Seriously? This was one of the main arguments in favor of Google when geeks were spreading the word of this great new search engine from late '97. Then in April '98 (IIRC) they released a paper detailing some of the principles of the PageRank algorithm... although not before they'd submitted an application to the patent office a few months prior! Never mind, Page+Brin promised to open up the full set of algorithms used when ready. Guess what? They got rich, and that never happened. Just as their original plan (admittedly dropped much earlier) was to not base a search engine on ads, then only on text ads, but today 99% of revenue is from ads - including those annoying banners.
Google only received initial support because it painted itself as geek-friendly. Most netizens today haven't even heard of the word "netizen", let alone recall why Google became popular.
Belittling someone you disagree with by calling their argument "amusing" or "loony" is schoolyard politician's rhetoric, of no benefit to your viewpoint.
Eric Smidt never said "no-one is entitled to piracy [privacy]".
Actually, that's precisely what he implied. This post hopefully clarifies it. "Don't do it if you don't want someone knowing about it," is a blanket statement that you are not entitled to privacy.
He simply said the reality is if your want privacy don't use Google
Indeed, and you find it difficult to extrapolate from that an explanation for why we wouldn't want to welcome Google as a fibre backbone provider in the UK?!
Don't use weasel words like "the reality" as if there was some anomalous third party forcing Google's hand. Google/chooses/ to collect an enormous amount of data for great lengths of time: "the reality" is "Google's lack of respect for privacy".
Secondly google hired a high profile NSA employee Matt Cutts and suddenly its a prequisite for an "important position"? Please.
Did you actually follow the job openings links provided via the LMGTFY search above? I can't prove that/every/ top job at Google/requires/ NSA clearance, and AC was clearly exaggerating, but unless the job postings are all made up to make Google look bad, a significant number of significant Google positions require some form of US security clearance. To deal with your strawman, this isn't the same thing as "being NSA" - it just means you're very unlikely to tell on the NSA when they start making requests of you.
As to Schmidt, I believe you're paraphrasing and putting a ludicrously positive spin on: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
Let's recap the most important points he's made there:
1. Don't do something if you don't want others knowing about it. This is the most anti-privacy argument one can possibly make.
2. Google keeps data for an unnecessarily long time, and if that causes you to get into trouble, well... it's the PATRIOT Act's fault, somehow.
Basic research to answer your remaining questions can be done with, you know, well... LGMTFY heheh.
(FWIW, the most hilarious article is Google's astroturfer, Matt "this is my personal opinion, the fact that I work for Google is irrelevant" Cutts, writing a fictional conversation to somehow disprove Google's association with the CIA. But it proves nothing either way.)
Not putting anyone down but it does seem that in an era of satellite phones like Iridium the HF ham radio op are not so relevant.
If you are talking about a more general cultural problem in Haiti, then what is better than a group of ham radio operators to demonstrate a sense of community and ability without reliance on infrastructure? Amateur radio operators would be able to help with satellite phones as well, you know, just as Ericsson helped restore the GSM network, but these endeavours assume ongoing external support (which eventually will have to be paid for again). If I am in an unstable region, should I be trying to rely on the consistency of physical laws alone, or is it safe to also assume the continued benevolence of foreign governments and corporations?
Even sitting in my safe home in England, I know that all the conveniences of modern living require immense reliance on a few very powerful players. Why would I be so foolish as to assume that the increasingly centralised approach of the last 50 years is going to be more stable than anything humanity has seen over the last few thousand?
Charity is perhaps best served by helping people to look after themselves as part of a community. The US military and Ericsson do not exist or practice for these purposes.
"In 1972 [year before Roe vs Wade], 24 women died from causes known to be associated with legal abortions and 39 died as a result of known illegal abortions."
The OP was a troll + a couple of friends with modpoints.
I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find out that the number of deaths per year since, say, 1950 due to illegal US abortions has been measured in the low 100s at most.
One need not explicitly state the unjustified conclusion. "Cheerlead," "fashionable," "political war," "liberating" - all of those terms make your implied conclusion crytsal clear.
This being
speaking against dragging those who find themselves pregnant into the war.
as I stated in the last line of the original post. Cheerlead the case for choice if you will, but that means wanting women to remain well educated on all options, not fighting a quasi-religious war for abortion against pro-lifers with the preggos as pawns.
I think you've (albeit slowly!) come to admit an understanding of my original post, albeit via sarcastic "sure, that could have been what you meant". We all make misunderstandings and it's cool that we could talk it through.
Hello, McFly? That's PRECISELY the loaded word fallacy - to use a term that has multiple definitions such that the implications of the other definitions are taken.
It's the loaded word fallacy when it's intended to make the audience jump to an unjustified evaluative conclusion. Since no such conclusion has been applied further on in the argument, there is no application of the fallacy.
However, to set up a strawman by misinterpreting a particular word in a sense in which it was not used is an application of the equivocation fallacy.
Didja notice my use of quotations around the word "cheerleading?
Yes, quotation marks are normally used to delimit a quote. I assumed that you were using quotation marks in order to suggest my use of the term, but now you explain that you were using it to suggest something precisely unlike my use of the term.
Or maybe the part were I added "so called" before "cheerleading?"
Yes, "so-called" is a cheap rhetorical device used by third rate politicians as a warning that they're about to engage in sophistry. For example, a bad pro-lifer would write of the woman's "so-called 'freedoms'", even when it's obvious from the quote marks that the term is being quoted rather than chosen. The "so-called" is useless unjustified filler to attack the opposition's language.
A clear use of the loaded word fallacy if there ever was one.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume the problem here is that your native language is not English, rather than accusing you of equivocation fallacy. After all, from your posting history, you seem to be the one who enjoys angrily accusing the opposition of making random fallacies;-).
To celebrate something isn't necessarily to parade it as a glorious thing in the streets; it may merely be to hold it in high social standing, and it can be used to indicate the (non-clandestine) performance of the event. Adoption is not held in high social standing by any significant group, and practising the act of adoption is not as popular as practising the act of abortion.
Can you show me where either you or I previously used words identical to, or indicating equality with "the only reason?"
The problem is your supporting argument:
no one is trying to make adoption illegal, hence adoption doesn't need so called 'cheerleading.'
You stated, quite clearly, not Ax => not Bx, where "A" is "trying to be made illegal" and "B" is "needs cheerleading". That was the whole of your argument, and I tackled the contrapositive. You didn't provide a case that the cheerleading is rightly motivated by the pressure to make abortion illegal, rather than a desire to educate. If the latter, A is irrelevant. You didn't provide reasonable evidence that there was a credible threat that abortion would be made illegal in the US. You didn't even qualify by saying "political cheerleading", but that would make the argument trivial.
What you've done is attempt to exaggerate my point way out of proportion
What I've done is argue with precisely the point that you presented to me. I cannot decode your poor rhetoric to guess what you were trying to say. Any qualified interpretation I make seems to be based on the same assumptions I tackled in my previous post.
Do you see how you've painted yourself as being irrational and perhaps even perhaps a slightly foaming at the mouth?
Dude, this is an obvious troll thread, and every post made to it against the OP has been by me. It's simply interesting to watch you work, even up to the final desperate flamebait, "slightly foaming at the mouth?" What this makes me is a thief of my own time, and little else.
M: Oh look, this isn't an argument. A: Yes it is. M: No it isn't. It's just contradiction.
If you did, you would realize that no one is trying to make adoption illegal, hence adoption doesn't need so called 'cheerleading.'
What? The only reason to cheerlead something is a few people trying to make it illegal? There was me thinking that the main aim was education, not Fighting El Hombre. I see a few people arguing against the teaching of evolution in schools, so I guess we need lots of people cheerleading evolutionary biology, but math is pretty much free and legal where I live, so guess I'm wasting my life cheerleading for better numeracy.
Well, I should have expected a slightly unusual report from a micro-nation with corporal punishment and severely restricted speech! (although, again, you will know more about Singapore than me, so maybe I am not up-to-date with its attitude)
And yet, your exception comes down to the same thing: the powerful man with the gun initiating violent force against the man who is merely moving from A to B and who has the audacity not to do as he is told.
Which Asian countries allow Americans to do volunteer work for non-profits without a visa?
From what I can tell, your association is with Singapore, and their government website visitor information only seems to talk about admission without a visa for "social" purposes. But you may be referring to elsewhere, and nevertheless almost certainly know more about Singaporean law than I do!
I even reinstalled the secretary's Windows 98 PC with Ubuntu 9.04 and OpenOffice and told her it was Windows Vista. (HA!)
Is this trolling? You went to volunteer at random medical establishments and installed Linux on random computers, while lying about what you were doing? Seriously? And what do you expect to happen when a maintenance issue arises and some records cannot be obtained?
Also, what about supporting your local adoption support group? I realise that it is not fashionable to cheerlead adoption, in the way that the right to abort seems to be celebrated. Do you realise how many more women's lives you would help if you did not throw every girl with an unwanted fetus into your political war by seeing yourself as liberating them, when in fact all you are doing is putting new emotional pressures on them? Stop misleading yourself that the alternatives are "abort" and "leave school and look after". Instead you could educate them about the thousands of families looking to take care of children and who often cannot have children of their own.
disclaimer: this post is not speaking for or against abortion,just speaking against dragging those who find themselves pregnant into the war.
Name me one country on this planet where I wouldn't be shot at or otherwise violently assaulted if I walked through the wrong neighbourhood. Does the man with the gun represent the whole country?
Does the world, as a culture, want to be left alone to die in squalor?
Visit volunteermatch.com and see how much IT help non-profits need. Its quite a bit.
OK. Find me two outside North America which want IT help during spring break week, where a US resident acting individually is likely to be acceptable. Bonus if you can specify the visa requirements.
No-one is arguing against the assertion that nonprofits need IT help. It is the list of expectations that is being questioned.
Would you believe even the counselors need counseling.
Certainly. The Samaritans, dubious as some of their methods may be, emphasised to me the recognition that volunteer counsellors must themselves be debriefed where necessary and observed carefully. Counsellors often need to talk through with someone else whatever situation they have just discussed with the visitor/caller.
However, unless things have got completely mad, disaster counsellors would still require specific and regular training, normally forming a sitting army of sorts. Also, such people would not be flown abroad for a few days!
Disabusing someone of a naive or selfish notion is not snide, although it might be slightly painful to hear.
I'm sure there are plenty of places in the world who could use some professional expertise.
Yes, but such expertise is provided through organisations with transnational connections and volunteers either training on an ongoing basis for emergencies, e.g. ARES, or providing their services for extended periods.
The Peace Corps., as far as I'm aware, involves dedicated volunteers working abroad for extended periods, with financial benefits for the groups it targets such as student loan deferment. It is in no way whatever a substitute for a week's holiday. You are quite right, however, that IT volunteers exist.
And if real world shrinks were anything like the ones you see on TV, you'd have a point.
I agree. I was not trying to poke fun at the role of a professional counsellor (goodness knows I have benefitted from counselling!). The idea of someone being able to provide quick and effective mental health assistance at some international/interplanetary disaster site for a week a year just reminded me of the TV heroine image of Troi.
Yes, an academic involved in studying mental health in disaster situations might suddenly be in demand for a week, but your general counsellor will not be. Perhaps there is a counsellor equivalent of ARES as mentioned in this post?
if you didn't have cell service or a way to communicate, the chances of being rescued go down.
Which is precisely why I mentioned the military and amateur radio emergency societies, such as the Amateur Radio Emergency Service in the United States. These guys do routinely help out in national disasters, and occasionally with international contacts, but they do so through having spent a generous proportion of their free time in self-training exercises so that they are useful during such emergencies. Relief efforts will be co-ordinated through the society, unless of course you find yourself in an emergency, in which case you will put your training into practice.
I do, of course, encourage geeks to get involved in amateur radio. I am fairly new to it, and do not yet have the skill to get involved in emergency exercises, though I would like to reach that stage. I am just not going to pretend that offering a Spring break week each year is going to put me in that state. Professional readiness for emergencies involves ongoing training and exercise.
Every country has an excess of networking engineers, and the last thing people need during a disaster is Deanna Troi.
Unless you have an expertise in food distribution/agriculture, medicine, or communication - in the first case, you are probably in the military or academia; in the second, Medecins sans Frontiers; and in the third, in the military or amateur radio emergency societies - you will probably just be excess baggage.
Of course, if you are not just looking for an excuse for holiday and want to help at home, where you will actually be useful in smaller scale projects looking for locals, go for it!
When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!
We'll send them all we've got, John Wayne and Randolph Scott, Remember those exciting fighting scenes? To the shores of Tripoli, But not to Mississippoli,
What do we do? We send the Marines! For might makes right, And till they've seen the light, They've got to be protected, All their rights respected, 'Till somebody we like can be elected.
Members of the corps All hate the thought of war, They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means. Stop calling it aggression, O we hate that expression. We only want the world to know That we support the status quo. They love us everywhere we go, So when in doubt, Send the Marines!
I think you misunderstand capitalism. The aim is to produce something sufficiently good at a price that enough people can afford. The fact that there is probably a manufacturer in the United States able to build absolutely anything you want at arbitrarily good quality providing you are prepared to pay enough does not mean that every other country in the world is irrelevant.
As for those gradual improvements, do you have some romantic image of the wise white men visiting a village of peasants with tools and precise layouts and firmware, and suddenly Foxconn is born? Just as with Japan up to the '80s, the improvements in China are in manufacturing process and firmware.
What do you think will happen when they develop an intellectual property economy to rival the West?
China could simply do that... and on its own terms, because of its clout thanks to manufacturing capability and owed $.
I mean, it is quite trivial to argue that a US style notion of intellectual property is not necessary for innovation. China could just enforce the GPL as the only form of intellectual property right, for example - I'm not going to provide an argument for the GPL as a good foundation for innovation, because it has been provided thousands of times over the past two decades on the Internet.
Actually, I'm not even asserting that the GPL alone is satisfactory, merely illustrating to you that there is nothing off topic about suggesting that China can build its own notion of intellectual property. It needs "Western discipline" in applying whatever notion it chooses, i.e. it needs the rule of law, but it does not need Western notions. Indeed, the founding Fathers did not even believe in the notion of intellectual property: knowledge and the expression of knowledge was something naturally without ownership, but to which authors were granted temporary monopoly for the advancement of sciences and the useful arts. The United States was in fact very late in adopting the Berne Convention, the clear dividing line between a constitutional approach towards intellectual creativity and one based on the idea of ideas and expressions as property.
Are you even reading the same site as me? Read through 100 random well-moderated Slashdot posts to see whether they are "balanced". Each comment exists to make a particular point, not to present a balanced summary of all views.
Everyone agrees that China egregiously abuses environmental, human, intellectual property and business rights, but you don't need to shout "also, Satan is evil!" everytime you are discussing Satan, as if respecting some sort of religious protocol. The point is that "Satan" is becoming ever more powerful, and would carry on just fine without one particular gorilla. Big businesses familiar with Chinese political culture have been doing business in China since before Page and Brin were born.
(And appreciate the sentiment, AC. It appears I have "excellent" karma, probably because I normally do not start new discussions but get involved in long threads where people are less interested in moderating and more in discussing.)
Pointing out the strength of the Chinese in the world economy and making comparisons to other far Eastern nations in recent history is not off topic. This isn't a question of withdrawing from some random authoritarian state which needs Google investment and expertise, this is about getting into a spat with the largest manufacturing centre in the world, without which we wouldn't all have the cheap PCs and mobile devices that give Google such a market.
Consider where China could be in the next 20 or 30 years if it starts to adopt Western discipline in intellectual property. It has already got this far without abandoning many of its restrictive principles. Moreover, great advancement has been achieved in many centralised states... never mind, this would be implying that the Google capitalistic hero of the day is not inevitably going to win for life, so I'm fighting a losing battle.
Slashdot Mirror
Which algorithms are these, pray tell?
Seriously? This was one of the main arguments in favor of Google when geeks were spreading the word of this great new search engine from late '97. Then in April '98 (IIRC) they released a paper detailing some of the principles of the PageRank algorithm... although not before they'd submitted an application to the patent office a few months prior! Never mind, Page+Brin promised to open up the full set of algorithms used when ready. Guess what? They got rich, and that never happened. Just as their original plan (admittedly dropped much earlier) was to not base a search engine on ads, then only on text ads, but today 99% of revenue is from ads - including those annoying banners.
Google only received initial support because it painted itself as geek-friendly. Most netizens today haven't even heard of the word "netizen", let alone recall why Google became popular.
As amusing as your paranoid rant is
Belittling someone you disagree with by calling their argument "amusing" or "loony" is schoolyard politician's rhetoric, of no benefit to your viewpoint.
Eric Smidt never said "no-one is entitled to piracy [privacy]".
Actually, that's precisely what he implied. This post hopefully clarifies it. "Don't do it if you don't want someone knowing about it," is a blanket statement that you are not entitled to privacy.
He simply said the reality is if your want privacy don't use Google
Indeed, and you find it difficult to extrapolate from that an explanation for why we wouldn't want to welcome Google as a fibre backbone provider in the UK?!
Don't use weasel words like "the reality" as if there was some anomalous third party forcing Google's hand. Google /chooses/ to collect an enormous amount of data for great lengths of time: "the reality" is "Google's lack of respect for privacy".
Secondly google hired a high profile NSA employee Matt Cutts and suddenly its a prequisite for an "important position"? Please.
Did you actually follow the job openings links provided via the LMGTFY search above? I can't prove that /every/ top job at Google /requires/ NSA clearance, and AC was clearly exaggerating, but unless the job postings are all made up to make Google look bad, a significant number of significant Google positions require some form of US security clearance. To deal with your strawman, this isn't the same thing as "being NSA" - it just means you're very unlikely to tell on the NSA when they start making requests of you.
As to Schmidt, I believe you're paraphrasing and putting a ludicrously positive spin on:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it's important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
Let's recap the most important points he's made there:
1. Don't do something if you don't want others knowing about it. This is the most anti-privacy argument one can possibly make.
2. Google keeps data for an unnecessarily long time, and if that causes you to get into trouble, well... it's the PATRIOT Act's fault, somehow.
Basic research to answer your remaining questions can be done with, you know, well... LGMTFY heheh.
(FWIW, the most hilarious article is Google's astroturfer, Matt "this is my personal opinion, the fact that I work for Google is irrelevant" Cutts, writing a fictional conversation to somehow disprove Google's association with the CIA. But it proves nothing either way.)
Hyperbole is not valid reductio. Many an argument is dismissed via this fallacy.
Not putting anyone down but it does seem that in an era of satellite phones like Iridium the HF ham radio op are not so relevant.
If you are talking about a more general cultural problem in Haiti, then what is better than a group of ham radio operators to demonstrate a sense of community and ability without reliance on infrastructure? Amateur radio operators would be able to help with satellite phones as well, you know, just as Ericsson helped restore the GSM network, but these endeavours assume ongoing external support (which eventually will have to be paid for again). If I am in an unstable region, should I be trying to rely on the consistency of physical laws alone, or is it safe to also assume the continued benevolence of foreign governments and corporations?
Even sitting in my safe home in England, I know that all the conveniences of modern living require immense reliance on a few very powerful players. Why would I be so foolish as to assume that the increasingly centralised approach of the last 50 years is going to be more stable than anything humanity has seen over the last few thousand?
Charity is perhaps best served by helping people to look after themselves as part of a community. The US military and Ericsson do not exist or practice for these purposes.
Is the CDC good enough for you?
"In 1972 [year before Roe vs Wade], 24 women died from causes known to be associated with legal abortions and 39 died as a result of known illegal abortions."
The OP was a troll + a couple of friends with modpoints.
I'll leave it as an exercise for you to find out that the number of deaths per year since, say, 1950 due to illegal US abortions has been measured in the low 100s at most.
One need not explicitly state the unjustified conclusion. "Cheerlead," "fashionable," "political war," "liberating" - all of those terms make your implied conclusion crytsal clear.
This being
speaking against dragging those who find themselves pregnant into the war.
as I stated in the last line of the original post. Cheerlead the case for choice if you will, but that means wanting women to remain well educated on all options, not fighting a quasi-religious war for abortion against pro-lifers with the preggos as pawns.
I think you've (albeit slowly!) come to admit an understanding of my original post, albeit via sarcastic "sure, that could have been what you meant". We all make misunderstandings and it's cool that we could talk it through.
Hello, McFly? That's PRECISELY the loaded word fallacy - to use a term that has multiple definitions such that the implications of the other definitions are taken.
It's the loaded word fallacy when it's intended to make the audience jump to an unjustified evaluative conclusion. Since no such conclusion has been applied further on in the argument, there is no application of the fallacy.
However, to set up a strawman by misinterpreting a particular word in a sense in which it was not used is an application of the equivocation fallacy.
Didja notice my use of quotations around the word "cheerleading?
Yes, quotation marks are normally used to delimit a quote. I assumed that you were using quotation marks in order to suggest my use of the term, but now you explain that you were using it to suggest something precisely unlike my use of the term.
Or maybe the part were I added "so called" before "cheerleading?"
Yes, "so-called" is a cheap rhetorical device used by third rate politicians as a warning that they're about to engage in sophistry. For example, a bad pro-lifer would write of the woman's "so-called 'freedoms'", even when it's obvious from the quote marks that the term is being quoted rather than chosen. The "so-called" is useless unjustified filler to attack the opposition's language.
Stop hitting yourself.
Shouldn't that be, "LOL I TROL you"?
A clear use of the loaded word fallacy if there ever was one.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume the problem here is that your native language is not English, rather than accusing you of equivocation fallacy. After all, from your posting history, you seem to be the one who enjoys angrily accusing the opposition of making random fallacies ;-).
To celebrate something isn't necessarily to parade it as a glorious thing in the streets; it may merely be to hold it in high social standing, and it can be used to indicate the (non-clandestine) performance of the event. Adoption is not held in high social standing by any significant group, and practising the act of adoption is not as popular as practising the act of abortion.
Can you show me where either you or I previously used words identical to, or indicating equality with "the only reason?"
The problem is your supporting argument:
no one is trying to make adoption illegal, hence adoption doesn't need so called 'cheerleading.'
You stated, quite clearly, not Ax => not Bx, where "A" is "trying to be made illegal" and "B" is "needs cheerleading". That was the whole of your argument, and I tackled the contrapositive. You didn't provide a case that the cheerleading is rightly motivated by the pressure to make abortion illegal, rather than a desire to educate. If the latter, A is irrelevant. You didn't provide reasonable evidence that there was a credible threat that abortion would be made illegal in the US. You didn't even qualify by saying "political cheerleading", but that would make the argument trivial.
What you've done is attempt to exaggerate my point way out of proportion
What I've done is argue with precisely the point that you presented to me. I cannot decode your poor rhetoric to guess what you were trying to say. Any qualified interpretation I make seems to be based on the same assumptions I tackled in my previous post.
Do you see how you've painted yourself as being irrational and perhaps even perhaps a slightly foaming at the mouth?
Dude, this is an obvious troll thread, and every post made to it against the OP has been by me. It's simply interesting to watch you work, even up to the final desperate flamebait, "slightly foaming at the mouth?" What this makes me is a thief of my own time, and little else.
Just because you claim it doesn't make it true.
M: Oh look, this isn't an argument.
A: Yes it is.
M: No it isn't. It's just contradiction.
If you did, you would realize that no one is trying to make adoption illegal, hence adoption doesn't need so called 'cheerleading.'
What? The only reason to cheerlead something is a few people trying to make it illegal? There was me thinking that the main aim was education, not Fighting El Hombre. I see a few people arguing against the teaching of evolution in schools, so I guess we need lots of people cheerleading evolutionary biology, but math is pretty much free and legal where I live, so guess I'm wasting my life cheerleading for better numeracy.
Well, I should have expected a slightly unusual report from a micro-nation with corporal punishment and severely restricted speech! (although, again, you will know more about Singapore than me, so maybe I am not up-to-date with its attitude)
And yet, your exception comes down to the same thing: the powerful man with the gun initiating violent force against the man who is merely moving from A to B and who has the audacity not to do as he is told.
Which Asian countries allow Americans to do volunteer work for non-profits without a visa?
From what I can tell, your association is with Singapore, and their government website visitor information only seems to talk about admission without a visa for "social" purposes. But you may be referring to elsewhere, and nevertheless almost certainly know more about Singaporean law than I do!
I even reinstalled the secretary's Windows 98 PC with Ubuntu 9.04 and OpenOffice and told her it was Windows Vista. (HA!)
Is this trolling? You went to volunteer at random medical establishments and installed Linux on random computers, while lying about what you were doing? Seriously? And what do you expect to happen when a maintenance issue arises and some records cannot be obtained?
Also, what about supporting your local adoption support group? I realise that it is not fashionable to cheerlead adoption, in the way that the right to abort seems to be celebrated. Do you realise how many more women's lives you would help if you did not throw every girl with an unwanted fetus into your political war by seeing yourself as liberating them, when in fact all you are doing is putting new emotional pressures on them? Stop misleading yourself that the alternatives are "abort" and "leave school and look after". Instead you could educate them about the thousands of families looking to take care of children and who often cannot have children of their own.
disclaimer: this post is not speaking for or against abortion,just speaking against dragging those who find themselves pregnant into the war.
If they wanted us, they wouldn't shoot at us.
Name me one country on this planet where I wouldn't be shot at or otherwise violently assaulted if I walked through the wrong neighbourhood. Does the man with the gun represent the whole country?
Does the world, as a culture, want to be left alone to die in squalor?
Visit volunteermatch.com and see how much IT help non-profits need. Its quite a bit.
OK. Find me two outside North America which want IT help during spring break week, where a US resident acting individually is likely to be acceptable. Bonus if you can specify the visa requirements.
No-one is arguing against the assertion that nonprofits need IT help. It is the list of expectations that is being questioned.
Would you believe even the counselors need counseling.
Certainly. The Samaritans, dubious as some of their methods may be, emphasised to me the recognition that volunteer counsellors must themselves be debriefed where necessary and observed carefully. Counsellors often need to talk through with someone else whatever situation they have just discussed with the visitor/caller.
However, unless things have got completely mad, disaster counsellors would still require specific and regular training, normally forming a sitting army of sorts. Also, such people would not be flown abroad for a few days!
Disabusing someone of a naive or selfish notion is not snide, although it might be slightly painful to hear.
I'm sure there are plenty of places in the world who could use some professional expertise.
Yes, but such expertise is provided through organisations with transnational connections and volunteers either training on an ongoing basis for emergencies, e.g. ARES, or providing their services for extended periods.
The Peace Corps., as far as I'm aware, involves dedicated volunteers working abroad for extended periods, with financial benefits for the groups it targets such as student loan deferment. It is in no way whatever a substitute for a week's holiday. You are quite right, however, that IT volunteers exist.
And if real world shrinks were anything like the ones you see on TV, you'd have a point.
I agree. I was not trying to poke fun at the role of a professional counsellor (goodness knows I have benefitted from counselling!). The idea of someone being able to provide quick and effective mental health assistance at some international/interplanetary disaster site for a week a year just reminded me of the TV heroine image of Troi.
Yes, an academic involved in studying mental health in disaster situations might suddenly be in demand for a week, but your general counsellor will not be. Perhaps there is a counsellor equivalent of ARES as mentioned in this post?
if you didn't have cell service or a way to communicate, the chances of being rescued go down.
Which is precisely why I mentioned the military and amateur radio emergency societies, such as the Amateur Radio Emergency Service in the United States. These guys do routinely help out in national disasters, and occasionally with international contacts, but they do so through having spent a generous proportion of their free time in self-training exercises so that they are useful during such emergencies. Relief efforts will be co-ordinated through the society, unless of course you find yourself in an emergency, in which case you will put your training into practice.
I do, of course, encourage geeks to get involved in amateur radio. I am fairly new to it, and do not yet have the skill to get involved in emergency exercises, though I would like to reach that stage. I am just not going to pretend that offering a Spring break week each year is going to put me in that state. Professional readiness for emergencies involves ongoing training and exercise.
Every country has an excess of networking engineers, and the last thing people need during a disaster is Deanna Troi.
Unless you have an expertise in food distribution/agriculture, medicine, or communication - in the first case, you are probably in the military or academia; in the second, Medecins sans Frontiers; and in the third, in the military or amateur radio emergency societies - you will probably just be excess baggage.
Of course, if you are not just looking for an excuse for holiday and want to help at home, where you will actually be useful in smaller scale projects looking for locals, go for it!
When someone makes a move
Of which we don't approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess,
But first send the Marines!
We'll send them all we've got,
John Wayne and Randolph Scott,
Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
To the shores of Tripoli,
But not to Mississippoli,
What do we do? We send the Marines!
For might makes right,
And till they've seen the light,
They've got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
'Till somebody we like can be elected.
Members of the corps
All hate the thought of war,
They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means.
Stop calling it aggression,
O we hate that expression.
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo.
They love us everywhere we go,
So when in doubt,
Send the Marines!
I think you misunderstand capitalism. The aim is to produce something sufficiently good at a price that enough people can afford. The fact that there is probably a manufacturer in the United States able to build absolutely anything you want at arbitrarily good quality providing you are prepared to pay enough does not mean that every other country in the world is irrelevant.
As for those gradual improvements, do you have some romantic image of the wise white men visiting a village of peasants with tools and precise layouts and firmware, and suddenly Foxconn is born? Just as with Japan up to the '80s, the improvements in China are in manufacturing process and firmware.
At the risk of repeating myself:
What do you think will happen when they develop an intellectual property economy to rival the West?
China could simply do that... and on its own terms, because of its clout thanks to manufacturing capability and owed $.
I mean, it is quite trivial to argue that a US style notion of intellectual property is not necessary for innovation. China could just enforce the GPL as the only form of intellectual property right, for example - I'm not going to provide an argument for the GPL as a good foundation for innovation, because it has been provided thousands of times over the past two decades on the Internet.
Actually, I'm not even asserting that the GPL alone is satisfactory, merely illustrating to you that there is nothing off topic about suggesting that China can build its own notion of intellectual property. It needs "Western discipline" in applying whatever notion it chooses, i.e. it needs the rule of law, but it does not need Western notions. Indeed, the founding Fathers did not even believe in the notion of intellectual property: knowledge and the expression of knowledge was something naturally without ownership, but to which authors were granted temporary monopoly for the advancement of sciences and the useful arts. The United States was in fact very late in adopting the Berne Convention, the clear dividing line between a constitutional approach towards intellectual creativity and one based on the idea of ideas and expressions as property.
Are you even reading the same site as me? Read through 100 random well-moderated Slashdot posts to see whether they are "balanced". Each comment exists to make a particular point, not to present a balanced summary of all views.
Everyone agrees that China egregiously abuses environmental, human, intellectual property and business rights, but you don't need to shout "also, Satan is evil!" everytime you are discussing Satan, as if respecting some sort of religious protocol. The point is that "Satan" is becoming ever more powerful, and would carry on just fine without one particular gorilla. Big businesses familiar with Chinese political culture have been doing business in China since before Page and Brin were born.
(And appreciate the sentiment, AC. It appears I have "excellent" karma, probably because I normally do not start new discussions but get involved in long threads where people are less interested in moderating and more in discussing.)
Pointing out the strength of the Chinese in the world economy and making comparisons to other far Eastern nations in recent history is not off topic. This isn't a question of withdrawing from some random authoritarian state which needs Google investment and expertise, this is about getting into a spat with the largest manufacturing centre in the world, without which we wouldn't all have the cheap PCs and mobile devices that give Google such a market.
Consider where China could be in the next 20 or 30 years if it starts to adopt Western discipline in intellectual property. It has already got this far without abandoning many of its restrictive principles. Moreover, great advancement has been achieved in many centralised states... never mind, this would be implying that the Google capitalistic hero of the day is not inevitably going to win for life, so I'm fighting a losing battle.