This is largely the fault of physicists. Mathematicians complain about their abuse of notation constantly; whereas mathematicians go to great pains to come up with mathematical notation that is clear, concise, useful, and most importantly, general, physicists seem to love their little pet symbols. Even Richard Feynman, whom I greatly respect, talked about how he discovered some of the basic notions of calculus on his own as young student, and came up with his own notation as a result -- nothing wrong with this, mind you -- but then went on to say that he continued to use this notation in his own work and notes for much of his high school and undergraduate years. I hate to say it, but that's sort of typically physicist. Needlessly obfuscatory. Richard Feynman was a smart guy, to be sure, but his pet notation was unlikely more intuitive than the notation that mathematicians had spent centuries developing and refining, many of whom were -- no offense to the man, he's in good company -- much more intelligent than Richard Feynman was.
Quantum Physics is filled with examples like this -- some physicist, through the course of his research, reinvents the mathematical wheel because he hasn't been exposed to much technical maths, and so his pet notation becomes standard among physicists, even though mathematicians studying the problem more abstractly had come up with elegant and concise notation a hundred years prior.
It's tremendously frustrating. See for example all the wacky bra and ket bullshit in QM. Or the algebraic manipulation of infintesimals as if they were members of the real or complex fields (of course, one can do something like this with differential forms, but very few physicists seem the least bit aware of the corner cases and happily "multiply through by dx" without considering what that means). It's extremely frustrating. My upper division electricity and magnetism teacher actually used this technique once and warned us that "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." Can you believe it?
But then, most physicists stop taking math classes their junior year of undergrad, and from then on learn all their math in physics classes. You don't learn much math in lower division... so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they all suck at math.
I think the GP's point is that Australia has increasingly been pandering to US interests to such a degree that it seems to much of the local population that the Aussie government is putting the US's interests over the interests of its own people. Indeed, this seems to be true. And while Oz is on the whole much less religious than the US, this is changing; John Howard attends church and what's more makes something of a public affair of it, from what I understand. This is widely seen as a political tactic to secure the support of an increasingly religious Australia. Keep in mind, still nothing like the fundamentalist fanatics that are endemic in the US, but the landscape is nonetheless changing.
Australia seems to have (and feel free to correct me, as I am not Australian, I've just spent some time there) something of the Big Brother mentality that the UK does, but thankfully is too sparsely populated to really see its ideas through to the same extent. These days it seems that New Zealand is the place to go if you value your freedom; they seem to be sane and relatively libertarian. But they're also isolated, have crappy weather (depending on where you're from in the US, you may disagree) and the local dialect is nearly unintelligible, even to many Australians.
They may have been unconcerned about AIDS in the 60s and 70s because the first confirmed case was in 1981. Of course, there had been cases of HIV infection before that, but they were so sporadic that no one knew what they were and so they were not identified as such. For all intents and purposes, every kind of VD except herpes was curable in the 1960s and 1970s. Condoms do little to protect against HPV anyway. You can't really blame people for being unconcerned about a disease they didn't even know existed, and was so rare anyway that it might as well not have.
IPv4 sites can be accessed with IPv6; IPv6 addresses include IPv4 addresses as a subset. On IPv6, you can access the entire IPv4-only internet; it is the IPv6-only internet that you cannot access with IPv4. That currently constitutes a minuscule number of sites, so it is no great loss, but once IPv6 begins to take hold -- and it will, China, India and Japan do not have enough addresses given their populations -- people who insist on using IPv4 will begin to find that large swaths of the internet are inaccessible.
It's not like anyone is expecting an overnight change, as IPv6 was designed to co-exist with IPv4 for some years. But once the number of IPv6 sites reaches some critical mass, abandonment of IPv4 will be quick. Early adopters of IPv6 will absolutely not find themselves penalized, assuming that their ISP does in fact support IPv6, as they can do everything they can currently do with IPv4 with IPv6 and possibly more.
Your points about naval combat and North Africa are well taken. Of course, since we're talking about US involvement in WWII -- remember that the OP said that we didn't need to remember how the French saved our butts in 1776 because we'd repaid our debt with WWII -- it's somewhat tangential, but nonetheless relevant.
To reiterate, I don't mean to imply that we did nothing during WWII, and I certainly don't mean to imply that Britain did nothing during WWII -- just that both of these nations did less than might have been expected of them, the US in particular. The truth is, the US had no real reason to enter WWII, and while she did so for not entirely altruistic reasons, it's worth remembering that we could have told Europe to fuck itself and didn't. So that in itself is commendable, on some level.
What I take issue with is the way that Americans bring up WWII every time they feel criticized by Europeans. This is particularly true when it comes to the French. "If it weren't for us, you'd all be speaking German." Whereas the French never say "don't forget what we did for you in 1776", Americans pull out WWII literally all the time. This wouldn't be so bad if America had been half as important to the war effort as the average American seems to think we were. My point -- and I think it stands -- is that most Americans are not the least bit aware of how much the Soviet Union did, they literally think that we marched in and saved the day. No surprise there: that's what we're taught in school. If the USSR is mentioned at all, it's as a footnote, usually with the caveat that "Stalin was a bad guy". Stalin was not a nice guy, it's true -- but he was far more competent than Hitler in the long run, because Stalin actually learned from his mistakes. Especially late in the war, Hitler replaced a good number of his most competent generals with members of the SS -- consider the appointment of Heinrich Himmler to command Army Group Vistula in defense of Berlin, a disaster -- whereas Stalin largely got over his initial distrust of the Army and removed bureaucratic deadlocks (like the political commissars scattered throughout the chain of command) that had been disastrous early in the war. He made mistakes to be sure, but he learned from them.
You poo-poo the lives lost as irrelevant, but that is clearly not the case. The Red Army continued to advance, fighting with whatever they could find, and incurring tremendous losses. Unlike the US and the UK, they did not have the military infrastructure to do any better -- the USSR in 1942 hadn't even completely industrialized. If it hadn't been for Stalin's emphasis on industrialization, it would have been even worse, and they might not have prevailed.
For the record, my other grandfather was French, born and raised in Pas-de-Calais, and he remembers the German occupation well. There are bullet holes on the side of the Belfry in Arras, but it's nothing -- and I mean nothing -- like what you see in Eastern Europe to this day. No one is saying that the soldiers on the Western Front had it easy in a general sense, but comparatively speaking, the WF was nothing compared to the fighting that was being done in the East. The Germans also incurred their heaviest losses there.
Disclaimer: my grandfather was a German soldier on the eastern front.
When you say "but they wouldn't have stood a chance if the other Allies weren't there, also fighting", what exactly do you mean? France was occupied, Spain was neutral, Italy was one of the Axis powers -- who exactly was fighting? The French resistance? The UK was sitting on their island, getting shelled by Germany and occasionally shooting down planes over the Channel, although most of the shooting down was done by the Germans -- they didn't open the Western Front until D-day. That was in June 1944. The USSR, on the other hand, turned the tide against the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad, which was -- wait for it -- in late 1942. By April 1944, still before D-day, Soviet troops had pushed Germany entirely out of Soviet territory and had entered occupied German territory; Germany was already collapsing in on itself. The Allies fighting on the newly opened Western Front several months later would encounter relatively little resistance. Nazi Germany was essentially finished by this time.
This is not to say that the US did nothing, far from it: but the idea that the USSR wouldn't have kicked Germany's ass on its own is completely incorrect, Germany was running for its life by the time D-day rolled around and there's no reason to believe that that would have changed. Of course, then all of Europe would have been Communist.
My grandfather, who was only 17 at the time, ran from the Red Army to surrender to the Americans, because he'd heard that the Americans were nicer to their POWs than the Russians. Small wonder -- the life expectancy of a Russian soldier at the Battle of Stalingrad was less than a day, can you really blame them for hating the Germans? We suffered comparatively little.
You're drunk on cold war propaganda. There's no doubt that the USSR and Germany had a pact do divide Europe -- but that's no different than the arms, technology, and supplies that we (as in the US, the UK, and France) gave the Nazis to protect us from the Communist threat we perceived from the USSR. Germany at the end of WWI was not in any sort of position to engineer the huge economic and military comeback that they did on their own -- they had help, and it was from us (the Allies). When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, what did the Allies do? Nothing. The UK and France were deadset on avoiding war, and they feared Stalin, so not only did they appease Hitler, they actually armed him (the US is guilty of this too). And we (the US) entered the European theater in December of 1941, nearly 3 years after WWII started on the continent.
Sure, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed a pact, but neither of them had any intention of honoring it, as the Nazis hated and feared Communists and Stalin gravely underestimated Hitler. And here's the thing -- until people became aware of the atrocities being committed by the Nazi party, what was wrong with supporting them? You must keep the time frame in mind: we now see Nazis as the embodiment of all evil, but before news of the Holocaust got out, the Nazis were just another fascist party. And again, lest you forget, the reason fascism enjoyed such popular support in Europe (and elsewhere) in the late 30s early 40s was because of the Great Depression, which left many people wondering whether or not free market capitalism could even work: the only country left untouched by the depression was the Soviet Union. Now of course we better understand the effects of monetary policy and investment on the economy, and know that that's bunk, but at the time, people thought that crashes like the great depression may be a result of the inherent instability of markets, and statism in its left and right wing forms was immensely popular, especially in nations that had been monarchies in fairly recent memory.
There's one other very important point, and this is mainly why I accused you of being drunk on cold war propaganda. Stalin severely changed the direction of the Soviet Union's expansionist policies by declaring the feasibility of "Socialism in one Nation". You see, up until then, much Communist thinking was centered on the idea that the whole world must be Communist, or capitalist trade would remain a driving economic force on the national level. Sure, the USSR might be communist, but they would still need to buy and sell commodities on the international markets, meaning that they were a socialist enclave that still needed to concern itself with free market details. Trotsky was very much against this idea, and continued to champion the idea of worldwide revolution until his death. Stalin, on the other hand, suggested that the USSR concentrate on itself and less on the rest of the world. He felt that having the USSR be Socialist was enough, and that there was no need to forment revolt in the rest of the world.
In other words, the world-domination plans you speak of were, well, non-existent.
Furthermore, and this I really don't get, you say "they've [the USSR] already invaded several Eastern European countries" -- uhh, which? Why don't you take a look at this map of Europe in 1920, after WWI and tell me what nations they "invaded" by the time WWII came around. The answer, simply, is none -- those nations behind the iron curtain fell under Soviet influence after WWII, and that was a result of the Allies carving up Europe. The poor relations between the Warsaw Pact nations and the NATO nations was a direct result of the Cold War, and the iron curtain was a result of that. Lest you forget, West Germany was also occupied by the Allies.
And just in case you're confused, I'm not saying that the USSR was great in every way -- just that they bled for Europe in a way that cannot possibly be c
Repaid generously? Are you nuts? Do you know how many people the US lost in WWII? Total? In both the European and Pacific theaters? 300 thousand. That's it. And we lost most of our people fighting Japan, not the Germans.
Do you know how many people the USSR lost? 27 million. By the time we invaded Normandy, Germany was already collapsing. Do you know why we waited as long as we did? Tit-for-tat revenge: Lenin pulled the newly formed Soviet Union out of WWI as soon as he took power in 1917, leaving us and our allies high and dry. We didn't need to wait as long as we did; Stalin was begging us for reinforcements, and we could have invaded at any time, but we stood our ground, as a kind of "fuck you" to the Russians, who were hemorrhaging soldiers. Meanwhile, France suffered.
And in WWI, France kicked ass militarily, and remained a major European power. Our role in WWI was relatively small and unimportant compared to Britain and France, who lest you forget, were the world superpowers then. We benefited tremendously from WWII; we were the only developed nation to emerge unscathed, whereas Europe was decimated, its infrastructure utterly destroyed, reduced to a smoking pile of rubble. Then, as if that weren't enough, we enacted the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, which more than anything drove the economic growth we experienced in the 1950s -- because the Europeans lacked the infrastructure to produce the goods they required, they were forced to buy them from us, on money we lent them.
Of course, much later we forgave that debt, and patted ourselves on the back and said, look what nice people we are. But in the meantime we had engineered American corporate dominance, and Europe has been in our shadow ever since. And sniveling little brats in the US grow up thinking that our country did all the heavy lifting in World War II, when the harsh truth is that the USSR sacrificed nearly 1 in 10 of its people to save Europe. When De Gaulle had the gall to suggest that France should maintain friendly diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, we actually criticized him!
It is sickening -- absolutely sickening -- to hear people who clearly have never bothered reading a history book in their lives say that France "owes" us for WWII, when we were too cowardly to even engage the Wehrmacht until we knew the Soviet Union had them licked. Then we raised two generations of Americans on propaganda, never even mentioning the sacrifice they made.
The Russians were the heroes of that war. They deserve our respect, which we've never given them. And I would suggest that you never go dangling WWII in the face of the French -- or anyone else in Europe -- again.
Now, as a disclaimer, I am not a libertarian and I think their ideas regarding economics are often over-simplified and stupid, but when it comes to civil rights, they have it right on: "The right you have to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Which means, basically, that as long as you aren't infringing on the rights of others (in this case, the right to go through life without being assaulted), you can do whatever you want.
When it comes to laws against polygamy in the US, I am in complete agreement with your assessment -- it's not the government's business and they shouldn't interfere. In fact, polygamy in the US was not illegal until people concerned about the growing popularity of Mormonism used legislation against polygamy to "get around" freedom of religion, which made banning the "cult" in a more straightforward manner impossible. It was stupid then and it's stupid now, and it ought to be repealed. What the hell do I care if my neighbor wants more than one wife or more than one husband? It doesn't concern me at all, unless I'm some busybody neighbor with nothing better to do than to foist my notion of morality onto people of another culture.
The whole anti-spanking BS is a bit harder to nail down, because someone in a position of power is smacking someone who cannot defend themselves and who most likely does not consent to being smacked. Of course, parents are legally responsible for their children until a certain age, and that presumably confers them certain rights. Whether or not spanking is one of those rights is a difficult gray area, because child abuse is clearly illegal -- where do we draw the line? But I agree with you, anti-spanking legislation is stupid. The only time we'd want to restrict that is when it's excessive, and there are already perfectly good laws banning child abuse that cover that. But my point is, it's not such a great example because someone's rights are being violated -- the question is whether or not we as a society care.
Regardless of whether it's in India or elsewhere, obscenity laws are frankly stupid. The government shouldn't have that sort of legislation on the books. Whether it's a peck on the cheek or a bare-chested girl in public, it's completely moronic. If you don't like what you see, then don't look. It's as simple as that. You do not have the right to go through life unoffended, because the right to offend is simply too precious. People are offended by criticism. People are offended by interracial relationships. People are offended by all sorts of behaviors, and we as a society should rightly tell them to go fuck themselves if they think the offense they feel warrants judicial protection.
Having said that, it seems that this is a case of a relatively small minority of religious fundamentalists getting their panties in a bunch over nothing. Most Indians didn't seem to have a problem with it. Of course he should have been more sensitive, but kissing someone on the cheek? Come on...
Of course, here in the US we also have small but extremely vocal groups of religious fundamentalists that make similarly ridiculous statements -- but generally, we try our best to ignore them, and the courts certainly don't side with them.
I don't think that's what he's saying. Let's take this out of the political realm for a moment. Suppose you were trying to develop a well-balanced perspective on vi vs. emacs. Given their long standing enmity, you'd probably agree that it would be silly to try to get a well-balanced perspective on their relative merits by attending a "vi rules, emacs drools" party, or vice versa. You'd be much better off asking someone who was less emotionally married to the subject and who could comment convincingly on the inevitable pros and cons of both pieces of software.
Moving back into the political, if you were a non-American attempting to develop a well-rounded and nuanced perspective on American foreign policy, would you go and ask Iranians? Iraqis? Probably not. Not because these groups don't have valid complaints -- but rather because their bad experiences hamstring their ability to approach the issue of America's foreign policy in a rational way.
Similarly, the Palestinians would probably not be the right people to ask about Israel's right to exist. This is not because their complaints are unjustified, nor is to say that those should not be addressed -- but their feud with Israel makes them the least likely, in principle, to provide you with a nuanced perspective on the topic.
Armed with this understanding, the thing to realize about the Cuban American population in Florida and elsewhere is that, well, they hate Castro. Asking them what kind of a guy Castro is is about as productive as asking an internal party cadre in Cuba what kind of a guy Castro is -- the response is certain, before you even ask the question. Cuban Americans hate Castro -- that's why they left. They're not going to tell you about the good things he's done, because they want him out of power, and they see American pressure as a means to that end. Similarly, if you asked somebody high up in the Cuban Communist Party what they thought of him, they would certainly not mention anything about the bad things he's done -- they owe their livelihood to him, it is in their best interest that you see him as a good leader worthy of support.
This is the essence of propaganda, whatever end it pushes. You needn't lie; no one is perfect. Choose a side, and then selectively report only the good or only the bad, depending on which view you'd like your readership to take. If you listen to liberals, for example, Bush's tax-cuts were a "gift to the rich, at the expense of the poor" -- but in actuality, thanks to a (proven) economic phenomenon known as the Laffer curve, federal income has increased since the tax cuts, which should surprise no one who has studied economics. This is quietly ignored in the left-leaning press, who instead opt to play the percentages game and say that the middle class pays proportionally more of the tax burden than it used to, ignoring that everyone is paying less than they used to. In a similar vein, when you listen to Fox news, the completely unjustifiable Iraq war was justifiable because they had WMD, or Saddam was a bad guy, or whatever -- now, the right is careful not to invoke images of WMD because they know that it will hurt their image, which is already so tarnished that one wonders how much more damage can be done.
Selective reporting -- you should always be wary of it. My view, and I believe it nuanced, is that Castro has been a pretty brutal guy at times, and can in no way be considered a great leader by any honest definition of the term. But having said that, it is telling that the infant mortality rate in Cuba is the lowest in the Americas -- which, lest you gloss over it, includes the US and Canada. The literacy rate in Cuba is nearly 100%. People are poor, but they are not walking around on the street fearing for their lives, either, as in many places in Latin America, where kidnapping and drug cartel related deaths are a fact of life. It's not such an easy question to answer: well meaning but weak governments hav
I don't get why so many folks get upset that they can't say nigger and that black people can. Think about it, you call your girlfriend "baby" but you bristle if your buddy does it -- terms are not absolute, they never have been. Depending on context and speaker, some terms are acceptable some of the time and not acceptable at all at other times. You go to the bar with your friends and say fuck this and fuck that, but at the office with your boss you probably wouldn't dare, even though it's entirely likely that he uses the f-word with his close friends too.
If you're under the impression that a black person calling you cracker is funny, then you need to get your head examined. They might think it's funny, in the same way that the people who read Stormfront think calling black people niggers is funny. But that's what they are: the black equivalent of Stormfront. Ignore them, or kick their asses. But don't bitch because they can call each other nigger and have it not be offensive, and you can't.
The reason we as a society accept the use of slur words by members of a community they were meant to denigrate (nigger, queer, fag, jap, whatever) is because it is extremely unlikely that members of said community have a one-dimensional understanding of the complexity of members of that community. A black person who uses the term "nigger" understands that the stereotypes associated with that term are not binding; he knows enough about black people, being one himself, to not have his use of the word reflect ignorance. While you may find this hard to believe, use of the n-word by non-blacks is sometimes tolerated by black people, as long as they're all friends and the person using the word is known to be using the word as a joke and not as a statement of bigotry.
Many minorities have "reclaimed" terms for themselves; queer is a label used with pride by the homosexual community, for example, but its use by non-members of the LGBT community (like the use of fag) is not well looked upon.
For what it's worth, many black people find the use of the word nigger by blacks extremely offensive. This may come as a surprise to you, but black people are not all alike.
As for the greater tolerance society has for anti-white racism, well, it is hypocritical, but it's also expected, because of the economic and social influence that whites have in our society. Do you honestly think that a black man calling his white boss a "cracker" would keep his job, unless they were very close friends? Do you honestly think that white people have no power in this society to call the shots?
I lived as a minority in Asia for 4 years -- when 99% of the population is another ethnicity, and has all sorts of wildly inaccurate and paranoid ideas about you because of the color of your skin, it gets to you. It may be hard for you to appreciate what it means, because you're unlikely to ever experience it. At least I was a foreigner and could leave -- these people live their whole lives as citizens of a country where the majority of people don't understand them and what's worse don't care to understand them.
Not being able to call a black person nigger is not such a hardship, frankly. And it surprises me that you would even want to.
Your demand for refutations of statistical differences is spurious, because, as I said, no one is arguing that differences do exist. What we are arguing about is the source of these differences. Statistical analysis of a population will uncover only the existence of differences, and not their source. So in this case I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps you misunderstood what I was talking about?
As for your quip about China specifically pushing women into these fields, well, for starters I lived in China for four years, so I think I'm qualified to comment. There's no special incentive for women to enter these fields that I've observed. However, it's worth noting that even if the government or someone else were going to great pains to get women into CS, that doesn't change the fact that the Chinese women coming out of their universities and ours are singularly competent and grok CS just as well, and frequently better, than their male counterparts. So if your argument is that there's some biological reason that women are inferior at CS, that would seem to refute it -- if they were truly inferior, why are they succeeding, and in large numbers?
Could it be, perhaps, that Chinese culture values things like excellence in tech in a way that the US never has? Let me clue you in: there's no word in Mandarin for nerd or geek, the social class does not exist. There's no notion that you're uncool because you're good at computers, math, physics, chemistry -- quite the opposite, in fact, in China kids that excel in these subjects are popular. There's also no social association between "being anti-social" and "being smart". In the US, and on Slashdot, nerds defend their nerdiness by creating some sort of "anti-cool" image for themselves; they convince themselves that nerds don't need to be social, that that's all a game played by the peons who don't know any better. They pride themselves on their lack of social ability, going so far as to say things like "I'm a self-diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, but I don't see it as a defect, I see it as a strength." You don't see that sort of thing in China.
And frankly, that makes all the difference. When being good at computers is cool, and isn't associated with being unable to have a conversation with a member of the opposite sex and an aversion to showering, you suddenly find that a lot of smart people attracted to CS. And it's not just women who turn away from CS: lots of smart guys can't cope with geek posturing, either. Geeks have done their best to make CS as unappealing a place as possible for people that aren't similarly socially inept, regardless of gender.
Maybe not, but for what it's worth, my math department (I graduated five years ago) was around 50 percent female at the undergraduate level, which granted was lower than the university average (our class admitted roughly 60 percent women, so men were over-represented in math relative to that standard.) I will admit that this was not the case in graduate school, where we were lucky to have 30%. However, given the competency of my undergraduate female classmates, it certainly wasn't for lack of talent or ability; for whatever reason, fewer women seemed to want to go to graduate school for math. I knew quite a few that ended up getting MAs in Education, and many that didn't go on to advanced studies at all. But it certainly wasn't because they weren't good at math.
But then, math is not filled with geeky misogynist males, either, neither among the students nor among the faculty -- our department had a good mix of female professors (my graduate algebra teacher was one, for example) and many of them were well respected in the field and well positioned in the department. This is very rarely the case in CS departments. Women are uncommon, not only as students, but among the faculty as well, and contempt for women among a male population that (forgive the stereotype) can't generally get laid to save itself is thinly veiled. It doesn't surprise me in the least that women aren't attracted to CS. It's certainly not a problem of smarts, let me tell you -- women are well-represented in math.
There's something wrong with computer scientists. Of course, this should surprise exactly no-one who is honest with themselves about the sorts of people that CS departments currently attract. Here's a hint: if you say things like "I have Asperger's syndrome and I'm proud of it", then you're probably part of the problem (not to mention stupid). That's not directed at you, parent, but to Slashdotters in general.
I guess my point (which I apparently didn't explain clearly enough) is that CS majors don't take enough math to qualify for even a math minor at most schools, much less a math major. If you take the programming out of CS, what's left is most definitely not a math major, what's left is a bunch of lower division math and science courses.
It didn't used to be like that, because as you mentioned, in the old days, emphasis was on the theoretical much more than the applied -- discrete math, the development of algorithms, etc. This kind of CS was much more mathematical in nature, certainly. But it hasn't been like this for a long time now, the "engineering" aspects of CS are overemphasized (in my opinion). In the old days, the language used to demonstrate an algorithm or technique was one that most purely demonstrated the material in question -- languages like Lisp, Haskell, ML, and SmallTalk dominated CS classes and it was typical for each class to use a different language, namely the one that best suited its needs.
Nowadays, many CS departments, even ones at good schools, are teaching everything in Java or C++. Not that there's anything wrong with these languages, but they are generic project languages, designed not to do any particular thing well, but rather to be effective application-builders. Java certainly is greatly inferior to a language like Lisp if what you're studying is recursion theory, for example, or polymorphic programming techniques. But no one does application development in Lisp, and what most IT shops want these days is a drone with a particular skill set that they can simply "drop in" to their existing Java-based IT environment without doing much training.
I was originally a CS major, and my interests were in real CS -- I was already a competent programmer with several years of real world project development experience under my belt when I entered university, I didn't need to relearn C++. I changed my major to math after having taken a few undergraduate CS courses and realizing that all I was going to learn was "applied CS" as a CS major, ie, programming.
Despite what so many code-whores on Slashdot seem to think, programming is not hard, not at all. The emphasis on programming in so many CS departments has turned CS into a vocational program. As others have noted, it is certainly important to program in CS -- how else can you implement algorithms? But the language you implement an algorithm in should reflect the logic of the algorithm, not the other way around (for example, have you ever seen quicksort implemented in Haskell? If you have, you'll see why implementing it C++ or Java when trying to understand the logic of it is completely braindead).
Reading academic papers published in CS journals should drive the point home: more often than not, the algorithms are written in mathematical pseudocode, not in any particular programming language. Why? Because who cares about the syntax that Java or C++ or any other language enforces on you? What you're discussing is the algorithm. Much of the papers involves proving that the algorithm is O(n log(n)) or whatever, talking about the amount of space it uses, discussing optimisations, complexity trade-offs, etc. It's more math than programming, and yet the average CS major couldn't prove a basic theorem to save their lives.
Speaking as a math major, anyone who thinks of calculus or linear algebra as advanced math has not taken much math. For the record, the requirement I outlined in my previous post (the bridge course) is an upper division course, generally taken after two years of undergraduate math (which includes vector calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations). It sounds like the UC system requires more math than Purdue for its CS majors, which in the grand scheme of things is still nowhere near enough math to qualify as a math major.
Certainly, the fact that men and women are different is undeniable, but the question as to why they are different is the key one here. I have a feeling that your post (and many other posts like it on Slashdot) are assuming (and it's a big assumption, with exactly 0 evidence) that the differences that exist are biological in nature, and not sociological.
Lots of people here have commented that in their CS classes, most of the women were non-American, with Asian and Eastern European foreign students making up the bulk of the women in the program. This suggests, more than anything, that the differences you see between men and women in the United States are sociological in nature, rather than biological -- people growing up in other cultures do not seem show the same differences between the sexes that we observe here.
There have occasionally been studies done on men and women that suggest things like "women are more social, men more analytical" which are then parrotted endlessly by the media because they fit very nicely into the stereotypes we have about men and women. When these studies are refuted in peer-reviewed journals, as they to date always have been, the media, not surprisingly, never reports on it.
At the moment, the only proven biological differences between men and women are primary and secondary sexual characteristics, ie, gentials and breasts or lack thereof.
Since this is Slashdot, and most of us are geeks who think that something like sociology isn't a real science, it doesn't surprise me in the least that very few of us are likely to have taken a soc class or read a book or two on the subject. Suffice to say, it turns out that most of the differences that we observe between the sexes are provably the result of upbringing, and not the result of actual biology. The easiest way to see this is to note, for example, that in China, the number of women studying CS and Engineering is much closer to 50% of the total number of students. Given this, the only way to make the biology argument work is to suggest that the Chinese are somehow biologically predisposed to math and science. Ignoring the racialist implications of such a claim for a moment, it's worth noting that most modern science and math was developed in the west, making such a claim hard to substantiate.
Are you joking? A bunch of lower division math courses do not a math degree make. I don't know where you go to school, but CS - programming = a few lower division math and science courses. I went to the University of California, and the highest math class CS majors had to take was the lowest upper division math class offered, a "bridge course" on proof techniques and set theory (which, when I took it, most of the CS majors managed to fail).
CS may have grown out of the math departments at Stanford and Berkeley, but these days (lamentably) a CS degree appears to be equivalent to a vocational programming degree from a technical school like DeVry. Seriously, it doesn't take much to learn Java, C++, assembly or whatever. Most of what CS courses do these days is teach people how to program, because that's what employers want. The abstract algorithm development stuff with proofs and rigour that used to be the core of a CS degree is mainly taught in graduate school these days. It's been like that pretty much since the bubble, when everyone realized that hey, you can make a lot of money in CS, if you know how to program.
I lived in Beijing for four years, until last September, and still return there frequently (ie, I was there two weeks ago). If you're paying 9 to 16 yuan for pirated DVDs, you're being seriously ripped off. Just so you know.
Furthermore, despite what people always say, there are very few police relative to the population in China, even in Beijing (which has a larger police presence than most cities). In the old days, becoming a policeman was a stable job that gave you power, respect, and an enviable income. Nowadays, this is no longer the case. Everyone wants to make money, and the private sector is the way to get that. It's also the way to get influence -- if you have money, you make connections, and if you have connections, you can get away with most anything.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that not that many young people are finding a career in law enforcement attractive anymore. Beijing cops are tough mothers -- I've seen them smack people for giving them lip -- but the basic truth is that there simply aren't enough of them to matter. Guan bu zhao, as the Chinese say.
There are 13 million people in Beijing municipality -- think about that. That's nearly the population of the entire continent of Australia.
No, actually, "gook" is a term that originated in the Korean war for Korean people. Because many of the soldiers who fought in the Korean war were officers in the Vietnam war, their racial slurs were adopted and modified by a new generation, leading to great confusion about the origins of the term.
The etymology of the word gook is interesting, because it may be one of the few racial slurs that originated with a people's term for themselves. In Korean, guk means "country" and by extension a country's people; when it is not modified (cf. waiguk, outside country, foreigner) it is understood to be Korea or its peoples. Speakers of Chinese will recognize the word as having sintic origin (gúo, country, and wàigúo, foreign country, respectively, in Mandarin).
The term was appropriated by the Americans during the Korean war and used as a racial slur for Korean people in general, which must have been confusing to the Koreans (imagine someone using "American" as a slur for Americans to get an idea). Then, in Vietnam, the old "Asians are all the same" mentality prompted GIs to extend its meaning (imagine "American" being a racial slur for all white people, for example -- yes, I know many Americans aren't white, it's not a perfect analogy, deal with it).
I lived in China from 2002 to 2006 and there, you have a completely different dynamic. Whereas in the US it's generally understood that copyright infringement is illegal and maybe even wrong, in China, there is absolutely no respect for copyright whatsoever. Large, legit companies offer mp3 search engines that directly link to popular music. The discman and walkman were never common in China -- the mp3 player is ubiquitous, and no one really buys music. Even if you wanted to buy a CD, finding a reputable vendor that isn't just selling you a pirated copy is difficult.
So what's the deal? Why isn't the music industry dead in China, as so many analysts in the western world are predicting will happen here because of widespread "piracy"? Maybe they're just freeloading off of us? No, western music is not particularly popular in China. Much of their music comes from Taiwan and Hong Kong, but there's no respect for copyright law in those places, either. And the mainland market is growing, fast. A few years back one of the most popular songs ever on the mainland was a silly song some college kid recorded in their dorm and that spread on the internet like wildfire (Laoshu ai dami). So in a market where any artist can record their own song and make it big by word of mouth and "illegal" copying, what value-added services do the labels offer?
The answer, simply, is fame. Nowadays, recording your own music and distributing it on-line is no longer difficult. Making it sound really good might be hard, but let's be honest: the top 40 hits aren't exactly classical music. They sound just about the same on shitty iPod earbuds as they do on a 20 thousand dollar audiophile setup. So, given how much you give up to have that producer do the recording for you, maybe signing with a label isn't such a great deal anymore.
But the one thing a big label can give you is fame. Instant fame. If you want to be famous, if that's your goal -- and for many musicians, their goal is not so much making music as living like a rock star -- then the RIAA and its ilk can give that to you. In China, this seems to be their only purpose. They don't just make you into a famous musician, they make you into an idol. You sell products. You act in films. You go to fancy parties, appear on TV shows, you do all that stuff. All the bagua gossip magazines talk about you, all the kids want to either sleep with you or be you, depending on their gender. This is their value-added service: fame.
That kid who did "Laoshu ai dami" -- I don't even know his name -- produced the most played song on the mainland (and in Taiwan, too, if memory serves) for like a two year period. His song was instantly covered by all sorts of label-sanctioned teen idols, who's versions went into heavy circulation. The kid, well, I don't know who he is or what became of him. That's the difference between having a label at your back and not.
People will always want to be famous, and we unwashed masses will always want celebrities to gossip about, envy, and emulate. In a world like ours, becoming super-famous can be easy if the corporations are backing you, and without their help, it's nearly impossible to have sustainable fame.
I don't see the labels and their ilk disappearing anytime soon. But like China, they may simply have to accept the fact that people are not going to stop copying music. Regardless of whether you think it's wrong or not, understand: it's not going to stop. Trying to keep it from happening is like passing prohibition, or trying to convince kids not to have premarital sex. You might win a few hearts and minds, but not enough to matter.
The only answer is changing how your business model works, and what it emphasizes. Perhaps the Chinese model is worth a look.
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This is largely the fault of physicists. Mathematicians complain about their abuse of notation constantly; whereas mathematicians go to great pains to come up with mathematical notation that is clear, concise, useful, and most importantly, general, physicists seem to love their little pet symbols. Even Richard Feynman, whom I greatly respect, talked about how he discovered some of the basic notions of calculus on his own as young student, and came up with his own notation as a result -- nothing wrong with this, mind you -- but then went on to say that he continued to use this notation in his own work and notes for much of his high school and undergraduate years. I hate to say it, but that's sort of typically physicist. Needlessly obfuscatory. Richard Feynman was a smart guy, to be sure, but his pet notation was unlikely more intuitive than the notation that mathematicians had spent centuries developing and refining, many of whom were -- no offense to the man, he's in good company -- much more intelligent than Richard Feynman was.
Quantum Physics is filled with examples like this -- some physicist, through the course of his research, reinvents the mathematical wheel because he hasn't been exposed to much technical maths, and so his pet notation becomes standard among physicists, even though mathematicians studying the problem more abstractly had come up with elegant and concise notation a hundred years prior.
It's tremendously frustrating. See for example all the wacky bra and ket bullshit in QM. Or the algebraic manipulation of infintesimals as if they were members of the real or complex fields (of course, one can do something like this with differential forms, but very few physicists seem the least bit aware of the corner cases and happily "multiply through by dx" without considering what that means). It's extremely frustrating. My upper division electricity and magnetism teacher actually used this technique once and warned us that "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." Can you believe it?
But then, most physicists stop taking math classes their junior year of undergrad, and from then on learn all their math in physics classes. You don't learn much math in lower division... so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they all suck at math.
Jokes you don't get always seem weak, I'm afraid.
When will you slashdotters evr lrn?!
I think the GP's point is that Australia has increasingly been pandering to US interests to such a degree that it seems to much of the local population that the Aussie government is putting the US's interests over the interests of its own people. Indeed, this seems to be true. And while Oz is on the whole much less religious than the US, this is changing; John Howard attends church and what's more makes something of a public affair of it, from what I understand. This is widely seen as a political tactic to secure the support of an increasingly religious Australia. Keep in mind, still nothing like the fundamentalist fanatics that are endemic in the US, but the landscape is nonetheless changing.
Australia seems to have (and feel free to correct me, as I am not Australian, I've just spent some time there) something of the Big Brother mentality that the UK does, but thankfully is too sparsely populated to really see its ideas through to the same extent. These days it seems that New Zealand is the place to go if you value your freedom; they seem to be sane and relatively libertarian. But they're also isolated, have crappy weather (depending on where you're from in the US, you may disagree) and the local dialect is nearly unintelligible, even to many Australians.
They may have been unconcerned about AIDS in the 60s and 70s because the first confirmed case was in 1981. Of course, there had been cases of HIV infection before that, but they were so sporadic that no one knew what they were and so they were not identified as such. For all intents and purposes, every kind of VD except herpes was curable in the 1960s and 1970s. Condoms do little to protect against HPV anyway. You can't really blame people for being unconcerned about a disease they didn't even know existed, and was so rare anyway that it might as well not have.
IPv4 sites can be accessed with IPv6; IPv6 addresses include IPv4 addresses as a subset. On IPv6, you can access the entire IPv4-only internet; it is the IPv6-only internet that you cannot access with IPv4. That currently constitutes a minuscule number of sites, so it is no great loss, but once IPv6 begins to take hold -- and it will, China, India and Japan do not have enough addresses given their populations -- people who insist on using IPv4 will begin to find that large swaths of the internet are inaccessible.
It's not like anyone is expecting an overnight change, as IPv6 was designed to co-exist with IPv4 for some years. But once the number of IPv6 sites reaches some critical mass, abandonment of IPv4 will be quick. Early adopters of IPv6 will absolutely not find themselves penalized, assuming that their ISP does in fact support IPv6, as they can do everything they can currently do with IPv4 with IPv6 and possibly more.
Your points about naval combat and North Africa are well taken. Of course, since we're talking about US involvement in WWII -- remember that the OP said that we didn't need to remember how the French saved our butts in 1776 because we'd repaid our debt with WWII -- it's somewhat tangential, but nonetheless relevant.
To reiterate, I don't mean to imply that we did nothing during WWII, and I certainly don't mean to imply that Britain did nothing during WWII -- just that both of these nations did less than might have been expected of them, the US in particular. The truth is, the US had no real reason to enter WWII, and while she did so for not entirely altruistic reasons, it's worth remembering that we could have told Europe to fuck itself and didn't. So that in itself is commendable, on some level.
What I take issue with is the way that Americans bring up WWII every time they feel criticized by Europeans. This is particularly true when it comes to the French. "If it weren't for us, you'd all be speaking German." Whereas the French never say "don't forget what we did for you in 1776", Americans pull out WWII literally all the time. This wouldn't be so bad if America had been half as important to the war effort as the average American seems to think we were. My point -- and I think it stands -- is that most Americans are not the least bit aware of how much the Soviet Union did, they literally think that we marched in and saved the day. No surprise there: that's what we're taught in school. If the USSR is mentioned at all, it's as a footnote, usually with the caveat that "Stalin was a bad guy". Stalin was not a nice guy, it's true -- but he was far more competent than Hitler in the long run, because Stalin actually learned from his mistakes. Especially late in the war, Hitler replaced a good number of his most competent generals with members of the SS -- consider the appointment of Heinrich Himmler to command Army Group Vistula in defense of Berlin, a disaster -- whereas Stalin largely got over his initial distrust of the Army and removed bureaucratic deadlocks (like the political commissars scattered throughout the chain of command) that had been disastrous early in the war. He made mistakes to be sure, but he learned from them.
You poo-poo the lives lost as irrelevant, but that is clearly not the case. The Red Army continued to advance, fighting with whatever they could find, and incurring tremendous losses. Unlike the US and the UK, they did not have the military infrastructure to do any better -- the USSR in 1942 hadn't even completely industrialized. If it hadn't been for Stalin's emphasis on industrialization, it would have been even worse, and they might not have prevailed.
For the record, my other grandfather was French, born and raised in Pas-de-Calais, and he remembers the German occupation well. There are bullet holes on the side of the Belfry in Arras, but it's nothing -- and I mean nothing -- like what you see in Eastern Europe to this day. No one is saying that the soldiers on the Western Front had it easy in a general sense, but comparatively speaking, the WF was nothing compared to the fighting that was being done in the East. The Germans also incurred their heaviest losses there.
Disclaimer: my grandfather was a German soldier on the eastern front.
When you say "but they wouldn't have stood a chance if the other Allies weren't there, also fighting", what exactly do you mean? France was occupied, Spain was neutral, Italy was one of the Axis powers -- who exactly was fighting? The French resistance? The UK was sitting on their island, getting shelled by Germany and occasionally shooting down planes over the Channel, although most of the shooting down was done by the Germans -- they didn't open the Western Front until D-day. That was in June 1944. The USSR, on the other hand, turned the tide against the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad, which was -- wait for it -- in late 1942. By April 1944, still before D-day, Soviet troops had pushed Germany entirely out of Soviet territory and had entered occupied German territory; Germany was already collapsing in on itself. The Allies fighting on the newly opened Western Front several months later would encounter relatively little resistance. Nazi Germany was essentially finished by this time.
This is not to say that the US did nothing, far from it: but the idea that the USSR wouldn't have kicked Germany's ass on its own is completely incorrect, Germany was running for its life by the time D-day rolled around and there's no reason to believe that that would have changed. Of course, then all of Europe would have been Communist.
My grandfather, who was only 17 at the time, ran from the Red Army to surrender to the Americans, because he'd heard that the Americans were nicer to their POWs than the Russians. Small wonder -- the life expectancy of a Russian soldier at the Battle of Stalingrad was less than a day, can you really blame them for hating the Germans? We suffered comparatively little.
You're drunk on cold war propaganda. There's no doubt that the USSR and Germany had a pact do divide Europe -- but that's no different than the arms, technology, and supplies that we (as in the US, the UK, and France) gave the Nazis to protect us from the Communist threat we perceived from the USSR. Germany at the end of WWI was not in any sort of position to engineer the huge economic and military comeback that they did on their own -- they had help, and it was from us (the Allies). When the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, what did the Allies do? Nothing. The UK and France were deadset on avoiding war, and they feared Stalin, so not only did they appease Hitler, they actually armed him (the US is guilty of this too). And we (the US) entered the European theater in December of 1941, nearly 3 years after WWII started on the continent.
Sure, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed a pact, but neither of them had any intention of honoring it, as the Nazis hated and feared Communists and Stalin gravely underestimated Hitler. And here's the thing -- until people became aware of the atrocities being committed by the Nazi party, what was wrong with supporting them? You must keep the time frame in mind: we now see Nazis as the embodiment of all evil, but before news of the Holocaust got out, the Nazis were just another fascist party. And again, lest you forget, the reason fascism enjoyed such popular support in Europe (and elsewhere) in the late 30s early 40s was because of the Great Depression, which left many people wondering whether or not free market capitalism could even work: the only country left untouched by the depression was the Soviet Union. Now of course we better understand the effects of monetary policy and investment on the economy, and know that that's bunk, but at the time, people thought that crashes like the great depression may be a result of the inherent instability of markets, and statism in its left and right wing forms was immensely popular, especially in nations that had been monarchies in fairly recent memory.
There's one other very important point, and this is mainly why I accused you of being drunk on cold war propaganda. Stalin severely changed the direction of the Soviet Union's expansionist policies by declaring the feasibility of "Socialism in one Nation". You see, up until then, much Communist thinking was centered on the idea that the whole world must be Communist, or capitalist trade would remain a driving economic force on the national level. Sure, the USSR might be communist, but they would still need to buy and sell commodities on the international markets, meaning that they were a socialist enclave that still needed to concern itself with free market details. Trotsky was very much against this idea, and continued to champion the idea of worldwide revolution until his death. Stalin, on the other hand, suggested that the USSR concentrate on itself and less on the rest of the world. He felt that having the USSR be Socialist was enough, and that there was no need to forment revolt in the rest of the world.
In other words, the world-domination plans you speak of were, well, non-existent.
Furthermore, and this I really don't get, you say "they've [the USSR] already invaded several Eastern European countries" -- uhh, which? Why don't you take a look at this map of Europe in 1920, after WWI and tell me what nations they "invaded" by the time WWII came around. The answer, simply, is none -- those nations behind the iron curtain fell under Soviet influence after WWII, and that was a result of the Allies carving up Europe. The poor relations between the Warsaw Pact nations and the NATO nations was a direct result of the Cold War, and the iron curtain was a result of that. Lest you forget, West Germany was also occupied by the Allies.
And just in case you're confused, I'm not saying that the USSR was great in every way -- just that they bled for Europe in a way that cannot possibly be c
Repaid generously? Are you nuts? Do you know how many people the US lost in WWII? Total? In both the European and Pacific theaters? 300 thousand. That's it. And we lost most of our people fighting Japan, not the Germans.
Do you know how many people the USSR lost? 27 million. By the time we invaded Normandy, Germany was already collapsing. Do you know why we waited as long as we did? Tit-for-tat revenge: Lenin pulled the newly formed Soviet Union out of WWI as soon as he took power in 1917, leaving us and our allies high and dry. We didn't need to wait as long as we did; Stalin was begging us for reinforcements, and we could have invaded at any time, but we stood our ground, as a kind of "fuck you" to the Russians, who were hemorrhaging soldiers. Meanwhile, France suffered.
And in WWI, France kicked ass militarily, and remained a major European power. Our role in WWI was relatively small and unimportant compared to Britain and France, who lest you forget, were the world superpowers then. We benefited tremendously from WWII; we were the only developed nation to emerge unscathed, whereas Europe was decimated, its infrastructure utterly destroyed, reduced to a smoking pile of rubble. Then, as if that weren't enough, we enacted the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, which more than anything drove the economic growth we experienced in the 1950s -- because the Europeans lacked the infrastructure to produce the goods they required, they were forced to buy them from us, on money we lent them.
Of course, much later we forgave that debt, and patted ourselves on the back and said, look what nice people we are. But in the meantime we had engineered American corporate dominance, and Europe has been in our shadow ever since. And sniveling little brats in the US grow up thinking that our country did all the heavy lifting in World War II, when the harsh truth is that the USSR sacrificed nearly 1 in 10 of its people to save Europe. When De Gaulle had the gall to suggest that France should maintain friendly diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, we actually criticized him!
It is sickening -- absolutely sickening -- to hear people who clearly have never bothered reading a history book in their lives say that France "owes" us for WWII, when we were too cowardly to even engage the Wehrmacht until we knew the Soviet Union had them licked. Then we raised two generations of Americans on propaganda, never even mentioning the sacrifice they made.
The Russians were the heroes of that war. They deserve our respect, which we've never given them. And I would suggest that you never go dangling WWII in the face of the French -- or anyone else in Europe -- again.
Now, as a disclaimer, I am not a libertarian and I think their ideas regarding economics are often over-simplified and stupid, but when it comes to civil rights, they have it right on: "The right you have to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Which means, basically, that as long as you aren't infringing on the rights of others (in this case, the right to go through life without being assaulted), you can do whatever you want.
When it comes to laws against polygamy in the US, I am in complete agreement with your assessment -- it's not the government's business and they shouldn't interfere. In fact, polygamy in the US was not illegal until people concerned about the growing popularity of Mormonism used legislation against polygamy to "get around" freedom of religion, which made banning the "cult" in a more straightforward manner impossible. It was stupid then and it's stupid now, and it ought to be repealed. What the hell do I care if my neighbor wants more than one wife or more than one husband? It doesn't concern me at all, unless I'm some busybody neighbor with nothing better to do than to foist my notion of morality onto people of another culture.
The whole anti-spanking BS is a bit harder to nail down, because someone in a position of power is smacking someone who cannot defend themselves and who most likely does not consent to being smacked. Of course, parents are legally responsible for their children until a certain age, and that presumably confers them certain rights. Whether or not spanking is one of those rights is a difficult gray area, because child abuse is clearly illegal -- where do we draw the line? But I agree with you, anti-spanking legislation is stupid. The only time we'd want to restrict that is when it's excessive, and there are already perfectly good laws banning child abuse that cover that. But my point is, it's not such a great example because someone's rights are being violated -- the question is whether or not we as a society care.
Regardless of whether it's in India or elsewhere, obscenity laws are frankly stupid. The government shouldn't have that sort of legislation on the books. Whether it's a peck on the cheek or a bare-chested girl in public, it's completely moronic. If you don't like what you see, then don't look. It's as simple as that. You do not have the right to go through life unoffended, because the right to offend is simply too precious. People are offended by criticism. People are offended by interracial relationships. People are offended by all sorts of behaviors, and we as a society should rightly tell them to go fuck themselves if they think the offense they feel warrants judicial protection.
Having said that, it seems that this is a case of a relatively small minority of religious fundamentalists getting their panties in a bunch over nothing. Most Indians didn't seem to have a problem with it. Of course he should have been more sensitive, but kissing someone on the cheek? Come on...
Of course, here in the US we also have small but extremely vocal groups of religious fundamentalists that make similarly ridiculous statements -- but generally, we try our best to ignore them, and the courts certainly don't side with them.
That's certainly a fair position to take.
I don't think that's what he's saying. Let's take this out of the political realm for a moment. Suppose you were trying to develop a well-balanced perspective on vi vs. emacs. Given their long standing enmity, you'd probably agree that it would be silly to try to get a well-balanced perspective on their relative merits by attending a "vi rules, emacs drools" party, or vice versa. You'd be much better off asking someone who was less emotionally married to the subject and who could comment convincingly on the inevitable pros and cons of both pieces of software.
Moving back into the political, if you were a non-American attempting to develop a well-rounded and nuanced perspective on American foreign policy, would you go and ask Iranians? Iraqis? Probably not. Not because these groups don't have valid complaints -- but rather because their bad experiences hamstring their ability to approach the issue of America's foreign policy in a rational way.
Similarly, the Palestinians would probably not be the right people to ask about Israel's right to exist. This is not because their complaints are unjustified, nor is to say that those should not be addressed -- but their feud with Israel makes them the least likely, in principle, to provide you with a nuanced perspective on the topic.
Armed with this understanding, the thing to realize about the Cuban American population in Florida and elsewhere is that, well, they hate Castro. Asking them what kind of a guy Castro is is about as productive as asking an internal party cadre in Cuba what kind of a guy Castro is -- the response is certain, before you even ask the question. Cuban Americans hate Castro -- that's why they left. They're not going to tell you about the good things he's done, because they want him out of power, and they see American pressure as a means to that end. Similarly, if you asked somebody high up in the Cuban Communist Party what they thought of him, they would certainly not mention anything about the bad things he's done -- they owe their livelihood to him, it is in their best interest that you see him as a good leader worthy of support.
This is the essence of propaganda, whatever end it pushes. You needn't lie; no one is perfect. Choose a side, and then selectively report only the good or only the bad, depending on which view you'd like your readership to take. If you listen to liberals, for example, Bush's tax-cuts were a "gift to the rich, at the expense of the poor" -- but in actuality, thanks to a (proven) economic phenomenon known as the Laffer curve, federal income has increased since the tax cuts, which should surprise no one who has studied economics. This is quietly ignored in the left-leaning press, who instead opt to play the percentages game and say that the middle class pays proportionally more of the tax burden than it used to, ignoring that everyone is paying less than they used to. In a similar vein, when you listen to Fox news, the completely unjustifiable Iraq war was justifiable because they had WMD, or Saddam was a bad guy, or whatever -- now, the right is careful not to invoke images of WMD because they know that it will hurt their image, which is already so tarnished that one wonders how much more damage can be done.
Selective reporting -- you should always be wary of it. My view, and I believe it nuanced, is that Castro has been a pretty brutal guy at times, and can in no way be considered a great leader by any honest definition of the term. But having said that, it is telling that the infant mortality rate in Cuba is the lowest in the Americas -- which, lest you gloss over it, includes the US and Canada. The literacy rate in Cuba is nearly 100%. People are poor, but they are not walking around on the street fearing for their lives, either, as in many places in Latin America, where kidnapping and drug cartel related deaths are a fact of life. It's not such an easy question to answer: well meaning but weak governments hav
I don't get why so many folks get upset that they can't say nigger and that black people can. Think about it, you call your girlfriend "baby" but you bristle if your buddy does it -- terms are not absolute, they never have been. Depending on context and speaker, some terms are acceptable some of the time and not acceptable at all at other times. You go to the bar with your friends and say fuck this and fuck that, but at the office with your boss you probably wouldn't dare, even though it's entirely likely that he uses the f-word with his close friends too.
If you're under the impression that a black person calling you cracker is funny, then you need to get your head examined. They might think it's funny, in the same way that the people who read Stormfront think calling black people niggers is funny. But that's what they are: the black equivalent of Stormfront. Ignore them, or kick their asses. But don't bitch because they can call each other nigger and have it not be offensive, and you can't.
The reason we as a society accept the use of slur words by members of a community they were meant to denigrate (nigger, queer, fag, jap, whatever) is because it is extremely unlikely that members of said community have a one-dimensional understanding of the complexity of members of that community. A black person who uses the term "nigger" understands that the stereotypes associated with that term are not binding; he knows enough about black people, being one himself, to not have his use of the word reflect ignorance. While you may find this hard to believe, use of the n-word by non-blacks is sometimes tolerated by black people, as long as they're all friends and the person using the word is known to be using the word as a joke and not as a statement of bigotry.
Many minorities have "reclaimed" terms for themselves; queer is a label used with pride by the homosexual community, for example, but its use by non-members of the LGBT community (like the use of fag) is not well looked upon.
For what it's worth, many black people find the use of the word nigger by blacks extremely offensive. This may come as a surprise to you, but black people are not all alike.
As for the greater tolerance society has for anti-white racism, well, it is hypocritical, but it's also expected, because of the economic and social influence that whites have in our society. Do you honestly think that a black man calling his white boss a "cracker" would keep his job, unless they were very close friends? Do you honestly think that white people have no power in this society to call the shots?
I lived as a minority in Asia for 4 years -- when 99% of the population is another ethnicity, and has all sorts of wildly inaccurate and paranoid ideas about you because of the color of your skin, it gets to you. It may be hard for you to appreciate what it means, because you're unlikely to ever experience it. At least I was a foreigner and could leave -- these people live their whole lives as citizens of a country where the majority of people don't understand them and what's worse don't care to understand them.
Not being able to call a black person nigger is not such a hardship, frankly. And it surprises me that you would even want to.
The this case he was refering to was yours, parent, not his own. As should have been obvious from context.
Your demand for refutations of statistical differences is spurious, because, as I said, no one is arguing that differences do exist. What we are arguing about is the source of these differences. Statistical analysis of a population will uncover only the existence of differences, and not their source. So in this case I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps you misunderstood what I was talking about?
As for your quip about China specifically pushing women into these fields, well, for starters I lived in China for four years, so I think I'm qualified to comment. There's no special incentive for women to enter these fields that I've observed. However, it's worth noting that even if the government or someone else were going to great pains to get women into CS, that doesn't change the fact that the Chinese women coming out of their universities and ours are singularly competent and grok CS just as well, and frequently better, than their male counterparts. So if your argument is that there's some biological reason that women are inferior at CS, that would seem to refute it -- if they were truly inferior, why are they succeeding, and in large numbers?
Could it be, perhaps, that Chinese culture values things like excellence in tech in a way that the US never has? Let me clue you in: there's no word in Mandarin for nerd or geek, the social class does not exist. There's no notion that you're uncool because you're good at computers, math, physics, chemistry -- quite the opposite, in fact, in China kids that excel in these subjects are popular. There's also no social association between "being anti-social" and "being smart". In the US, and on Slashdot, nerds defend their nerdiness by creating some sort of "anti-cool" image for themselves; they convince themselves that nerds don't need to be social, that that's all a game played by the peons who don't know any better. They pride themselves on their lack of social ability, going so far as to say things like "I'm a self-diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, but I don't see it as a defect, I see it as a strength." You don't see that sort of thing in China.
And frankly, that makes all the difference. When being good at computers is cool, and isn't associated with being unable to have a conversation with a member of the opposite sex and an aversion to showering, you suddenly find that a lot of smart people attracted to CS. And it's not just women who turn away from CS: lots of smart guys can't cope with geek posturing, either. Geeks have done their best to make CS as unappealing a place as possible for people that aren't similarly socially inept, regardless of gender.
Maybe not, but for what it's worth, my math department (I graduated five years ago) was around 50 percent female at the undergraduate level, which granted was lower than the university average (our class admitted roughly 60 percent women, so men were over-represented in math relative to that standard.) I will admit that this was not the case in graduate school, where we were lucky to have 30%. However, given the competency of my undergraduate female classmates, it certainly wasn't for lack of talent or ability; for whatever reason, fewer women seemed to want to go to graduate school for math. I knew quite a few that ended up getting MAs in Education, and many that didn't go on to advanced studies at all. But it certainly wasn't because they weren't good at math.
But then, math is not filled with geeky misogynist males, either, neither among the students nor among the faculty -- our department had a good mix of female professors (my graduate algebra teacher was one, for example) and many of them were well respected in the field and well positioned in the department. This is very rarely the case in CS departments. Women are uncommon, not only as students, but among the faculty as well, and contempt for women among a male population that (forgive the stereotype) can't generally get laid to save itself is thinly veiled. It doesn't surprise me in the least that women aren't attracted to CS. It's certainly not a problem of smarts, let me tell you -- women are well-represented in math.
There's something wrong with computer scientists. Of course, this should surprise exactly no-one who is honest with themselves about the sorts of people that CS departments currently attract. Here's a hint: if you say things like "I have Asperger's syndrome and I'm proud of it", then you're probably part of the problem (not to mention stupid). That's not directed at you, parent, but to Slashdotters in general.
I guess my point (which I apparently didn't explain clearly enough) is that CS majors don't take enough math to qualify for even a math minor at most schools, much less a math major. If you take the programming out of CS, what's left is most definitely not a math major, what's left is a bunch of lower division math and science courses.
It didn't used to be like that, because as you mentioned, in the old days, emphasis was on the theoretical much more than the applied -- discrete math, the development of algorithms, etc. This kind of CS was much more mathematical in nature, certainly. But it hasn't been like this for a long time now, the "engineering" aspects of CS are overemphasized (in my opinion). In the old days, the language used to demonstrate an algorithm or technique was one that most purely demonstrated the material in question -- languages like Lisp, Haskell, ML, and SmallTalk dominated CS classes and it was typical for each class to use a different language, namely the one that best suited its needs.
Nowadays, many CS departments, even ones at good schools, are teaching everything in Java or C++. Not that there's anything wrong with these languages, but they are generic project languages, designed not to do any particular thing well, but rather to be effective application-builders. Java certainly is greatly inferior to a language like Lisp if what you're studying is recursion theory, for example, or polymorphic programming techniques. But no one does application development in Lisp, and what most IT shops want these days is a drone with a particular skill set that they can simply "drop in" to their existing Java-based IT environment without doing much training.
I was originally a CS major, and my interests were in real CS -- I was already a competent programmer with several years of real world project development experience under my belt when I entered university, I didn't need to relearn C++. I changed my major to math after having taken a few undergraduate CS courses and realizing that all I was going to learn was "applied CS" as a CS major, ie, programming.
Despite what so many code-whores on Slashdot seem to think, programming is not hard, not at all. The emphasis on programming in so many CS departments has turned CS into a vocational program. As others have noted, it is certainly important to program in CS -- how else can you implement algorithms? But the language you implement an algorithm in should reflect the logic of the algorithm, not the other way around (for example, have you ever seen quicksort implemented in Haskell? If you have, you'll see why implementing it C++ or Java when trying to understand the logic of it is completely braindead).
Reading academic papers published in CS journals should drive the point home: more often than not, the algorithms are written in mathematical pseudocode, not in any particular programming language. Why? Because who cares about the syntax that Java or C++ or any other language enforces on you? What you're discussing is the algorithm. Much of the papers involves proving that the algorithm is O(n log(n)) or whatever, talking about the amount of space it uses, discussing optimisations, complexity trade-offs, etc. It's more math than programming, and yet the average CS major couldn't prove a basic theorem to save their lives.
Speaking as a math major, anyone who thinks of calculus or linear algebra as advanced math has not taken much math. For the record, the requirement I outlined in my previous post (the bridge course) is an upper division course, generally taken after two years of undergraduate math (which includes vector calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations). It sounds like the UC system requires more math than Purdue for its CS majors, which in the grand scheme of things is still nowhere near enough math to qualify as a math major.
Certainly, the fact that men and women are different is undeniable, but the question as to why they are different is the key one here. I have a feeling that your post (and many other posts like it on Slashdot) are assuming (and it's a big assumption, with exactly 0 evidence) that the differences that exist are biological in nature, and not sociological.
Lots of people here have commented that in their CS classes, most of the women were non-American, with Asian and Eastern European foreign students making up the bulk of the women in the program. This suggests, more than anything, that the differences you see between men and women in the United States are sociological in nature, rather than biological -- people growing up in other cultures do not seem show the same differences between the sexes that we observe here.
There have occasionally been studies done on men and women that suggest things like "women are more social, men more analytical" which are then parrotted endlessly by the media because they fit very nicely into the stereotypes we have about men and women. When these studies are refuted in peer-reviewed journals, as they to date always have been, the media, not surprisingly, never reports on it.
At the moment, the only proven biological differences between men and women are primary and secondary sexual characteristics, ie, gentials and breasts or lack thereof.
Since this is Slashdot, and most of us are geeks who think that something like sociology isn't a real science, it doesn't surprise me in the least that very few of us are likely to have taken a soc class or read a book or two on the subject. Suffice to say, it turns out that most of the differences that we observe between the sexes are provably the result of upbringing, and not the result of actual biology. The easiest way to see this is to note, for example, that in China, the number of women studying CS and Engineering is much closer to 50% of the total number of students. Given this, the only way to make the biology argument work is to suggest that the Chinese are somehow biologically predisposed to math and science. Ignoring the racialist implications of such a claim for a moment, it's worth noting that most modern science and math was developed in the west, making such a claim hard to substantiate.
Are you joking? A bunch of lower division math courses do not a math degree make. I don't know where you go to school, but CS - programming = a few lower division math and science courses. I went to the University of California, and the highest math class CS majors had to take was the lowest upper division math class offered, a "bridge course" on proof techniques and set theory (which, when I took it, most of the CS majors managed to fail).
CS may have grown out of the math departments at Stanford and Berkeley, but these days (lamentably) a CS degree appears to be equivalent to a vocational programming degree from a technical school like DeVry. Seriously, it doesn't take much to learn Java, C++, assembly or whatever. Most of what CS courses do these days is teach people how to program, because that's what employers want. The abstract algorithm development stuff with proofs and rigour that used to be the core of a CS degree is mainly taught in graduate school these days. It's been like that pretty much since the bubble, when everyone realized that hey, you can make a lot of money in CS, if you know how to program.
I lived in Beijing for four years, until last September, and still return there frequently (ie, I was there two weeks ago). If you're paying 9 to 16 yuan for pirated DVDs, you're being seriously ripped off. Just so you know.
Furthermore, despite what people always say, there are very few police relative to the population in China, even in Beijing (which has a larger police presence than most cities). In the old days, becoming a policeman was a stable job that gave you power, respect, and an enviable income. Nowadays, this is no longer the case. Everyone wants to make money, and the private sector is the way to get that. It's also the way to get influence -- if you have money, you make connections, and if you have connections, you can get away with most anything.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that not that many young people are finding a career in law enforcement attractive anymore. Beijing cops are tough mothers -- I've seen them smack people for giving them lip -- but the basic truth is that there simply aren't enough of them to matter. Guan bu zhao, as the Chinese say.
There are 13 million people in Beijing municipality -- think about that. That's nearly the population of the entire continent of Australia.
No, actually, "gook" is a term that originated in the Korean war for Korean people. Because many of the soldiers who fought in the Korean war were officers in the Vietnam war, their racial slurs were adopted and modified by a new generation, leading to great confusion about the origins of the term.
The etymology of the word gook is interesting, because it may be one of the few racial slurs that originated with a people's term for themselves. In Korean, guk means "country" and by extension a country's people; when it is not modified (cf. waiguk, outside country, foreigner) it is understood to be Korea or its peoples. Speakers of Chinese will recognize the word as having sintic origin (gúo, country, and wàigúo, foreign country, respectively, in Mandarin).
The term was appropriated by the Americans during the Korean war and used as a racial slur for Korean people in general, which must have been confusing to the Koreans (imagine someone using "American" as a slur for Americans to get an idea). Then, in Vietnam, the old "Asians are all the same" mentality prompted GIs to extend its meaning (imagine "American" being a racial slur for all white people, for example -- yes, I know many Americans aren't white, it's not a perfect analogy, deal with it).
I lived in China from 2002 to 2006 and there, you have a completely different dynamic. Whereas in the US it's generally understood that copyright infringement is illegal and maybe even wrong, in China, there is absolutely no respect for copyright whatsoever. Large, legit companies offer mp3 search engines that directly link to popular music. The discman and walkman were never common in China -- the mp3 player is ubiquitous, and no one really buys music. Even if you wanted to buy a CD, finding a reputable vendor that isn't just selling you a pirated copy is difficult.
So what's the deal? Why isn't the music industry dead in China, as so many analysts in the western world are predicting will happen here because of widespread "piracy"? Maybe they're just freeloading off of us? No, western music is not particularly popular in China. Much of their music comes from Taiwan and Hong Kong, but there's no respect for copyright law in those places, either. And the mainland market is growing, fast. A few years back one of the most popular songs ever on the mainland was a silly song some college kid recorded in their dorm and that spread on the internet like wildfire (Laoshu ai dami). So in a market where any artist can record their own song and make it big by word of mouth and "illegal" copying, what value-added services do the labels offer?
The answer, simply, is fame. Nowadays, recording your own music and distributing it on-line is no longer difficult. Making it sound really good might be hard, but let's be honest: the top 40 hits aren't exactly classical music. They sound just about the same on shitty iPod earbuds as they do on a 20 thousand dollar audiophile setup. So, given how much you give up to have that producer do the recording for you, maybe signing with a label isn't such a great deal anymore.
But the one thing a big label can give you is fame. Instant fame. If you want to be famous, if that's your goal -- and for many musicians, their goal is not so much making music as living like a rock star -- then the RIAA and its ilk can give that to you. In China, this seems to be their only purpose. They don't just make you into a famous musician, they make you into an idol. You sell products. You act in films. You go to fancy parties, appear on TV shows, you do all that stuff. All the bagua gossip magazines talk about you, all the kids want to either sleep with you or be you, depending on their gender. This is their value-added service: fame.
That kid who did "Laoshu ai dami" -- I don't even know his name -- produced the most played song on the mainland (and in Taiwan, too, if memory serves) for like a two year period. His song was instantly covered by all sorts of label-sanctioned teen idols, who's versions went into heavy circulation. The kid, well, I don't know who he is or what became of him. That's the difference between having a label at your back and not.
People will always want to be famous, and we unwashed masses will always want celebrities to gossip about, envy, and emulate. In a world like ours, becoming super-famous can be easy if the corporations are backing you, and without their help, it's nearly impossible to have sustainable fame.
I don't see the labels and their ilk disappearing anytime soon. But like China, they may simply have to accept the fact that people are not going to stop copying music. Regardless of whether you think it's wrong or not, understand: it's not going to stop. Trying to keep it from happening is like passing prohibition, or trying to convince kids not to have premarital sex. You might win a few hearts and minds, but not enough to matter.
The only answer is changing how your business model works, and what it emphasizes. Perhaps the Chinese model is worth a look.
I think the reference was actually from the movie starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Stanley Kubrick, which predates stuff like IRC by more than twenty years. The bash.org quote is a reference to the movie, too. Good movie.