say and believe what they like, and that we have no right to 'freedom from speech'; I actually made a clarification to my original post to that effect.
I strongly disagree with your last paragraph, though. All I ask is that religions be held to precisely the same standard as any other community organisation, no more, no less. People's right to religious belief should be protected as much as their right to political belief; again no more, no less. As for removing a person from his job just because of his religion, I'd be absolutely furious if that happened - just because I strongly disagree with someone's belief, doesn't mean I'm so short sighted as to ignore the importance of protecting freedom for everybody. If his religion happened to be interfering with his ability to teach science effectively then that's a quite different matter, and again I'd apply the simple test of "would it be acceptable for non-religious reasons?"; if he's telling people that God holds molecules together with tiny strands of angel hair, or if he's telling them that the four humours explain all of medical science, he should be fired for incompetence. That's not a matter of belief, though, that's a matter of letting one's belief interfere with the satisfactory performance of one's job.
Wrong in 3 ways:
1. The UK is not "more secular than the US". Secular does not mean "count the atheists and agnostics". (It especially doesn't mean "...and count anyone who hasn't been to church a while as an atheist regardless of whether they say they are Christian on a census form, because we know better than they do what their beliefs are" -- which is the tactic usually used to proclaim how secular the UK is.) Secular society does not depend on how many people believe or do not believe. Secular matters are the contrast from Regular matters -- "regular" matters are subject to ecclesiastical law, whereas "secular" matters are not. Brushing your teeth is "secular"; it is not "atheist". It isn't anything to do with whether or not anybody believes in God. So the US, where there is constitutional separation between church and state, is every bit as secular as the UK regardless of how many believers or non-believers there are in either country. Recently there has been a brazen attempt to co-opt the word "secular" for rhetorical reasons: to pretend that the phrase "secular society" means that the country belongs to atheists not to the religious -- after all, everyone supports "secular society" (strictly meaning the government is not subject to church law) so if we can co-opt the word "secular" to be a synonym for "atheist" then people will think they've already signed up to support "atheist society", right?
2. Your complaint about faith schools suggests you couldn't answer "no" to resisting sacking that Muslim teacher. You'd like to shut the whole school! As you should well know if you're from the UK you can set up a non-religious independent school and receive state funding for it -- such as the "city academies" the last government brought in, but independent government-funded secular schools have been around for a very long time. I went to one when I was a chil
As I mentioned in a post above, if you think their opinions on sharing are ridiculous, then it makes an excellent statement on the problems with allowing religion to be a protected class. Religion is something that a group of people happen to believe - you can't give special treatment to certain types of belief without discriminating against those who do not subscribe to those particular types.
You've predicated this on some false assumptions. First, a lot of jurisdictions do not give the extent of "special treatment to religion" you'd like to claim -- tax breaks in most places I've lived are usually under the charities laws as community and non-profit organisations (in other words, it'd be tax-exempt whether it was a prayer circle or a knitting circle), and if anything many churches are given special penalties in that regular donations (as opposed to one-off donations) are often not tax deductible as they are treated as membership fees by the tax office even if they are not.
In terms of being a "protected class" you need to realise what this means: you are given legal protection to disagree with what people in power tell you you should believe, and to express your belief whether or not they like it. Freedom of religion is identical to freedom of speech -- it is the freedom to say things in public that someone with enough power might want to prevent you from saying. And generally there's not a right to freedom from speech ("Silence that man from stating views I don't like! Cart him off to the political prison for violating my freedom from speech!", or on a smaller scale, "I'm a your boss and I'm a Republican; if you vote democrat then you're fired"). There are some protections that have to be there to prevent abuse -- such as that Republican boss not being allowed to fire his Democrat employees. And there have to be some exemptions just to make things work, but again they are not unique to religion. Churches are indeed allowed to religiously discriminate when employing their priests and say "no, really we do want a Christian priest to lead this Christian congregation, not just a generic religious leader of any religion." But then I'm pretty sure Obama wasn't required by law to interview die hard Republicans to be his policy advisers either.
Calls for "freedom from religion", and there have been plenty on Slashdot, are effectively identical to calls for a command society with institutionalised atheism and punishment for anyone who expresses a view opposed to that of those in power -- effectively, the worst parts of communism without any of that airy fairy looking after the poor. Because without enforcement, punishment, and the loss of liberty, "freedom from religion" couldn't be enforced. The temptation to try and enforce a command society can happen at a community level. Perhaps a good thought experiment on Slashdot would be to ask this: "You see your son's science teacher coming out of a Mosque having just prayed... do you want to have this man removed from his job because he dared disagree with your own religious/irreligious beliefs?" I suspect quite a few on Slashdot would struggle to answer "no".
Take any number of people coming out of high school from your grandfathers time (or heck even our modern time [or double heck grab a bunch of workers from a car factory), I'd like for you to find one that could design an airplane that flies, figure out all the materials required, then form assembly instructions that could be repeated for best results in the fastest way possible.
Actually, that's pretty easy. My uncle on my mother's side. If I recall correctly, he did not attend university. However he most certainly was an engineer who designed aircraft and did just what you say, for British Aerospace. Or to give you another example, Frank Whittle invented and built the jet engine while he was an aircraft apprentice in the RAF. It was only after he invented the engine that aviation now totally relies upon that he attended university.
A WW2 era Toolmaker is not low skill. On the contrary it took great skill and was highly regarded trade back in the day.
Absolutely, and that is precisely my point. But if you look at the other replies to my post, you will see exactly the sort of prejudice ("it was in a factory, therefore it must have been low skill and a dog could do it") that I was complaining about. In your case, you believe that there once were high skill jobs, but you seem to believe that there aren't any more. There is still a whole ecosystem of high-skill labour around setting up and running an efficient manufacturing plant that is also lost when manufacturing is closed down as an industry. People look at manufacturing and see only the low-skill jobs. I see old university friends who are chemical engineers, process engineers, polymer chemists, and many other fields who have to move countries to get a job because we just don't make anything here any more.
It's like everyone clammoring to bail out GM and save a bunch of low skill jobs that are going nowhere but overseas in the future anyway. It's a losing battle with the wrong objective.
Actually that's not true in two ways.
First, I always think it's remarkably arrogant that we label manufacturing jobs "low-skill". My grandfather was a toolmaker in an aeroplane factory in World War 2. Imagine a job swap between us and see think which would be the bigger disaster: him trying to do some academic research and put a paper into a conference, or me trying to actually physically build an aeroplane good enough that your life could depend on it while the luftwaffe try to shoot you down. But for some reason it's his job that would be classified as "blue collar" and "low-skill".
The second is that labour costs are much less of an impetus for moving "low-skill" jobs than they used to be. Wages in China have risen such that many companies have thought about moving manufacturing away to lower-wage countries like Bangladesh, etc. But the skills and infrastructure needed to run serious industrial scale manufacturing are not present there making business to difficult. It's no longer worth the saving. As globalisation equalises costs of living, the factories are going to stop playing musical chairs with countries, and start sticking where the capacity and infrastructure has been built up. And right now, regardless of costs, that is China because the US has been slashing and burning its manufacturing skills and capacity.
Something like this could be useful.. heh heh.
You've already got it. The temporary brain change is called "Oh crap, I've got an exam tomorrow! Right, where are the books?"
wow really? Even a monkey could have figured that out.
Doh! So that's why I haven't seen any monkeys trying to build space rockets! I knew there had to be an explanation in there somewhere.
I don't think it is accurate to describe an Android win as a Linux win. To say Android based phones indicate Linux's success seems about as logical as saying Mac OS X's success demonstrates FreeBSD's triumph over Linux. As nearly all Mac users don't know or care about the FreeBSD underpinnings, nearly all Android users don't know or care about the Linux underpinnings.
I couldn't disagree more. Linux is not a UI. That users do not "care" about it is part of Linux's victory: Linux has successfully commoditised operating system kernels so much that users are no longer willing to pay a premium to use a particular one. In times gone by, "which operating system does it use" was a serious question; now it's not. Jim Zemelin couldn't care two hoots what UI environment is popular.
Windows is both an operating system kernel and a UI environment. One half of that has now been completely commoditised. The interesting question is whether HTML5 will commoditise the other half.
Really the only people who would have a solid reason to dislike the GPL are those with a strong desire to use someone else's work without ever having to contribute anything in return.
Or anyone writing open source code that wants to use both a GPL library and a library with an incompatible open source licence. Eg, you cannot combine GPLv2 code with GPLv3 code, and there are many more incompatible open source licences.
Why Nokia? Why? Do the management like Microsoft money more than they like staying in business?
Comparatively, MS must look pretty good - in that "very distant third place" (where I'd guess WP7 will be in 2012) is much better than "completely dead" (where Symbian and MeeGo would be in 2012). Already in 2011, I've seen mobile phone stands in shopping centres here effectively categorising their phones to the user as "Here's the iPhone, here's our Android phones, here's some Windows Phone 7 phones on businessy-sounding plans, and here's some assorted crap". Symbian and MeeGo were never going to get the recognition to get out of the "here's some assorted crap" category. Phone 7 will probably have a smallish market share, but with MS doing all the advertising spending, and Nokia having been given billions by MS just for turning up.
There are also a couple of things that might just help Phone 7 eke out a slice of the market. The first is that (where I am anyway) carriers all put iPhones on ridiculously expensive plans, whether or not it actually costs much more as a device. So any other smartphone gets a big price advantage to the consumer just for not being an iPhone. The second is if Google doesn't manage to squash the "rogue apps" problem completely -- people are much more personal about their phones than their computers, and thoughts of rogue apps running up large bills will scare people, especially as (again, where I am) carriers won't help customers stop their data usage from going hundreds of dollars over the limit in their plan -- because they use that fear to sell people bigger data plans than they need. So that'd be an irony of ironies -- security problems pushing people towards Microsoft!
There's a great variety of projects in there. Everything from serious academic theorem provers to even more serious things like helping people play Monkey Island
And though it's intended effect is to tarnish Google's image/brand consumers really don't give a shit. They're going to buy an Android phone if they want one despite any copyright issues or what could turn out to be platform propaganda.
"Going to buy an Android phone" doesn't mean "don't give a shit". I'm a Google and Android customer (and a very nice phone it is too) and it irks me when I hear that Google isn't "playing nice" precisely because I am a customer. I'm much more annoyed when I hear that a company that has my support is misbehaving than one I don't do much business with anyway. In this case, there's FUD in that I don't think it affects the apps the way the article claims, but if Google have been stripping the licences off header files and replacing them with different licences the authors did not sign up to then whether or not it's illegal, it's going to make some people grumpy. (Especially academic techies like myself who are prone to grumpiness at the best of times!) If they believe it is not copyrightable, then there's an argument for no licence for those files but applying a different licence suggests to me that they think they have some copyright ownership over those header files to be able to assert the change.
So it's evil when Google mines my data and makes no attempt to hide the fact that they do, but it's ok when congress creates fusion centers that create profiles of average american citizens that have never committed any crimes and places wire taps on phones without proper warrants or just cause. I'm sorry, but I actually feel much safer trusting Google with my information than I do the federal government. Google just wants to make a profit, the federal government wants to control my life.
Don't be so sure. For instance, Google Analytics tracks you on sites before you can even know the site uses Google Analytics (they require sites to include information in their privacy policy, but by the time you've found the link to that it's already to late, you have been tracked). To "opt out" you have to install a special modification (plugin) to your browser and even then they will not delete the data they have already collected on you. Google does not just want to make a profit -- it's explicit mission, as communicated to its employees, is to "organise the world's information" -- particularly to organise all the information it can possibly collect about you. With governments you can vote with your vote; with most companies you can vote with your wallet; but with Google, who collect data on you by so many more means now than just search, you can't even vote with your wallet.
The natural reaction in the tech community is to go "Yeah, but it's Google". They're kind of like our team, we've been supporting them since they were a cool late 90s start-up. But a wiser rule of thumb is not to rely on which companies are "good" or "bad". So not "but it's ok, it's Google not Microsoft" but to think about what a company could do. With Microsoft, you had your data. They tried to tie the world to buying their software, but if you wanted to take your business away you could take your docs to another word processor and you would have your data not MS. But there is no getting the data Google have collected on you away from them -- the analytics and tracking logs will not be given up. And usually they won't even reveal what they've collected; not even (as the WiFi case showed) to the police if it is discovered they have collected it illegally.
At the moment, Google might not be doing much that you strenuously object to with your data. But SCO (Caldera) was a "nice company" before Darl McBride. It is a bad idea to put yourself at the mercy of a company's "niceness". Especially one like Google that has made a number of gaffes recently but still seems to believe it "does no evil" - over time the definition seems to be creeping from "we must only do good things" to "if we're doing it, it must be ok." The time to rein things in and ensure there are appropriate balances is before the company goes SCO on you.
Google is not distributing the software, they are merely providing the Marketplace application infrastructure and server storage space used by the distributor of the software to sell and deploy.
You do realise you're trying to claim "Google aren't the distributor, they just do all the distribution..."
Follow Rana El Kaliouby's work -- that's pretty much what her PhD and subsequent research has been on.
Why are Google to blame here? iOS has violations too.
Because the licences don't have a clause saying:
5.1 Unless Apple's breaking the licence too, in which case do whatever you like.
Nor (as Slashdot might like) one saying
5.1 Unless you are Google, in which case of course we all know you "do no evil", so do what you like because by definition we mustn't think it's evil.
If Google are distributing it (and they are -- Android Market is owned and operated by Google) then they are most definitely on the hook. The GPL, amongst others, explicitly calls out distributors of software.
1) It's possible that its success is more or less an accident of history -- they put something good enough together at the right time to become the premiere social network, and because of the network effect, it's sticky enough people don't simply defect despite its problems.
You think that's an "accident"?? Almost certainly, that was the business plan! People were starting to turn on to the idea of social networks, and by targeting exclusively universities first, they would hit an early-adopter demographic just at the time they were forming many new social connections (freshers) that they wouldn't want to lose by moving to a different network later, and the network effect would make it grow. That ain't no accident!
Either way, though, the upshot is that it's more or less an abusive platform
Newsflash -- they're all abusive platforms. That's what tech giants do. We all know about trying to break away from the MS monopoly, and the tight hold they've tried to have on the world's doc formats. Good luck trying to stop Google having your data -- even if you eschew their services they'll still track you thanks to Google Analytics on most major sites. (And they really do see it as their data -- if you agree to send your search queries and your URL clicks to Bing, Google will make a merry dance about how that means Bing is copying their data. In other words Google does not believe that you have the right to send your behaviour data to anyone but them.) Facebook wants to own your social interactions, and make as much as possible of your online world depend on your social network ("look, your applications are now part of our network"). And, as has been true since long before Microsoft beat up Netscape, every large technology company wants to break every other large technology company for fear that even if they're not really competitors now they might be soon. Facebook might do search, so Google better kill 'em now if they can...
And it's not conspiracy -- it's explicit. The VCs that fund them in the start always ask the question "How are you going to protect your market?" -- or in other words "How can we achieve lock-in?"
If Google is willing to partner with Facebook for advertising and Facebook thinks having a pissing contest is more important, then to any would-be Facebook developers: doesn't that tell you what their priorities are? Their priorities certainly don't include you. If you have skill and talent and a good work ethic, why not go someplace where your efforts are better appreciated?
Because like most businesses or entrepreneurs, you'd rather go where the customers are.
It'll take you anywhere you want to go, discreetly routed past the shops and billboards that AdSense reckons you should see, while quietly logging your every breath, word, and glance for later analysis. Within a week you'll be wondering why every time you pick the kids up from school, it seems to drive home via the Lego shop!
Wikipedia needs a better moderation system. Articles that are not verified or not notable can go into a second tier where they have to be searched for by specifically requesting second tier access.
Why is anything (any established article) being deleted from Wikipedia? Is the world suddenly running out of bits? Is Jimmy Wales really so hard up for storage that individual text pages will make a difference? It's not as if they have to print and bind books with it like a traditional encyclopaedia.
At the very least, it should be pretty simple to measure notability by access statistics. But that begs the question that if nobody is accessing it, it isn't even costing you in bandwidth to hang onto it, so you might as well not delete it even then.
Youtube!
MOST CERTAINLY NOT. I am unaware of any rival startup that has been squashed, bullied, or suffered a hostile takeover by Google.
Then you should read the news a bit more.
Yelp, Foundem, and 1plusV have all made complaints in the last 3 months.
BTW - you may or may not have noticed, but Microsoft's most innovative stuff has always been acquired in one manner or another. Google, on the other hand, innovates day in, and day out.
Like Google Docs... oops, no that was an acquisition (Writely). Or Android... oops, no, an acquisition again. Or Google Maps ... blast that was another acquisition... hang on, I'm sure I'll think of an example to back up your case soon.
How do you feel about hiring a guy with a BS in Mathematics and a Minor in CS? Undergrad here taking that route and one year off from grad wondering if it was a good idea haha
As you'll no doubt see from the thread, opinions on the best hiring strategies vary quite a bit! Unless it turns out I'm on your hiring panel (vanishingly unlikely) I'd hesitate before offering anything other than anecdotal advice. But on the anecdotal side, I was on the hiring panel for a part-time-student role a while ago, and on of our top choices had just that combination; I believe he's since taken a graduate entry role at Microsoft (after working here for a year in the last year of his course).