josh-j
The worry wasn't that avian flu or the swine flu would kill a lot of people in their current states, but that they would mutate into something considerably more dangerous. The swine flu, for example, was known to spread easily but wasn't _yet_ very lethal. The avian flu (H5N1) didn't _yet_ spread easily, but was very lethal.
If the swine flu mutated into something more lethal or if the avian flu mutated into something more communicable, then everyone would probably know someone that died from either virus. And that's exactly the worry with these new crop of viruses, and why it's important to react with extraordinarily measures -- to prevent them from becoming something much worse.
What language should be the conservative choice based on the many factors and ignoring the specific case for the general case?
Java should be the conservative choice for your web framework's language (rather than PHP). Scala, Clojure, Nodejs, Erlang, Lua, and Haskell should be in your list of workable yet "cool" languages (rather than Ruby or Python).
And not only that, but words have denotations and connotations. "Ugly", in common usage, denotes and points to a set of subjective physical characteristics. "Ugly" also connotes and points to a negative affect that isn't explicit in its denotation.
I'm not simply saying that racism is "something that connotes immorality", but that is what we're connotating when we use that word in its various denotations (although, it's not necessarily the case). Racism's denotation can be literally anything. I can say, for example, that it's racist to call Canadians effusive pushovers even though "Canadian" is a nationality rather than a race.
And people do exactly that. In the U.K., for example, it's common for people to call people that insult the French "racist."
Language is fluid.
So, I think you can see why people are affronted when someone says "black people cannot be racist" without putting it within a certain context. The implication is that it's not immoral for black people to act denotatively common-usage-racist.
For example, if an organized group of American Asians began touting their superiority over other races and advocated and lobbied for more Asians in positions of power because they're superior, wouldn't you still consider their actions to be immoral?
People can use whichever definition they like, but they need to be open about it, and they need to realize by using another definition they're not also redefining or constraining the connotation -- that's begging the question.
So, black people cannot be sociologically-racist-therefore-immoral against white people, but they can be common-usage-racist-therefore-immoral against white people.
(I should also note that labeling something with a word that connotes a negative or positive affect isn't much of an argument for the applicability of that connotation to that something. It's a heuristic more than it is an argument.)
I think the culture that she's implicitly promoting is ultimately a suspicious and hostile one where there is no principle of charity but instead there's the inverse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity). And not by the fact that she reported it to PyCon organizers, but by the fact that she then escalated it to the public. In this instance, I think she should have kept their identities anonymous in her tweets and blog post.
There are instances where I can imagine revealing their identities would be the right thing to do, but this doesn't come close to it by my judgement (for all that's worth).
That doesn't follow -- you're begging the question. Why is disclosing something public, if well detailed, not irresponsible when it can cause harm (as this situation did)? And why should people being previously asked to disclose such information make it a responsible action? Furthermore, do you have an example of such disclosures -- you speak as though you do?
I got the impression reading Adria's blog post that she thought she was responding to sexism. Sexism is what most everyone is responding to in this event -- real or imagined.
The problem is that the way Adria responded, in part, harmed people that didn't deserve harm (and if they did deserve it, it shouldn't be up to her to mete it out -- which by taking it public she is effectively doing). She should have kept their identities anonymous unless it was necessary to do otherwise.
In a culture that strives to be politically correct (no negative connotation intended), any egalitarian issue can be wielded like a weapon. I think Adria was aware of that, and so I think she deserves a fair amount of blame for the events that followed her actions.
Hofstadter says analogy is the core of cognition. We tie unknown things to known things to understand them, and I think that's why you get all these bad analogies where people try to tie the more abstract concepts of fp like monads to everyday things ( "monads are like burritos," for example).
And this really doesn't make sense because monads and such are pure abstractions. How do you tie a pure abstraction to something concrete? It's like saying zero is like a burrito.
The better analogies tie pure abstractions like monads and arrows to other abstractions that you already understand. For instance, Odersky trains you by iteratively refactoring imperative Scala code into more functional code, and thereby gradually carrying you up the ladder of abstraction.
But if we consider the resources to learn the language along with the language, then I think Scala dominates Haskell. Haskell was painful for me to learn because to become proficient I had to trudge through not only books but wikis, blogs, and code. There is nothing like Odersky's Scala book in Haskell. Learn you a Haskell, the Haskell wikibook, and Real World Haskell are all _terrible_ at preparing someone to become a proficient haskeller because while they show you the language they don't train you to think functionally.
In imperative languages you're giving a lot of sequential instructions to a robot. In functional languages you're programming the robot to understand a new language, and then you describe the way things ought to be in that language.
You'll need to operationalize what you mean to make any sense, and then to be right you'll need to provide evidence.