I don't see why a RISC chip would be inherently harder to build than a CISC chip.
That's not the problem because RISC CPUs *are* easier to build. The problem is in *using* RISC CPUs. Each instruction is simple, so you need many instructions to do the same thing that one instruction does on CISC. So the code size grows. Also instead of fetching one MOVSx and chewing on it until you transfer the whole block your RISC CPU may need to sit in a tight loop and load/store word by word, and fetch the instructions also - hopefully from a local cache but it's still work.
Basically RISC and CISC are ways to optimize the distribution of work between different pieces of a computing system. If your memory is fast and cheap go RISC. If your memory is not very fast then you get a major hit in performance. But a RISC CPU is simpler. I can understand that when CPU of IBM/370 took a large room it was a valid point. But today IC designers literally don't know what to do with the silicon real estate that they have on each die. So it makes sense to throw FETs at the problem and save the precious memory bandwidth for things that truly must be in RAM - your data, or your efficiently packed machine instructions. RISC has advantages only when your CPU must be simple and run cold, and when RAM is faster than your CPU - and that is the case in many embedded systems.
nstead, we ended up with a country that thought a large military class with many very poor proles with a wafte of communistic ideas was communism.
The "we" does not include the USSR. The abbreviation means "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and every child knew that they had socialism, not communism. There is a big difference.
It is also important to understand that USSR had no "military class" and not a single soul in any way benefited from military manufacturing, very much unlike the USA.
What sort of opportunities are there for American citizens to work abroad?
None whatsoever, as a general rule. All countries (and EU) protect their labor market and do not allow foreigners to just come and work. And the USA does the same. Basically you will need a work visa which usually requires some sponsorship from a local company, and you need to allow some time (years?) for the paperwork to get through. Without such arrangements you will be in position of a Mexican who illegally crossed the border.
IMO, the only possibility to quickly move out and start working is in gaining employment with a US company that has offices in other countries. This way you can be hired here and then transferred abroad with no questions asked.
Folks seem to neglect this minor detail that it is ultimately a good thing the USDA is taking measures to prevent mis-information and FUD from affecting beef exports
It's not a good thing at all. USDA is interfering with the free market. In a free market anyone is able to buy any test kits [that are not regulated like an atom bomb] and test as many of his own cattle as he wishes. It might be a stupid thing to do, but it shouldn't be a USDA mandate to protect people from unwise decisions.
The kits should be available to anyone who asks them, and if the government wants to educate the customers it is free to advertise their shortcomings. The very fact that this abnormal situation exists tells us that the US economy has little to do with a free market. We see that the market wants the testing to be done, and the government says "no, you may not."
Very hard to fake in real time, but it can be done.
IANAP (I am not a prestidigitator) but I saw many on TV. It would be possible to take an HDD, show it to witnesses and then drop a different HDD into the smelter. Notebook drives are particularly easy to substitute.
This can be defeated only by the customer personally dropping the HDD into the machine, and the machine has to be inspected before and after the process, including checking the weight of the scrap. This presumes that the machine is sufficiently simple to verify.
If I were the customer concerned about my secret data, I'd put the drives under a hydraulic press first, then I'd roll the resulting foil up and give to the operator of a smelter.
Will I have to bother going into work the day after they fire this thing up?
Most workers find a faster Internet link at work, which will be essential to see all the videos of the unfolding doom. Remember, there will be no rebroadcasts!
We have such a warning at work, on the doors. There are indeed dangerous chemicals in the building, in one chemical lab, accessible to maybe 10 chemists. The remaining 1,990 workers do sales and support and design stuff on computers.
It's really quite amazing how much the hardware has outstripped the ability of software to keep up.
It's not amazing at all. Most desktop applications are single-threaded because you, the operator, are single-threaded. MS Word could enter words on all 100 pages of your book simultaneously, but you aren't able to produce them. An audio player could decode and play 100 songs to you at the same time, but you want to listen to one song at a time...
I can see niche desktop applications where multiple threads are of use. For example, GIMP (or Paint.net or Photoshop) could apply your filter to 100 independent squares of the photo if you have 100 cores. However the gain would be tiny, the extra coding labor would be considerable, and you still need to stitch these squares... all to gain a second or two of a rare filter operation?
The most effective use of multiple cores today is either in servers, or in finite element modeling applications.
A well known Russian comedian once said: "Let's debate the taste of a pineapple with people who ate them."
Insiders generally know more than outsiders. This is triply true for such a paranoid society as North Korea. We do not care what North Koreans think about hamburgers. Americans similarly have no clue if there is life on Alpha Centauri, but who cares about that? We only care if they know what is happening inside the country. The whole population of North Korea knows everything on that subject - it's all made by their hands, after all. If you want to know what NK is up to, ask Kim's closest advisors - they know, they probably told him what he wants. Who outside of this circle would know that? Nobody.
And you feel that this is fair and just treatment?
Well, this is a very serious question now. Why? Because the true democracy can not survive; it is just as non-viable as a true communism or socialism. A true democracy, where everything is allowed, also allows for its own destruction. This happens because people are not identical clones of each other. People have interests; some people (very few) have lust for power, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get all the power.
In a democracy such a populist, using words of an ancient Greek, "only need to promise more money to the public" to win. This flaw was well known back then, and practically could be controlled only in small scale democracies, like village-sized cities. As societies grew, this law of nature selected Kings and Czars and many other rulers (they didn't exist in a vacuum, and a good group of barons could do a quick job on an uncooperative King.)
Later populists came to power in France, killed thousands of people and eventually got killed themselves. Populists reoccur all the time these days; Boris Yeltsin was one such populist, he rose on the platform of government being asleep (or drunk) at the wheel, as later we learned. In Venezuela Hugo Chavez is heavily using populist methods ("money to the people".) So this is not just a theory.
Anyhow, now we see that a true democracy can be subverted from within. Once a person gets to the reins he may well want to stay in charge. Saddam of Iraq was one such guy - he led a revolt, set up his pocket Baath party, and sat on the throne until recently. Lenin and Stalin in Russia did exactly the same thing earlier. A certain German politician, not to be named due to Godwin, was also a great orator and populist. People literally died for him. So now we see that a true democracy tends to decay into a dictatorship, and the catalyst that is needed is an aggressive, ambitious populist and the society that is not as wise as it should (it is seldom wise, as a rule - people are not paid to learn governing, and it's a boring job.)
Now we want democracy but we don't want it to slide into fascism and tyranny. How do we do that? Democracy is not stable. If you look above you will see that to keep the democracy flourishing you need to maintain wise voters, or you need to put a clamp on politicians. The USA can not maintain wise voters because first it's too hard and only Switzerland can claim such a success. Secondly, the USA seemingly is not interested in educated citizenry - the public education system is training children to be just smart enough to hold a basic job.
Without smart voters the society in the USA can see a massive upheaval (a revolt.) You can observe shades of it looking at Obama. But Obama is a well-trained politician, he will not stray from the party line, not any more than a Soviet politician would dare. You can see for yourself what Obama says and how he votes - it's perfectly in line with the current policy. No revolts allowed here; and if anyone tries... remember politicians and social leaders who were suddenly killed and their killers also killed. It happened here.
So it seems obvious that the democracy in the USA (or any democracy that wants to survive) can not afford uncontrolled rabble rousers. They are bad news. Some say: "Let them speak and the public will sort them out" - no, if the public is stupid (as all public invariably is, in the USA or in Russia or in China) then this rabble rouser can suddenly become the next Fuehrer. It has happened before, and we'd better remember that.
You are welcome to agree or disagree, I do not advocate anything - I only tried to explain how, in my opinion, this particular political system called "democracy" works. I understand where you are coming from, but now and then you need to go into the details of how things are done in the real world. If you don't like how it works, make a plan and publish it. Karl Marx did just that, and it kept people busy for a century. I don't know how well you will be received, though, if you propose to abolish the existing system - and what will you replace it with? The planet hasn't seen yet a large scale system that is better. Design one if you can.
Supposing I stand, in Canada, just north of the US border, and I see the police beating an innocent man 10 feet to the south of me in the USA. Are you suggesting that I shouldn't speak out?
This presupposes that you can instantly judge the situation. Sometimes it is easier, sometimes it is more difficult. Even in your example will you risk your life to cross a police officer? He is already doing something illegal (beating someone.) What stops him from shooting you and then dropping the bloody baton into your cold, dead hands? What good can you do when you, the only witness, are dead and framed, and the crooked cop walks? Is there a smarter thing to do?
We can debate for hours even a trivial thing, like the one you drew. But what if the decision is about some foreign affairs? Here is a quiz: in 1917 there were three major parties in Russia - bolsheviks, mensheviks and SRs (socialist-revolutionaries.) Which one will you support? Answer: you'd have to be insane to even consider answering this question, they were all bad. And how can you, over tens of thousands of miles, recognize who is better and who is worse?
But today, you might say, we have news, radio, internet and such. This doesn't help. You simply become the hostage of different people. Nobody among the media will tell you the truth, in part because they don't know it and in part because they are not paid to tell the truth. Remember the staged photographs of Kosovars "behind" the fence (in front of it, in fact) or the Kuwait ambassador's daughter telling tall tales about the Iraqi soldiers? All lies.
The only way to know the truth is, IMO, to be part of it. People who live in land $X are the only true witnesses of what is happening there. And even their word should be accepted carefully, with many checks - people have interests and will lie for a dollar (or for Euro these days.)
I can say that I do not know much about Tibet, and I suspect that Tibet is not knowable to me unless I go and live there for a while. I'm not going to do that. So I don't tell China or Tibetans even my own opinion on the subject because it is most likely wrong. If Tibet - the whole of it - truly wants to be free, there are plenty of ways to get there. A general strike of the whole Tibet will not go unnoticed. A hunger strike of all Tibetans will bring the Chinese government to its knees. I don't want to listen to loud politicians who probably represent nobody in their native land. Such loudmouths are dime a dozen and they will be glad to sell any lie that is convenient (remember Iraq's Curveball? Remember Ahmed Chalabi?) I ignore them all and try to mind my own business.
If we exclude people's ideas based on where the ideas come from rather than the merit of the idea itself, we are doing ourselves a great disservice.
True. Tibetans are welcome to set up a conference, in Tibet or abroad, and invite native and foreign speakers. I don't recall Mr. Powderly being invited to such an event, though. Even the wisest words will be badly received if spoken in wrong circumstances; even the tastiest food will not be welcomed if offered in a wrong moment.
Is it necessarily true that those not involved in a given situation would not have something positive to add?
Not true, IMO. Imagine a phone poll about a prospective product. The pollster calls random numbers and asks "if I were to offer you this vacuum cleaner with that feature for so much, would you buy one?" The results can be very informative.
However it is my right to enter my phone number into the "do not call" registry, or simply to not answer calls from unknown numbers. This is the harshest recourse that a citizen has in this case. A country can go farther and, for example, make all prerecorded sales calls illegal (which FCC just did, as I recall.) This becomes the law, and people can go to jail for breaking it. A country can make even harsher laws, outlawing all sales phone calls, for example. Many countries limit activities of foreign activists to social ends, and explicitly forbid them any political work. In the USA there are laws against foreign political contributions, for example - nobody wants to let China use its dollars to buy politicians here.
To summarize, yes, a stranger may have a useful opinion on a subject that does not concern him. But still he has the right to be left alone on his land.
So now Mr. Powderly is akin to a terrorist or hired killer for speaking his mind. Nice, will you liken him to Hitler next?
Godwin aside, Mr. Powderly is reportedly a lawbreaker who lied on his visa application and conspired to violate other laws of China (not important whether they are fair or not, and a foreigner has no say in fairness of Chinese laws anyway.) I think he will be just deported with no further consequences. To look from a different angle, if a Chinese tourist will write on his immigration form that he is entering the USA to instigate a revolt against the government he'd be lucky to be only denied entry; if he lies and then instigates a revolt then he will visit Cuba, all expenses paid.
Is calling attention to one country's invasion and mistreatment of another REALLY akin to telling someone to fuck themselves, or projecting graphic sexual images onto a score board?
You can easily find that out by hacking into the score board and showing Abu Ghraib photos during the game. They will cover all the aspects under discussion.
Does James Powderly have an army with which to back up his request?
Policy of interventionism does not have to use an army. There are many non-military methods. Send a pile of money to the desired foreign political party and see it win. Send a pile of money to some terrorists and see unrest growing, then declare that the country is now a "failed state" and then take it over. Send some black money to a killer and take the undesirable political figure out.
Everyone has every right to tell anyone anything, and everyone is free to ignore others' requests.
Let's see. Do I have a right to [hypothetically] tell you to go Cheney yourself? In public? Repeatedly? Loudly? Even if you tell me in no uncertain terms that you don't want to hear this offer ever again? Of course not, this would be harassment. But if I don't have that right to annoy and harass you, then your statement is flawed.
Your position seems quite authoritarian.
I believe that the government represents the people and acts on their behalf. If the Chinese government does not allow certain types of speech then I presume the majority of Chinese people agree. If they don't like that, they are expected to change the government *themselves* as it is their right and obligation. Until they do so I will keep presuming that their officials speak for them. I consider them free to act as they please; if they want they can easily overthrow any government, they have the numbers and revolutions happened before in China, the Chinese people can do it if they want to.
No one is forcing anyone to listen or act on Mr. Powderly's desires
We are talking here about Mr. Powderly's plan to force his political statement onto hundreds of thousands of people who didn't even come to see it. Would you like to come to a baseball game and suddenly see a [as an example - I don't care about this one] graphic gay promotional video similarly projected onto the score board? Can you say that the gay activists are free and welcome to do this?
You are right, he didn't, I just unthinkingly dragged this in because that's the subject we are discussing here (a foreigner came to China to tell them how to govern themselves.) It's also counter-intuitive when someone "expresses his desires" about something that you have nothing to do with. Normally if someone tells you something it's because you are somehow involved, otherwise it's waste of time.
No, you are not free to tell me how I should conduct my business. If you try to tell me things on my own land you are trespassing, please leave.
We are free to demonstrate and protest that which we find morally objectionable,
Absolutely, as long as you do it on your own territory, or on a public land.
and no arbitrary borders or citizenship should stop us.
Sorry, the property line is here and you may not cross without my permission.
I find your stance morally reprehensible, as it seeks to divide people into arbitrary groups
Sorry, you are swinging your ax at the freedom of association. Any group of people is free to join for any common purpose it wishes.
who are not allowed to support each other in seeking redress for wrongs.
Allowed? No, there is no authority over nations (the UN is not even close.) Free people, grouped into a nation or just standing on a street corner, may choose to allow or disallow an input from outsiders. It's *their* decision, if they are free, of course.
You advocate a particularly sick form of authoritarianism
No, I advocate freedom. You, on the other hand, advocate interventionism, a policy that hurts the United States on the international arena. What right do you have to tell other nations how to live?
What does the fact that he isn't Tibetan or a Chinese citizen have to do with anything?
People of any country have an exclusive right to demand changes from their government. Only then they are free. This guy makes Chinese and Tibetans less free because he infringes on their rights, and on top of that his example justifies more oppression from the government.
As a bad analogy, you are free to move furniture in your house, and only your family's wishes may constrain you. However what will you say if I, a total stranger, set up demonstrations around your house demanding that a certain desk should be moved into a certain corner, and not where it is now?
Even better example. Judge issues warrant for you to produce paper files. You are the only one who knows where they are located. If you try saying that telling the court where they are would be self incrimination and thus you are invoking the 5th you should not be suprised to find yourself in a cell.
Conclusion: anyone who uses his constitutional right to not incriminate himself incriminates himself. [Head explodes.]
why don't you see what the legal definition of "depicting" is [...]
You lost the context here. Depicting can be many things indeed, you are right about that. However "animation depicting..." means only one thing - a work of art that is made with hand-drawn or otherwise artificially generated series of images. These images are not real photographs because that would be called a movie.
A computer model is far more useful than a piece of hardware on your desk. It does more and costs less.
One important aspect is measurements. There is no easy way to do any meaningful measurements in a microwave circuit unless it is specifically designed for that (and for nothing else.) However a CST or Ansoft model allows you to measure the field, or the current, or whatever else you want in any point of the model (and of the space around it, if you build an antenna, for example.) These measurements will be totally non-invasive, as opposed to a real-world probe that you would have to use. Some RF designs require hundreds of iterations before you achieve the desired compromise between all your design goals. Doing this in a computer will take a month. Doing this in metal will take 10 years.
Another advantage is in parametric design. Usually models are not hardcoded, but defined with a set of parameters (Excel for Autodesk Inventor, built-in spreadsheets for SolidWorks, etc.) You can manipulate these parameters and [almost] instantly see their effect. To do this in a real-world hardware you'd need weeks and thousands of dollars.
Per my current practice, the model is built only as a working prototype, when the design has been done and validated on the computer. This model can be also used as a sales demo, but the main purpose of building it is to verify the calculations, and the quality of the overall design (such as "can it be assembled?")
I have NO problem with bringing an Indian over here when we have a SHORTAGE in a field
You will ALWAYS have a shortage in the field when employers want to sift through 100,000 applicants and find just one who is absolutely best for this job (or so they think.) In other words, they want the 0.001% of Earth's geniuses gathered from the entire planet.
This is a problem because there is no simple criteria of who is fit to do this and that. If you dig trenches, anyone who can dig a trench qualifies, and it's easy to see that. In engineering it's hard even for managers to assess the skills of an employee, let alone to prove this in court.
Given the limitations of GPS, except for when it's in a garage or building;)
This is a moot point nowadays, modern navigation GPS units have accelerometers that are precise enough to support a good distance on inertial navigation alone, until they can reacquire a satellite signal.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why a RISC chip would be inherently harder to build than a CISC chip.
That's not the problem because RISC CPUs *are* easier to build. The problem is in *using* RISC CPUs. Each instruction is simple, so you need many instructions to do the same thing that one instruction does on CISC. So the code size grows. Also instead of fetching one MOVSx and chewing on it until you transfer the whole block your RISC CPU may need to sit in a tight loop and load/store word by word, and fetch the instructions also - hopefully from a local cache but it's still work.
Basically RISC and CISC are ways to optimize the distribution of work between different pieces of a computing system. If your memory is fast and cheap go RISC. If your memory is not very fast then you get a major hit in performance. But a RISC CPU is simpler. I can understand that when CPU of IBM/370 took a large room it was a valid point. But today IC designers literally don't know what to do with the silicon real estate that they have on each die. So it makes sense to throw FETs at the problem and save the precious memory bandwidth for things that truly must be in RAM - your data, or your efficiently packed machine instructions. RISC has advantages only when your CPU must be simple and run cold, and when RAM is faster than your CPU - and that is the case in many embedded systems.
Yelling fire in a crowded theater is indeed permissible under free speech.
It is also a good idea if there is an actual fire in a crowded theater.
You can't fight for your rights and at the same time expect convenience. Last time the USA had a civil war some people were even killed!
nstead, we ended up with a country that thought a large military class with many very poor proles with a wafte of communistic ideas was communism.
The "we" does not include the USSR. The abbreviation means "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and every child knew that they had socialism, not communism. There is a big difference.
It is also important to understand that USSR had no "military class" and not a single soul in any way benefited from military manufacturing, very much unlike the USA.
What sort of opportunities are there for American citizens to work abroad?
None whatsoever, as a general rule. All countries (and EU) protect their labor market and do not allow foreigners to just come and work. And the USA does the same. Basically you will need a work visa which usually requires some sponsorship from a local company, and you need to allow some time (years?) for the paperwork to get through. Without such arrangements you will be in position of a Mexican who illegally crossed the border.
IMO, the only possibility to quickly move out and start working is in gaining employment with a US company that has offices in other countries. This way you can be hired here and then transferred abroad with no questions asked.
Folks seem to neglect this minor detail that it is ultimately a good thing the USDA is taking measures to prevent mis-information and FUD from affecting beef exports
It's not a good thing at all. USDA is interfering with the free market. In a free market anyone is able to buy any test kits [that are not regulated like an atom bomb] and test as many of his own cattle as he wishes. It might be a stupid thing to do, but it shouldn't be a USDA mandate to protect people from unwise decisions.
The kits should be available to anyone who asks them, and if the government wants to educate the customers it is free to advertise their shortcomings. The very fact that this abnormal situation exists tells us that the US economy has little to do with a free market. We see that the market wants the testing to be done, and the government says "no, you may not."
Very hard to fake in real time, but it can be done.
IANAP (I am not a prestidigitator) but I saw many on TV. It would be possible to take an HDD, show it to witnesses and then drop a different HDD into the smelter. Notebook drives are particularly easy to substitute.
This can be defeated only by the customer personally dropping the HDD into the machine, and the machine has to be inspected before and after the process, including checking the weight of the scrap. This presumes that the machine is sufficiently simple to verify.
If I were the customer concerned about my secret data, I'd put the drives under a hydraulic press first, then I'd roll the resulting foil up and give to the operator of a smelter.
Will I have to bother going into work the day after they fire this thing up?
Most workers find a faster Internet link at work, which will be essential to see all the videos of the unfolding doom. Remember, there will be no rebroadcasts!
We have such a warning at work, on the doors. There are indeed dangerous chemicals in the building, in one chemical lab, accessible to maybe 10 chemists. The remaining 1,990 workers do sales and support and design stuff on computers.
It's really quite amazing how much the hardware has outstripped the ability of software to keep up.
It's not amazing at all. Most desktop applications are single-threaded because you, the operator, are single-threaded. MS Word could enter words on all 100 pages of your book simultaneously, but you aren't able to produce them. An audio player could decode and play 100 songs to you at the same time, but you want to listen to one song at a time...
I can see niche desktop applications where multiple threads are of use. For example, GIMP (or Paint.net or Photoshop) could apply your filter to 100 independent squares of the photo if you have 100 cores. However the gain would be tiny, the extra coding labor would be considerable, and you still need to stitch these squares... all to gain a second or two of a rare filter operation?
The most effective use of multiple cores today is either in servers, or in finite element modeling applications.
This I must call bullshit on
A well known Russian comedian once said: "Let's debate the taste of a pineapple with people who ate them."
Insiders generally know more than outsiders. This is triply true for such a paranoid society as North Korea. We do not care what North Koreans think about hamburgers. Americans similarly have no clue if there is life on Alpha Centauri, but who cares about that? We only care if they know what is happening inside the country. The whole population of North Korea knows everything on that subject - it's all made by their hands, after all. If you want to know what NK is up to, ask Kim's closest advisors - they know, they probably told him what he wants. Who outside of this circle would know that? Nobody.
And you feel that this is fair and just treatment?
Well, this is a very serious question now. Why? Because the true democracy can not survive; it is just as non-viable as a true communism or socialism. A true democracy, where everything is allowed, also allows for its own destruction. This happens because people are not identical clones of each other. People have interests; some people (very few) have lust for power, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to get all the power.
In a democracy such a populist, using words of an ancient Greek, "only need to promise more money to the public" to win. This flaw was well known back then, and practically could be controlled only in small scale democracies, like village-sized cities. As societies grew, this law of nature selected Kings and Czars and many other rulers (they didn't exist in a vacuum, and a good group of barons could do a quick job on an uncooperative King.)
Later populists came to power in France, killed thousands of people and eventually got killed themselves. Populists reoccur all the time these days; Boris Yeltsin was one such populist, he rose on the platform of government being asleep (or drunk) at the wheel, as later we learned. In Venezuela Hugo Chavez is heavily using populist methods ("money to the people".) So this is not just a theory.
Anyhow, now we see that a true democracy can be subverted from within. Once a person gets to the reins he may well want to stay in charge. Saddam of Iraq was one such guy - he led a revolt, set up his pocket Baath party, and sat on the throne until recently. Lenin and Stalin in Russia did exactly the same thing earlier. A certain German politician, not to be named due to Godwin, was also a great orator and populist. People literally died for him. So now we see that a true democracy tends to decay into a dictatorship, and the catalyst that is needed is an aggressive, ambitious populist and the society that is not as wise as it should (it is seldom wise, as a rule - people are not paid to learn governing, and it's a boring job.)
Now we want democracy but we don't want it to slide into fascism and tyranny. How do we do that? Democracy is not stable. If you look above you will see that to keep the democracy flourishing you need to maintain wise voters, or you need to put a clamp on politicians. The USA can not maintain wise voters because first it's too hard and only Switzerland can claim such a success. Secondly, the USA seemingly is not interested in educated citizenry - the public education system is training children to be just smart enough to hold a basic job.
Without smart voters the society in the USA can see a massive upheaval (a revolt.) You can observe shades of it looking at Obama. But Obama is a well-trained politician, he will not stray from the party line, not any more than a Soviet politician would dare. You can see for yourself what Obama says and how he votes - it's perfectly in line with the current policy. No revolts allowed here; and if anyone tries ... remember politicians and social leaders who were suddenly killed and their killers also killed. It happened here.
So it seems obvious that the democracy in the USA (or any democracy that wants to survive) can not afford uncontrolled rabble rousers. They are bad news. Some say: "Let them speak and the public will sort them out" - no, if the public is stupid (as all public invariably is, in the USA or in Russia or in China) then this rabble rouser can suddenly become the next Fuehrer. It has happened before, and we'd better remember that.
You are welcome to agree or disagree, I do not advocate anything - I only tried to explain how, in my opinion, this particular political system called "democracy" works. I understand where you are coming from, but now and then you need to go into the details of how things are done in the real world. If you don't like how it works, make a plan and publish it. Karl Marx did just that, and it kept people busy for a century. I don't know how well you will be received, though, if you propose to abolish the existing system - and what will you replace it with? The planet hasn't seen yet a large scale system that is better. Design one if you can.
Supposing I stand, in Canada, just north of the US border, and I see the police beating an innocent man 10 feet to the south of me in the USA. Are you suggesting that I shouldn't speak out?
This presupposes that you can instantly judge the situation. Sometimes it is easier, sometimes it is more difficult. Even in your example will you risk your life to cross a police officer? He is already doing something illegal (beating someone.) What stops him from shooting you and then dropping the bloody baton into your cold, dead hands? What good can you do when you, the only witness, are dead and framed, and the crooked cop walks? Is there a smarter thing to do?
We can debate for hours even a trivial thing, like the one you drew. But what if the decision is about some foreign affairs? Here is a quiz: in 1917 there were three major parties in Russia - bolsheviks, mensheviks and SRs (socialist-revolutionaries.) Which one will you support? Answer: you'd have to be insane to even consider answering this question, they were all bad. And how can you, over tens of thousands of miles, recognize who is better and who is worse?
But today, you might say, we have news, radio, internet and such. This doesn't help. You simply become the hostage of different people. Nobody among the media will tell you the truth, in part because they don't know it and in part because they are not paid to tell the truth. Remember the staged photographs of Kosovars "behind" the fence (in front of it, in fact) or the Kuwait ambassador's daughter telling tall tales about the Iraqi soldiers? All lies.
The only way to know the truth is, IMO, to be part of it. People who live in land $X are the only true witnesses of what is happening there. And even their word should be accepted carefully, with many checks - people have interests and will lie for a dollar (or for Euro these days.)
I can say that I do not know much about Tibet, and I suspect that Tibet is not knowable to me unless I go and live there for a while. I'm not going to do that. So I don't tell China or Tibetans even my own opinion on the subject because it is most likely wrong. If Tibet - the whole of it - truly wants to be free, there are plenty of ways to get there. A general strike of the whole Tibet will not go unnoticed. A hunger strike of all Tibetans will bring the Chinese government to its knees. I don't want to listen to loud politicians who probably represent nobody in their native land. Such loudmouths are dime a dozen and they will be glad to sell any lie that is convenient (remember Iraq's Curveball? Remember Ahmed Chalabi?) I ignore them all and try to mind my own business.
If we exclude people's ideas based on where the ideas come from rather than the merit of the idea itself, we are doing ourselves a great disservice.
True. Tibetans are welcome to set up a conference, in Tibet or abroad, and invite native and foreign speakers. I don't recall Mr. Powderly being invited to such an event, though. Even the wisest words will be badly received if spoken in wrong circumstances; even the tastiest food will not be welcomed if offered in a wrong moment.
Is it necessarily true that those not involved in a given situation would not have something positive to add?
Not true, IMO. Imagine a phone poll about a prospective product. The pollster calls random numbers and asks "if I were to offer you this vacuum cleaner with that feature for so much, would you buy one?" The results can be very informative.
However it is my right to enter my phone number into the "do not call" registry, or simply to not answer calls from unknown numbers. This is the harshest recourse that a citizen has in this case. A country can go farther and, for example, make all prerecorded sales calls illegal (which FCC just did, as I recall.) This becomes the law, and people can go to jail for breaking it. A country can make even harsher laws, outlawing all sales phone calls, for example. Many countries limit activities of foreign activists to social ends, and explicitly forbid them any political work. In the USA there are laws against foreign political contributions, for example - nobody wants to let China use its dollars to buy politicians here.
To summarize, yes, a stranger may have a useful opinion on a subject that does not concern him. But still he has the right to be left alone on his land.
So now Mr. Powderly is akin to a terrorist or hired killer for speaking his mind. Nice, will you liken him to Hitler next?
Godwin aside, Mr. Powderly is reportedly a lawbreaker who lied on his visa application and conspired to violate other laws of China (not important whether they are fair or not, and a foreigner has no say in fairness of Chinese laws anyway.) I think he will be just deported with no further consequences. To look from a different angle, if a Chinese tourist will write on his immigration form that he is entering the USA to instigate a revolt against the government he'd be lucky to be only denied entry; if he lies and then instigates a revolt then he will visit Cuba, all expenses paid.
Is calling attention to one country's invasion and mistreatment of another REALLY akin to telling someone to fuck themselves, or projecting graphic sexual images onto a score board?
You can easily find that out by hacking into the score board and showing Abu Ghraib photos during the game. They will cover all the aspects under discussion.
Does James Powderly have an army with which to back up his request?
Policy of interventionism does not have to use an army. There are many non-military methods. Send a pile of money to the desired foreign political party and see it win. Send a pile of money to some terrorists and see unrest growing, then declare that the country is now a "failed state" and then take it over. Send some black money to a killer and take the undesirable political figure out.
Everyone has every right to tell anyone anything, and everyone is free to ignore others' requests.
Let's see. Do I have a right to [hypothetically] tell you to go Cheney yourself? In public? Repeatedly? Loudly? Even if you tell me in no uncertain terms that you don't want to hear this offer ever again? Of course not, this would be harassment. But if I don't have that right to annoy and harass you, then your statement is flawed.
Your position seems quite authoritarian.
I believe that the government represents the people and acts on their behalf. If the Chinese government does not allow certain types of speech then I presume the majority of Chinese people agree. If they don't like that, they are expected to change the government *themselves* as it is their right and obligation. Until they do so I will keep presuming that their officials speak for them. I consider them free to act as they please; if they want they can easily overthrow any government, they have the numbers and revolutions happened before in China, the Chinese people can do it if they want to.
No one is forcing anyone to listen or act on Mr. Powderly's desires
We are talking here about Mr. Powderly's plan to force his political statement onto hundreds of thousands of people who didn't even come to see it. Would you like to come to a baseball game and suddenly see a [as an example - I don't care about this one] graphic gay promotional video similarly projected onto the score board? Can you say that the gay activists are free and welcome to do this?
You are right, he didn't, I just unthinkingly dragged this in because that's the subject we are discussing here (a foreigner came to China to tell them how to govern themselves.) It's also counter-intuitive when someone "expresses his desires" about something that you have nothing to do with. Normally if someone tells you something it's because you are somehow involved, otherwise it's waste of time.
We are all free to express our desires to anyone.
No, you are not free to tell me how I should conduct my business. If you try to tell me things on my own land you are trespassing, please leave.
We are free to demonstrate and protest that which we find morally objectionable,
Absolutely, as long as you do it on your own territory, or on a public land.
and no arbitrary borders or citizenship should stop us.
Sorry, the property line is here and you may not cross without my permission.
I find your stance morally reprehensible, as it seeks to divide people into arbitrary groups
Sorry, you are swinging your ax at the freedom of association. Any group of people is free to join for any common purpose it wishes.
who are not allowed to support each other in seeking redress for wrongs.
Allowed? No, there is no authority over nations (the UN is not even close.) Free people, grouped into a nation or just standing on a street corner, may choose to allow or disallow an input from outsiders. It's *their* decision, if they are free, of course.
You advocate a particularly sick form of authoritarianism
No, I advocate freedom. You, on the other hand, advocate interventionism, a policy that hurts the United States on the international arena. What right do you have to tell other nations how to live?
What does the fact that he isn't Tibetan or a Chinese citizen have to do with anything?
People of any country have an exclusive right to demand changes from their government. Only then they are free. This guy makes Chinese and Tibetans less free because he infringes on their rights, and on top of that his example justifies more oppression from the government.
As a bad analogy, you are free to move furniture in your house, and only your family's wishes may constrain you. However what will you say if I, a total stranger, set up demonstrations around your house demanding that a certain desk should be moved into a certain corner, and not where it is now?
Even better example. Judge issues warrant for you to produce paper files. You are the only one who knows where they are located. If you try saying that telling the court where they are would be self incrimination and thus you are invoking the 5th you should not be suprised to find yourself in a cell.
Conclusion: anyone who uses his constitutional right to not incriminate himself incriminates himself. [Head explodes.]
why don't you see what the legal definition of "depicting" is [...]
You lost the context here. Depicting can be many things indeed, you are right about that. However "animation depicting ..." means only one thing - a work of art that is made with hand-drawn or otherwise artificially generated series of images. These images are not real photographs because that would be called a movie.
A computer model is far more useful than a piece of hardware on your desk. It does more and costs less.
One important aspect is measurements. There is no easy way to do any meaningful measurements in a microwave circuit unless it is specifically designed for that (and for nothing else.) However a CST or Ansoft model allows you to measure the field, or the current, or whatever else you want in any point of the model (and of the space around it, if you build an antenna, for example.) These measurements will be totally non-invasive, as opposed to a real-world probe that you would have to use. Some RF designs require hundreds of iterations before you achieve the desired compromise between all your design goals. Doing this in a computer will take a month. Doing this in metal will take 10 years.
Another advantage is in parametric design. Usually models are not hardcoded, but defined with a set of parameters (Excel for Autodesk Inventor, built-in spreadsheets for SolidWorks, etc.) You can manipulate these parameters and [almost] instantly see their effect. To do this in a real-world hardware you'd need weeks and thousands of dollars.
Per my current practice, the model is built only as a working prototype, when the design has been done and validated on the computer. This model can be also used as a sales demo, but the main purpose of building it is to verify the calculations, and the quality of the overall design (such as "can it be assembled?")
A Flatlander's Universe is a sheet of paper. He has no idea that there are many sheets in a ream.
I have NO problem with bringing an Indian over here when we have a SHORTAGE in a field
You will ALWAYS have a shortage in the field when employers want to sift through 100,000 applicants and find just one who is absolutely best for this job (or so they think.) In other words, they want the 0.001% of Earth's geniuses gathered from the entire planet.
This is a problem because there is no simple criteria of who is fit to do this and that. If you dig trenches, anyone who can dig a trench qualifies, and it's easy to see that. In engineering it's hard even for managers to assess the skills of an employee, let alone to prove this in court.
Given the limitations of GPS, except for when it's in a garage or building ;)
This is a moot point nowadays, modern navigation GPS units have accelerometers that are precise enough to support a good distance on inertial navigation alone, until they can reacquire a satellite signal.