foss software is not so much a hobby nowadays, so i don't think getting paid really isn't a primary differentiating factor. recent research indicates that significant contributions are being made to linux by hired hands (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2009/08/linux-foundation-updates-study-linux-development-statistics-who-wri), over 70% of the kernel, for instance.
does anyone know the correlation of results of research done on mice to results later found in humans? i've heard it's very low and certainly many drugs that were tested on mice and deemed safe were taken off the market due to dangers in humans.
Haven't you ever gotten really enthusiastic about a project before? Didn't this enthusiasm motivate you to get started and see how far you could push your idea, even while a little part of you knew that realistically it probably wouldn't live up to all of your expectations?
yes, yes, we westerners always know what's best for others. our grasp of the complex issues of a billion-plus person country are perfectly reflected by cartoonish summaries spawning countless cartoonish comments.
BAD GOVERNMENT! No Tibet for you!
INTERNET could FREE PEOPLE OF CHINA, because the truth will set you freeeeeeee!!!!
CHINESE likey censorship, if car come too
now that i think about it, it's perfect. this government vs the people narrative is just like star wars! now if only the bad guys would dress up in white plastic suits so the rest of the world could tell who they are, we could send in chewie. i hope the real emperor's head isn't as pale as it was in the movie...the camera beaming images back to a free west might crack a lens.
la is definitely special in a lot of ways, but one thing it actually has in common with many cities is much of its public transportation radiates outward from downtown. i picked a place to live near downtown, right on the gold line and commute to northridge (~25 miles) on trains and buses most days. in addition to saving money straight up ($4.50/day driving vs $3 on train/bus), employers often offer ride share incentives. the cost to me of my monthly pass is $12.
the main problem in la is there are no outer rings as ctmzeus pointed out (though pasadena city hall to glendale city hall is closer to 20 minutes than 30 all day, so i'm not sure where the 3hr trek comes from). as the subject says, everyone's situation is different. however, even in sprawling, exurby sourthern ca, public-transit-commute-friendly situations can be created.
perhaps i'm wrong about how all this works, even after rtfa, but hasn't the paper industry been efficient in an energy sense for some time? assuming that it's okay to reward industries for efficiency (which is arguable, but it's what the bill does), shouldn't paper be rewarded for having been efficient all along?
fwiw, a similar situation is happening right now in l.a. with water (albeit with penalties instead of rewards). people are being penalized during drought conditions for not reducing their water usage. those who have been conserving all along have a hard time reducing and get penalized.
with gm and other players from the auto industry working with the electricity industry (as discussed on slashdot at http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/22/1827224), i would say the line of reasoning is quite on-topic. if our solar energy production capacity and ability to store that energy advance sufficiently, we'll be charging cars overnight rather than pumping gas.
i know this is nitpicky, but the christians fighting for creationism typically don't like catholics (ie, where priests come from).
see the following quote from http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp: Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that manâ(TM)s body developed from previous biological forms, under Godâ(TM)s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul.
mit just did a study saying that all the infrastructure required to support this fancy internet thing and the social apparatus it depends on costs roughly 8.5 tons of carbon per person (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/footprint-tt0416.html?tr=y&auid=3701558). okay, so that's only the u.s., but let's use it as a basis of argument.
your single modern-day scientist is consuming roughly 4x what the u.n. thinks is sustainable (search for 14.5 gigatonnes in http://www.undp.or.th/news_20072911.html) just by being alive, never mind the energy required for scholarly pursuits. my suspicion is this number is much higher than the 1908 fellow with a slide rule and large library.
i would be surprised if the ratio of per-capita energy consumption of 2008 to 1908 is higher than the per-capita productivity of the same period (in other words, i think technology has made us more efficient). all i'm saying is the efficiencies are not the huge leaps and bounds we tend to attribute to ourselves.
well, first off i want to thank you for coming back from personal attacks. it's not often on public message boards that things start down that path and come back from it.
i agree with pretty much everything you say. there are a few subtle nuanced differences, which i outline below, but for the most part i think we agree.
the distinction i was making with slashdot being chinese is simply that there often is a diverse set of chinese perspectives on slashdot (albeit not modded up to 4 or 5).
it is expected and responsible that people criticise all governments, particularly their own. however, when the criticism ends up being all invective (to borrow your term) and that invective results in a mob mentality where there's essentially a free-for-all devoid of rational thought, something else is going on. it's hard to get that kind of reaction unless you've hit a nerve of some kind or another.
my original post was intended to show that we've reached that point with china, both on slashdot and in the general media.
my last two posts were just trying ferret out why. to analyze that, you have to look at cross-cultural attitudes and, unfortunately, stereotypes and ignorance. in this context, separating a people from their government becomes academic. if one can freely attack a people because of his/her attitude towards them and their culture, s/he will certainly attack their government even more freely. in other words, i think it's now open season on the chinese government because it's been open season on asian people (again, i include much of the middle east here) for some time.
to clarify my point on media representation, i thought up the following exercise. if you make a 3d plot, you can quite clearly illustrate the biases. put on the x-axis a strength spectrum (-1 for weak, 1 for strong), on the y-axis a goodness spectrum (-1 for evil, 1 for good). if you prefer, the y-axis could be antagonist/protagonist instead of good/evil. on the z-axis, plot the frequency that you see characters with those traits in western (or perhaps more appropriately, northwestern, as south america and africa are rarely included in "western") entertainment. if you make that plot for non-asians, you'll find a reasonable frequency in the upper-right quadrant (strong, good). the plot for asians is, in comparison, quite small.
no christian bashing (at least on slashdot) has ever compared to the china bashing we're seeing now. you may feel differently because you are a christian. i am neither a citizen of china nor part of its government, so i will claim higher objectivity on this one.
i've noticed everything you mention about portrayal, but you really are reaching if you think the mere existence of unfair portrayal of others means that it isn't more pronounced for asians. any media representation class or text book will back me up on this. and don't forget that "asians" (at least in my discussion) includes many arabs.
my ethnicity has no bearing on this discussion any more than your religion.
the distinction between a government and its people is an academic one. i'm explaining the deep-rooted feelings of one culture for another. the standard "the people must rise" makes no difference if the people agree with the government. by attacking the government, you are attacking the people who support it. maybe they have their reasons for supporting it.
also, by saying that chinese forums never say anything bad about the west, you are conversely implicating slashdot as non-chinese. i disagree with that.
you're trying equate being christian on slashdot to being a racial minority? really?
it's apologist to lump the recent vitriol for china in with even the anti-microsoft hyperbole. the hatred voiced for china is far more irrational and that irrationality is far more rewarded than any of the examples you mention.
imho, the two primary contributors to this are fear and media representation. everyone seems to be worried about jobs going to china. though manufacturing has been streaming there for years, more and more, you see "soft" jobs getting shipped there too. because of this fear, people lash out and china, forgetting their own laziness and education-slashing elected officials deserve some blame.
media representation of chinese (and asians in general) is also troublesome. time after time, asians are neither dominant nor strong (unless you count the asian equivalent of blaxploitation, martial arts movies). the men are often portrayed as weaker than women of other races and the women adhere to the dragon lady/lotus flower dichotomy. just about every study of media representation of asians bears this pattern out. as a result, people feel it's okay to bully asians. there are countless examples of this before the recent spate of china-bashing, sarah silverman being the most notorious in recent memory.
the point is there isn't much use in talking about generalities that apply weakly (christianity, corporations, etc), it's only the generalities that apply strongly (fear, representation, etc) that need to be fixed.
you should notice the only things modded up to 4 or 5 are for china-bashing and proclaim the need to isolate them. honestly, should anything that says "fuck china" be modded up? ever?
in other words, what gets promoted on this site is not measured criticism, but knee-jerk childishness.
i know this is slashdot and opinions voiced extremely are more likely to get modded up (or whatever dumb verb is equivalent to "digg"). but, really, how much china-bashing can one site tolerate and promote? how can people call for actively isolating a country of over a billion people and consider themselves nerds? where i grew up, nerds were among the few who stood a chance of seeing things rationally. these are clearly not the nerds of slashdot.
yes, china's government has issues. but no government in the world can escape this. french policy led to race riots. saudi arabia prohibits women from being elected. canadian ships open up waterways for the sole purpose of clubbing baby seals to death. and so on and so forth.
the world is an interconnected place. we have all contributed to all of these governments' actions, whether we like to think so or not. china's government did not appear out of a vacuum to suddenly take control of the country overnight. outside economic forces (cheap labor demand) contributed to how the chinese government behaves; and outside political forces (shift to capitalism please) did as well. forgetting your wallet and your vote in this (or selectively ignoring both) is irresponsible to the greatest degree.
it is also absolute cowardice to hide behind the "evil corporations did it" argument. while there may exist some few who have existed without ever patronizing a corporation, they do not represent even a slim minority. corporations act for profit, which only their customers (which means you) can hand them. and when customers are uninformed when purchasing, then they (again, this means you) are part of the problem.
if you've never been a customer, feel free to absolve yourself of this rant. otherwise, try to find a grown-up solution for grown-up problems. isolating china is not only a childish knee-jerk reaction, but it's completely ineffective. fidel's government was never overthrown and kim jong-il is still in power.
from what it sounds like, you don't read actual books as much as you do many other things (listen to music, surf the web, etc). i don't own a kindle, but based on what i've seen it is geared specifically to avid readers of print material. its e-ink display has only one purpose, to display text as readers of print material are accustomed, something i'm not sure the palm t/x accomplishes.
i rather appreciate the fact that the kindle does one thing and focuses on it rather than trying to be all-in-one.
also, when comparing price, remember that the kindle comes with wireless service. or, perhaps more appropriately, the price of the wireless service is included in the "book" purchase (in other words, no monthly fees for access).
The three elements we're used to (R, L and C) relate four things, potential, current, flux and charge. R relates current and potential, L current and flux and C potential and charge. The thing that relates flux to charge is this newfangled (compared to the other three) thing called a memristor. The other two relations (potential/flux and current/charge) are fundamental conservation laws.
At least that's what my quick Googling on the subject turned up.
Slashdot Mirror
foss software is not so much a hobby nowadays, so i don't think getting paid really isn't a primary differentiating factor. recent research indicates that significant contributions are being made to linux by hired hands (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2009/08/linux-foundation-updates-study-linux-development-statistics-who-wri), over 70% of the kernel, for instance.
does anyone know the correlation of results of research done on mice to results later found in humans? i've heard it's very low and certainly many drugs that were tested on mice and deemed safe were taken off the market due to dangers in humans.
Haven't you ever gotten really enthusiastic about a project before? Didn't this enthusiasm motivate you to get started and see how far you could push your idea, even while a little part of you knew that realistically it probably wouldn't live up to all of your expectations?
yes and yes. and then she slapped me.
yes, yes, we westerners always know what's best for others. our grasp of the complex issues of a billion-plus person country are perfectly reflected by cartoonish summaries spawning countless cartoonish comments.
BAD GOVERNMENT! No Tibet for you!
INTERNET could FREE PEOPLE OF CHINA, because the truth will set you freeeeeeee!!!!
CHINESE likey censorship, if car come too
now that i think about it, it's perfect. this government vs the people narrative is just like star wars! now if only the bad guys would dress up in white plastic suits so the rest of the world could tell who they are, we could send in chewie. i hope the real emperor's head isn't as pale as it was in the movie...the camera beaming images back to a free west might crack a lens.
that's not true. tommy chong is in prison. what is torture if not taking weed away from him?
Whenever a cop roughs someone up, a police-watcher would be there with a camera to put it all on tape. Try to negate that in court!
already did. google rodney king.
la is definitely special in a lot of ways, but one thing it actually has in common with many cities is much of its public transportation radiates outward from downtown. i picked a place to live near downtown, right on the gold line and commute to northridge (~25 miles) on trains and buses most days. in addition to saving money straight up ($4.50/day driving vs $3 on train/bus), employers often offer ride share incentives. the cost to me of my monthly pass is $12.
the main problem in la is there are no outer rings as ctmzeus pointed out (though pasadena city hall to glendale city hall is closer to 20 minutes than 30 all day, so i'm not sure where the 3hr trek comes from). as the subject says, everyone's situation is different. however, even in sprawling, exurby sourthern ca, public-transit-commute-friendly situations can be created.
perhaps i'm wrong about how all this works, even after rtfa, but hasn't the paper industry been efficient in an energy sense for some time? assuming that it's okay to reward industries for efficiency (which is arguable, but it's what the bill does), shouldn't paper be rewarded for having been efficient all along?
fwiw, a similar situation is happening right now in l.a. with water (albeit with penalties instead of rewards). people are being penalized during drought conditions for not reducing their water usage. those who have been conserving all along have a hard time reducing and get penalized.
now if you could just improve my understanding of physics enough to comprehend the link you sent, i'll be all set.
with gm and other players from the auto industry working with the electricity industry (as discussed on slashdot at http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/22/1827224), i would say the line of reasoning is quite on-topic. if our solar energy production capacity and ability to store that energy advance sufficiently, we'll be charging cars overnight rather than pumping gas.
wow, i'm disappointed in slashdot. 2 hours since the posting that this guy was a victim of a murder-suicide and not a single post acknowledging it.
i mean, i hate spam, but i'm not about to wish the do-er of the deed dead.
just remember, enron wasn't a penny stock.
ok, sorry to have to keep doing this, but the christians fighting for creation in schools are very rarely, if ever, catholics.
search for "human evolution" at http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp if you need proof.
i thought it was well understood that fundamentalist christians despise catholics.
i know this is nitpicky, but the christians fighting for creationism typically don't like catholics (ie, where priests come from).
see the following quote from http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp:
Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that manâ(TM)s body developed from previous biological forms, under Godâ(TM)s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul.
mit just did a study saying that all the infrastructure required to support this fancy internet thing and the social apparatus it depends on costs roughly 8.5 tons of carbon per person (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/footprint-tt0416.html?tr=y&auid=3701558). okay, so that's only the u.s., but let's use it as a basis of argument.
your single modern-day scientist is consuming roughly 4x what the u.n. thinks is sustainable (search for 14.5 gigatonnes in http://www.undp.or.th/news_20072911.html) just by being alive, never mind the energy required for scholarly pursuits. my suspicion is this number is much higher than the 1908 fellow with a slide rule and large library.
i would be surprised if the ratio of per-capita energy consumption of 2008 to 1908 is higher than the per-capita productivity of the same period (in other words, i think technology has made us more efficient). all i'm saying is the efficiencies are not the huge leaps and bounds we tend to attribute to ourselves.
well, first off i want to thank you for coming back from personal attacks. it's not often on public message boards that things start down that path and come back from it.
i agree with pretty much everything you say. there are a few subtle nuanced differences, which i outline below, but for the most part i think we agree.
the distinction i was making with slashdot being chinese is simply that there often is a diverse set of chinese perspectives on slashdot (albeit not modded up to 4 or 5).
it is expected and responsible that people criticise all governments, particularly their own. however, when the criticism ends up being all invective (to borrow your term) and that invective results in a mob mentality where there's essentially a free-for-all devoid of rational thought, something else is going on. it's hard to get that kind of reaction unless you've hit a nerve of some kind or another.
my original post was intended to show that we've reached that point with china, both on slashdot and in the general media.
my last two posts were just trying ferret out why. to analyze that, you have to look at cross-cultural attitudes and, unfortunately, stereotypes and ignorance. in this context, separating a people from their government becomes academic. if one can freely attack a people because of his/her attitude towards them and their culture, s/he will certainly attack their government even more freely. in other words, i think it's now open season on the chinese government because it's been open season on asian people (again, i include much of the middle east here) for some time.
to clarify my point on media representation, i thought up the following exercise. if you make a 3d plot, you can quite clearly illustrate the biases. put on the x-axis a strength spectrum (-1 for weak, 1 for strong), on the y-axis a goodness spectrum (-1 for evil, 1 for good). if you prefer, the y-axis could be antagonist/protagonist instead of good/evil. on the z-axis, plot the frequency that you see characters with those traits in western (or perhaps more appropriately, northwestern, as south america and africa are rarely included in "western") entertainment. if you make that plot for non-asians, you'll find a reasonable frequency in the upper-right quadrant (strong, good). the plot for asians is, in comparison, quite small.
no christian bashing (at least on slashdot) has ever compared to the china bashing we're seeing now. you may feel differently because you are a christian. i am neither a citizen of china nor part of its government, so i will claim higher objectivity on this one.
i've noticed everything you mention about portrayal, but you really are reaching if you think the mere existence of unfair portrayal of others means that it isn't more pronounced for asians. any media representation class or text book will back me up on this. and don't forget that "asians" (at least in my discussion) includes many arabs.
my ethnicity has no bearing on this discussion any more than your religion.
the distinction between a government and its people is an academic one. i'm explaining the deep-rooted feelings of one culture for another. the standard "the people must rise" makes no difference if the people agree with the government. by attacking the government, you are attacking the people who support it. maybe they have their reasons for supporting it.
also, by saying that chinese forums never say anything bad about the west, you are conversely implicating slashdot as non-chinese. i disagree with that.
you're trying equate being christian on slashdot to being a racial minority? really?
it's apologist to lump the recent vitriol for china in with even the anti-microsoft hyperbole. the hatred voiced for china is far more irrational and that irrationality is far more rewarded than any of the examples you mention.
imho, the two primary contributors to this are fear and media representation. everyone seems to be worried about jobs going to china. though manufacturing has been streaming there for years, more and more, you see "soft" jobs getting shipped there too. because of this fear, people lash out and china, forgetting their own laziness and education-slashing elected officials deserve some blame.
media representation of chinese (and asians in general) is also troublesome. time after time, asians are neither dominant nor strong (unless you count the asian equivalent of blaxploitation, martial arts movies). the men are often portrayed as weaker than women of other races and the women adhere to the dragon lady/lotus flower dichotomy. just about every study of media representation of asians bears this pattern out. as a result, people feel it's okay to bully asians. there are countless examples of this before the recent spate of china-bashing, sarah silverman being the most notorious in recent memory.
the point is there isn't much use in talking about generalities that apply weakly (christianity, corporations, etc), it's only the generalities that apply strongly (fear, representation, etc) that need to be fixed.
you should notice the only things modded up to 4 or 5 are for china-bashing and proclaim the need to isolate them. honestly, should anything that says "fuck china" be modded up? ever?
in other words, what gets promoted on this site is not measured criticism, but knee-jerk childishness.
notice that my post got modded DOWN to 0.
shareholders are people too.
well, i haven't actually seen horns and hooves grow from one yet. if i do, i'll let you know.
i know this is slashdot and opinions voiced extremely are more likely to get modded up (or whatever dumb verb is equivalent to "digg"). but, really, how much china-bashing can one site tolerate and promote? how can people call for actively isolating a country of over a billion people and consider themselves nerds? where i grew up, nerds were among the few who stood a chance of seeing things rationally. these are clearly not the nerds of slashdot.
yes, china's government has issues. but no government in the world can escape this. french policy led to race riots. saudi arabia prohibits women from being elected. canadian ships open up waterways for the sole purpose of clubbing baby seals to death. and so on and so forth.
the world is an interconnected place. we have all contributed to all of these governments' actions, whether we like to think so or not. china's government did not appear out of a vacuum to suddenly take control of the country overnight. outside economic forces (cheap labor demand) contributed to how the chinese government behaves; and outside political forces (shift to capitalism please) did as well. forgetting your wallet and your vote in this (or selectively ignoring both) is irresponsible to the greatest degree.
it is also absolute cowardice to hide behind the "evil corporations did it" argument. while there may exist some few who have existed without ever patronizing a corporation, they do not represent even a slim minority. corporations act for profit, which only their customers (which means you) can hand them. and when customers are uninformed when purchasing, then they (again, this means you) are part of the problem.
if you've never been a customer, feel free to absolve yourself of this rant. otherwise, try to find a grown-up solution for grown-up problems. isolating china is not only a childish knee-jerk reaction, but it's completely ineffective. fidel's government was never overthrown and kim jong-il is still in power.
and judging by the population in the southwest, it appears mexico is winning.
from what it sounds like, you don't read actual books as much as you do many other things (listen to music, surf the web, etc). i don't own a kindle, but based on what i've seen it is geared specifically to avid readers of print material. its e-ink display has only one purpose, to display text as readers of print material are accustomed, something i'm not sure the palm t/x accomplishes.
i rather appreciate the fact that the kindle does one thing and focuses on it rather than trying to be all-in-one.
also, when comparing price, remember that the kindle comes with wireless service. or, perhaps more appropriately, the price of the wireless service is included in the "book" purchase (in other words, no monthly fees for access).
even beavis and butthead got the science of iron man.
duuuuuh deeh
de neh neh
de-neh neh-neh neh-neh deh
duh neh neh
boyoyoyoyoooinng!
The three elements we're used to (R, L and C) relate four things, potential, current, flux and charge. R relates current and potential, L current and flux and C potential and charge. The thing that relates flux to charge is this newfangled (compared to the other three) thing called a memristor. The other two relations (potential/flux and current/charge) are fundamental conservation laws.
At least that's what my quick Googling on the subject turned up.