When I went to university I wanted to be a mathematician (I was quite good at math) and got my degree in pure mathematics (my senior thesis had to do with certain low dimensional applications of algebraic topology, if you care). Needless to say, I ended up not in mathematics but in finance, as an analyst.
While it's a very different world, I will say that it does require a great deal of work and that it isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination.
However, I have not met a single undergraduate business major -- not a one -- who learned any of this beyond the level of a survey course, and many of the people I work with are Harvard and Princeton grads. Most of them were heavily involved in the greek system and partied their way through school. Don't let this fool you -- they're smart and they work their asses off now: our hours are comparable or worse than the startup hours I used to pull during the dot com boom. But the fact remains that at uni, they did essentially nothing. They got their positions not so much as a result of smarts but as a result of a) their alma mater and b) family connections.
There seems to be a myth on Slashdot that getting a degree in Business is both easier and pays more out of school than a CS degree. It's a myth because it doesn't pay more. Pretty much everyone knows business majors are slackers, much as communications majors are. It's an entirely different story if you have an Econ or Finance degree, but that's not the same thing as Business (or worse, International Business, which seems to really attract some of the most incompetent morons I've ever met.)
Of course there are exceptions -- if you are one, then I apologize for painting your ilk with the broad brush. But basically employers don't take Business majors seriously most of the time. Accounting majors make bank. Finance majors make bank. Econ majors can make bank. But these are hard majors, and tedious. I dare say that most of the CS people I know wouldn't last a week in them, mostly for cultural reasons.
Try getting a job with a straight undergraduate Business degree. "Would you like fries with that?"
Thai people don't use chopsticks, and there are precious few in the country (unless you go to a Chinese restaurant or are hanging out somewhere where there are a lot of Chinese tourists).
So this aspect of your story seems, well, apocryphal.
So, I was stupid enough to fall for exactly the PR line that they setup, so what? Advertisement convinces more people to do stupid shit than "support the war". Why don't people get so upset about people being stupid enough to buy an extended warranty on electronics?
Maybe because extended warranties on electronics don't result in the deaths of countless innocent Iraqi civilians, coalition soldiers, and hell, Iraqi soldiers too. Maybe it's because they don't result in a society so chaotic that people are afraid to go outside -- say what you will about Saddam and his evil (no argument from me regarding that fact) but at least, under his regime, 95% of the populace could go to the market and buy fruit without fearing for their lives.
Having said that though, I agree with a comment you made in another post in this thread: the merits of the inital invasion aside, the US should absolutely not pull out until Iraq is stable. To do otherwise would be akin to sacking a man's house under false pretences, and then not having the decency to make sure it's rebuilt.
While I agree with the spirit of your comment, I think you missed the GP's point. In the case of the US, you have a population that believes in the preservation of democracy, and so if someone hijacked the democratic process and declared himself dictator for life, there would be revolt -- revolt facilitated by an armed populace, thanks to the 2nd amendment.
However, the situation that (I believe) the GP is refering to is more subtle. It's like that line in "The Quiet American" (have you seen it? great movie) in which a wide eyed bushy tailed american (Brendan Frasier, amazingly not annoying in this movie) is waxing lyrical to a world weary british journalist in Saigon about bringing democracy to Vietnam, and the journalist (played extremely well by Michael Caine) says something like, "It's not that simple: you guarantee democracy for these people, and they'll elect Ho Chi Minh."
Similarly, Iraq. The merits of invading the nation aside, we have a real situation on our hands now: if we guarantee fair elections for Iraqis, will they elect a leadership that will preserve the values of the democratic process and of individual freedom and expression, or will they elect a leadership that turns the previously secular Iraq into a newer version of islamofacist Iran?
When the population cares about freedom, preserving freedom isn't difficult, because true authority comes from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicle aquatic ceremony. If enough of the people disagree with the leadership's position, there will be revolt -- if it comes to that, problem solved.
But what if the people don't value freedom, or want to give it up, and be slaves? It seems like a stupid question, but lots of people who have never known freedom (that's most of the world, unfortunately) don't know its value, and they will not stand up to defend it because they've never had it.
So is it ethical, in this case, to restrict their freedom to restrict their own freedom? Or is that nanny statism? It's a bit of a quandry, really...
Religion was a support mechanism for a primitive mind. Now I truly believe that it is being evolved out, and will become less and less prevalant into the future, despite the efforts of small, but loud, groups trying to keep it alive.
That, my friend, is deliciously brilliant flaimbait. I mean, here we are, debating with religious ID proponents who hold a disbelief of evolution as their central tenant, and you, in the same thread, claim that religion is a "support mechanism for a primitive mind" and that it is being, of all things, "evolved out"! I'm laughing my butt off right now in enjoyment. So thank you for that.
I'd like to respectively disagree with you, though. I don't think the human mind (or humans in general) have evolved much recently, because most of the mechanisms thought to cause evolution (ie, natural selection pressures, etc) have not been shaping the human population for some time (roughly since humans began to organize themselves in large agrarian societies, I'd imagine.) When was the last time you had to run from a leopard? We have all these hereditary diseases that, in a population driven by evolutionary pressure, one would have expected to have disappeared long ago. But advances in science, particularly in medicine, but also in automation and economics, have made it possible for humans to live longer in poorer health. A good thing, I think.
Anyway though I'd advance that people 10 millenia ago were, on average, as intellectually able as modern man, modulo differences in diet (which do seem to effect intelligence, insofar as intelligence can be measured -- I don't believe in that psychometrics BS, for the record.) Certainly, people today are better educated, but that's due to environment, not biological abilities. Don't mistake knowledge for intelligence, as Einstein pleaded.
I think though that in the olden days religion was much more prevalent largely because there was so much in man's environment that he did not understand. Nowadays, most everything that is easily observable has been explained using natural phenomena -- modern science concerns itself primarily with hypotheses whose greatest obstacles are designing experiments to reliably prove or disprove them and that require years of education to even understand. Old concerns, like why does the sky make angry-sounding noises when it rains sometimes, well, science put those to rest long ago.
But through it all I think a lot of religious people who are scientifically minded have realized that while science has been much more successful than religion at explaining the how of things, it fails when it confronts the why. Perhaps fails is the wrong word, because that would imply that science set out to explain the why, when it most certainly does not. Science explains the how of things, and cannot, by definition, explain the why. As anyone who has ever encountered a 3 year old will tell you, every answer to a why question begs another why question, and eventually, taken to its logical conclusion, the end answer is always, "I don't know."
Religion gives an answer to why. It's usually pat and simplistic, which is why many of us ridicule it. "Because God made it that way," is the typical answer. But the thing to realize is that for many people having faith in something like that is a tremendously powerful and positive force in their lives. I have religious friends who are scientifically minded in other respects, and sometimes I truly envy them -- I spend a lot of time in the dark being terrified of death. They seem to feel like they're part of something. But I can't make that leap of faith. I need proof for things. The things I cannot prove, like the existance (or non-existance) of God, I just ignore.
Still though, I think it's important to recognize that not all religious people are crazy anti-science biggots who want everyone to live a stoneage lifestyle where the shaman could say "Thor brings the thunder be
Let me preface all this by saying that I'm not intrinsically against the notion of the universe being directly or indirectly created, but I feel the need to point out that your logic is somewhat flawed.
Essentially, you're saying, "Everything has a cause, a beginning. The Big Bang theory postulates a beginning, but no cause. This contradicts our understanding that effect must have cause, and therefore, there must be a cause. That cause must be God, or something isomorphic to God."
I'll admit that I too am uncomfortable with the Big Bang, for reasons similar to the ones you mention (although I am not religious). The problem with your argument is that by postulating that everything must have a beginning and a cause for existance, you are intrinsically requiring the same for any deity you might assume created the universe. Essentially, you say "the universe was created by God" and I respond "and God was created by whom?"
You must understand that you are not proving anything by transfering instantaneous creation from some scientifically understandable and indirectly observable thing (the Big Bang) to something that has no basis in science (God), because the problem you (and I too) had with the Big Bang rightly still stands: who created God? What "cause" caused his "effect"?
Why is it acceptable to you, from a logical perspective, to say that nothing created God, but unacceptable to suggest that nothing created the Big Bang?
So that's the first problem.
The second problem is that General Relativity certainly seems to suggest that cause can follow effect, as absurd as that may seem. Note that I am not suggesting that this is the case for the Big Bang, because I don't know (nor does anyone, I don't think). But it's worth noting that there are a lot of things we know to be true about the universe today that contradict our simple daily observations. This is especially true for the very small and for speeds approaching the speed of light. As it happens, the big bang encompasses both of these.
I am not a Physicist, so I won't pretend to be an expert -- my background is in pure mathematics. But I just wanted to note that saying "God created the universe" is logically equivalent, in terms of problems, to saying "the Big Bang created the universe". Neither deals with cause and effect.
Unfortunately, any theory that deals with the beginning of time will have this problem, I think. You're welcome to believe that it was God that caused the Big Bang, if that's consistant with your faith. But don't try to logically refute atheists by using that old "unmoved mover" argument that St. Thomas Aquinas tried so many years ago and that philosophers have had a field day with ever since.
First, yes, it is indeed 'viruses' and not that other neologism which I will not repeat.
I would advance that spelling MS 'M$' is indeed "l33t" speak, or at least Slashdot hive-mind-ism. I suppose that you can tell by now that I'm something of an anal bastard when it comes to spelling... but I'm not just another grammar nazi replying to your post. I do actually have a point, really, I just needed to get that out of my system.
OS X will never be a Windows killer. There are a number of reasons for this, but the largest is Apple itself. It isn't that OS X is inferior to Windows -- anyone who has used both knows that the opposite is clearly true. The problem, put simply, is that Apple's extremely savvy marketing machine plays the trendy card. They are not interested in being a commodity, that's not how it works. As much as techies would like it if every user with a closed source bent went with OS X rather than Windows, Apple will never take the steps necessary to make that happen. They market themselves as a beautiful, trendy, somewhat-pricier-but-worth-the-cost maker of personal computing devices. It's all marketing, of course. Price/Benefit analysis of some of their offerings (such as laptops) show that for the hardware, they aren't actually much more expensive, but that's not the point.
Car analogies are so tired, I know, but Windows is like a Toyota Tercel, only it's piss-poor quality. It's one of those beasts that everyone uses, that has nothing special about it. It isn't beautiful, it isn't ugly, it's functional, but not much fun to use, etc. It's affordable for almost everyone with a mind to own a personal computer.
The Macintosh, however, is a Porsche. It looks beautiful, it handles really well, and as any Porsche or Macintosh owner will tell you, when you use/drive it, you know where your money went, and you don't regret the decision you made to spend a little bit more. Porsche does not want their automobile to replace the Toyota Tercel. In people's popular consciousness, a Porsche is not something that everyone uses, it's not for the masses.
In the same way that a Porsche is for rockstars and CEOs, a Macintosh is for artists, musicians, trendy folks. Not people who spend all day looking at MS Excel spreadsheets. This is Marketing speak, mind you. The truth is that most Macintosh users use their machines just like a Windows user uses theirs -- and to come back to the car analogy, most Porsche drivers drive their car to work just like all the Tercel owners do. But in the promotional literature, it's all twisty highways in Germany, and you never drive your Porsche without sunglasses on. For the Mac, it's all editing your music and getting ready for your gig, because you're a rockstar.
You have to understand that it's perfectly possible to be an extremely profitable company -- as both Apple and Porsche are -- without being a monopoly. We've lived under the thumb of MS for so long that we've started thinking that any OS vendor has to be the dominant one -- it's like some Highlander-esque OS fight. But the truth is that this is not the normal, free market course of things, it's an aberration.
In a perfect world, you'd have many OSs, who thanks to open standards are largely interoperable. Each would find its niche. Apple has already found theirs. They don't want to be MS.
Also, and this is important: it takes more than an intel processor to be a PC compatible machine. SGI demonstrated how easy it is to make an intel based machine that is nothing like a PC, hardware-wise. The intel-based Mac will be as much a Mac as the PowerPC and 68k based Macs were. Lots of other machines have used 68k processors, for example, but only Macs were Macs, and it's not just a matter of software. Intel will be no different.
There's a lot more to a computer than its processor.
As to "liking MS" -- the only people who never liked MS are too young to remember the days when IBM was the evil corporation, and M
If it's a modern Intel CPU, you should ask if he'd like chips with that out-of-order.
Yeah, yeah, I'll be here all week.
Re:C/C++ dying? What are they smoking?
on
Demise of C++?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, let's see. C is an extremely simple and portable programming language. There are many, many compilers that support recent standards in their entirety. (I know C99 is lagging behind, but it contains a lot of fairly exotic features if you ask me).
In an anecdotal way, a relatively mature and competent C programmer could take a good shot at implementing a C compiler and come away with something pretty close to the real thing, because C is, well, simple, and consistant. C++ on the other hand -- it's so huge and complicated that I don't believe there has ever been a compiler that implements all of it, but correct me if I'm wrong on this. Needless to say, that level of complexity is troublesome.
In the old days -- by which I mean a decade ago -- we were still constrained enough on memory and CPU that C and C++ were the dominant programming languages for application development, with no sign of that ever changing. Dropping in on usenet would easily yield a religious C/C++ war with some C geek saying "C++ is bloated and slow" much as we say "Java is bloated and slow" today. It's laughable now. C++ may be slightly slower than C, but even without recent compiler advances by todays standards the difference has essentially always been negligible in well written code.
What I'm trying to point out here is that the focus in software development has changed drastically in the last decade. Unless you're in the embedded market, there are hardly ever CPU and memory constraints, and every corporation worth its salt has started to see that there may be something to languages that are easy to maintain and quick to develop in, even at the expense of speed (which is hardly ever relevant in a typical desktop or web application, which is what most application dev is these days).
Looking back, I think it was the web boom that changed everyone's perceptions. In the old days, you did all serious programming in C or C++ and everything else was either scripting or esoteric. But the first CGI scripts were, well, scripts. They were increasingly written with more and more powerful languages (more powerful than scripting languages, I mean) -- languages like perl, java, whatever -- and brought closer and closer to the webserver to increase their responsiveness and power -- but no one ever seriously considered writing these apps in C or C++, because it had been established historically that the pain and suffering, the bugs, the slow development cycle -- well, it just wasn't worth the effort.
I believe the explosion of web based services taught IT managers everywhere that C and C++ were, at least, not the only answer to the question of "what language should we write this thing in". CS folks have known forever that it's "the right tool for the job", but CTOs have generally always been partial to whatever language is vogue, without understanding the pros and cons at a deep level. So in the old days it was FORTRAN or C, then C++, then Java, Perl, C#, Python, Ruby -- the doors were opened by the whole web thing.
The result is, nowadays, C and C++ are increasingly less relevant. I say this as a die hard C programmer, mind you. C and C++ are increasingly used in relatively special environments. Embedded. System kernels. Drivers. That sort of stuff. In these fields, C++ is hurting. While I'd love to say it's because everyone recognizes that C++ is inferior, because I've always disliked C++'s hack-it-all-on approach, the truth is that legacy has a lot to do with this stuff. In the embedded market, resources are still so constrained that in many cases even pure C is not efficient enough -- they write programs in special subsets of C that have a lot of features built in to the language that take advantage of the somewhat exotic hardware they need to run on. So C++ is out, but then, strictly speaking, C didn't cut it either.
Kernels, well, the truth is that of the systems kernels in use these days, most of them predate C++ (or at least, th
The problem with the plan is that the vast majority of these companies own the majority of the voting shares of their own stock, themselves, and only sell either a minority of full stock or lower-class shares to the plebes and geeks, or else never go public at all.
When a corporation buys its own stock -- refered to as buying shares for the treasury, or equivalently buying treasury shares -- they are not able to exercize voting rights. They can sell the shares, or, if the board agrees, retire them, registering an accounting gain or loss as a result, but the ownership of this common stock does not confer the rights of an owner upon the corporate entity itself, as per SEC and FASB regulations (and IASB as well, as I understand).
Of course, individual persons -- such as management -- may own shares in their own company, and often do. These shares rarely represent a controlling interest, however, especially in large companies. The reason is simple: a company typically finances its operations with a mixture of debt and equity (as per its WACC). Financing means, of course, that the corporation expects money in exchange for shares it sells to the public (including insiders, such as management). Generally, when a firm IPOs, the core management team will retain a controlling interest in the firm for as long as they can -- but this is difficult to maintain because said core management team will probably splinter and break up as time goes on.
Now, I don't know about Microsoft (because I haven't checked) but I don't think Bill Gates or any one person in the company owns a controlling share in the company (but I might be wrong on this count, anyone less lazy than me is free to check). For example, Paul Allen was cofounder -- he presumably had a lot of Microsoft stock that he sold or still owns. He probably did not sell all this stock to Bill Gates.
In practice though, if BG owns 35% of the company, this ends up being almost as good as a controlling share, because the remaining 65% of shareholders don't necessarily see eye to eye on most things.
They would, however, see eye to eye on something as ludicrous as freeing all of Microsoft's software (I say ludicrous from a business perspective, not from an ethical perspective -- I essentially agree with RMS's position that proprietary software is not ethical, but that's another story.) So in order to make the GP's idea work, you would have to buy a controlling share in the absolute sense: more than 50%.
Of course, because of corporate raiding and management lobbying, the SEC requires that people intending hostile takeover to report their intentions publically, giving management adequate time to defend themselves. A typical defense is the use of a white knight, who agrees with management and buys enough stock to prevent a third party from buying a controlling share. With Microsoft, there would be no reason to look any further than Bill Gates.
As cool as the idea sounds, I don't think it's workable. Keep dreaming, though. Perhaps you'll think of something that is.
I only took one Women's Studies class -- it was upper division -- and it was very hard for me. I was the only guy, I got bashed constantly -- men this and men that, blah blah blah blah. It was a horrible, horrible experience.
But I learned more in that class I think than in almost any other class I've ever taken. I wouldn't consider it as a major -- but it's definitely worth taking one course and taking it seriously, to the end.
I was a math major at UC Davis, which at the time had a very strong math department (I chose it over Berkeley for this reason). The vast majority of guys dropped out of math when we got to upper division. Not because they're less able at math, I don't think, but rather because most of them were science majors and basic, applied analysis (the sort you get in lower division math courses) was all they needed for their major.
In General Topology, on the first day of the class, there were about 20 people enrolled, all math majors, of course. At that point we had a 60/40 ratio of women to men -- all of my difficult upper division math classes were female dominated, although I understand that was less the case in applied math (I majored in pure math). On the day of the final, there were 5 people, including myself, and there was only one other guy. 4 girls, 2 guys. Who got the only A in the class? A girl. General Topology is beautiful but really, really hard if you've never taken topology before.
I took the graduate level abstract algebra sequence, too (Math 250ABC at my school). Who taught it? A woman. About half the class was female. Oops.
I will admit that the only fields medalist in our department, Bill Thurston, who revolutionized hyperbolic knot theory, was a guy -- but otherwise, women were very well represented in our department, and at the undergraduate level at least, they positively kicked the pants off of their male counterparts.
So apparently we have conflicting anecdotes. Were you a math major? Or were you a science major who took one or two upper div classes and then moved on to Physics or CS?
In undergraduate math classes, only a very small number of participants are actually math majors, because almost all technical majors require math. All majors require some math. I tell you, the minute we passed Math 108 -- the only upper division class required by our department for CS majors -- we went from 80% male to 60% female.
This is not the case. There's a great deal of variation in gender roles across societies. The vast majority of the world's societies are patriarchal, which in all likelihood can be attributed to the importance of superior male physical strength in the time those societies were forming. But not all societies are patriarchal -- I lived in Polynesia for some time as a kid, and let me tell you, social roles are not the same across cultures.
Even within patriarchal societies, cultural roles and norms vary wildly. Travel more.
Everything you say is true, but I'm not sure that I agree that it's productive on a social level. The argument you're making against attempts to be more inclusive of women in CS or wherever are essentially the same arguments that people make against affirmative action -- and they make good points.
However, just as with affirmative action, there are clearly pros as well as cons. Some other posters have noted that "there are lots of girls in my CS classes, they're just all Chinese" and similar comments. Now, I live in China, and lots and lots of girls here are CS majors. Quality-wise, they vary just about as much as the male population does, which shouldn't surprise anyone, because as you yourself noted, possession of a vagina doesn't mean you're any better or worse at math & CS then possessors of a penis are. Some people who obviously don't spend much time around Chinese have suggested that perhaps it's because the Chinese aren't as patriarchal -- but it's very much a male-oriented society. So what gives? Why is CS an "acceptable" and even "popular" field for women in China?
I think there are two issues here. One is that during the Communist period, equality for women was one of the big pushes in this country (and I'm sure this is equally true in the former Soviet Bloc). The result is that while a tremendous gender bias still remains, respect for women (at least on a superficial level) is much more ingrained, and there is generally much less chauvinist posturing. Now you are strong and thick skinned, but discrimination and bullying weighs in on most people, and even if nothing is overtly said -- look at how incredibly sexist much of Slashdot is. I think this is one issue -- a pervasive and open lack of respect for women in these fields (and elsewhere) undeniably exists in the west.
A second reason is that in the US at least, intelligence is not looked upon very highly. My sister scored 1550 on her SATs and lied about her scores to her friends. This sort of behaviour is sadly all too common, and is not at all limited to women -- the vast majority of "geeks", regardless of gender, suffered social ostracization during their pubescent years. There is a large amount of evidence that girls in the west are more susceptible to peer pressure on average than boys (probably also a result of the expectation that women be submissive). This in itself is enough of a problem, but it's clear to me that at the root of this the social stigma on intelligence is really to blame. Lots of smart kids in the US avoid particular courses of study because of the social stigma attached to them. Let's face it, there's not a dearth of normal, well socialized guys in CS courses either.
In China, though (and I understand in Russia as well) people who are good at math and science, regardless of gender, are looked up to by their peers -- to be good in these courses means that you are intelligent and intelligence is valued. It's funny because in my experience, culturally at least, Chinese men (from China) are more threatened by intelligent women than even western men are, but despite this, an overwhelming cultural and social devotion to intelligence produces an incentives mechanism that encourages everyone to get involved in "difficult" courses. This includes women.
I don't think there's any point in denying that having more women involved in CS would be a good thing, if only to help socialize the males -- many guys on Slashdot are nice people who mean well, but it's clear that they don't spend a lot of time around women and often make incredibly insensitive comments that pigeonhole women into exactly the stereotype that would have people like yourself getting your nails done 24/7 and constantly saying things like "Like, oh my god! I like totally want to get that new dress at <whereever>!"
Do you like that stereotype?
I know a lot of geek girls, and many of them begin to build an alternate identity for themselves where they begin thinking of themselves
sudo-ideology? Haha, someone's been using the command line a lot lately!
Seriously, I agree that the GP (and all the other "oh-noes-India-is-taking-our-jobses!@1" ranters, too, as it happens) is a moron, but the term you're looking for is 'pseudo', and the leading p is not entirely silent (at least, not in the dialect of English I speak).
While being a sed junky is cool and all, in perl one generally uses $1 and $2 instead of \1 and \2, respectively. The latter works to support people who are used to using sed, but it makes for somewhat non-standard syntax and isn't recommended by the perl documentation.
"I think therefore I am" can be broken down logically into two propositions, P = "think" and Q = "exist". "therefore" is the same thing as "implies", so we can say "I think" implies "I exist", or, symbolically, P => Q.
"You don't think therefore you don't exist", then, can be symbolically written as ~P => ~Q (read as "not" P implies "not" Q). ~P => ~Q is known as the converse of P => Q (it is in fact logically equivalent to Q => P) and assuming that an implication and its converse are logically equivalent is one of the most common logical fallacies.
To see that ~P => ~Q is equivalent to Q => P, it is important to recognize that any implication is equivalent to its contrapositive, ~Q => ~P. Let's take an example. "If you post on slashdot about people's sigs, then you are a moron". In this case, let's let P = "post on slashdot about people's sigs" and Q = "are a moron". Then the contrapositive ~Q => ~P is "If you are not a moron, then you do not post on slashdot about people's sigs." The example should demonstrate the equivalence of the two statements (a more rigorous proof can be had by comparing truth tables for the two statements).
It is therefore easy to see that the converse of P => Q, generally taken to be Q => P, is equivalent to ~P => ~Q by the contrapositive identity. It should be clear that in the form Q => P (If you are a moron, then you post on slashdot about people's sigs) is not true -- it is trivial to find examples of morons that do not even know that slashdot exists, and thus certainly don't post offtopic comments about people's sigs. It is not much harder to see that the converse in the form ~P => ~Q (If you do not post on slashdot about people's sigs, then you are not a moron) is likewise not equivalent; after all, many morons don't post on slashdot.
By using this contrived example we are able to see that cogito ergo sum cannot be equivalent non cogitas ergo non es, unless cogitare is logically equivalent to esse, which Descartes unfortunately did not tell us, but which we can take a gander at: does everything that exists think? I'm tempted to say no, but who can tell?
Unfortunately, what with the corrupt dictatorships and instability that have plagued the region for decades, it seems unlikely that western companies would invest in them.
India and China are largely stable and have a well educated populace. Africa (with the notable exception of South Africa and possibly Egypt) has country risk much higher than most companies are prepared to deal with.
Um, Lenovo is a private company. Like many private companies in much of the world, they began as state owned (not uncommon in countries moving away from government ownership, like Britain and Germany, for example) but are not presently state owned (nor have they been for a while, IIRC).
First of all, I am not a free market fundamentalist, a libertarian, or whatever. I'm actually closer to a socialist, but that doesn't mean that I don't read economics textbooks.
We aren't talking about "complex monopolies", whatever that means, we're talking about "oligopolies", in which a small number of suppliers control the market. In a monopoly, only one supplier effectively controls the market and is able to set prices.
I also said nothing about them being impossible, I said that the incentives structure is such that the larger the number of organizations belonging to a cartel, the more difficult it becomes to enforce collusive price setting, because any one member stands to gain a lot if he cheats. Small cartels (with say, 4-5 organizations) can set prices quite effectively and often do, but this becomes more difficult when the numbers get high. Take a look at OPEC's spotty collusion record (hint: they're constantly stabbing each other in the back).
The problem with the OP's statement, simply put, is that what he is describing is not an oligopoly with high entry barriers where a small number of established players are operating a collusive cartel (this is where cartels tend to work). Rather, it is a market with relatively low entry barriers (develop a product with military/law enforcement/anti-terrorist uses, and try to sell it to governments around the world, anyone can do that) and as a result there is absolutely no incentive whatsoever for a new player to jack their prices above the optimum rate, because they can sell more at a lower price (and make more money). While this market isn't purely competitive (ie, they aren't trading a commodity like oil that is purely substitutable) there are substitutes that perform the same function and barring a contract (which is how the military at least normally ensures that it can waste as much money as possible) there is no reason whatsoever that law enforcement would buy the "EyeBall" and not the somewhat different but functionally equivalent "EyeSlinky" or whatever (it's an example, it doesn't exist.)
Your knee-jerk response is really upsetting, because it's completely illogical. There's a great deal of very hard evidence for what I'm saying, it's not libertarian hand-waving about how great the world would be if the highway system were privatized. There have been a lot of oligopolies in the world, and many of them have broken down, and there are good reasons as to why that happens (and explanations for why it doesn't when it does not).
Furthermore, if you'll go back and read my response, you'll notice that I'm not actually disagreeing with the poster's central thesis, but rather with the logic he uses to get there (no one wants to cut prices because they're all making so much money with prices high completely ignores demand -- of course suppliers are happier the higher they can set the price, but unfortunately, people buy less of things when prices are high).
In the last paragraph of my post I suggested that perhaps dealings with the government (which has a ton of money that it arguably has incentives to spend, rather than save) may make the law of demand behave somewhat differently, at least locally (I mean this in a mathematical sense).
I'd rather hope that someone named "listen", especially with such a low id, would at least try to read a little bit more carefully, and barring that, be a little more courteous.
And none of them would dare giving the game away by trying to be cheaper than the others, there's just too much money to be made for everybody without having to being normal business competition into play.
Oh, come on. Anyone with a basic understanding of economics knows that large scale collusion never really works, precisely because there's too much money to be made by cutting prices assuming everyone else doesn't (and assuming that prices are artificially high to begin with). It's like the prisoner's dilema from game theory: if both of you declines to tell on the other, you do reduced sentences, because they can't prove anything without your testimony: but if one of you tattles on the other, the tattler does reduced time and the tattlee does more. So the question is, do you keep mum and hope the other person does too, or do you try to be the first one to tattle?
Any game theorist will tell you that the odds get worse for the no-tattle scenario the larger the number of prisoners gets, and this is true for collusive oligopolies as well. There's simply too much money to be made by cutting the price (because the law of demand will have all your customers preferencially buying from you).
Of course, in the military/law enforcement world, private contractors classically try to get the government to accept only their products at whatever price they set, and so what you say is true, but not for the reasons you stated it.
Although I do admit that your "incentive to spend more to be seen as protecting the people" scenario is intriguing and possibly even true. If that's the case, then it stands to reason that the law of demand doesn't really hold, because to a government money is free (up to a point) and higher prices are better. But I'm not sure it's the case (anyone know of any studies?)
You know, my first gf was gay (we were really young at the time, she came out of the closet while we were together, we're still friends) and she fits your doc martens spiked hair huge boobs image pretty well. And at the time (this was in the early 90s) we looked around for gay oriented games (because she was a gamer, I'm not) and actually did find a few, they do exist.
But when only 10% of the population is gay, and so much of the other 90% is homophobic, marketing to the gay demographic is a tall order -- not much in profits and lots in moral backlash from the fundies. Most of what we found was amateurish (although still fun) shareware. We lived in the SF bay area at the time, which of course helps somewhat.
It definitely would be nice to see a little bit more variety in games though. Big reason I don't play games, honestly (other than nethack, occasionally).
As it happens, Victoria's Secret markets very much to men (there are, as I understand it, more male catalog subscribers than female). Most of my girlfriends have bought and worn VS underwear, but not the lacy ensemble -- the simple looking cotton kind (apparently VS makes very comfortable underwear for a pretty good price). The teddies and lacy thongs they feature prominently in the catalog are apparently primarily purchased by husbands and boyfriends, not by women themselves (most of whom seem to comment, "yeah, it's sexy, but I don't think I could justify spending that much for so little material, especially if I'm only going to wear it in the bedroom.")
The point, of course, is that the Victoria's Secret catalog is a bad example, but I don't think you have to look much further than Cosmopolitan to find one that proves your point fairly well.
I'm not sure I agree with it, but I don't want to get into that.
Slashdot Mirror
When I went to university I wanted to be a mathematician (I was quite good at math) and got my degree in pure mathematics (my senior thesis had to do with certain low dimensional applications of algebraic topology, if you care). Needless to say, I ended up not in mathematics but in finance, as an analyst.
While it's a very different world, I will say that it does require a great deal of work and that it isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination.
However, I have not met a single undergraduate business major -- not a one -- who learned any of this beyond the level of a survey course, and many of the people I work with are Harvard and Princeton grads. Most of them were heavily involved in the greek system and partied their way through school. Don't let this fool you -- they're smart and they work their asses off now: our hours are comparable or worse than the startup hours I used to pull during the dot com boom. But the fact remains that at uni, they did essentially nothing. They got their positions not so much as a result of smarts but as a result of a) their alma mater and b) family connections.
There seems to be a myth on Slashdot that getting a degree in Business is both easier and pays more out of school than a CS degree. It's a myth because it doesn't pay more. Pretty much everyone knows business majors are slackers, much as communications majors are. It's an entirely different story if you have an Econ or Finance degree, but that's not the same thing as Business (or worse, International Business, which seems to really attract some of the most incompetent morons I've ever met.)
Of course there are exceptions -- if you are one, then I apologize for painting your ilk with the broad brush. But basically employers don't take Business majors seriously most of the time. Accounting majors make bank. Finance majors make bank. Econ majors can make bank. But these are hard majors, and tedious. I dare say that most of the CS people I know wouldn't last a week in them, mostly for cultural reasons.
Try getting a job with a straight undergraduate Business degree. "Would you like fries with that?"
Operate chopsticks?
Thai people don't use chopsticks, and there are precious few in the country (unless you go to a Chinese restaurant or are hanging out somewhere where there are a lot of Chinese tourists).
So this aspect of your story seems, well, apocryphal.
Maybe because extended warranties on electronics don't result in the deaths of countless innocent Iraqi civilians, coalition soldiers, and hell, Iraqi soldiers too. Maybe it's because they don't result in a society so chaotic that people are afraid to go outside -- say what you will about Saddam and his evil (no argument from me regarding that fact) but at least, under his regime, 95% of the populace could go to the market and buy fruit without fearing for their lives.
Having said that though, I agree with a comment you made in another post in this thread: the merits of the inital invasion aside, the US should absolutely not pull out until Iraq is stable. To do otherwise would be akin to sacking a man's house under false pretences, and then not having the decency to make sure it's rebuilt.
While I agree with the spirit of your comment, I think you missed the GP's point. In the case of the US, you have a population that believes in the preservation of democracy, and so if someone hijacked the democratic process and declared himself dictator for life, there would be revolt -- revolt facilitated by an armed populace, thanks to the 2nd amendment.
However, the situation that (I believe) the GP is refering to is more subtle. It's like that line in "The Quiet American" (have you seen it? great movie) in which a wide eyed bushy tailed american (Brendan Frasier, amazingly not annoying in this movie) is waxing lyrical to a world weary british journalist in Saigon about bringing democracy to Vietnam, and the journalist (played extremely well by Michael Caine) says something like, "It's not that simple: you guarantee democracy for these people, and they'll elect Ho Chi Minh."
Similarly, Iraq. The merits of invading the nation aside, we have a real situation on our hands now: if we guarantee fair elections for Iraqis, will they elect a leadership that will preserve the values of the democratic process and of individual freedom and expression, or will they elect a leadership that turns the previously secular Iraq into a newer version of islamofacist Iran?
When the population cares about freedom, preserving freedom isn't difficult, because true authority comes from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicle aquatic ceremony. If enough of the people disagree with the leadership's position, there will be revolt -- if it comes to that, problem solved.
But what if the people don't value freedom, or want to give it up, and be slaves? It seems like a stupid question, but lots of people who have never known freedom (that's most of the world, unfortunately) don't know its value, and they will not stand up to defend it because they've never had it.
So is it ethical, in this case, to restrict their freedom to restrict their own freedom? Or is that nanny statism? It's a bit of a quandry, really...
That, my friend, is deliciously brilliant flaimbait. I mean, here we are, debating with religious ID proponents who hold a disbelief of evolution as their central tenant, and you, in the same thread, claim that religion is a "support mechanism for a primitive mind" and that it is being, of all things, "evolved out"! I'm laughing my butt off right now in enjoyment. So thank you for that.
I'd like to respectively disagree with you, though. I don't think the human mind (or humans in general) have evolved much recently, because most of the mechanisms thought to cause evolution (ie, natural selection pressures, etc) have not been shaping the human population for some time (roughly since humans began to organize themselves in large agrarian societies, I'd imagine.) When was the last time you had to run from a leopard? We have all these hereditary diseases that, in a population driven by evolutionary pressure, one would have expected to have disappeared long ago. But advances in science, particularly in medicine, but also in automation and economics, have made it possible for humans to live longer in poorer health. A good thing, I think.
Anyway though I'd advance that people 10 millenia ago were, on average, as intellectually able as modern man, modulo differences in diet (which do seem to effect intelligence, insofar as intelligence can be measured -- I don't believe in that psychometrics BS, for the record.) Certainly, people today are better educated, but that's due to environment, not biological abilities. Don't mistake knowledge for intelligence, as Einstein pleaded.
I think though that in the olden days religion was much more prevalent largely because there was so much in man's environment that he did not understand. Nowadays, most everything that is easily observable has been explained using natural phenomena -- modern science concerns itself primarily with hypotheses whose greatest obstacles are designing experiments to reliably prove or disprove them and that require years of education to even understand. Old concerns, like why does the sky make angry-sounding noises when it rains sometimes, well, science put those to rest long ago.
But through it all I think a lot of religious people who are scientifically minded have realized that while science has been much more successful than religion at explaining the how of things, it fails when it confronts the why. Perhaps fails is the wrong word, because that would imply that science set out to explain the why, when it most certainly does not. Science explains the how of things, and cannot, by definition, explain the why. As anyone who has ever encountered a 3 year old will tell you, every answer to a why question begs another why question, and eventually, taken to its logical conclusion, the end answer is always, "I don't know."
Religion gives an answer to why. It's usually pat and simplistic, which is why many of us ridicule it. "Because God made it that way," is the typical answer. But the thing to realize is that for many people having faith in something like that is a tremendously powerful and positive force in their lives. I have religious friends who are scientifically minded in other respects, and sometimes I truly envy them -- I spend a lot of time in the dark being terrified of death. They seem to feel like they're part of something. But I can't make that leap of faith. I need proof for things. The things I cannot prove, like the existance (or non-existance) of God, I just ignore.
Still though, I think it's important to recognize that not all religious people are crazy anti-science biggots who want everyone to live a stoneage lifestyle where the shaman could say "Thor brings the thunder be
Let me preface all this by saying that I'm not intrinsically against the notion of the universe being directly or indirectly created, but I feel the need to point out that your logic is somewhat flawed.
Essentially, you're saying, "Everything has a cause, a beginning. The Big Bang theory postulates a beginning, but no cause. This contradicts our understanding that effect must have cause, and therefore, there must be a cause. That cause must be God, or something isomorphic to God."
I'll admit that I too am uncomfortable with the Big Bang, for reasons similar to the ones you mention (although I am not religious). The problem with your argument is that by postulating that everything must have a beginning and a cause for existance, you are intrinsically requiring the same for any deity you might assume created the universe. Essentially, you say "the universe was created by God" and I respond "and God was created by whom?"
You must understand that you are not proving anything by transfering instantaneous creation from some scientifically understandable and indirectly observable thing (the Big Bang) to something that has no basis in science (God), because the problem you (and I too) had with the Big Bang rightly still stands: who created God? What "cause" caused his "effect"?
Why is it acceptable to you, from a logical perspective, to say that nothing created God, but unacceptable to suggest that nothing created the Big Bang?
So that's the first problem.
The second problem is that General Relativity certainly seems to suggest that cause can follow effect, as absurd as that may seem. Note that I am not suggesting that this is the case for the Big Bang, because I don't know (nor does anyone, I don't think). But it's worth noting that there are a lot of things we know to be true about the universe today that contradict our simple daily observations. This is especially true for the very small and for speeds approaching the speed of light. As it happens, the big bang encompasses both of these.
I am not a Physicist, so I won't pretend to be an expert -- my background is in pure mathematics. But I just wanted to note that saying "God created the universe" is logically equivalent, in terms of problems, to saying "the Big Bang created the universe". Neither deals with cause and effect.
Unfortunately, any theory that deals with the beginning of time will have this problem, I think. You're welcome to believe that it was God that caused the Big Bang, if that's consistant with your faith. But don't try to logically refute atheists by using that old "unmoved mover" argument that St. Thomas Aquinas tried so many years ago and that philosophers have had a field day with ever since.
Cheers...
First, yes, it is indeed 'viruses' and not that other neologism which I will not repeat.
I would advance that spelling MS 'M$' is indeed "l33t" speak, or at least Slashdot hive-mind-ism. I suppose that you can tell by now that I'm something of an anal bastard when it comes to spelling... but I'm not just another grammar nazi replying to your post. I do actually have a point, really, I just needed to get that out of my system.
OS X will never be a Windows killer. There are a number of reasons for this, but the largest is Apple itself. It isn't that OS X is inferior to Windows -- anyone who has used both knows that the opposite is clearly true. The problem, put simply, is that Apple's extremely savvy marketing machine plays the trendy card. They are not interested in being a commodity, that's not how it works. As much as techies would like it if every user with a closed source bent went with OS X rather than Windows, Apple will never take the steps necessary to make that happen. They market themselves as a beautiful, trendy, somewhat-pricier-but-worth-the-cost maker of personal computing devices. It's all marketing, of course. Price/Benefit analysis of some of their offerings (such as laptops) show that for the hardware, they aren't actually much more expensive, but that's not the point.
Car analogies are so tired, I know, but Windows is like a Toyota Tercel, only it's piss-poor quality. It's one of those beasts that everyone uses, that has nothing special about it. It isn't beautiful, it isn't ugly, it's functional, but not much fun to use, etc. It's affordable for almost everyone with a mind to own a personal computer.
The Macintosh, however, is a Porsche. It looks beautiful, it handles really well, and as any Porsche or Macintosh owner will tell you, when you use/drive it, you know where your money went, and you don't regret the decision you made to spend a little bit more. Porsche does not want their automobile to replace the Toyota Tercel. In people's popular consciousness, a Porsche is not something that everyone uses, it's not for the masses.
In the same way that a Porsche is for rockstars and CEOs, a Macintosh is for artists, musicians, trendy folks. Not people who spend all day looking at MS Excel spreadsheets. This is Marketing speak, mind you. The truth is that most Macintosh users use their machines just like a Windows user uses theirs -- and to come back to the car analogy, most Porsche drivers drive their car to work just like all the Tercel owners do. But in the promotional literature, it's all twisty highways in Germany, and you never drive your Porsche without sunglasses on. For the Mac, it's all editing your music and getting ready for your gig, because you're a rockstar.
You have to understand that it's perfectly possible to be an extremely profitable company -- as both Apple and Porsche are -- without being a monopoly. We've lived under the thumb of MS for so long that we've started thinking that any OS vendor has to be the dominant one -- it's like some Highlander-esque OS fight. But the truth is that this is not the normal, free market course of things, it's an aberration.
In a perfect world, you'd have many OSs, who thanks to open standards are largely interoperable. Each would find its niche. Apple has already found theirs. They don't
want to be MS.
Also, and this is important: it takes more than an intel processor to be a PC compatible machine. SGI demonstrated how easy it is to make an intel based machine that is nothing like a PC, hardware-wise. The intel-based Mac will be as much a Mac as the PowerPC and 68k based Macs were. Lots of other machines have used 68k processors, for example, but only Macs were Macs, and it's not just a matter of software. Intel will be no different.
There's a lot more to a computer than its processor.
As to "liking MS" -- the only people who never liked MS are too young to remember the days when IBM was the evil corporation, and M
It must be Murphy's law of mod points at work again: "As soon as your modpoints expire, you will find something worth modding up."
AC's formatting sucks but he doesn't deserve to stick around at 0. AC, get an account, please, this sort of contribution shouldn't be anonymous.
Although, for the record, it's spelled 'kernel'.
If it's a modern Intel CPU, you should ask if he'd like chips with that out-of-order.
Yeah, yeah, I'll be here all week.
Well, let's see. C is an extremely simple and portable programming language. There are many, many compilers that support recent standards in their entirety. (I know C99 is lagging behind, but it contains a lot of fairly exotic features if you ask me).
In an anecdotal way, a relatively mature and competent C programmer could take a good shot at implementing a C compiler and come away with something pretty close to the real thing, because C is, well, simple, and consistant. C++ on the other hand -- it's so huge and complicated that I don't believe there has ever been a compiler that implements all of it, but correct me if I'm wrong on this. Needless to say, that level of complexity is troublesome.
In the old days -- by which I mean a decade ago -- we were still constrained enough on memory and CPU that C and C++ were the dominant programming languages for application development, with no sign of that ever changing. Dropping in on usenet would easily yield a religious C/C++ war with some C geek saying "C++ is bloated and slow" much as we say "Java is bloated and slow" today. It's laughable now. C++ may be slightly slower than C, but even without recent compiler advances by todays standards the difference has essentially always been negligible in well written code.
What I'm trying to point out here is that the focus in software development has changed drastically in the last decade. Unless you're in the embedded market, there are hardly ever CPU and memory constraints, and every corporation worth its salt has started to see that there may be something to languages that are easy to maintain and quick to develop in, even at the expense of speed (which is hardly ever relevant in a typical desktop or web application, which is what most application dev is these days).
Looking back, I think it was the web boom that changed everyone's perceptions. In the old days, you did all serious programming in C or C++ and everything else was either scripting or esoteric. But the first CGI scripts were, well, scripts. They were increasingly written with more and more powerful languages (more powerful than scripting languages, I mean) -- languages like perl, java, whatever -- and brought closer and closer to the webserver to increase their responsiveness and power -- but no one ever seriously considered writing these apps in C or C++, because it had been established historically that the pain and suffering, the bugs, the slow development cycle -- well, it just wasn't worth the effort.
I believe the explosion of web based services taught IT managers everywhere that C and C++ were, at least, not the only answer to the question of "what language should we write this thing in". CS folks have known forever that it's "the right tool for the job", but CTOs have generally always been partial to whatever language is vogue, without understanding the pros and cons at a deep level. So in the old days it was FORTRAN or C, then C++, then Java, Perl, C#, Python, Ruby -- the doors were opened by the whole web thing.
The result is, nowadays, C and C++ are increasingly less relevant. I say this as a die hard C programmer, mind you. C and C++ are increasingly used in relatively special environments. Embedded. System kernels. Drivers. That sort of stuff. In these fields, C++ is hurting. While I'd love to say it's because everyone recognizes that C++ is inferior, because I've always disliked C++'s hack-it-all-on approach, the truth is that legacy has a lot to do with this stuff. In the embedded market, resources are still so constrained that in many cases even pure C is not efficient enough -- they write programs in special subsets of C that have a lot of features built in to the language that take advantage of the somewhat exotic hardware they need to run on. So C++ is out, but then, strictly speaking, C didn't cut it either.
Kernels, well, the truth is that of the systems kernels in use these days, most of them predate C++ (or at least, th
When a corporation buys its own stock -- refered to as buying shares for the treasury, or equivalently buying treasury shares -- they are not able to exercize voting rights. They can sell the shares, or, if the board agrees, retire them, registering an accounting gain or loss as a result, but the ownership of this common stock does not confer the rights of an owner upon the corporate entity itself, as per SEC and FASB regulations (and IASB as well, as I understand).
Of course, individual persons -- such as management -- may own shares in their own company, and often do. These shares rarely represent a controlling interest, however, especially in large companies. The reason is simple: a company typically finances its operations with a mixture of debt and equity (as per its WACC). Financing means, of course, that the corporation expects money in exchange for shares it sells to the public (including insiders, such as management). Generally, when a firm IPOs, the core management team will retain a controlling interest in the firm for as long as they can -- but this is difficult to maintain because said core management team will probably splinter and break up as time goes on.
Now, I don't know about Microsoft (because I haven't checked) but I don't think Bill Gates or any one person in the company owns a controlling share in the company (but I might be wrong on this count, anyone less lazy than me is free to check). For example, Paul Allen was cofounder -- he presumably had a lot of Microsoft stock that he sold or still owns. He probably did not sell all this stock to Bill Gates.
In practice though, if BG owns 35% of the company, this ends up being almost as good as a controlling share, because the remaining 65% of shareholders don't necessarily see eye to eye on most things.
They would, however, see eye to eye on something as ludicrous as freeing all of Microsoft's software (I say ludicrous from a business perspective, not from an ethical perspective -- I essentially agree with RMS's position that proprietary software is not ethical, but that's another story.) So in order to make the GP's idea work, you would have to buy a controlling share in the absolute sense: more than 50%.
Of course, because of corporate raiding and management lobbying, the SEC requires that people intending hostile takeover to report their intentions publically, giving management adequate time to defend themselves. A typical defense is the use of a white knight, who agrees with management and buys enough stock to prevent a third party from buying a controlling share. With Microsoft, there would be no reason to look any further than Bill Gates.
As cool as the idea sounds, I don't think it's workable. Keep dreaming, though. Perhaps you'll think of something that is.
I only took one Women's Studies class -- it was upper division -- and it was very hard for me. I was the only guy, I got bashed constantly -- men this and men that, blah blah blah blah. It was a horrible, horrible experience.
But I learned more in that class I think than in almost any other class I've ever taken. I wouldn't consider it as a major -- but it's definitely worth taking one course and taking it seriously, to the end.
I was a math major at UC Davis, which at the time had a very strong math department (I chose it over Berkeley for this reason). The vast majority of guys dropped out of math when we got to upper division. Not because they're less able at math, I don't think, but rather because most of them were science majors and basic, applied analysis (the sort you get in lower division math courses) was all they needed for their major.
In General Topology, on the first day of the class, there were about 20 people enrolled, all math majors, of course. At that point we had a 60/40 ratio of women to men -- all of my difficult upper division math classes were female dominated, although I understand that was less the case in applied math (I majored in pure math). On the day of the final, there were 5 people, including myself, and there was only one other guy. 4 girls, 2 guys. Who got the only A in the class? A girl. General Topology is beautiful but really, really hard if you've never taken topology before.
I took the graduate level abstract algebra sequence, too (Math 250ABC at my school). Who taught it? A woman. About half the class was female. Oops.
I will admit that the only fields medalist in our department, Bill Thurston, who revolutionized hyperbolic knot theory, was a guy -- but otherwise, women were very well represented in our department, and at the undergraduate level at least, they positively kicked the pants off of their male counterparts.
So apparently we have conflicting anecdotes. Were you a math major? Or were you a science major who took one or two upper div classes and then moved on to Physics or CS?
In undergraduate math classes, only a very small number of participants are actually math majors, because almost all technical majors require math. All majors require some math. I tell you, the minute we passed Math 108 -- the only upper division class required by our department for CS majors -- we went from 80% male to 60% female.
Something to think about.
This is not the case. There's a great deal of variation in gender roles across societies. The vast majority of the world's societies are patriarchal, which in all likelihood can be attributed to the importance of superior male physical strength in the time those societies were forming. But not all societies are patriarchal -- I lived in Polynesia for some time as a kid, and let me tell you, social roles are not the same across cultures.
Even within patriarchal societies, cultural roles and norms vary wildly. Travel more.
Everything you say is true, but I'm not sure that I agree that it's productive on a social level. The argument you're making against attempts to be more inclusive of women in CS or wherever are essentially the same arguments that people make against affirmative action -- and they make good points.
However, just as with affirmative action, there are clearly pros as well as cons. Some other posters have noted that "there are lots of girls in my CS classes, they're just all Chinese" and similar comments. Now, I live in China, and lots and lots of girls here are CS majors. Quality-wise, they vary just about as much as the male population does, which shouldn't surprise anyone, because as you yourself noted, possession of a vagina doesn't mean you're any better or worse at math & CS then possessors of a penis are. Some people who obviously don't spend much time around Chinese have suggested that perhaps it's because the Chinese aren't as patriarchal -- but it's very much a male-oriented society. So what gives? Why is CS an "acceptable" and even "popular" field for women in China?
I think there are two issues here. One is that during the Communist period, equality for women was one of the big pushes in this country (and I'm sure this is equally true in the former Soviet Bloc). The result is that while a tremendous gender bias still remains, respect for women (at least on a superficial level) is much more ingrained, and there is generally much less chauvinist posturing. Now you are strong and thick skinned, but discrimination and bullying weighs in on most people, and even if nothing is overtly said -- look at how incredibly sexist much of Slashdot is. I think this is one issue -- a pervasive and open lack of respect for women in these fields (and elsewhere) undeniably exists in the west.
A second reason is that in the US at least, intelligence is not looked upon very highly. My sister scored 1550 on her SATs and lied about her scores to her friends. This sort of behaviour is sadly all too common, and is not at all limited to women -- the vast majority of "geeks", regardless of gender, suffered social ostracization during their pubescent years. There is a large amount of evidence that girls in the west are more susceptible to peer pressure on average than boys (probably also a result of the expectation that women be submissive). This in itself is enough of a problem, but it's clear to me that at the root of this the social stigma on intelligence is really to blame. Lots of smart kids in the US avoid particular courses of study because of the social stigma attached to them. Let's face it, there's not a dearth of normal, well socialized guys in CS courses either.
In China, though (and I understand in Russia as well) people who are good at math and science, regardless of gender, are looked up to by their peers -- to be good in these courses means that you are intelligent and intelligence is valued. It's funny because in my experience, culturally at least, Chinese men (from China) are more threatened by intelligent women than even western men are, but despite this, an overwhelming cultural and social devotion to intelligence produces an incentives mechanism that encourages everyone to get involved in "difficult" courses. This includes women.
I don't think there's any point in denying that having more women involved in CS would be a good thing, if only to help socialize the males -- many guys on Slashdot are nice people who mean well, but it's clear that they don't spend a lot of time around women and often make incredibly insensitive comments that pigeonhole women into exactly the stereotype that would have people like yourself getting your nails done 24/7 and constantly saying things like "Like, oh my god! I like totally want to get that new dress at <whereever>!"
Do you like that stereotype?
I know a lot of geek girls, and many of them begin to build an alternate identity for themselves where they begin thinking of themselves
sudo-ideology? Haha, someone's been using the command line a lot lately!
Seriously, I agree that the GP (and all the other "oh-noes-India-is-taking-our-jobses!@1" ranters, too, as it happens) is a moron, but the term you're looking for is 'pseudo', and the leading p is not entirely silent (at least, not in the dialect of English I speak).
Cheers...
While being a sed junky is cool and all, in perl one generally uses $1 and $2 instead of \1 and \2, respectively. The latter works to support people who are used to using sed, but it makes for somewhat non-standard syntax and isn't recommended by the perl documentation.
Just FYI.
I know it's just a joke, but...
"I think therefore I am" can be broken down logically into two propositions, P = "think" and Q = "exist". "therefore" is the same thing as "implies", so we can say "I think" implies "I exist", or, symbolically, P => Q.
"You don't think therefore you don't exist", then, can be symbolically written as ~P => ~Q (read as "not" P implies "not" Q). ~P => ~Q is known as the converse of P => Q (it is in fact logically equivalent to Q => P) and assuming that an implication and its converse are logically equivalent is one of the most common logical fallacies.
To see that ~P => ~Q is equivalent to Q => P, it is important to recognize that any implication is equivalent to its contrapositive, ~Q => ~P. Let's take an example. "If you post on slashdot about people's sigs, then you are a moron". In this case, let's let P = "post on slashdot about people's sigs" and Q = "are a moron". Then the contrapositive ~Q => ~P is "If you are not a moron, then you do not post on slashdot about people's sigs." The example should demonstrate the equivalence of the two statements (a more rigorous proof can be had by comparing truth tables for the two statements).
It is therefore easy to see that the converse of P => Q, generally taken to be Q => P, is equivalent to ~P => ~Q by the contrapositive identity. It should be clear that in the form Q => P (If you are a moron, then you post on slashdot about people's sigs) is not true -- it is trivial to find examples of morons that do not even know that slashdot exists, and thus certainly don't post offtopic comments about people's sigs. It is not much harder to see that the converse in the form ~P => ~Q (If you do not post on slashdot about people's sigs, then you are not a moron) is likewise not equivalent; after all, many morons don't post on slashdot.
By using this contrived example we are able to see that cogito ergo sum cannot be equivalent non cogitas ergo non es, unless cogitare is logically equivalent to esse, which Descartes unfortunately did not tell us, but which we can take a gander at: does everything that exists think? I'm tempted to say no, but who can tell?
Good for Africa.
They need it far more than we do.
Unfortunately, what with the corrupt dictatorships and instability that have plagued the region for decades, it seems unlikely that western companies would invest in them.
India and China are largely stable and have a well educated populace. Africa (with the notable exception of South Africa and possibly Egypt) has country risk much higher than most companies are prepared to deal with.
Um, Lenovo is a private company. Like many private companies in much of the world, they began as state owned (not uncommon in countries moving away from government ownership, like Britain and Germany, for example) but are not presently state owned (nor have they been for a while, IIRC).
First of all, I am not a free market fundamentalist, a libertarian, or whatever. I'm actually closer to a socialist, but that doesn't mean that I don't read economics textbooks.
We aren't talking about "complex monopolies", whatever that means, we're talking about "oligopolies", in which a small number of suppliers control the market. In a monopoly, only one supplier effectively controls the market and is able to set prices.
I also said nothing about them being impossible, I said that the incentives structure is such that the larger the number of organizations belonging to a cartel, the more difficult it becomes to enforce collusive price setting, because any one member stands to gain a lot if he cheats. Small cartels (with say, 4-5 organizations) can set prices quite effectively and often do, but this becomes more difficult when the numbers get high. Take a look at OPEC's spotty collusion record (hint: they're constantly stabbing each other in the back).
The problem with the OP's statement, simply put, is that what he is describing is not an oligopoly with high entry barriers where a small number of established players are operating a collusive cartel (this is where cartels tend to work). Rather, it is a market with relatively low entry barriers (develop a product with military/law enforcement/anti-terrorist uses, and try to sell it to governments around the world, anyone can do that) and as a result there is absolutely no incentive whatsoever for a new player to jack their prices above the optimum rate, because they can sell more at a lower price (and make more money). While this market isn't purely competitive (ie, they aren't trading a commodity like oil that is purely substitutable) there are substitutes that perform the same function and barring a contract (which is how the military at least normally ensures that it can waste as much money as possible) there is no reason whatsoever that law enforcement would buy the "EyeBall" and not the somewhat different but functionally equivalent "EyeSlinky" or whatever (it's an example, it doesn't exist.)
Your knee-jerk response is really upsetting, because it's completely illogical. There's a great deal of very hard evidence for what I'm saying, it's not libertarian hand-waving about how great the world would be if the highway system were privatized. There have been a lot of oligopolies in the world, and many of them have broken down, and there are good reasons as to why that happens (and explanations for why it doesn't when it does not).
Furthermore, if you'll go back and read my response, you'll notice that I'm not actually disagreeing with the poster's central thesis, but rather with the logic he uses to get there (no one wants to cut prices because they're all making so much money with prices high completely ignores demand -- of course suppliers are happier the higher they can set the price, but unfortunately, people buy less of things when prices are high).
In the last paragraph of my post I suggested that perhaps dealings with the government (which has a ton of money that it arguably has incentives to spend, rather than save) may make the law of demand behave somewhat differently, at least locally (I mean this in a mathematical sense).
I'd rather hope that someone named "listen", especially with such a low id, would at least try to read a little bit more carefully, and barring that, be a little more courteous.
Oh, come on. Anyone with a basic understanding of economics knows that large scale collusion never really works, precisely because there's too much money to be made by cutting prices assuming everyone else doesn't (and assuming that prices are artificially high to begin with). It's like the prisoner's dilema from game theory: if both of you declines to tell on the other, you do reduced sentences, because they can't prove anything without your testimony: but if one of you tattles on the other, the tattler does reduced time and the tattlee does more. So the question is, do you keep mum and hope the other person does too, or do you try to be the first one to tattle?
Any game theorist will tell you that the odds get worse for the no-tattle scenario the larger the number of prisoners gets, and this is true for collusive oligopolies as well. There's simply too much money to be made by cutting the price (because the law of demand will have all your customers preferencially buying from you).
Of course, in the military/law enforcement world, private contractors classically try to get the government to accept only their products at whatever price they set, and so what you say is true, but not for the reasons you stated it.
Although I do admit that your "incentive to spend more to be seen as protecting the people" scenario is intriguing and possibly even true. If that's the case, then it stands to reason that the law of demand doesn't really hold, because to a government money is free (up to a point) and higher prices are better. But I'm not sure it's the case (anyone know of any studies?)
You know, my first gf was gay (we were really young at the time, she came out of the closet while we were together, we're still friends) and she fits your doc martens spiked hair huge boobs image pretty well. And at the time (this was in the early 90s) we looked around for gay oriented games (because she was a gamer, I'm not) and actually did find a few, they do exist.
But when only 10% of the population is gay, and so much of the other 90% is homophobic, marketing to the gay demographic is a tall order -- not much in profits and lots in moral backlash from the fundies. Most of what we found was amateurish (although still fun) shareware. We lived in the SF bay area at the time, which of course helps somewhat.
It definitely would be nice to see a little bit more variety in games though. Big reason I don't play games, honestly (other than nethack, occasionally).
As it happens, Victoria's Secret markets very much to men (there are, as I understand it, more male catalog subscribers than female). Most of my girlfriends have bought and worn VS underwear, but not the lacy ensemble -- the simple looking cotton kind (apparently VS makes very comfortable underwear for a pretty good price). The teddies and lacy thongs they feature prominently in the catalog are apparently primarily purchased by husbands and boyfriends, not by women themselves (most of whom seem to comment, "yeah, it's sexy, but I don't think I could justify spending that much for so little material, especially if I'm only going to wear it in the bedroom.")
The point, of course, is that the Victoria's Secret catalog is a bad example, but I don't think you have to look much further than Cosmopolitan to find one that proves your point fairly well.
I'm not sure I agree with it, but I don't want to get into that.
Good points, all of them.