Knowledge of Chinese history helps put things in perspective.
Prior to the 20th century, China was ruled by emperors. They were autocratic and restrictive. Progress in China had essentially halted for hundreds of years, and the place was being overrun by Europeans.
In the early 20th century, the emperors were finally overthrown and China's government changed to a republic. This government was brutal and ineffectual, and the situation quickly degenerated into civil war.
Not too long after this, the Japanese saw a great chance and invaded. They spent the next decade and a half rampaging about the country, killing and raping as they wished, with the two Chinese factions doing about as much damage to each other as to the Japanese.
The Japanese were finally thrown out in 1945 as part of their general defeat in WWII. The civil war between the two factions, of course, continued in full swing.
That takes us to about the middle of the 20th century. At this point China was dirt poor and isolated. While considered one of the great powers of the world, by this time this consideration was given more because of tradition than because of fact.
Jump forward to 2008. China is widely considered to be an emerging superpower, with a sizable force of nuclear weapons and a modern, sophisticated military. The Chinese economy is the second largest in the world. While much of the rural population remains relatively poor, the cities boast hundreds of millions of people whose lifestyles largely resemble the middle classes of Western countries.
Yeah, there were some painful times during the half century I skipped over. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were very unhappy events. But on the other hand, the modern government of China bears little resemblance to the one which ruled during that era.
Modern China is vastly better off than at any other point in that country's history, and its people know it. You could argue that this has happened despite, rather than because, of the Communists but at the very least they have guided it and it happened under their watch. For a people who have basically never experienced Western style freedoms, the current situation looks very good. The great majority of Chinese people are happy with their government, and I can't really say that they're wrong. I think that they would be much better off with democracy, but it's hard to argue with their current success.
Except that the trend is in the opposite direction.
For phones, it used to be that there were at least three different intra-US calling areas. (I'm talking about times when I was actually there to see it, it may have been even more in times past.) You had local, which was usually but not always unlimited. You had an expanded nearby area which got one long-distance rate. You had the rest of the country which got another long-distance rate.
Now it's quite common to have phones which can call anywhere in the US with no differentiation. Nearly all cell phones are like this now, and many land lines are too. Long distance rates are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
International calls are starting to get this way too. For some extra money you can get unlimited international calls to a whole bunch of countries around the globe.
Data has seen the same trend. It used to be that you'd often get stuff for free from within your BBS or ISP, but pay for stuff farther away. Then the internet came along and made everything essentially free.
I see no indication that this trend is reversing. There may very well be attempts to keep things within the local network but I think that these attempts will be technological (better P2P routing, caching servers, etc.) rather than financial. Long distance communication just keeps getting cheaper.
He just screwed up a closing tag. Look at the source. He meant to italicize "Every", but instead accidentally italicized the whole post. But don't let the facts get in the way of your America bashing.
As far as "the free ride is over" is concerned, what evidence do you have of this? So a couple of ISPs are experimenting with the idea of per-GB pricing, big deal. Most services are still unlimited in most of the developed world and there is no imminent rush of ISPs moving to other pricing models. Australia and New Zealand are the anomalies, not the rule.
You're right, people who fail to notice the importance of one small sign among the dozens which populate an airport screening area are the ones at fault, not terrorists or insane politicians.
Learning from the past is the only reasonable thing to do now; planes were hijacked, the loss of life and damage was significant, so we work to stop it happening again. Anything else would be reckless. Excellent! The big lesson from the past is that passengers no longer allow airplane hijackings, so there is no longer any pressing need for security to be particularly watchful for them.
You think that would really stop them if they were really useful? I'm sure the law could be changed to give an exception for this. Of course, Israel and El Al are both good at implementing actual security, as opposed to the rampant security theater we get in the US.
It's not like there are a lot of alternatives? Are you serious? Name one thing that Amazon sells which you cannot find in another online store in under thirty seconds.
"People are used to them" is not even remotely close to "there are few alternatives".
Certainly, but the combination of the two makes it all the more unlikely. It would be a big surprise if Apple went through a bunch of effort to create a CDMA version of the iPhone just so that they could turn around and break a highly publicized carrier exclusivity contract with it. If they were going to break the contract (and this is certainly the less plausible of the two) then you'd think it would be with T-Mobile, rather than creating new equipment whose existence would be sure to leak the news ahead of time.
Considering that Apple has a three-year exclusivity contract with AT&T and that the iPhone so far has only had GSM capability (Verizon's network is CDMA), you certainly should be surprised if that happens.
So you're saying you want your politicians to be two-faced liars, always afraid to say what they actually believe because it might be unpopular? That's funny, because it's one of my biggest complaints about the profession.
Face it, it would be a lot easier for the President if the country were a dictatorship. That's only a bad thing to say if you think that being easier is sufficient justification to make it so, something that this one sentence does not indicate.
Whether a machine is considered self-reproducing or not is somewhat subject to interpretation I suppose. Similar issues arise with quines (self-reproducing programs). For example, consider the classic C quine,
For me, this is not a true quine, because there is no "#include<stdio.h>". It will not compile on typical C compilers. (There are longer quines that do have the include.) Overall I agree with your post, but I just have to pick a nit. There is nothing wrong with the quine you mention. It should compile on any C compiler. The include is optional as long as you're using functions whose prototypes match what you get from using them implicitly, which printf does. It won't compile in a C++ compiler since C++ requires explicit prototypes, but C++ is not C.
I generally avoid voting for the two main parties, because the two main parties are both completely untrustworthy.
To answer your question, I voted for Obama. He may end up winning, but since that vote didn't put him into government it doesn't invalidate what I said.
If you mean that other Clinton, I was not old enough to vote in 1996.
Even if my record is not 100%, it doesn't change my argument one whit. Even if 100% of the people I vote for make it into office, that still leaves 98 senators and several hundred representatives who I didn't vote for. Even if I voted for every single one of them, I could be voting for them simply because they're the lesser of two evils (which is always the case if they belong to one of the two major parties).
I don't vote for it. I consistently vote against the people who end up in power. So why should I trust them? It ultimately comes down to trusting my fellow citizens, who have uniformly shown themselves to be worthless chowderheads when it comes to voting for politicians.
I mostly agree, but I think that there is some utility in memorization as well. The reason for this is not to avoid computers, but to benefit from the brain's ability to make associations, and to a lesser extent be able to work faster.
To take a sort of contrived example, let's say you're looking at some random data that you're getting from a server and you don't know why. Then you notice that the beginning of the data is 0xCAFEBABE. Ah hah! you say, this is the magic number for a Mach-O fat binary wrapper. This data must be coming from an executable on a Mac somewhere! The point being that you can't substitute searching for memorization because you wouldn't necessarily notice the association in the first place if you didn't have that number memorized.
Memorizing facts that you use on a constant basis will also make your work go faster than if you have to look them up each time, simply because you have them at hand. But this is not so important because the brain tends to do this automatically anyway. You can treat it as a sort of LRU cache to the internet.
Given this, I think that memorization is handy and can indeed make you actually smarter due to being able to recognize things you otherwise wouldn't. But the great emphasis placed on memorization of facts (and especially the regurgitation of these facts, which is different from and often less useful than recognition) in education in the past is indeed misplaced.
(As an aside, to emphasize the difference between recognition and regurgitation, I had to look up that Mach-O magic number, but I'm certain that I would have recognized it for what it was if I had actually seen it somewhere.)
I have a better idea. How about we not focus on terrorism at all. Terrorism is about as much of a threat to the average person as lightning or sharks. All the evidence I have seen indicates that, monetarily, we have spent orders of magnitude more money in fighting terrorism than we would lose to their attacks. This money could be far better put into saving lives elsewhere, resulting in a net gain for society.
It truly boggles the mind. To hear the modern Republican talk about it, modern terrorism is worse than the Nazis, who gave a really good try at taking over the world and killed millions of their enemies. To hear them talk about it, modern terrorism is worse than the Warsaw Pact, who threatened us with millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks, and tens of thousands of sophisticated aircraft. To hear them talk about it, modern terrorism is a greater threat than the USSR, who had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at us for decades, ready to kill 90+% of the population in a fabled "15-minute war".
It truly defies reason. Somehow the measures which defeated the Germans and the Russians are no longer enough. Somehow a rag-tag group of Arab extremists is a greater threat to the existence of the nation than a supremely determined and heavily armed nuclear superpower. And somehow the Republicans can say all of this with a straight face and people believe them!
Yeah, but who cares? They differ by a factor of 10, so mentally move the decimal point and compare.
On the other hand, when you're in an American store and you see one product marked as price per pound and another one as price per ounce, who the hell knows which one is cheaper. Since the units on the box usually match it's easier to just re-calculate the per-unit price from scratch than to try to reconcile the numbers these flaming morons put on their tags.
Or maybe it's all about not screwing up the store's inventory tracking system and not screwing up the accounting so that your drawer counts the way it should.
Purchases from a modern store are not as simple as "I give you some money, you give me some product", even if it may look that way from the point of view of the customer.
What a bunch of chowderheads. Getting an F should be demoralizing! You failed a course! You ought to be utterly ashamed of yourself. You should feel horrible, such that the only thing worse than admitting your failure to your parents is admitting it to yourself. You should be hiding that report card from your friends, turning red when they asked you how you did, and avoiding the eyes of your teacher.
And when you're done with all of that, you should start figuring out how you're going to avoid having it happen all over again.
If you make failure a gentle and unthreatening concept then, guess what, kids are not going to care if they succeed!
What first came to my mind was the chilling effect. It doesn't matter if anyone is actually watching, just the threat of observation/data retention is enough.
Kinda like red-light cameras. Some cities have realized that putting up the sign is as effective as installing a working camera. Depends on what their goal is. If their goal is to reduce the frequency of people running red lights, you're absolutely right. But frequently the goal of these cities is to increase revenue, in which case they want to have real cameras which are as unobtrusive as possible. Some cities have even been caught fiddling with the timing of their lights to cause more violations.
Now consider that theory as applied to data retention and surveillance. I'll wait here while you work through the implications.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowledge of Chinese history helps put things in perspective.
Prior to the 20th century, China was ruled by emperors. They were autocratic and restrictive. Progress in China had essentially halted for hundreds of years, and the place was being overrun by Europeans.
In the early 20th century, the emperors were finally overthrown and China's government changed to a republic. This government was brutal and ineffectual, and the situation quickly degenerated into civil war.
Not too long after this, the Japanese saw a great chance and invaded. They spent the next decade and a half rampaging about the country, killing and raping as they wished, with the two Chinese factions doing about as much damage to each other as to the Japanese.
The Japanese were finally thrown out in 1945 as part of their general defeat in WWII. The civil war between the two factions, of course, continued in full swing.
That takes us to about the middle of the 20th century. At this point China was dirt poor and isolated. While considered one of the great powers of the world, by this time this consideration was given more because of tradition than because of fact.
Jump forward to 2008. China is widely considered to be an emerging superpower, with a sizable force of nuclear weapons and a modern, sophisticated military. The Chinese economy is the second largest in the world. While much of the rural population remains relatively poor, the cities boast hundreds of millions of people whose lifestyles largely resemble the middle classes of Western countries.
Yeah, there were some painful times during the half century I skipped over. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were very unhappy events. But on the other hand, the modern government of China bears little resemblance to the one which ruled during that era.
Modern China is vastly better off than at any other point in that country's history, and its people know it. You could argue that this has happened despite, rather than because, of the Communists but at the very least they have guided it and it happened under their watch. For a people who have basically never experienced Western style freedoms, the current situation looks very good. The great majority of Chinese people are happy with their government, and I can't really say that they're wrong. I think that they would be much better off with democracy, but it's hard to argue with their current success.
How very appropriate, to have your sight both destroyed and restored by the same man's products!
So you're saying that he's stating something that's obviously untrue, and using this as a way to actually say something completely different?
I don't buy it. He said there's no alternative. There are a zillion alternatives. I'm arguing because he's wrong.
Except that the trend is in the opposite direction.
For phones, it used to be that there were at least three different intra-US calling areas. (I'm talking about times when I was actually there to see it, it may have been even more in times past.) You had local, which was usually but not always unlimited. You had an expanded nearby area which got one long-distance rate. You had the rest of the country which got another long-distance rate.
Now it's quite common to have phones which can call anywhere in the US with no differentiation. Nearly all cell phones are like this now, and many land lines are too. Long distance rates are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
International calls are starting to get this way too. For some extra money you can get unlimited international calls to a whole bunch of countries around the globe.
Data has seen the same trend. It used to be that you'd often get stuff for free from within your BBS or ISP, but pay for stuff farther away. Then the internet came along and made everything essentially free.
I see no indication that this trend is reversing. There may very well be attempts to keep things within the local network but I think that these attempts will be technological (better P2P routing, caching servers, etc.) rather than financial. Long distance communication just keeps getting cheaper.
He just screwed up a closing tag. Look at the source. He meant to italicize "Every", but instead accidentally italicized the whole post. But don't let the facts get in the way of your America bashing.
As far as "the free ride is over" is concerned, what evidence do you have of this? So a couple of ISPs are experimenting with the idea of per-GB pricing, big deal. Most services are still unlimited in most of the developed world and there is no imminent rush of ISPs moving to other pricing models. Australia and New Zealand are the anomalies, not the rule.
You're right, people who fail to notice the importance of one small sign among the dozens which populate an airport screening area are the ones at fault, not terrorists or insane politicians.
You think that would really stop them if they were really useful? I'm sure the law could be changed to give an exception for this. Of course, Israel and El Al are both good at implementing actual security, as opposed to the rampant security theater we get in the US.
They are metal detectors, not gun detectors. There is no magical setting which detects guns but fails to detect an identical amount of non-gun metal.
Do you think that airport luggage workers are somehow more trustworthy?
I assume he's not carrying the stuff on, because anyone who repeatedly ruins his own luggage is just being a moron.
It's not like there are a lot of alternatives? Are you serious? Name one thing that Amazon sells which you cannot find in another online store in under thirty seconds.
"People are used to them" is not even remotely close to "there are few alternatives".
Certainly, but the combination of the two makes it all the more unlikely. It would be a big surprise if Apple went through a bunch of effort to create a CDMA version of the iPhone just so that they could turn around and break a highly publicized carrier exclusivity contract with it. If they were going to break the contract (and this is certainly the less plausible of the two) then you'd think it would be with T-Mobile, rather than creating new equipment whose existence would be sure to leak the news ahead of time.
Considering that Apple has a three-year exclusivity contract with AT&T and that the iPhone so far has only had GSM capability (Verizon's network is CDMA), you certainly should be surprised if that happens.
So you're saying you want your politicians to be two-faced liars, always afraid to say what they actually believe because it might be unpopular? That's funny, because it's one of my biggest complaints about the profession.
Face it, it would be a lot easier for the President if the country were a dictatorship. That's only a bad thing to say if you think that being easier is sufficient justification to make it so, something that this one sentence does not indicate.
subject to interpretation I suppose. Similar issues arise
with
quines (self-reproducing programs). For example,
consider the classic C quine,
For me, this is not a true quine, because there is no
"#include<stdio.h>". It will not compile on typical C compilers.
(There are longer quines that do have the include.) Overall I agree with your post, but I just have to pick a nit. There is nothing wrong with the quine you mention. It should compile on any C compiler. The include is optional as long as you're using functions whose prototypes match what you get from using them implicitly, which printf does. It won't compile in a C++ compiler since C++ requires explicit prototypes, but C++ is not C.
I generally avoid voting for the two main parties, because the two main parties are both completely untrustworthy.
To answer your question, I voted for Obama. He may end up winning, but since that vote didn't put him into government it doesn't invalidate what I said.
If you mean that other Clinton, I was not old enough to vote in 1996.
Even if my record is not 100%, it doesn't change my argument one whit. Even if 100% of the people I vote for make it into office, that still leaves 98 senators and several hundred representatives who I didn't vote for. Even if I voted for every single one of them, I could be voting for them simply because they're the lesser of two evils (which is always the case if they belong to one of the two major parties).
I don't vote for it. I consistently vote against the people who end up in power. So why should I trust them? It ultimately comes down to trusting my fellow citizens, who have uniformly shown themselves to be worthless chowderheads when it comes to voting for politicians.
I mostly agree, but I think that there is some utility in memorization as well. The reason for this is not to avoid computers, but to benefit from the brain's ability to make associations, and to a lesser extent be able to work faster.
To take a sort of contrived example, let's say you're looking at some random data that you're getting from a server and you don't know why. Then you notice that the beginning of the data is 0xCAFEBABE. Ah hah! you say, this is the magic number for a Mach-O fat binary wrapper. This data must be coming from an executable on a Mac somewhere! The point being that you can't substitute searching for memorization because you wouldn't necessarily notice the association in the first place if you didn't have that number memorized.
Memorizing facts that you use on a constant basis will also make your work go faster than if you have to look them up each time, simply because you have them at hand. But this is not so important because the brain tends to do this automatically anyway. You can treat it as a sort of LRU cache to the internet.
Given this, I think that memorization is handy and can indeed make you actually smarter due to being able to recognize things you otherwise wouldn't. But the great emphasis placed on memorization of facts (and especially the regurgitation of these facts, which is different from and often less useful than recognition) in education in the past is indeed misplaced.
(As an aside, to emphasize the difference between recognition and regurgitation, I had to look up that Mach-O magic number, but I'm certain that I would have recognized it for what it was if I had actually seen it somewhere.)
I have a better idea. How about we not focus on terrorism at all. Terrorism is about as much of a threat to the average person as lightning or sharks. All the evidence I have seen indicates that, monetarily, we have spent orders of magnitude more money in fighting terrorism than we would lose to their attacks. This money could be far better put into saving lives elsewhere, resulting in a net gain for society.
It truly boggles the mind. To hear the modern Republican talk about it, modern terrorism is worse than the Nazis, who gave a really good try at taking over the world and killed millions of their enemies. To hear them talk about it, modern terrorism is worse than the Warsaw Pact, who threatened us with millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks, and tens of thousands of sophisticated aircraft. To hear them talk about it, modern terrorism is a greater threat than the USSR, who had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at us for decades, ready to kill 90+% of the population in a fabled "15-minute war".
It truly defies reason. Somehow the measures which defeated the Germans and the Russians are no longer enough. Somehow a rag-tag group of Arab extremists is a greater threat to the existence of the nation than a supremely determined and heavily armed nuclear superpower. And somehow the Republicans can say all of this with a straight face and people believe them!
Seriously. It would be a lot easier if it were a dictatorship. Are you going to start crucifying politicians for stating the truth now?
Yeah, but who cares? They differ by a factor of 10, so mentally move the decimal point and compare.
On the other hand, when you're in an American store and you see one product marked as price per pound and another one as price per ounce, who the hell knows which one is cheaper. Since the units on the box usually match it's easier to just re-calculate the per-unit price from scratch than to try to reconcile the numbers these flaming morons put on their tags.
Or maybe it's all about not screwing up the store's inventory tracking system and not screwing up the accounting so that your drawer counts the way it should.
Purchases from a modern store are not as simple as "I give you some money, you give me some product", even if it may look that way from the point of view of the customer.
What a bunch of chowderheads. Getting an F should be demoralizing! You failed a course! You ought to be utterly ashamed of yourself. You should feel horrible, such that the only thing worse than admitting your failure to your parents is admitting it to yourself. You should be hiding that report card from your friends, turning red when they asked you how you did, and avoiding the eyes of your teacher.
And when you're done with all of that, you should start figuring out how you're going to avoid having it happen all over again.
If you make failure a gentle and unthreatening concept then, guess what, kids are not going to care if they succeed!
If one out of every nine citizens is a criminal then you're doing something badly wrong, and electronic surveillance is not the way to fix it.
It doesn't matter if anyone is actually watching, just the threat of observation/data retention is enough.
Kinda like red-light cameras.
Some cities have realized that putting up the sign is as effective as installing a working camera. Depends on what their goal is. If their goal is to reduce the frequency of people running red lights, you're absolutely right. But frequently the goal of these cities is to increase revenue, in which case they want to have real cameras which are as unobtrusive as possible. Some cities have even been caught fiddling with the timing of their lights to cause more violations.
Now consider that theory as applied to data retention and surveillance. I'll wait here while you work through the implications.