> Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism
Openness (to experience) in the Five Factor Model is quite strongly correlated to IQ, so I'd rather expect that highly intelligent autistic people would score much higher regarding openness.
I don’t know the details… does the suspension make the current state in Germany similar to the Selective Service requirement in the US? Or is it “easy” for the German government to establish a draft?
> does the suspension make the current state in Germany similar to the Selective Service requirement in the US?
I don't know how the Selective Service requirement in the US works, so I can't answer this question.
> Or is it “easy” for the German government to establish a draft?
Such a (temporary) suspension can hypothetically terminated at any time by the government. The question is basically how the population will react. I guess if the suspension of the general conscription would be terminated by the government, there would be really furious public rallies (and I am rather certain that my boss would immediately attempt to approve a vacation request if I wanted to attend such a rally in Berlin if it happened during the work week - just as an "innocent" kind of support for this cause from behind the lines :-) ) because multiple generations got really radicalized against compulsory military service (I wrote about this topic at https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=46177817 ).
This is why the German government currently attempts to approach the whole topic of quitting the suspension of compulsory military service so indirectly.
In the US, men have to register for potential draft within a few months of turning 18. Women still exempt. But instituting an active draft wound take an act of congress and be signed by president - very unlikely to pass for the same reason you mention in German - the population likely wouldn’t stand for it.
This current US administration, who didn't win a majority in the first place, is under water on every issue, and is currently on a mission gerrymander everywhere they can in order to not lose congress in a year. What the people are willing to stand for doesn't matter.
I think the much bigger issue is that the older generation (those who, say, turned 18 in the 70s) told the younger generation lots of really nasty stories about the cruel trials people had to endure who wanted to do alternative national service (Zivildienst) instead of military service. These formed the value system of many people in at least two generations ("Soldaten sind Mörder" [soldiers are murders]).
EDIT: If you understand German, here is a song from 1972 about these brutal cross-examinations:
> Franz Josef Degenhardt - Befragung eines Kriegsdienstverweigerers
Additionally, the participation of Germany in the first aggressive wars in Yugoslavia in 1999 and then in Afghanistan from 2001 on (before citizens were told that the Bundeswehr is only a defense army, and would never participate in an aggressive war) lead to a radicalization of another generation against the Bundeswehr - and yes, this generation eagerly listened to the above-mentioned horror stories of the older generations. It is even rumored that this next generation's radicalization against the Bundeswehr indirectly lead to the suspension of the compulsory military service in Germany in 2011.
That's certainly some nuance there! I had in mind a more basic concept which due to legal restrictions in Germany maybe make thinking about it as part of German history and a geopolitical conflict likely to naturally reoccur is part of a Denkverbot.
But I think you should legally be able to answer if you can think of anything between 1914 and 1945 that is taught to Germans in schools that might cause younger Germans to feel some aversion towards preparing to fight a land war against russia in eastern ukraine? Anything that maybe resulted in the premature deaths of millions of young german men, initially volunteers who were solicited at the secondary school level?
Massive political differences and ultimate outcomes aside for each conflict, Germany becoming increasingly militarized has a poor track record when it comes to not getting extremely large numbers of teenage german boys killed in eastern Ukraine.
> What's a crime is that it can stay commercial. Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most.
In many cases, people are free to write their own implementation. Your claim "Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most." means that every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code, which is something very strong to ask for.
What is the true crime are the laws that in some cases make such an own implementation illegal (software patents, probitions of reverse-engineering, ...).
> every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code,
Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.
Access to the market is not a right but a privilege. If you want to sell things we can demand things of you.
Infringing on that should be justified in terms of protecting the rights of those involved, such as ensuring the quality of goods, enforcement of reasonable contract terms and such. We are involved in the process as participants in the market, and that’s the basis of any legitimacy we have to impose any rules in the market. That includes an obligation to fair treatment of other participants.
If someone writes notes, procedures, a diary, software etc for their own use they are under no obligation to publish it, ever. That’s basic privacy protection. Whether an executable was written from scratch in an assembler or is compiled from high level source code isn’t anyone else’s business. It should meet quality standards for commercial transactions and that’s it. There’s no more obligation to publish source than there is to publish design documents, early versions, or unpublished material. That would be an overreaching invasion of privacy.
On what justification? You just want to take their stuff, because?
People shouldn’t lose their rights to what they own, just because they do so through a company.
I do think reasonable taxation and regulation is justifiable but on the understanding that it is an imposition. There is a give and take when it comes to rights and obligations, but this seems like overreach.
> Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.
The analogy would be ever-so-slightly more accurate if you said "software is as much vital to the modern world as beverages".
It would also be more accurate if all water was free.
Fortunaley hardware designs are routinely reverse engineered and cloned. Imagine the world where industrial designs were as hard to reverse engineer as clone in practice as software. Global GDP would be 10% of what it is. Largest economies of the world owe lion share of their development to cloned designs.
> And I'm being generous when I say "pretty": I have never encountered it in any job or even in academia. People know of it. They just don't use it for work.
To my knowledge, at least in academia, Wolfram (Mathematica) seems to be used quite a bit by physicists. Also in some areas of mathematics it is used (but many mathematicians seems to prefer Maple). Concerning mathematical research, I want to mention that by now also some open-source (and often more specialized) CASs seem to have become more widespread, such as SageMath, SymPy, Macaulay2, GP/PARI or GAP.
I've been at a few universities and labs as a postdoc, and a Mathematica license always came either as part of the University or the department. It might not be relevant in some disciplines, but generally I assume it must be used a lot to warrant such broad licensing (it is a tool I use daily as a theoretical physicist).
The Maple syntax may superficially seem easier but actually leads to more problems in practice. The point of the [ ] is that argument of a function is logically distinct from algebraically grouping terms in an equation. Also, Mathematica is a camel case language since underscore is for pattern recognition, hence the capitalization of function names. Personally, I’ve found every little Mathematica design feature to be incredibly well thought out, logical, and consistently implemented over the whole of the language.
It's not about good nor bad, but about the different trade-offs that these two CASs made. What is more important for you is something that you can only answer for yourself.
I actually loved this idea so much that every language I make, I try to do the same. The point of it is that typing ( requires shift, while [ does not. And you have no idea when you have tunnel syndrome, how much it hurts each time you write a (. While it’s ugly, the hand thanks you for it.
> There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring
I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.
> Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now.
Rather: very commonly the local shops don't stock the parts that I would like to buy, and it is often hard to find out beforehand which kind of very specialized parts the local shop does or doesn't stock.
True story concerning electronic components: I went to some electronic store and wanted to buy a very specialized IC, which they didn't stock. But since the sales clerk could see my passion for tinkering with electronica, he covertly wrote down an address of a different, very small electronics store including instructions which tram line to take to get there (I was rather new to the city), which stocks a lock more stuff that tinkerers love. I guess the sales clerk was as disappointed with the range of goods that his employer has decided to concentrate on as I was. :-)
On the other hand, lots of former stores for PC component now have whole lots of shelf rows with mobile phone cases instead. I get that these have high sales margins, but no thanks ...
Thus, in my opinion it is not online shopping that killed local shops, but the fact that local shops simply don't offer and stock the products that I want to buy.
> What I want to see is mathematicians employ the same rigor of journalists using abbreviations: define (numerically) your notation, or terminology, the first time you use it, then feel free to use it as notation or jargon for the remainder of the paper.
They do.
The purpose of papers is to teach working mathematicians who are already deeply into the subject something novel. So of course only novel or uncommon notation is introduced in papers.
Systematic textbooks, on the other hand, nearly always introduce a lot of notation and background knowledge that is necessary for the respective audience. As every reader of such textbooks knows, this can easily be dozens or often even hundreds of pages (the (in)famous Introduction chapter).
Openness (to experience) in the Five Factor Model is quite strongly correlated to IQ, so I'd rather expect that highly intelligent autistic people would score much higher regarding openness.
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