A party-based political system will have to disappear if we want to see any long-term management of things like climate, population, pollution, etc. Making decisions for the next 3 years then changing them, and having to pander to whomever stuffs money in your party's pocket, is what has got us in the poo and I believe that system is unable to get us out of it.
> BASIC is useful for quick, simple tasks and can be simpler than more complex tools. > BASIC isn't ideal for complex tasks.
First line true, second line is false. For *past* versions of BASIC, you'd be right. Why does every mention of basic bring up memories over a decade old? Thanks to a small revolution, MS's VB.NET can (semantic differences aside) do anything C# can and is completely OO. Whether you choose VB, C# or Java, you can all code using similar, industry-standard paradigms now. Where exactly is VB.NET inferior to C#?
Microsoft did good, both with C# and VB. I distinctly remember people bitching blue in the face when C# came out, vowing never to use it. You could say C grew up a bit. BASIC grew up a hell of a lot. Now it's good for your kids *and* for you.
People who pick on basic now are living in the past. Be honest and just say you prefer your chosen language simply because it's *familiar*, not because it's better.
Careful you don't blind them with it. Thomas Dolby reference.
Back in the 60's-80's science was about making magic, making history, making a wonderful future. Now choosing your major is mainly determined by whether it'll get you a decent job. Life is different now. Sadly it's harder to make a living than in the past, which raises the question of who exactly are we doing this society thing for? Sometimes it seems that society is just another economic input.
Science has become ubiquitous to the point that most people are blinded to it, if not by it.
Take computers. I'm a developer, grew up with the Commodore 64 etc. Back then, computers filled me with awe. Just turning on my Tandy TRS-80 was a spin-out. It felt like rocket science and I was the pilot. Now my 8yr old nephews play on old laptops and their new DSIs. They're the same age I was, but they don't care how it works. It's not new anymore. Maybe the problem is that *nothing* is new anymore. At least not to the average kid.
Dinosaurs had their attention for a while there. But only until any inquisitive thought in a kid's mind was drowned under the enormous wall of noise that is our entertainment industry. "Ooh dinosaurs lived millions of years ago!" turned into "Raptors are cool!" then finally "when is the Ben 10 movie coming out?" There was a moment there, a glimmer, at the beginning. But when E-Rex gets the slightest scent of a potential audience, the consumer becomes the consumed. Hey, great tag line. Cha-ching.
All the time I see kids' curiosity become the target for hit-em-hard-and-move-on sales, and we wonder why interest in learning science - which, after all, requires a rather long and focussed attention span - is waning.
Seriously, *leaning forward and backward* to control something? Raising your entire arm? Well, I can see how this would help to *reduce* the time kids play games, which is probably good, but completely unrealistic. I can see law suits (in the US of course) related to RSI injuries or just back pain from playing like that.
Only if, and when, an announcement of separation and/or impending divorce is made, are the married couple no longer a team or a partnership.
If the law says it's illegal to open your spouse's mail while married, why does it also say your spouse suddenly owns your house and half your income after you get a divorce? Talk about double standards!:)
And if the taxpayer doesn't like how the government system works, hey, privatise the prison system. Then we'll really see some industry-standard, cutting-edge rehab programs, innovation such as only the private sector can deliver, in order to get those citizens back on their feet, on the straight and narrow, never to utilise commercial prison services ever again!
So the fact that I take a dump in the toilet with the door closed, instead of in the middle of the street, means I shouldn't be pooing at all? Yeah that makes heaps of sense. Think for a minute about those trite statements that politicians come out with before you mindlessly parrot them.
That's not the point. In nature, everything kills and eats everything else too.
So you don't mind your child seeing adults killing and eating each other for sport?
The point is, pornography is not sex. Read that again: Porn isn't sex. Porn is a bunch of people getting paid to have dicks shoved in their various holes (this is porn phraseology, sorry do I sound offensive?) in a an emotionless and largely inaccurate simulation of how real adults in the real world behave when they love each other and/or have sex.
So if you don't mind your kid seeing people having sex, that's fine. But if that's the case, you should be the first to prevent them from watching porn, because it is not an accurate representation of two people having sex.
I hope I have helped explain for you what porn actually is, so you can now make an educated decision about watching it.
Piffle, it seems we're having a discussion about the merits of education as a whole, when this is just about "innovating in software". Indeed web apps, which is even simpler. That's not the same as innovating in physics, biology, etc. or even in I.T. in general.
Why? Because all you need is an idea for the web and a knack for programming. You don't need an education for that. All the existing, supporting technologies - which people had to finish an education to provide for you - do all the rest of the work.
So it's not like society is losing anything here. A bunch of script kiddies skipping school. Let them go, makes more room for people with real brains. I sat that as an under-educated web developer myself, who has great respect for the truly smart people who helped create what we use.
Seriously, when was the last time that a government science fund produced something worth $24,000,000,000?
Are you serious? I believe you have this thing in the US called "The Military", whose government funding dwarfs every other in the world, regularly doing science and producing not just expensive hardware, but useful technologies which end up benefiting industry outside of Defence, therefore all people in the US and in some way the world over.
I'm sure we can name thousands of things we use, produced directly or indirectly from military R&D. Now imagine the military was 100% for-profit, privately funded. Do you think we would have better outcomes because of that?
Many Americans seem to have this weird neurosis when it comes to government. You're happy to spend more tax dollars than anyone in the world on The Military - which is basically how insurance works; the people pay and the government protects all of you (yes, even those who can't afford their own private bodyguards). But when Health Care comes up, you're like, "WTF why should we pay the government to protect those who can't afford their own protection! It's Socialism!" Seriously, that's psycho talk. Go see a therapist. Oh, can't afford one huh, that's a shame.
What is Civilisation for, if not an organised way to allow all people to live in relative safety and happiness? Seriously, what the hell else are we doing all this for, ultimately? You Americans are the first to produce Operahs and advertisements saying, "everyone deserves to be happy, anyone can achieve anything" while at the same time pissing your pants at the idea that YOU may be asked to help be responsible for making that society happen.
I laugh every time I hear a US senator talking about "small government". So what do you want, the bare minimum government funding or regulation for anything, *except the military*? Lol, you'll be shipping lead-painted toys to China's middle class in no time.
He may not directly lie, but he does present a biased opinion which, of course, is his right just like anyone with a video camera and some air time.
One example: In Sicko, Moore visits a hospital in Cuba, to basically show how wonderful "health care" is there. Now, whether he was misled by what Cuban officials told him, or whether he did it knowing full well that most Cubans cannot access that hospital, he is at fault. It's deceptive. He should have visited a normal hospital that the average Cuban would visit, to get the level of care most Cubans would get. Call it nitpicking, but I consider that questionable journalism, and makes me wonder how else he slants his facts to suit his argument. What he presented there wasn't the average experience.
Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before
Depends on the game, and what you mean by "content". Thief, for example, had small levels you had to revisit often, very few types of NPCs, and you basically did the same thing (sneak, kill, steal, buy stuff) over and over. The "content" was all in the storyline and the "mood". You could add more unique content to Thief but it wouldn't increase enjoyment of the game, just make it longer.
With Wow, the content is in the maps, items, quests and player interactions. There's no storyline. But they have a recipe of content and gameplay which is addictive to a lot of people. You could add a million more unique items and places to Wow and far from improving the game you could damage it. Wow's content directly affects gameplay and has to be balanced.
The original Tetris has perfect content for its players; random and repetitive. Notice how more elaborate versions of Tetris (3D for example) never outshone the original.
So repetitive content can suit a game, and more content doesn't always make a game better. It's about achieving a good "content recipe" for that particular game and its audience.
This is still terrifying obviously, but it's nowhere near the fictional Armageddon that many people associate with the words "nuclear war".
True. In fact, thinking long term, it would likely be beneficial to future generations. As we're going, all major fish stocks will be depleted in 50 years, in which time we also need to roughly double global food production to avoid famine for most of the population. There's increasing waste, pollution, ocean acidification even if you don't believe in climate change per se, and an energy crisis if we can't soon and successfully replace coal & oil for base load, not to mention the million other things we use petroleum for.
At the same time, now that the chips are down and major social and economic changes are required, our much-lauded Capitalism and Democracy look more and more like engines of short term self-interest that are, ironically, unable to make them. I mean, the astoundingly rapid changes made since the Industrial Revolution were not powered by high ideals of freedom and wealth for all, but motivations more or less the complete opposite. You could say we run on "managed self-interest". But it's not being managed well for a world of limited space and resources, and time is running out to change.
In brief, our problems are systemic, endemic and epidemic. Solutions are slow to arrive and our very culture works against most solutions being implemented at all. We're approaching a cliff with a great deal of momentum and denial.
However, there is an unpleasant solution. With most major cities and industry gone from a nuclear exchange, one may look forward to a more sustainable world and, assumedly, a wiser one, after a period of suffering and rebuilding. Post-Apocalypse World won't be full of scary mutants, but just as mass-graves remind us today of things we need to avoid, so too will a few well-placed glowing craters.
We need a crash course on how to live together on a single planet, because we're simply taking too long to learn how. To learn that countries are redundant concepts, party politics is worse than useless for managing the future, and our way of picking leaders (whether for companies or governments) attracts the wrong personality types.
A world struggling to recover from mutual destruction will likely be a better one in the end. Human beings tend to change their behaviour only after making mistakes. And we live in an age where we need a few major paradigm shifts if we want to survive long term. From the ways we run societies and manage populations, to the whole idea of commerce, wealth and power. As much as we wish it would, it's not going change by itself. Not in time.
So, if it's a choice between business as usual leading to millions dead and a globally wrecked ecosystem, or nuclear war leading to millions dead and chance for a wiser rebuild from the ashes, I would reluctantly have to vote for the latter, even if I won't be around to see it.
You missed one. NK is like China's Pit Bull, the scary looking dog you own so nobody messes with you. Or the slightly unbalanced "bad cop" which the good cop has to apologise for while it's all part of the play. However these days China doesn't need NK as much, and I'm sure NK knows that. That isn't a good situation for anyone, and I'm sure China has wanted to remain reassuring. Post Wikileaks, that's now an even more interesting situation.
NK has made China confident enough to be a player, letting in US commercial interests knowing it has bargaining power while NK lays on the crazy. China uses them at times to negotiate, though it's certainly a two-edged sword for them. With that in mind, you can be sure that China is at least partly responsible for NK's behaviour. The Chinese are very good chess players, and I think we'll see just how good they are in the next few years.
Indeed. It's interesting, the disconnect between how Americans (or a lot of us in the West) view US foreign policy, and how we view that of places like NK and Iran. Just looking at real history, the US can seem far more belligerent, war-like, invasive, tricky and downright nasty than many other countries. It's not hard to understand why the US is seen as "the great evil" by some.
The US just conducts itself more neurotically than the others, in a way. I guess that's the result of a democracy and a complex set of competing interests.
That's not to say the US doesn't "seek peace", but of course it's peace on their/our terms. Just as China also "seeks peace", on China's and their friends' terms.
That's a really good point, an incredibly important effect of increased CO2 which the article at least (if not the study itself) ludicrously fails to mention.
Also it assumes our economy is such that we will allow all this proposed new plant life to happen. Doubt the boffins took human behaviour into account.
That rationale assumes our economic model is generally a good thing for people.
Much like the climate-change idea, there are many who now say we need to reassess that system - that it's not only not working, but is the direct cause of much needless suffering and inequity in the world.
So what exactly is your reason to think The Holy Economy is a more important consideration of our natural environment?
Oh, and money DOES motivate file sharers. They're getting something for nothing.
They know *that* is wrong. Obviously one should pay *something* for music for a movie. But information, being digital, copyable, has therefore been democratised. We all know what a movie is worth to us, and we will *gladly* pay what it's worth. The problem is, there is little avenue to do so. Either get shafted or copy the thing. Easy choice.
I see it as a good thing. Collectively, people are making the statement that moguls are making too much money, and a lot of what they pass as entertainment is complete rubbish anyway and deserves to be devalued a few notches. Good on them I say. Nobody wants to see movies grossing stupendous amounts of money while hearing about "Hollywood accounting" and how artists aren't being paid their due. Is that moral?
So go, you big red file sharers. It's a statement in the making.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned the obvious: social dynamics and kickbacks?
There's more to it than altruism, justification and rebellion. There are very direct social and economical rewards for file sharing in various ways. For example, with torrents, you get so frustrated if there aren't enough seeds for the things you want, you tend to feel you should seed stuff more. And you feel grateful to those who seed. On the purely selfish side, when using file hosts (rapidshare, hotfile, etc) there are rewards you get for others downloading what you upload.
I think file sharing, like information/advice sharing on forums, is a wonderful expression of human altruism - doing things for others. Personally I don't really believe in 100% pure altruism (thinking evolutionarily) but who cares. It is what it is, and it'll never disappear.
Just because something goes against some artificially created economic rule it's seen as immoral? I don't think people who share files put much stock in that logic either. Capitalism, as we see it today, so obviously views moral and social responsibility as an impediment to progress that for them to raise the issue here is only laughable, and so we carry on as usual.
The attitudes behind file sharing are a direct product of what capitalism has fostered; as much separation between consumers and the creators of value, so that everyone in between can get rich. If file sharers only think they're stealing from the middle-men, who's to blame them? I doubt, however, they would pirate CDs of their town's local bands - partly as a moral decision, partly because they're $5 instead of $30.
Similarly, selling bootleg DVDs on the street is illegal and those who do so are shut down and arrested/fined.
It's not similar at all, if you're relating "selling" to web sites that post links to torrents and downloads. They're basically "leak" sites, like Wikileaks. They don't make the copies, they don't sell them, they just tell you they're there. It's like standing on your street corner next to a pile of DVDs, with a sign saying "this is a pile of copied DVDs". I'd like to see someone do that and resulting prosecution fail.
It's a matter of freedom of speech. Should a site be taken down for speaking freely about what is going on in the world? You can try to call that "facilitation", but of what exactly? They're not forcing people to download stuff. Whether they are, by their existence, encouraging or making "popular" the copying of material? That's tough to prove.
I thought our society was beyond persecuting the messenger. Apparently not. It's the same old shit which is, as we see in the Wikileaks situation, governments and commercial interests forcing their will beyond what the law should allow.
Sites that post links, like Wikileaks posting stuff already leaked, should be protected under freedom of speech. And it IS, otherwise they'd all be in prison by now. But as we see, time and again, that principle is bypassed by people with big sticks and a lot - of value to no-one apart from them - to lose.
Ha, yes I'm the same. When I was 12 my brother, who worked for IBM at the time, brought home an IBM 5120. Back then, computers were rocket science and I felt like a mad scientist playing with it, copying code for the old text-based games Star Trader and Star Trek. It was awe-inspiring, engaging, space-age. Keyboards were made of hewn stone. It felt important. My first home computer was also a TRS-80. Now I freelance writing commercial web apps, completely self taught.
But yeah, kids can learn anything if they're really interested in it. I think inspiring them is just as important as giving them the material and the freedom to learn.
But I think being inspired comes both from natural inclination and interaction with a teacher. You cannot replace the teacher. Too many times I've heard people talk about "the amazing art/science/math/history teacher they had" and I think that's very special. You won't get that over Skype.
I think trying to distance-teach kids (when it's not the only option) is disgusting and asking for trouble down the track. We will soon have a population of 7 Billion and somehow we can't manage to have enough teachers for small classrooms making kids feel special. It's pathetic. It's inexcusable. It's inhumane.
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A party-based political system will have to disappear if we want to see any long-term management of things like climate, population, pollution, etc. Making decisions for the next 3 years then changing them, and having to pander to whomever stuffs money in your party's pocket, is what has got us in the poo and I believe that system is unable to get us out of it.
He tried to get back in God's favor but was unable to completely.
He only got visits to Heaven every second Tuesday?
> BASIC is useful for quick, simple tasks and can be simpler than more complex tools.
> BASIC isn't ideal for complex tasks.
First line true, second line is false. For *past* versions of BASIC, you'd be right. Why does every mention of basic bring up memories over a decade old? Thanks to a small revolution, MS's VB.NET can (semantic differences aside) do anything C# can and is completely OO. Whether you choose VB, C# or Java, you can all code using similar, industry-standard paradigms now. Where exactly is VB.NET inferior to C#?
Microsoft did good, both with C# and VB. I distinctly remember people bitching blue in the face when C# came out, vowing never to use it. You could say C grew up a bit. BASIC grew up a hell of a lot. Now it's good for your kids *and* for you.
People who pick on basic now are living in the past. Be honest and just say you prefer your chosen language simply because it's *familiar*, not because it's better.
Careful you don't blind them with it. Thomas Dolby reference.
Back in the 60's-80's science was about making magic, making history, making a wonderful future. Now choosing your major is mainly determined by whether it'll get you a decent job. Life is different now. Sadly it's harder to make a living than in the past, which raises the question of who exactly are we doing this society thing for? Sometimes it seems that society is just another economic input.
Science has become ubiquitous to the point that most people are blinded to it, if not by it.
Take computers. I'm a developer, grew up with the Commodore 64 etc. Back then, computers filled me with awe. Just turning on my Tandy TRS-80 was a spin-out. It felt like rocket science and I was the pilot. Now my 8yr old nephews play on old laptops and their new DSIs. They're the same age I was, but they don't care how it works. It's not new anymore. Maybe the problem is that *nothing* is new anymore. At least not to the average kid.
Dinosaurs had their attention for a while there. But only until any inquisitive thought in a kid's mind was drowned under the enormous wall of noise that is our entertainment industry. "Ooh dinosaurs lived millions of years ago!" turned into "Raptors are cool!" then finally "when is the Ben 10 movie coming out?" There was a moment there, a glimmer, at the beginning. But when E-Rex gets the slightest scent of a potential audience, the consumer becomes the consumed. Hey, great tag line. Cha-ching.
All the time I see kids' curiosity become the target for hit-em-hard-and-move-on sales, and we wonder why interest in learning science - which, after all, requires a rather long and focussed attention span - is waning.
Seriously, *leaning forward and backward* to control something? Raising your entire arm? Well, I can see how this would help to *reduce* the time kids play games, which is probably good, but completely unrealistic. I can see law suits (in the US of course) related to RSI injuries or just back pain from playing like that.
Only if, and when, an announcement of separation and/or impending divorce is made, are the married couple no longer a team or a partnership.
If the law says it's illegal to open your spouse's mail while married, why does it also say your spouse suddenly owns your house and half your income after you get a divorce? Talk about double standards! :)
And if the taxpayer doesn't like how the government system works, hey, privatise the prison system. Then we'll really see some industry-standard, cutting-edge rehab programs, innovation such as only the private sector can deliver, in order to get those citizens back on their feet, on the straight and narrow, never to utilise commercial prison services ever again!
Oh wait..
So the fact that I take a dump in the toilet with the door closed, instead of in the middle of the street, means I shouldn't be pooing at all? Yeah that makes heaps of sense. Think for a minute about those trite statements that politicians come out with before you mindlessly parrot them.
That's not the point. In nature, everything kills and eats everything else too.
So you don't mind your child seeing adults killing and eating each other for sport?
The point is, pornography is not sex. Read that again: Porn isn't sex. Porn is a bunch of people getting paid to have dicks shoved in their various holes (this is porn phraseology, sorry do I sound offensive?) in a an emotionless and largely inaccurate simulation of how real adults in the real world behave when they love each other and/or have sex.
So if you don't mind your kid seeing people having sex, that's fine. But if that's the case, you should be the first to prevent them from watching porn, because it is not an accurate representation of two people having sex.
I hope I have helped explain for you what porn actually is, so you can now make an educated decision about watching it.
Sure, but nobody knows WHO bought that newspaper.
Piffle, it seems we're having a discussion about the merits of education as a whole, when this is just about "innovating in software". Indeed web apps, which is even simpler. That's not the same as innovating in physics, biology, etc. or even in I.T. in general.
Why? Because all you need is an idea for the web and a knack for programming. You don't need an education for that. All the existing, supporting technologies - which people had to finish an education to provide for you - do all the rest of the work.
So it's not like society is losing anything here. A bunch of script kiddies skipping school. Let them go, makes more room for people with real brains. I sat that as an under-educated web developer myself, who has great respect for the truly smart people who helped create what we use.
Seriously, when was the last time that a government science fund produced something worth $24,000,000,000?
Are you serious? I believe you have this thing in the US called "The Military", whose government funding dwarfs every other in the world, regularly doing science and producing not just expensive hardware, but useful technologies which end up benefiting industry outside of Defence, therefore all people in the US and in some way the world over.
I'm sure we can name thousands of things we use, produced directly or indirectly from military R&D. Now imagine the military was 100% for-profit, privately funded. Do you think we would have better outcomes because of that?
Many Americans seem to have this weird neurosis when it comes to government. You're happy to spend more tax dollars than anyone in the world on The Military - which is basically how insurance works; the people pay and the government protects all of you (yes, even those who can't afford their own private bodyguards). But when Health Care comes up, you're like, "WTF why should we pay the government to protect those who can't afford their own protection! It's Socialism!" Seriously, that's psycho talk. Go see a therapist. Oh, can't afford one huh, that's a shame.
What is Civilisation for, if not an organised way to allow all people to live in relative safety and happiness? Seriously, what the hell else are we doing all this for, ultimately? You Americans are the first to produce Operahs and advertisements saying, "everyone deserves to be happy, anyone can achieve anything" while at the same time pissing your pants at the idea that YOU may be asked to help be responsible for making that society happen.
I laugh every time I hear a US senator talking about "small government". So what do you want, the bare minimum government funding or regulation for anything, *except the military*? Lol, you'll be shipping lead-painted toys to China's middle class in no time.
He may not directly lie, but he does present a biased opinion which, of course, is his right just like anyone with a video camera and some air time.
One example: In Sicko, Moore visits a hospital in Cuba, to basically show how wonderful "health care" is there. Now, whether he was misled by what Cuban officials told him, or whether he did it knowing full well that most Cubans cannot access that hospital, he is at fault. It's deceptive. He should have visited a normal hospital that the average Cuban would visit, to get the level of care most Cubans would get. Call it nitpicking, but I consider that questionable journalism, and makes me wonder how else he slants his facts to suit his argument. What he presented there wasn't the average experience.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1936307620070719
Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic.
Oh.. I always thought it's what you call a deaf Ranger.
Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before
Depends on the game, and what you mean by "content". Thief, for example, had small levels you had to revisit often, very few types of NPCs, and you basically did the same thing (sneak, kill, steal, buy stuff) over and over. The "content" was all in the storyline and the "mood". You could add more unique content to Thief but it wouldn't increase enjoyment of the game, just make it longer.
With Wow, the content is in the maps, items, quests and player interactions. There's no storyline. But they have a recipe of content and gameplay which is addictive to a lot of people. You could add a million more unique items and places to Wow and far from improving the game you could damage it. Wow's content directly affects gameplay and has to be balanced.
The original Tetris has perfect content for its players; random and repetitive. Notice how more elaborate versions of Tetris (3D for example) never outshone the original.
So repetitive content can suit a game, and more content doesn't always make a game better. It's about achieving a good "content recipe" for that particular game and its audience.
This is still terrifying obviously, but it's nowhere near the fictional Armageddon that many people associate with the words "nuclear war".
True. In fact, thinking long term, it would likely be beneficial to future generations. As we're going, all major fish stocks will be depleted in 50 years, in which time we also need to roughly double global food production to avoid famine for most of the population. There's increasing waste, pollution, ocean acidification even if you don't believe in climate change per se, and an energy crisis if we can't soon and successfully replace coal & oil for base load, not to mention the million other things we use petroleum for.
At the same time, now that the chips are down and major social and economic changes are required, our much-lauded Capitalism and Democracy look more and more like engines of short term self-interest that are, ironically, unable to make them. I mean, the astoundingly rapid changes made since the Industrial Revolution were not powered by high ideals of freedom and wealth for all, but motivations more or less the complete opposite. You could say we run on "managed self-interest". But it's not being managed well for a world of limited space and resources, and time is running out to change.
In brief, our problems are systemic, endemic and epidemic. Solutions are slow to arrive and our very culture works against most solutions being implemented at all. We're approaching a cliff with a great deal of momentum and denial.
However, there is an unpleasant solution. With most major cities and industry gone from a nuclear exchange, one may look forward to a more sustainable world and, assumedly, a wiser one, after a period of suffering and rebuilding. Post-Apocalypse World won't be full of scary mutants, but just as mass-graves remind us today of things we need to avoid, so too will a few well-placed glowing craters.
We need a crash course on how to live together on a single planet, because we're simply taking too long to learn how. To learn that countries are redundant concepts, party politics is worse than useless for managing the future, and our way of picking leaders (whether for companies or governments) attracts the wrong personality types.
A world struggling to recover from mutual destruction will likely be a better one in the end. Human beings tend to change their behaviour only after making mistakes. And we live in an age where we need a few major paradigm shifts if we want to survive long term. From the ways we run societies and manage populations, to the whole idea of commerce, wealth and power. As much as we wish it would, it's not going change by itself. Not in time.
So, if it's a choice between business as usual leading to millions dead and a globally wrecked ecosystem, or nuclear war leading to millions dead and chance for a wiser rebuild from the ashes, I would reluctantly have to vote for the latter, even if I won't be around to see it.
China's only interests in NK are, in order:
You missed one. NK is like China's Pit Bull, the scary looking dog you own so nobody messes with you. Or the slightly unbalanced "bad cop" which the good cop has to apologise for while it's all part of the play. However these days China doesn't need NK as much, and I'm sure NK knows that. That isn't a good situation for anyone, and I'm sure China has wanted to remain reassuring. Post Wikileaks, that's now an even more interesting situation.
NK has made China confident enough to be a player, letting in US commercial interests knowing it has bargaining power while NK lays on the crazy. China uses them at times to negotiate, though it's certainly a two-edged sword for them. With that in mind, you can be sure that China is at least partly responsible for NK's behaviour. The Chinese are very good chess players, and I think we'll see just how good they are in the next few years.
Indeed. It's interesting, the disconnect between how Americans (or a lot of us in the West) view US foreign policy, and how we view that of places like NK and Iran. Just looking at real history, the US can seem far more belligerent, war-like, invasive, tricky and downright nasty than many other countries. It's not hard to understand why the US is seen as "the great evil" by some.
The US just conducts itself more neurotically than the others, in a way. I guess that's the result of a democracy and a complex set of competing interests.
That's not to say the US doesn't "seek peace", but of course it's peace on their/our terms. Just as China also "seeks peace", on China's and their friends' terms.
That's a really good point, an incredibly important effect of increased CO2 which the article at least (if not the study itself) ludicrously fails to mention.
Also it assumes our economy is such that we will allow all this proposed new plant life to happen. Doubt the boffins took human behaviour into account.
That rationale assumes our economic model is generally a good thing for people.
Much like the climate-change idea, there are many who now say we need to reassess that system - that it's not only not working, but is the direct cause of much needless suffering and inequity in the world.
So what exactly is your reason to think The Holy Economy is a more important consideration of our natural environment?
Oh, and money DOES motivate file sharers. They're getting something for nothing.
They know *that* is wrong. Obviously one should pay *something* for music for a movie. But information, being digital, copyable, has therefore been democratised. We all know what a movie is worth to us, and we will *gladly* pay what it's worth. The problem is, there is little avenue to do so. Either get shafted or copy the thing. Easy choice.
I see it as a good thing. Collectively, people are making the statement that moguls are making too much money, and a lot of what they pass as entertainment is complete rubbish anyway and deserves to be devalued a few notches. Good on them I say. Nobody wants to see movies grossing stupendous amounts of money while hearing about "Hollywood accounting" and how artists aren't being paid their due. Is that moral?
So go, you big red file sharers. It's a statement in the making.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned the obvious: social dynamics and kickbacks?
There's more to it than altruism, justification and rebellion. There are very direct social and economical rewards for file sharing in various ways. For example, with torrents, you get so frustrated if there aren't enough seeds for the things you want, you tend to feel you should seed stuff more. And you feel grateful to those who seed. On the purely selfish side, when using file hosts (rapidshare, hotfile, etc) there are rewards you get for others downloading what you upload.
I think file sharing, like information/advice sharing on forums, is a wonderful expression of human altruism - doing things for others. Personally I don't really believe in 100% pure altruism (thinking evolutionarily) but who cares. It is what it is, and it'll never disappear.
Just because something goes against some artificially created economic rule it's seen as immoral? I don't think people who share files put much stock in that logic either. Capitalism, as we see it today, so obviously views moral and social responsibility as an impediment to progress that for them to raise the issue here is only laughable, and so we carry on as usual.
The attitudes behind file sharing are a direct product of what capitalism has fostered; as much separation between consumers and the creators of value, so that everyone in between can get rich. If file sharers only think they're stealing from the middle-men, who's to blame them? I doubt, however, they would pirate CDs of their town's local bands - partly as a moral decision, partly because they're $5 instead of $30.
Similarly, selling bootleg DVDs on the street is illegal and those who do so are shut down and arrested/fined.
It's not similar at all, if you're relating "selling" to web sites that post links to torrents and downloads. They're basically "leak" sites, like Wikileaks. They don't make the copies, they don't sell them, they just tell you they're there. It's like standing on your street corner next to a pile of DVDs, with a sign saying "this is a pile of copied DVDs". I'd like to see someone do that and resulting prosecution fail.
It's a matter of freedom of speech. Should a site be taken down for speaking freely about what is going on in the world? You can try to call that "facilitation", but of what exactly? They're not forcing people to download stuff. Whether they are, by their existence, encouraging or making "popular" the copying of material? That's tough to prove.
I thought our society was beyond persecuting the messenger. Apparently not. It's the same old shit which is, as we see in the Wikileaks situation, governments and commercial interests forcing their will beyond what the law should allow.
Sites that post links, like Wikileaks posting stuff already leaked, should be protected under freedom of speech. And it IS, otherwise they'd all be in prison by now. But as we see, time and again, that principle is bypassed by people with big sticks and a lot - of value to no-one apart from them - to lose.
From the web site:
"We are overwhelmed and grateful that so many of you, all over the world, have offered to help with interacting with children over the Internet!"
Are they really that surprised?
Ha, yes I'm the same. When I was 12 my brother, who worked for IBM at the time, brought home an IBM 5120. Back then, computers were rocket science and I felt like a mad scientist playing with it, copying code for the old text-based games Star Trader and Star Trek. It was awe-inspiring, engaging, space-age. Keyboards were made of hewn stone. It felt important. My first home computer was also a TRS-80. Now I freelance writing commercial web apps, completely self taught.
But yeah, kids can learn anything if they're really interested in it. I think inspiring them is just as important as giving them the material and the freedom to learn.
But I think being inspired comes both from natural inclination and interaction with a teacher. You cannot replace the teacher. Too many times I've heard people talk about "the amazing art/science/math/history teacher they had" and I think that's very special. You won't get that over Skype.
I think trying to distance-teach kids (when it's not the only option) is disgusting and asking for trouble down the track. We will soon have a population of 7 Billion and somehow we can't manage to have enough teachers for small classrooms making kids feel special. It's pathetic. It's inexcusable. It's inhumane.