Its a lot easier to have evolution once youve tried to apt-get uninstall evolution*, and then wonder why it nuked your whole Gnome environment. For added giggles, figure out why so much depends on evolution-data-server even when evolution is gone.
And then try to figure out in what way Evolution is superior to Outlook Web Access off of exchange 2010. (protip, its not).
"Noise" in this case does not refer to sound, but presumably to perturbations in the normal electro(-magnetic?) emissions that are detected emanating from Saturn.
Unfortunately, they used the word "Audio" in TFS and TFH. "Audio" can only be used as far as I am aware to refer to sound.
I really doubt it, because a large number of the things that cause loud noises have very little electric effect, and vice versa. Sound is caused by vibration, electricity is not (except in some cases).
that "information wants to be free" is an observation of fact not an imperative.
No, its a non-sense statement-- information has no power of cognition, and thus cannot want anything. To speak of it thus is to speak absurdities. Im not even sure what principle people are trying to communicate when they make that statement-- that people tend to be bad at keeping information private? That is neither an argument for or against private information.
Furthermore the debate has no more to do with the fact that information "wants" to be free than the fact that round wheels "want" to roll has to do with the debate on speeding.
I quite agree, which is why I was criticizing that whole argument. When discussing whether or not it should be legal for wheels to roll, one does not argue that "well, they TEND to roll, therefore it should be legal", any more than you would make that argument with theft or secrecy. Its a complete non-sequitur.
Your question suggests you think the law of the land does significantly define morality. The reverse is the only sane belief, that the law of the land should be defined by morality.
As a slightly off-topic aside, I recently heard a concise description of the classical, philosophical definition of "morality" as opposed to "ethics", which described the difference thus-- morality is the system of ethics practiced by a society. That being the case, yes, laws would effect it.
All that aside, I never indicated to what extent I think laws affect morality or ethics; I simply stated I think it plays some role.
As for defining laws by morality / ethics, thats great, but we still dont have an answer to "where do your ethical values come from?"
Finally, as an interesting thought experiment, why dont we observe the responses from people decrying the evils of all secrets when the next article about google and privacy comes up. It seems that there are times where people will concede that SOME secrets are acceptable for various reasons; why is it then assumed that there are no reasons ever in government?
You're saying that because zimbaweans learned THE TRUTH and Mugabe could use it to his advantage that secrecy was entitled?
For the most part, yes, because the depiction of "the truth" that they were getting was mostly incorrect. Im not clear on what precisely the average Zimbabwean knows about this issue, but as Mugabe basically controls information there, you can bet that its not anything so accurate as you or I know.
while he lied to the people he represented?
In what way was he lying? It is well known that he opposes Mugabe; this is just an excuse to trump up treason charges. And as for "represented", you DO realize that Tsvangirai WON the last election and STILL doesnt really have control of the government, because Mugabe is refusing to step down?
Tsvangirai's "lie" as you term it is that he spoke with US officials and encouraged sanctions against Mugabe. I dont recall him ever stating he wouldnt do that, and I dont think any reasonable person familiar with Mugabe would find that to be some terrible crime.
First off, I didn't say that information wants to be free. I just called you out on a lousy, unexplained and false example which was proven to be a piece of media propaganda a long time ago and it all started with this piece of crap article:
When you say "proven to be some piece of propaganda", you mean that he ISNT facing treason charges, and that Mugabe ISNT still in power? Im not clear. The wikipedia article indicates neither of those to be true.
By the way, I'm not a history expert but I think there were compulsory drafts during the civil war too. So does everything that happened then apply now as well? No. Null argument.
Your premise, unless im reading it wrong, is that there is no place for secrecy in any part of the government-- and as this article is specifically about the military, your premise seems to include military and diplomatic relations as well. My counter argument which you are dismissing as null is that this has NEVER been recognized at any point in our country's history-- it seems to be assumed throughout all of our wars and throughout all of our history that there IS some information that can and at times must be kept secret. Does it apply now? Well, presumably you are indicating how things "should be", but you arent giving a reason for why they should be that way; and presumably the framework of the folks who wrote the Constitution has SOME say when talking about "how things should be". Obviously, just because things "have always been that way" is not in and of itself a perfect defense of the practice, but surely you can see it carries some weight.
Sure, keeps spewing official crap. "Values America stands for"? Really? Fake patriot rhetoric won't help your case.
Er, you completely missed the thrust of what i was saying. My statement was that this "WASNT some distortion of values america stands for", arguing AGAINST such rhetoric as it is commonly employed. I dont think secrecy is a "value", I think it is a necessary evil when discussing military operations.
Citizens will be lied to and everything will be kept secret to "protect" them from we-can't-tell-you-what dangers that lurk around.
Grats for building a strawman, thats not at all what I said. Im simply stating that it is lunacy to suppose military and diplomatic missions can be carried out successfully if the opposition and bad actors all know all of our plans as we plan them. Im not endorsing a government dominated by secrecy, at all.
With full secrecy comes no accountability.
Well, perhaps you would like to push for an amendment to the constitution. What you are talking about is a fundamental change to the way our military and diplomatic relations work, one that goes back to the founding of the country. I agree with your statement (the on
And yet they still make the most powerful and energy-efficient desktop and server processors out there, as well as leading the way in bus technology (this is the company that gave us PCIe, LightPeak, AGP....). One also remembers such tidbits as the absolute slaughter that occurs when pitting VIA or AMD processors against intels, or their SSDs against their competitors.
To claim they have "lost their way" when they are enjoying the last several years of beating the pants off of AMD is rather silly. And with an annual revenue of $45 billion, it seems ridiculous to claim they dont have "mojo". They seem to be doing quite fine, and churning out quite good products.
This is just your vision of how things should be? Oh, ok then.
No, its me stating a fact: that I am in a state of confusion over why people are overjoyed that others are violating the laws of the land in a democracy where the majority stands against them.
As if the imprimatur of law has an ounce of weight when it comes to morality.
One treads on dangerous ground when speaking of morality in such an issue, especially when you havent explained what your ground for morality is. Myself, I would say that part of a proper system of ethics recognizes the necessity to submit yourself to the governing laws of the land, unless such laws contradict a more basic ethical rule.
And honestly, I would not call the "need for information to be free" a deeper ethical rule.
So the question becomes, if the law of the land has absolutely no say in your mind as to how one should behave, where DO you derive your standards from?
Tsvangirai's position was put in jeopardy because he was allied with the US against Mugabe, and Mugabe was able to use his control of the media to twist it into some anti-Zimbabwe sentiment.
There is no possible way youre going to convince me that the curiosity of some citizens in the US was worth endangering the potential fixing of the disaster that is Zimbabwe.
One liners might make someone look like they know more than they do,
Pot calling the kettle black. How many one-liners pop up stating "information wants to be free", nevermind that the founding fathers, the 2 sides in the confederacy, and the WW2 united states would have utterly disagreed with that statement on certain matters? People complaining about the harsh treatment of Manning seem to have lost sight of the fact that during the Civil or Revolutionary wars, he would have already been shot or hung as a traitor.
This isnt some new thing that is a distortion of the values our country stands for; people have long recognized that once you get back into reality, some secrets are necessary for the functioning of diplomacy and for the waging of military operations.
How successful do you suppose Neptunes Spear would have been if Wikileaks had gotten wind of the operation beforehand, pray tell? In what conceivable way is it a service to US citizens to ensure that its operations are unsuccessful, as such operations will be if such intel is leaked?
You telling me that most of Google's research takes place outside the US?
What about microsoft, mostly based in India? Or would one say that Redmond is their center of operations?
What about Intel, can you cite sources showing the majority of their ops outside the US? Everything I could find showed the majority of their operations occuring in the US (or at least more operations in the US than in any other country).
All in all I think all the secrecy, and covert action makes us weaker not stronger.
Maybe look at the situation in Zimbabwe, and the fallout after the release of several diplomatic wires between Mugabe's opposition and the US, and then repeat that statement.
and the operations of government and the military are expected to be public since they are funded by the public.
I would LOVE if we could get some citations of where such an expectation has ever been upheld by any body of authority. Civil War cases, or WW2 cases might prove educational to those cheering for "the old days" of military knowledge being public. I believe we termed it "treason" back in the day.
Nonsense. Government data should be public unless there is a compelling need for secrecy.
"Should" and "is" are two different things. Possibly one should push for a change in legislation (I thought Obama was pushing a transparent government initiative...?), but until then I dont see any reason to get giddy because someone broke laws and saw fit to play the data-vigilante.
When until the last 1.5 years has apple been the 800-pound gorilla on the block? Your revisionist history of apple is quite interesting; id love to hear more.
I did not mean to imply that we're advanced by the nature of things and that they will never be "on our level", but as things stand now our economy IS healthier than Thailands for example (isnt most of their money from tourism anyways....?) If one of the goals of these proposed measures is to get Thailand (or whomever) to be a more responsible and successful player in the global economy, you cannot start with a country with no wealth.
The way Ive heard it explained best is that you help the country develop, and then you help it to become responsible-- we would not have passed modern emmissions standards during the industrial revolution, but one could argue that without that step we would never have ended up where we are now.
It seems to me, not being an expert on international trade, that part of the reason China is experiencing modest economic improvement and growth is because of the amount of exporting they are able to do. There are a lot of abuses going on there right now, and Im not really an "ends justifies the means" type of guy, but any time you start talking about imposing tariffs or embargos on a country in order to force them to shape up, you need to make sure you keep the consequences in mind. You may end up making things worse, whether they have less money for their infrastructure, or their workers have less money, or they simply find ways to drive prices still lower and find other buyers on the international market.
So if the US could band together with a large percentage of the importing world and say "we will not buy products that do not pass [conservative workplace and/or environmental guidelines]", it would seem to me that would be more effective than simply mandating they match their wage scale to ours with no regard to the current situation.
Better than standard metal is "memory metal", aka Flexon-- bend them, and they snap back into shape.
Ive had my frames for about 10 years now, and theyve been stepped on (sneakers and cleats), dropped, rolled on, slept in, etc, and the only thing that gets damaged is the non-bendy hinge, which I can adjust back into shape.
Theyre quite nice, and not having to replace them is great.
Source for following statements A recent gallup poll shows 54% of people who claim to be "very familiar with the patriot act" are either satisfied with it, or want it to go further. 65% of people "somewhat familiar" with it have the same opinion, and 62% of people not familiar with it have that opinion.
In all, 62% of americans do NOT think it has gone too far.
Regardless of whether or not you think the patriot act goes too far, calling for a revolution because you disagree with the majority of americans is going rather too far. This is a democracy, not an anarchy.
Feel free to express your opinion and lobby for change, but good gracious tone down the rhetoric. The government "pissed off its populace" far more when Obama issued the Executive order on abortion in his first week in office (Source, showing 58% disapproval and 35% approval of the order); but for some reason I didnt see people clamoring for a revolution over that; to cry for armed rebellion over a mere ~%40 disapproval seems ignorant and hypocritical.
People who bitch about price hikes because products get more expensive to make cleanly are idiots.
I have bad news for you, the form of government we have is NOT an authoritarian dictatorship where wonderful game-changing ideas can be endlessly enacted without the consent of the people. If legislators push through legislation that hits everyone's pocketbook, they will be voted out of office fairly rapidly.
You can argue that our system is thus flawed, and of course there is the old saying that "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time", and it is true-- with a good leader, a dictatorship or other such system CAN make these changes that you think are so great. The problem comes when you accept that power corrupts, and so we need a system where the "idiot" masses have a say in what happens in our government.
Incidentally, if folks are modding me down because they believe me to be wrong, I would love to know why-- I can see the weight of that argument, and think trade sanctions might be a way to force China to shape their game up; but for the life of me I cannot see how forcing our minimum wage on far poorer countries will do anything other than ruin their ability to export to us.
It seems like a situation where you can either stick with the status quo, or implement progress slowly-- that to attempt it quickly will only upset the entire system to no gain.
Again however, I am not so invested in my opinion that I cannot be corrected, and would love to hear an opposing viewpoint.
It has to do with the fact that the glyph that is closely approximated by =/= was taught in 4th grade math class to mean "not equal to", and "!=" only became an alternative (for me) in my junior or senior level classes where I began programming in C++. Im not even sure if != is the same as "not equals" on TI-BASIC, the programming language that I first learned.
In other words, =/= has a lot more history (at least for me) as being the not-equals, and I suspect the same is true for most people. Further, as a majority of the population never will see or understand C++ code, it seems silly to use an expression that is less natural to me, harder to see, and less understandable to the public, simply because some programmers on slashdot insist that language should be communicated in programming conventions rather than mathematical ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, theres always Ubuntu derivatives that keep the good parts and hack out the bad.
Its a lot easier to have evolution once youve tried to apt-get uninstall evolution*, and then wonder why it nuked your whole Gnome environment. For added giggles, figure out why so much depends on evolution-data-server even when evolution is gone.
And then try to figure out in what way Evolution is superior to Outlook Web Access off of exchange 2010. (protip, its not).
They wanted super high fidelity, so encoded it as a 3000kbps mp3 to up the quality from the original source.
"Noise" in this case does not refer to sound, but presumably to perturbations in the normal electro(-magnetic?) emissions that are detected emanating from Saturn.
Unfortunately, they used the word "Audio" in TFS and TFH. "Audio" can only be used as far as I am aware to refer to sound.
I really doubt it, because a large number of the things that cause loud noises have very little electric effect, and vice versa. Sound is caused by vibration, electricity is not (except in some cases).
that "information wants to be free" is an observation of fact not an imperative.
No, its a non-sense statement-- information has no power of cognition, and thus cannot want anything. To speak of it thus is to speak absurdities. Im not even sure what principle people are trying to communicate when they make that statement-- that people tend to be bad at keeping information private? That is neither an argument for or against private information.
Furthermore the debate has no more to do with the fact that information "wants" to be free than the fact that round wheels "want" to roll has to do with the debate on speeding.
I quite agree, which is why I was criticizing that whole argument. When discussing whether or not it should be legal for wheels to roll, one does not argue that "well, they TEND to roll, therefore it should be legal", any more than you would make that argument with theft or secrecy. Its a complete non-sequitur.
Your question suggests you think the law of the land does significantly define morality. The reverse is the only sane belief, that the law of the land should be defined by morality.
As a slightly off-topic aside, I recently heard a concise description of the classical, philosophical definition of "morality" as opposed to "ethics", which described the difference thus-- morality is the system of ethics practiced by a society. That being the case, yes, laws would effect it.
All that aside, I never indicated to what extent I think laws affect morality or ethics; I simply stated I think it plays some role.
As for defining laws by morality / ethics, thats great, but we still dont have an answer to "where do your ethical values come from?"
Finally, as an interesting thought experiment, why dont we observe the responses from people decrying the evils of all secrets when the next article about google and privacy comes up. It seems that there are times where people will concede that SOME secrets are acceptable for various reasons; why is it then assumed that there are no reasons ever in government?
Want to opt out? Well, then I guess you can live in the hinterlands and die young!
You're saying that because zimbaweans learned THE TRUTH and Mugabe could use it to his advantage that secrecy was entitled?
For the most part, yes, because the depiction of "the truth" that they were getting was mostly incorrect. Im not clear on what precisely the average Zimbabwean knows about this issue, but as Mugabe basically controls information there, you can bet that its not anything so accurate as you or I know.
while he lied to the people he represented?
In what way was he lying? It is well known that he opposes Mugabe; this is just an excuse to trump up treason charges.
And as for "represented", you DO realize that Tsvangirai WON the last election and STILL doesnt really have control of the government, because Mugabe is refusing to step down?
Tsvangirai's "lie" as you term it is that he spoke with US officials and encouraged sanctions against Mugabe. I dont recall him ever stating he wouldnt do that, and I dont think any reasonable person familiar with Mugabe would find that to be some terrible crime.
First off, I didn't say that information wants to be free. I just called you out on a lousy, unexplained and false example which was proven to be a piece of media propaganda a long time ago and it all started with this piece of crap article:
When you say "proven to be some piece of propaganda", you mean that he ISNT facing treason charges, and that Mugabe ISNT still in power? Im not clear. The wikipedia article indicates neither of those to be true.
By the way, I'm not a history expert but I think there were compulsory drafts during the civil war too. So does everything that happened then apply now as well? No. Null argument.
Your premise, unless im reading it wrong, is that there is no place for secrecy in any part of the government-- and as this article is specifically about the military, your premise seems to include military and diplomatic relations as well.
My counter argument which you are dismissing as null is that this has NEVER been recognized at any point in our country's history-- it seems to be assumed throughout all of our wars and throughout all of our history that there IS some information that can and at times must be kept secret. Does it apply now? Well, presumably you are indicating how things "should be", but you arent giving a reason for why they should be that way; and presumably the framework of the folks who wrote the Constitution has SOME say when talking about "how things should be". Obviously, just because things "have always been that way" is not in and of itself a perfect defense of the practice, but surely you can see it carries some weight.
Sure, keeps spewing official crap. "Values America stands for"? Really? Fake patriot rhetoric won't help your case.
Er, you completely missed the thrust of what i was saying. My statement was that this "WASNT some distortion of values america stands for", arguing AGAINST such rhetoric as it is commonly employed. I dont think secrecy is a "value", I think it is a necessary evil when discussing military operations.
Citizens will be lied to and everything will be kept secret to "protect" them from we-can't-tell-you-what dangers that lurk around.
Grats for building a strawman, thats not at all what I said. Im simply stating that it is lunacy to suppose military and diplomatic missions can be carried out successfully if the opposition and bad actors all know all of our plans as we plan them. Im not endorsing a government dominated by secrecy, at all.
With full secrecy comes no accountability.
Well, perhaps you would like to push for an amendment to the constitution. What you are talking about is a fundamental change to the way our military and diplomatic relations work, one that goes back to the founding of the country. I agree with your statement (the on
And yet they still make the most powerful and energy-efficient desktop and server processors out there, as well as leading the way in bus technology (this is the company that gave us PCIe, LightPeak, AGP....). One also remembers such tidbits as the absolute slaughter that occurs when pitting VIA or AMD processors against intels, or their SSDs against their competitors.
To claim they have "lost their way" when they are enjoying the last several years of beating the pants off of AMD is rather silly. And with an annual revenue of $45 billion, it seems ridiculous to claim they dont have "mojo". They seem to be doing quite fine, and churning out quite good products.
This is just your vision of how things should be? Oh, ok then.
No, its me stating a fact: that I am in a state of confusion over why people are overjoyed that others are violating the laws of the land in a democracy where the majority stands against them.
As if the imprimatur of law has an ounce of weight when it comes to morality.
One treads on dangerous ground when speaking of morality in such an issue, especially when you havent explained what your ground for morality is. Myself, I would say that part of a proper system of ethics recognizes the necessity to submit yourself to the governing laws of the land, unless such laws contradict a more basic ethical rule.
And honestly, I would not call the "need for information to be free" a deeper ethical rule.
So the question becomes, if the law of the land has absolutely no say in your mind as to how one should behave, where DO you derive your standards from?
Tsvangirai's position was put in jeopardy because he was allied with the US against Mugabe, and Mugabe was able to use his control of the media to twist it into some anti-Zimbabwe sentiment.
There is no possible way youre going to convince me that the curiosity of some citizens in the US was worth endangering the potential fixing of the disaster that is Zimbabwe.
One liners might make someone look like they know more than they do,
Pot calling the kettle black. How many one-liners pop up stating "information wants to be free", nevermind that the founding fathers, the 2 sides in the confederacy, and the WW2 united states would have utterly disagreed with that statement on certain matters? People complaining about the harsh treatment of Manning seem to have lost sight of the fact that during the Civil or Revolutionary wars, he would have already been shot or hung as a traitor.
This isnt some new thing that is a distortion of the values our country stands for; people have long recognized that once you get back into reality, some secrets are necessary for the functioning of diplomacy and for the waging of military operations.
How successful do you suppose Neptunes Spear would have been if Wikileaks had gotten wind of the operation beforehand, pray tell? In what conceivable way is it a service to US citizens to ensure that its operations are unsuccessful, as such operations will be if such intel is leaked?
You telling me that most of Google's research takes place outside the US?
What about microsoft, mostly based in India? Or would one say that Redmond is their center of operations?
What about Intel, can you cite sources showing the majority of their ops outside the US? Everything I could find showed the majority of their operations occuring in the US (or at least more operations in the US than in any other country).
Some sources would be nice.
Where are the intel chips DESIGNED? Where is the R&D taking place?
Just because the fab is in southeast asia doesnt mean that southeast asia contributed to the design.
Wonderful. Where are they based, where is the majority of their R&D based?
Youre not going to convince me that Intel doesnt count as a US tech giant.
All in all I think all the secrecy, and covert action makes us weaker not stronger.
Maybe look at the situation in Zimbabwe, and the fallout after the release of several diplomatic wires between Mugabe's opposition and the US, and then repeat that statement.
and the operations of government and the military are expected to be public since they are funded by the public.
I would LOVE if we could get some citations of where such an expectation has ever been upheld by any body of authority. Civil War cases, or WW2 cases might prove educational to those cheering for "the old days" of military knowledge being public. I believe we termed it "treason" back in the day.
Nonsense. Government data should be public unless there is a compelling need for secrecy.
"Should" and "is" are two different things. Possibly one should push for a change in legislation (I thought Obama was pushing a transparent government initiative...?), but until then I dont see any reason to get giddy because someone broke laws and saw fit to play the data-vigilante.
Well, government data is (nominally) public property and should be owned by and available to the public at large,
Can you cite a supreme course case, an amendment, an article of the constitution, etc?
No, this is just your vision of how things should be? Oh, ok then.
When until the last 1.5 years has apple been the 800-pound gorilla on the block? Your revisionist history of apple is quite interesting; id love to hear more.
I did not mean to imply that we're advanced by the nature of things and that they will never be "on our level", but as things stand now our economy IS healthier than Thailands for example (isnt most of their money from tourism anyways....?) If one of the goals of these proposed measures is to get Thailand (or whomever) to be a more responsible and successful player in the global economy, you cannot start with a country with no wealth.
The way Ive heard it explained best is that you help the country develop, and then you help it to become responsible-- we would not have passed modern emmissions standards during the industrial revolution, but one could argue that without that step we would never have ended up where we are now.
It seems to me, not being an expert on international trade, that part of the reason China is experiencing modest economic improvement and growth is because of the amount of exporting they are able to do. There are a lot of abuses going on there right now, and Im not really an "ends justifies the means" type of guy, but any time you start talking about imposing tariffs or embargos on a country in order to force them to shape up, you need to make sure you keep the consequences in mind. You may end up making things worse, whether they have less money for their infrastructure, or their workers have less money, or they simply find ways to drive prices still lower and find other buyers on the international market.
So if the US could band together with a large percentage of the importing world and say "we will not buy products that do not pass [conservative workplace and/or environmental guidelines]", it would seem to me that would be more effective than simply mandating they match their wage scale to ours with no regard to the current situation.
Better than standard metal is "memory metal", aka Flexon-- bend them, and they snap back into shape.
Ive had my frames for about 10 years now, and theyve been stepped on (sneakers and cleats), dropped, rolled on, slept in, etc, and the only thing that gets damaged is the non-bendy hinge, which I can adjust back into shape.
Theyre quite nice, and not having to replace them is great.
Oh for goodness sake.
Source for following statements
A recent gallup poll shows 54% of people who claim to be "very familiar with the patriot act" are either satisfied with it, or want it to go further. 65% of people "somewhat familiar" with it have the same opinion, and 62% of people not familiar with it have that opinion.
In all, 62% of americans do NOT think it has gone too far.
Regardless of whether or not you think the patriot act goes too far, calling for a revolution because you disagree with the majority of americans is going rather too far. This is a democracy, not an anarchy.
Feel free to express your opinion and lobby for change, but good gracious tone down the rhetoric. The government "pissed off its populace" far more when Obama issued the Executive order on abortion in his first week in office (Source, showing 58% disapproval and 35% approval of the order); but for some reason I didnt see people clamoring for a revolution over that; to cry for armed rebellion over a mere ~%40 disapproval seems ignorant and hypocritical.
So fuck 'em when they whine about it.
People who bitch about price hikes because products get more expensive to make cleanly are idiots.
I have bad news for you, the form of government we have is NOT an authoritarian dictatorship where wonderful game-changing ideas can be endlessly enacted without the consent of the people. If legislators push through legislation that hits everyone's pocketbook, they will be voted out of office fairly rapidly.
You can argue that our system is thus flawed, and of course there is the old saying that "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time", and it is true-- with a good leader, a dictatorship or other such system CAN make these changes that you think are so great. The problem comes when you accept that power corrupts, and so we need a system where the "idiot" masses have a say in what happens in our government.
Incidentally, if folks are modding me down because they believe me to be wrong, I would love to know why-- I can see the weight of that argument, and think trade sanctions might be a way to force China to shape their game up; but for the life of me I cannot see how forcing our minimum wage on far poorer countries will do anything other than ruin their ability to export to us.
It seems like a situation where you can either stick with the status quo, or implement progress slowly-- that to attempt it quickly will only upset the entire system to no gain.
Again however, I am not so invested in my opinion that I cannot be corrected, and would love to hear an opposing viewpoint.
It has to do with the fact that the glyph that is closely approximated by =/= was taught in 4th grade math class to mean "not equal to", and "!=" only became an alternative (for me) in my junior or senior level classes where I began programming in C++. Im not even sure if != is the same as "not equals" on TI-BASIC, the programming language that I first learned.
In other words, =/= has a lot more history (at least for me) as being the not-equals, and I suspect the same is true for most people. Further, as a majority of the population never will see or understand C++ code, it seems silly to use an expression that is less natural to me, harder to see, and less understandable to the public, simply because some programmers on slashdot insist that language should be communicated in programming conventions rather than mathematical ones.