I am not particularly talented in math(s). Math is hard for me.
I do not use much math(s) in my day job.
I consider math(s) the single most important subject I studied in my education, from third grade through Master's degree.

Education is not the same as training.
One can train for a vocation.
Coding is a vocation.
Do not study math(s) or attend a university if training, not education, is the only goal.

When my father was young, he said he felt like every product was stamped "Made in Japan".
When I was young, my toys were stamped "Make in Taiwan".
Now I'm middle-aged and I talk about the "Make in China" mark.
When my daughters are grown, products will probably have a different stamp.
And people will still be debating what it means to the US (as they should).
I'm pretty confident I won't be living in a post-apocalyptic bizarre-o US when it comes to pass.

There is wisdom in the parent post. All things being equal, the infrastructure and the populace of nation-state like the US is a bigger boon to business than the constraints imposed by its laws and regulations. If that were not true, Sealand and Somalia would be the greatest economic engines on the planet.

"Dangerous Waters" for geeks. Can't wait.

That sounds like a pretty clear-headed assessment. Now what does the US have to gain by establishing a military presence in Poland? Or for that matter, trying to bring Georgia into NATO? I don't understand how this advances US strategic interests, but I do see how it antagonizes Russia. Why goad Russia this way? What is the US trying to accomplish? It's a mystery to me.

I'm old enough to remember the days when companies had other goals in addition to increasing share holder value. The change came about in the 1980s and the credit is usually given to one man: Jack Welch, then CEO of GE. Check out the Wikipedia article on him:

"In 1981 he [Jack] made a speech in New York City called 'Growing fast in a slow-growth economy'.[6] This is often acknowledged as the 'dawn' of the obsession with shareholder value. "

I propose that we will make more progress in our inquiry if we re-frame how we approach the matter. These articles (viz. Apple and Microsoft) have generated a lot of traffic because there is a tacit expectation that corporations have moral responsibilities or are moral actors. I want to challenge those assumptions.

To assign feelings to corporations is anthropomorphic: Apple cannot hate (or love) America any more than a colony of bacteria can hate or love a petri dish. A corporation will seek to minimize its tax burden the same way a simple organism unpleasant stimulus in its environment. Casting that behavior as moral or immoral is a fallacy. It is an easy mistake to make because every behavior a company exhibits is an expression of a decision made by a person. People are moral actors endowed with individual wills, conscience, and (hopefully) a moral compass.

There does not have to be any conscious evil unpinning corporate behavior for a corporation to behave in ways that feels immoral or amoral to us. For example, if a finance executive can reduce a corporation's tax burden by taking steps that are not demonstrably illegal, that exec will prosper. His superiors will reward him and entrust him with more power. His rival will fall by the wayside. If a financial executive's moral compass caused him to make decisions that were not in the corporation's best interests, the corporate body will expel him, just as a living body might try to eliminate a cancer.

The system rules by which corporations act are observable and remarkably consistent. This might be useful. For example, the phenomenon that water tends to run down hill is also observable and remarkably consistent, and this simple observations leads us to build damns to store potential energy, irrigate crops and control flooding.

The turning point comes when we stop asking "how can we make corporations to behave like good citizens" and start asking "how can we best harness corporate behavior for the good of the citizens". If I had the answers, I'd try and write a book instead /. post. Approaching the problem from a new perspective might lead us to some new territory we haven't already covered.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking this. I used to work for the UBS, just outside of Zürich. The cantina had great food and the price was subsidized by the company. Hardly nefarious.

But for whatever reason, I had a flash back to the days of IBM golf courses, IBM private resorts, and even an IBM gun club. After all, IBM had great products, their competitors couldn't touch them, and their stock was better than bricks of gold. They might as well throw some money around, because nothing could ever threaten their empire, right? Right?

That 'Q' didn't look quite right.

I'll start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Archons

The answer to your question is that, IMHO, this is not much of a story. Yes, there is both apathy and discontent-- I'm no exception. But if my time at the university taught me anything, it taught me that this is a normal, and often healthy, part of the human condition.

Extinction is the most popular choice. Clearly, Neal Stephenson is responsible for these results.

I attended SC11 (sc11.supercomputing.org) last year. FORTRAN is still the work horse of (large-scale) numerical computing. C/C++ are popular. So are MATLAB and R. They was even a NumPy tutorial and some sessions on emerging languages like Chapel. But FORTRAN was king.

I thought this was an interesting thread about FORTRAN v. C -- http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=169974

Off-topic:When it came to programming, the general drift of the conference was not toward new languages, but toward adding meta-information, vis-a-vi compiler directives.

I started laughing as soon as a I read the question: "Have you ever been to a Ruby conference?". I haven't, but my imagination went there immediately. I *have* been to a Ruby users group meeting. It was held at a coffee shop. I arrived early, ordered a cappuccino, and popped open my laptop. Young men filed into the cafe, opening their laptops. I kept waiting for the meeting to to start. It was 30 minutes past the start time and cafe was fully of Ruby hackers working away on their laptops.

Eventually I asked someone if I was in the right place. Sadly, I was. The only agenda on the Ruby users group meeting was to code, mostly in silence, and mostly alone. There was no rule that you had to be a white guy in your 20s and work for Amazon or a tiny start-up, but that is the way demographics fell out. I tried to strike up a few conversations, but no one liked me interrupting the meeting that way. Sub-cultures can alienate others. Sometimes the alienation is stronger with respect to gender and sometimes the alienation is just strong.

>whom did Palmer do a service by calling attention to the situation?

Job-seekers with a legal right to work.