Have you? Turing seems to have been a fairly public minded man (Never having met him, it's tough to be sure). It seems reasonable, even quite likely, that Turing would have preferred this to a victory both for himself AND LGBT community. Though he would probably have had no idea what I just said (both LGBT as a demographic and the idea of their being a community of such people being after his time), I thik he probably would have agreed with the sentiment.
No, but they did know that his ideas on mathematics and electronic computers all but won the War. Had Turing and his colleges not cracked Enigma, the war would have lasted MUCH longer and cost many more Allied lives; though the greater resources of the US and Soviets probably would have won it eventually. The man was a hero and his ideas and inventions were clearly very useful, even if the full extent of their capabilities was not yet understood. Other gay men, men with titles and influence, were tolerated if not embraced by British society; but apparently saving thousands of live and contributing immensely to the most important War effort Britain has experience in a the last thousand years wasn't enough to earn Turing similar courtesy.
Yes, I suppose you could say that, though the definition of the term makes it something of a fallacy. "Bigotry" implies unthinking dislike of someone, generally because of something they can't help. Their race, their sex, their sexual orientation, all of these things are either hardwired at birth or determined by a process of such complexity that we couldn't change them if we wanted to. Religious bigotry is an exception, but as many religious bigots equate "religion" with "race" (i.e. Jews are often considered both), even there it's a matter of perspective. Bigots on the other hand, always chose to be bigots. I therefore chose to disassociate myself with them. They have a perfect right to spout their hatred, but I don't have to listen to it or participate. So, fine I am "Bigoted" against bigots.
Hate Christians while admiring odd religions you know little about?
As they say, "some of my best friends are Christians." I don't hate Christians though I also don't think they deserve special privileges any more than member of other religions. They have a perfect right to believe what they wish, say what they wish, and do what they wish as long as they don't try to restrict my right to do the same. As a member of an "odd religion that you know little about". I get a bit annoyed by attempts to:
(a) Outlaw the practices or beliefs of my religion or that of others (except in cases where they adversely affect society or people. I'm quite OK with banning human sacrifice or ritual scaring of non-consenting children, please don't raise this strawman.)
(b) Act as if because the majority are Christians everyone should be, and use this idea to make Christianity a sort of "state religion". This includes overtly Christian prayers at inappropriate places (like a military ceremony I'm forced to attend or a town council meeting that all members of the community are welcome at).
(c) Act in a "bigoted" manner toward member of other religions. This includes, but is not limited to: trying to convert me, assuming I'm a moron, or attempting to physically harm me. If your religion requires you to witness (and some do); feel free to do so once, but respect my desire not to hear it again when asked. Jesus himself said that the best way to witness is to hold yourself up as an example, he never mentions browbeating with a Bible.
(d) Turn Christian moral precepts into laws. The most obvious example here being anti-homosexual laws, but blue laws are probably more annoying to the vast majority of people. Both are equally stupid and come from the same impetus. I could care less what you think God has to say about alcoholic beverages (especially since the Bible outright states that Jesus enjoyed a good glass of wine now and again), or other people's sexuality. Feel free to not drink. Feel free to think gay people are evil. Please do not try to codify either into law.
Pro-Choice but against the death penalty?
Yes, and I don't see the conflict. It's a simple matter of not seeing undeveloped fetuses as citizens with rights, but seeing adults as being so. Also, my objection to the Death Penalty is not so much about thinking some horrible criminals don't deserve it... they do. It's more because of the imperfection of human judgment. It may seem obvious to a jury that a given person is guilty of a horrible crime, only to have it later proved through new evidence or new analysis techniques that he or she did not. It's happened many times in both capital and non-capital cases. My great preference, when it happens, is for there to be someone alive to be freed and apologized to. Apologies to a corpse, as has been stated above, are not all that meaningful
Brown good, White bad?
No. It doesn't matter. Some people, white, brown, yellow, or red, are bad. Some are good. Most are shades of gray in between.
The problem is that laws aren't (and probably shouldn't be) written as guidelines. They're written as rules. If the rules say you're an adult at 18, and that adults cannot have sex with children, then some pissed off parent is going to INSIST that this rule applies to his 17.85 year old daughter and her 18.25 year old boy friend he doesn't approve of; no matter what common sense says. This sort of problem has been mitigated in a lot of jurisdictions by modifying the rule slightly to say "18 year olds are adults, and adults cannot have sex with children, unless their ages are 2 or fewer years apart" or by lowering the age of consent to 16 or something along these lines.
Even with these adjusted rules you get stupid stuff that happens ("Ahh, but my daughter is exactly 2 year and ONE DAY younger than that boy."), but treating the laws as guidelines tends to create the opposite problem. Situations where legitimately bad things have happened, but people get away with them because of leeway in the law and influence. It's one of the great conundrums of civilization.
That doesn't follow. Just because you CAN compete with someone else on a level playing field doesn't mean you want too. If you and I were dueling to the death with pistols, and I know that I am slightly better than you and thus likely to win, should I refuse to allow a further handicap of your abilities just because I'm pretty sure I can win anyway? If I were an honorable man, or a man wishing to appear honorable for some person in the audience, I might indeed refuse to allow you to be further handicapped. Companies have no such honor. Companies take any advantage they can get, even if they already have other advantages.
Generally speaking, the court of public opinion seems to think that Apple makes one of the best smart-phones on the market right now. It's extremely popular and selling more units daily. Google has had considerably more limited success with Android. This hardly means that Apple is going to let Google find new advantages to catch up if they can help it. By preference they want to keep their dominance, and do so with the least possible effort on their part.
They aren't "subverting the will of the judiciary". The judiciary isn't charging thousands of dollars a month and making a huge profit off of this. They're charging a few cents a page to cover the expense of keeping the program running. If someone else can and will store the same documents for free, it's less load for them to deal with. These are all public record documents that you could see for free if you went down to the courthouse and asked for them (though they'd probably charge you for copies, to cover those costs), it's not like these guys are breaking into the courthouse systems and raping and pillaging the information. It's public domain stuff, being stored in the public domain.
Then, there is also the the question of reasonable and appropriate workload. If I estimate that a project will take 7 months at a normal 40 hour work week for each of the my 6 team members, and you tell me that we'll do it in 4 or else... Well with 60 or 70 hour work weeks, we might in fact be able to push out something that looks like a finished project. That doesn't mean 4 months is a reasonable estimate. It just means that it's possible to do the job in 4 months by killing everyone.
It's not that any of this stuff is universal in the Christian faith, but it tends to be nearly universal amongst those Christians who are convinced that the world is going to end any day now. Exceptions exist, YMMV, etc, but most of the real "apocalypse watchers" also tend to be the type of Christian to believe in literal anti-Christs, Marks, and the Rapture.
And still you provide not one single practical idea on what can be done. You're implying that I don't care what happens outside the borders of the US. I do. Many thing that happen outside of the US are outrageous miscarriages of justice, and it is very sad that they happen. I hereby express my outrage in front of the entire Internet that China's government appears to be run by particularly successful gangsters. It is sad and unfortunate and I wish it could be otherwise. Now what? What should I do to fix it? What should I even petition my government to do to fix it? Maybe next time I'm on the phone with Barrack, I can give him a suggestion or two from you. What do you suggest? You haven't answered a single practical question I've posed, you've simply told me how much I hate the rest of the world.
On the other hand, there are many miscarriages of justice right here in the US; and to one extent or another I can do something about those. I can write my congressman, or the President. I can vote for someone who sees things my way. I can file lawsuits. I can post my opinion on the Internet where they join the opinions of others to become demographically relevant. There are any number of things, small and large, that I can do to attempt to change the policies of my own government. I see no practical way that I can attempt to change the policies of the Chinese government. I could even attempt to influence my government to get it to attempt to influence the Chinese government... I just have no idea what they can really do to improve the matter. "Fix the Chinese Government" is not exactly a detailed policy statement to design actions around.
For about the last 2-3 hundred years various European countries and the US have at various points tried to "fix" various other people's countries, societies, and governments. Sometimes the motives have been exceedingly altruistic, other times they have been exceedingly greedy. Most times they have been a combination of the two. The success stories can be numbered on one or two hands, the failures number in the hundreds. The dismal, horrifying failures involving thousands of death and massive instability probably outnumber the success stories. You accuse me of adding magic lines to a map to divide people... I accuse you of trying to magic away lines that have existed for millennium. Lines of culture, religion, and government that people put there because they wanted them. Not just evil westerners, everybody. Give the Internet a hundred years and it might begin to erase those lines, after 10 it has barely blurred them.
If asked a hundred Chinese to define "freedom" you'd probably get 60 or 70 different answers, some very close to your concept others nothing like it. If you asked those same people if they thought the US ought to be "interfering" in their country you'd probably get a close to unanimous "no".
More like: I'm a cop, and I see someone murdered in another jurisdiction. I report the crime to the local police and trust them to handle the investigation and bring the criminal to justice. If they're incompetent or corrupt, they may fail to do so, but I've done what I can. I'm not the local police and I can't conduct my own investigation. Now if I see someone litter in my own jurisdiction I can write them a ticket. I have influence in my jurisdiction, but not in someone else's.
At any rate, other than expressing my outrage and angst on an Internet forum, I ask again what I can do about about events in China? Even assuming that tomorrow morning someone wakes me up and tells me I've been elected "Chief Police Dude for All Morality in the World" and I can use all the resources of every Western nation to fight evil and corrupt governments everywhere I find them. What can I do? I could try economic sanctions or boycotts of goods, but those tend to hurt the already suffering average citizens of a country as much if not more than its government. I could send in the troops, but we've all seen how well that works. In most cases the best you can hope for is something resembling freedom and democracy while the occupiers are in place and thing fall apart afterward. Success stories like post WWII Japan are exceedingly rare. The most I could really do is what the West already does. Shake my finger sternly and say "You should really be a better government."
You also haven't even addressed my last point. Assuming you somehow get a free democratic government in place in some of these countries, how do you (within the framework of free elections and speech) prevent them from electing the same sorts of people that already run the country? My favorite example of this is the Israeli West Bank where everybody treated (reasonably enough) free and democratic elections as a great and noble goal. So the people elected Hamas... In a landslide. The high minded thing to do at that point would have been to accept the result and try to normalize relations with Hamas, but that's hardly practical both because we hate Hamas and because they hate us. What happens when we give the Chinese free and open elections and they elect the same people who continue the same polices?
Maybe, maybe not. There have been death at American "Youth Boot Camps" too, and we have all of the freedoms you mention. Accepting for the moment that you are right, however, and that this death could have been prevented in a "free society", it's not the argument you were making in your original post. There you implied that you already knew the Chinese Government was going to just cover this up and let the camp continue operations as normal, because the Chinese Government has done other thing which you disagree with. Your argument these was essentially "China has done evil things, therefore China is inherently evil, and will always make an evil choice over a good in every situation."
You aren't wrong, but you aren't right either. Certainly there are places where it is worse to live than in any Western country, and certainly as citizens of the world and human beings we should be concerned about the people in those places. However, we can only hope to influence our own governments. Since we don't want our own countries to fall down the same rabbit holes that we've seen other countries go down, we monitor and criticize our own governments to try to prevent such a slide. The fact that China may be worse doesn't excuse our government from moving in the same direction as the the Chinese government. To grossly simplify things: if there a continuum of behavior for a national government with "0" being really awful and "100" being really great, just because China is a "20" and your government is a "65" doesn't mean you shouldn't protest when your government moves to "64" or try to influence it to hit "66".
The fact is that we can't do a lot about what Beijing and Tehran do. If we boycott their products are we hurting the government or the people? Same question with economic sanctions. Attempts to impose Western style freedom and democracy from the outside almost universally end badly, and often leave people worse off than they were under the old "bad" regime. I think most of us can agree that we wouldn't want to live in China or Iran, but there is no apparent easy solution to the problem of how to make them better places to live.
Add to this the fact that many (certainly not all, maybe not even most, but many) people in these countries like things as they are, and you have an even bigger mess. Assuming you somehow force a change, how in your newly free and democratic country do you prevent a relapse the first time things get bad? We see this in Western countries all the time... When things are stressful, the country tightens up. Things become less free (still much better than China of course, but we clearly contract in the direction of "safety" when things are tough). In country with little democratic tradition and with conservative pointing back to the "good old days" under the Communists or the Supreme Leader what's to prevent backslides?
Few if any progressive like what happens in China or Iran, but at the same time we know that there's a lot less that we can do about it than we can do about what happens in our own countries.
Not to defend China, which certainly does have a very bad track record, but your logic doesn't make sense. The fact that the Chinese government does not grant what we consider normal and appropriate rights to its people has little to do with how they handle this matter, which appears to relate to a non-government unlicensed facility. Just because a person or entity does things which we disagree with doesn't mean that they will always without fail make every choice with an eye toward "what's the opposite of what Darkness404 would do?"
It's certainly possible that they will handle this badly and cover it up, they've done so before. On the other hand, to assume that you simply know what's happening, because you disagree with other policies of the Chinese government is a complete non sequitur.
I was just about to point that out. Lots of kids have little cards that their parent load their allowance on these days. Saves worry about losing the money or it getting stolen by older kids, etc. Also allows parents to see where the money was spent. I do tend to think that this whole thing is rather silly, and Apple is being a bit high handed, but the credit card argument is bunk. There's about a dozen version of prepaid or debit type cards that kids have these days, and all work like a "credit card" to the iTunes system.
"chkdsk" isn't an arcane process. "chkdsk -r" on this particular chipset employs an arcane process to do an in depth check for physical problems on the drive. In other words, this bug: only affects people running "chkdsk -r" on a secondary hard drive, with a particular chipset, who have not update their chipset driver, and is caused by an arcane process within the un-updated driver. I'm hardly a Microsoft apologist, but this seems like a Hell of a tempest in a teapot to me.
(As a side note, anybody know how capitalization works when a sentence begins with a reference to a command? Changing the first letter to a capital actually changes the name of the command, at least in Unix, so it seems like the wrong thing to do.)
You could probably reduce the number of problems by using multiple systems and only voiding the warranty if there are multiple detections of abuse.
That makes sense. If you return one iPod swearing you didn't drop it, despite what the sensor says; go ahead and take the customer's word for it. When you're on the third iPod that you swear you didn't drop despite what sensor says... well...
Eh, I know I'm being pedantic and all, but OSX is Unix. More so that many of the "free-nix" OS's, if only because Apple paid to get it checked for Unixyness.
I've thought of that, but it's a lot more complicated. To make that work you'd have to have some sort of huge database of what things (for a fairly nebulous definition of "things") are, and hardware and software to interface between the glasses and the database. In something like a museum this could work to an extent, you're issued glasses and a portable interface device (or with small enough circuitry, just really smart glasses)when you go in, and the heavy lifting is done by back room servers that store the database and interpret the camera signals. The whole thing could be on a Museum WLAN. It would still be a lot of programming, but it could be done I think. Outside of that kind of limited system though you'd have a much harder time. Sure it'd be great if you could turn your sunglasses into a permanent HUD that gives you information as you want or need it, but the backed programming would be colossal and everyone would have to carry something probably on par with a desktop computer in power to handle the interfacing. I don't think current generation phones and PDAs could handle it.
Like I said, I wasn't implying that junior officers could just all go away, and life would move on (after all where else would we all learn how to be captains:-P). More of a chain of authority thing. A platoon NEEDS a Platoon Leader, but if the authority required to perform the administrative and logistical functions of a platoon leader can be temporarily vested in a Platoon Sergeant via a filed letter from the commander, they may not need a Platoon Leader this week or this month. In the old Army, there were thing that ONLY officers could do. There still are, but they're fewer and with enough rank on the authorization letter some can be gotten around. Battlefield commissions tended to be the result of needing someone with some authority available to a unit right now in the heat of battle, not to an Army wide shortage of junior officers. If that authority can be delegated to an NCO in the short term the immediacy of needing battlefield commissions goes away.
Well in my welding example you're just using a normal (though modified) safety device for the job. With the surgeon... Well, maybe a modified face shield? I dunno... the idea is training for specific jobs anyway, it's not like you'd be walking around your day-to-day life wearing the things. You'd want to make it as natural as possible for the trainees, and where possible use eye gear normal to the job; but some people will probably just have to use goofy glasses.
We had that happen a few times while I was overseas. This was before the DoD blanket ban on thumbdrives, so I'd take my unclass drive to my room, download whatever I couldn't get to, bring it back and install it. If it needed to go on a classified system I'd use my unclass system to burn it to non-writable media first.
At the time this was perfectly legal, though I suspect it would get you in a lot trouble now. What a difference a few years makes. I imagine you could still do it that way if you burn to CD directly on your home machine and brought the CD in through whatever document control your unit has setup. Bit more of a PITA, but doable in a pinch unless your unit is really hard assed.
My troubles came from senior officers that hadn't brought their own computers and wanted to plug their DoD laptops into the housing nets. I swear if I can afford a cheapo disposable laptop on a senior lieutenant's salary, you can certainly do so as a senior major. Go to the PX, get a cheap computer and stop trying to act like regulation doesn't apply to people above O-3.
Ever since I first heard of it I've thought augmented reality is going to be big some day. It's not much more than a toy right now (watching the video, it was clear that there's still a long way to go before it reaches it's full promise), but someday it'll be there. At my last job we used a lot of virtual reality modeling to do experimental training programs (learn to weld without real fire kind of stuff). Augmented reality will be so much better for this kind of thing. Think about it. A welder uses a real (modified) torch on a real piece of metal, but his goggles show the metal heating up and reforming. Or combine it with the tactile stuff from the other example and surgeon uses a "real" scalpel in a real operating room, but sees and feels a virtual patient. You could learn and practice very complicated procedures this way.
We're no where near being able to build holodecks, but between this tactile display tech and augmented reality we may not have to. Use the real world as your backdrop, put in real things where ever appropriate, and only simulate the stuff that you actually need to interact with.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you? Turing seems to have been a fairly public minded man (Never having met him, it's tough to be sure). It seems reasonable, even quite likely, that Turing would have preferred this to a victory both for himself AND LGBT community. Though he would probably have had no idea what I just said (both LGBT as a demographic and the idea of their being a community of such people being after his time), I thik he probably would have agreed with the sentiment.
No, but they did know that his ideas on mathematics and electronic computers all but won the War. Had Turing and his colleges not cracked Enigma, the war would have lasted MUCH longer and cost many more Allied lives; though the greater resources of the US and Soviets probably would have won it eventually. The man was a hero and his ideas and inventions were clearly very useful, even if the full extent of their capabilities was not yet understood. Other gay men, men with titles and influence, were tolerated if not embraced by British society; but apparently saving thousands of live and contributing immensely to the most important War effort Britain has experience in a the last thousand years wasn't enough to earn Turing similar courtesy.
So you are bigoted against bigots?
Yes, I suppose you could say that, though the definition of the term makes it something of a fallacy. "Bigotry" implies unthinking dislike of someone, generally because of something they can't help. Their race, their sex, their sexual orientation, all of these things are either hardwired at birth or determined by a process of such complexity that we couldn't change them if we wanted to. Religious bigotry is an exception, but as many religious bigots equate "religion" with "race" (i.e. Jews are often considered both), even there it's a matter of perspective. Bigots on the other hand, always chose to be bigots. I therefore chose to disassociate myself with them. They have a perfect right to spout their hatred, but I don't have to listen to it or participate. So, fine I am "Bigoted" against bigots.
Hate Christians while admiring odd religions you know little about?
As they say, "some of my best friends are Christians." I don't hate Christians though I also don't think they deserve special privileges any more than member of other religions. They have a perfect right to believe what they wish, say what they wish, and do what they wish as long as they don't try to restrict my right to do the same. As a member of an "odd religion that you know little about". I get a bit annoyed by attempts to:
(a) Outlaw the practices or beliefs of my religion or that of others (except in cases where they adversely affect society or people. I'm quite OK with banning human sacrifice or ritual scaring of non-consenting children, please don't raise this strawman.)
(b) Act as if because the majority are Christians everyone should be, and use this idea to make Christianity a sort of "state religion". This includes overtly Christian prayers at inappropriate places (like a military ceremony I'm forced to attend or a town council meeting that all members of the community are welcome at).
(c) Act in a "bigoted" manner toward member of other religions. This includes, but is not limited to: trying to convert me, assuming I'm a moron, or attempting to physically harm me. If your religion requires you to witness (and some do); feel free to do so once, but respect my desire not to hear it again when asked. Jesus himself said that the best way to witness is to hold yourself up as an example, he never mentions browbeating with a Bible.
(d) Turn Christian moral precepts into laws. The most obvious example here being anti-homosexual laws, but blue laws are probably more annoying to the vast majority of people. Both are equally stupid and come from the same impetus. I could care less what you think God has to say about alcoholic beverages (especially since the Bible outright states that Jesus enjoyed a good glass of wine now and again), or other people's sexuality. Feel free to not drink. Feel free to think gay people are evil. Please do not try to codify either into law.
Pro-Choice but against the death penalty?
Yes, and I don't see the conflict. It's a simple matter of not seeing undeveloped fetuses as citizens with rights, but seeing adults as being so. Also, my objection to the Death Penalty is not so much about thinking some horrible criminals don't deserve it... they do. It's more because of the imperfection of human judgment. It may seem obvious to a jury that a given person is guilty of a horrible crime, only to have it later proved through new evidence or new analysis techniques that he or she did not. It's happened many times in both capital and non-capital cases. My great preference, when it happens, is for there to be someone alive to be freed and apologized to. Apologies to a corpse, as has been stated above, are not all that meaningful
Brown good, White bad?
No. It doesn't matter. Some people, white, brown, yellow, or red, are bad. Some are good. Most are shades of gray in between.
The problem is that laws aren't (and probably shouldn't be) written as guidelines. They're written as rules. If the rules say you're an adult at 18, and that adults cannot have sex with children, then some pissed off parent is going to INSIST that this rule applies to his 17.85 year old daughter and her 18.25 year old boy friend he doesn't approve of; no matter what common sense says. This sort of problem has been mitigated in a lot of jurisdictions by modifying the rule slightly to say "18 year olds are adults, and adults cannot have sex with children, unless their ages are 2 or fewer years apart" or by lowering the age of consent to 16 or something along these lines.
Even with these adjusted rules you get stupid stuff that happens ("Ahh, but my daughter is exactly 2 year and ONE DAY younger than that boy."), but treating the laws as guidelines tends to create the opposite problem. Situations where legitimately bad things have happened, but people get away with them because of leeway in the law and influence. It's one of the great conundrums of civilization.
That doesn't follow. Just because you CAN compete with someone else on a level playing field doesn't mean you want too. If you and I were dueling to the death with pistols, and I know that I am slightly better than you and thus likely to win, should I refuse to allow a further handicap of your abilities just because I'm pretty sure I can win anyway? If I were an honorable man, or a man wishing to appear honorable for some person in the audience, I might indeed refuse to allow you to be further handicapped. Companies have no such honor. Companies take any advantage they can get, even if they already have other advantages.
Generally speaking, the court of public opinion seems to think that Apple makes one of the best smart-phones on the market right now. It's extremely popular and selling more units daily. Google has had considerably more limited success with Android. This hardly means that Apple is going to let Google find new advantages to catch up if they can help it. By preference they want to keep their dominance, and do so with the least possible effort on their part.
They aren't "subverting the will of the judiciary". The judiciary isn't charging thousands of dollars a month and making a huge profit off of this. They're charging a few cents a page to cover the expense of keeping the program running. If someone else can and will store the same documents for free, it's less load for them to deal with. These are all public record documents that you could see for free if you went down to the courthouse and asked for them (though they'd probably charge you for copies, to cover those costs), it's not like these guys are breaking into the courthouse systems and raping and pillaging the information. It's public domain stuff, being stored in the public domain.
Then, there is also the the question of reasonable and appropriate workload. If I estimate that a project will take 7 months at a normal 40 hour work week for each of the my 6 team members, and you tell me that we'll do it in 4 or else... Well with 60 or 70 hour work weeks, we might in fact be able to push out something that looks like a finished project. That doesn't mean 4 months is a reasonable estimate. It just means that it's possible to do the job in 4 months by killing everyone.
It's not that any of this stuff is universal in the Christian faith, but it tends to be nearly universal amongst those Christians who are convinced that the world is going to end any day now. Exceptions exist, YMMV, etc, but most of the real "apocalypse watchers" also tend to be the type of Christian to believe in literal anti-Christs, Marks, and the Rapture.
And still you provide not one single practical idea on what can be done. You're implying that I don't care what happens outside the borders of the US. I do. Many thing that happen outside of the US are outrageous miscarriages of justice, and it is very sad that they happen. I hereby express my outrage in front of the entire Internet that China's government appears to be run by particularly successful gangsters. It is sad and unfortunate and I wish it could be otherwise. Now what? What should I do to fix it? What should I even petition my government to do to fix it? Maybe next time I'm on the phone with Barrack, I can give him a suggestion or two from you. What do you suggest? You haven't answered a single practical question I've posed, you've simply told me how much I hate the rest of the world.
On the other hand, there are many miscarriages of justice right here in the US; and to one extent or another I can do something about those. I can write my congressman, or the President. I can vote for someone who sees things my way. I can file lawsuits. I can post my opinion on the Internet where they join the opinions of others to become demographically relevant. There are any number of things, small and large, that I can do to attempt to change the policies of my own government. I see no practical way that I can attempt to change the policies of the Chinese government. I could even attempt to influence my government to get it to attempt to influence the Chinese government... I just have no idea what they can really do to improve the matter. "Fix the Chinese Government" is not exactly a detailed policy statement to design actions around.
For about the last 2-3 hundred years various European countries and the US have at various points tried to "fix" various other people's countries, societies, and governments. Sometimes the motives have been exceedingly altruistic, other times they have been exceedingly greedy. Most times they have been a combination of the two. The success stories can be numbered on one or two hands, the failures number in the hundreds. The dismal, horrifying failures involving thousands of death and massive instability probably outnumber the success stories. You accuse me of adding magic lines to a map to divide people... I accuse you of trying to magic away lines that have existed for millennium. Lines of culture, religion, and government that people put there because they wanted them. Not just evil westerners, everybody. Give the Internet a hundred years and it might begin to erase those lines, after 10 it has barely blurred them.
If asked a hundred Chinese to define "freedom" you'd probably get 60 or 70 different answers, some very close to your concept others nothing like it. If you asked those same people if they thought the US ought to be "interfering" in their country you'd probably get a close to unanimous "no".
Oh, and are you allergic to capital letters?
More like: I'm a cop, and I see someone murdered in another jurisdiction. I report the crime to the local police and trust them to handle the investigation and bring the criminal to justice. If they're incompetent or corrupt, they may fail to do so, but I've done what I can. I'm not the local police and I can't conduct my own investigation. Now if I see someone litter in my own jurisdiction I can write them a ticket. I have influence in my jurisdiction, but not in someone else's.
At any rate, other than expressing my outrage and angst on an Internet forum, I ask again what I can do about about events in China? Even assuming that tomorrow morning someone wakes me up and tells me I've been elected "Chief Police Dude for All Morality in the World" and I can use all the resources of every Western nation to fight evil and corrupt governments everywhere I find them. What can I do? I could try economic sanctions or boycotts of goods, but those tend to hurt the already suffering average citizens of a country as much if not more than its government. I could send in the troops, but we've all seen how well that works. In most cases the best you can hope for is something resembling freedom and democracy while the occupiers are in place and thing fall apart afterward. Success stories like post WWII Japan are exceedingly rare. The most I could really do is what the West already does. Shake my finger sternly and say "You should really be a better government."
You also haven't even addressed my last point. Assuming you somehow get a free democratic government in place in some of these countries, how do you (within the framework of free elections and speech) prevent them from electing the same sorts of people that already run the country? My favorite example of this is the Israeli West Bank where everybody treated (reasonably enough) free and democratic elections as a great and noble goal. So the people elected Hamas... In a landslide. The high minded thing to do at that point would have been to accept the result and try to normalize relations with Hamas, but that's hardly practical both because we hate Hamas and because they hate us. What happens when we give the Chinese free and open elections and they elect the same people who continue the same polices?
Maybe, maybe not. There have been death at American "Youth Boot Camps" too, and we have all of the freedoms you mention. Accepting for the moment that you are right, however, and that this death could have been prevented in a "free society", it's not the argument you were making in your original post. There you implied that you already knew the Chinese Government was going to just cover this up and let the camp continue operations as normal, because the Chinese Government has done other thing which you disagree with. Your argument these was essentially "China has done evil things, therefore China is inherently evil, and will always make an evil choice over a good in every situation."
It just doesn't work that way.
You aren't wrong, but you aren't right either. Certainly there are places where it is worse to live than in any Western country, and certainly as citizens of the world and human beings we should be concerned about the people in those places. However, we can only hope to influence our own governments. Since we don't want our own countries to fall down the same rabbit holes that we've seen other countries go down, we monitor and criticize our own governments to try to prevent such a slide. The fact that China may be worse doesn't excuse our government from moving in the same direction as the the Chinese government. To grossly simplify things: if there a continuum of behavior for a national government with "0" being really awful and "100" being really great, just because China is a "20" and your government is a "65" doesn't mean you shouldn't protest when your government moves to "64" or try to influence it to hit "66".
The fact is that we can't do a lot about what Beijing and Tehran do. If we boycott their products are we hurting the government or the people? Same question with economic sanctions. Attempts to impose Western style freedom and democracy from the outside almost universally end badly, and often leave people worse off than they were under the old "bad" regime. I think most of us can agree that we wouldn't want to live in China or Iran, but there is no apparent easy solution to the problem of how to make them better places to live.
Add to this the fact that many (certainly not all, maybe not even most, but many) people in these countries like things as they are, and you have an even bigger mess. Assuming you somehow force a change, how in your newly free and democratic country do you prevent a relapse the first time things get bad? We see this in Western countries all the time... When things are stressful, the country tightens up. Things become less free (still much better than China of course, but we clearly contract in the direction of "safety" when things are tough). In country with little democratic tradition and with conservative pointing back to the "good old days" under the Communists or the Supreme Leader what's to prevent backslides?
Few if any progressive like what happens in China or Iran, but at the same time we know that there's a lot less that we can do about it than we can do about what happens in our own countries.
Which is wrong and implies that a news report about a different camp shows a contradiction to the government report about this camp. Whee.
Not to defend China, which certainly does have a very bad track record, but your logic doesn't make sense. The fact that the Chinese government does not grant what we consider normal and appropriate rights to its people has little to do with how they handle this matter, which appears to relate to a non-government unlicensed facility. Just because a person or entity does things which we disagree with doesn't mean that they will always without fail make every choice with an eye toward "what's the opposite of what Darkness404 would do?"
It's certainly possible that they will handle this badly and cover it up, they've done so before. On the other hand, to assume that you simply know what's happening, because you disagree with other policies of the Chinese government is a complete non sequitur.
My household has two of the things and our bill is only like $105. Not sure where these numbers come from.
I was just about to point that out. Lots of kids have little cards that their parent load their allowance on these days. Saves worry about losing the money or it getting stolen by older kids, etc. Also allows parents to see where the money was spent. I do tend to think that this whole thing is rather silly, and Apple is being a bit high handed, but the credit card argument is bunk. There's about a dozen version of prepaid or debit type cards that kids have these days, and all work like a "credit card" to the iTunes system.
"chkdsk" isn't an arcane process. "chkdsk -r" on this particular chipset employs an arcane process to do an in depth check for physical problems on the drive. In other words, this bug: only affects people running "chkdsk -r" on a secondary hard drive, with a particular chipset, who have not update their chipset driver, and is caused by an arcane process within the un-updated driver. I'm hardly a Microsoft apologist, but this seems like a Hell of a tempest in a teapot to me.
(As a side note, anybody know how capitalization works when a sentence begins with a reference to a command? Changing the first letter to a capital actually changes the name of the command, at least in Unix, so it seems like the wrong thing to do.)
You could probably reduce the number of problems by using multiple systems and only voiding the warranty if there are multiple detections of abuse.
That makes sense. If you return one iPod swearing you didn't drop it, despite what the sensor says; go ahead and take the customer's word for it. When you're on the third iPod that you swear you didn't drop despite what sensor says... well...
Maybe he's a National Guardsmen who's an economist in the civilian world? I must admit I'm at a loss for other explanations.
Eh, I know I'm being pedantic and all, but OSX is Unix. More so that many of the "free-nix" OS's, if only because Apple paid to get it checked for Unixyness.
I've thought of that, but it's a lot more complicated. To make that work you'd have to have some sort of huge database of what things (for a fairly nebulous definition of "things") are, and hardware and software to interface between the glasses and the database. In something like a museum this could work to an extent, you're issued glasses and a portable interface device (or with small enough circuitry, just really smart glasses)when you go in, and the heavy lifting is done by back room servers that store the database and interpret the camera signals. The whole thing could be on a Museum WLAN. It would still be a lot of programming, but it could be done I think. Outside of that kind of limited system though you'd have a much harder time. Sure it'd be great if you could turn your sunglasses into a permanent HUD that gives you information as you want or need it, but the backed programming would be colossal and everyone would have to carry something probably on par with a desktop computer in power to handle the interfacing. I don't think current generation phones and PDAs could handle it.
Like I said, I wasn't implying that junior officers could just all go away, and life would move on (after all where else would we all learn how to be captains :-P). More of a chain of authority thing. A platoon NEEDS a Platoon Leader, but if the authority required to perform the administrative and logistical functions of a platoon leader can be temporarily vested in a Platoon Sergeant via a filed letter from the commander, they may not need a Platoon Leader this week or this month. In the old Army, there were thing that ONLY officers could do. There still are, but they're fewer and with enough rank on the authorization letter some can be gotten around. Battlefield commissions tended to be the result of needing someone with some authority available to a unit right now in the heat of battle, not to an Army wide shortage of junior officers. If that authority can be delegated to an NCO in the short term the immediacy of needing battlefield commissions goes away.
Well in my welding example you're just using a normal (though modified) safety device for the job. With the surgeon... Well, maybe a modified face shield? I dunno... the idea is training for specific jobs anyway, it's not like you'd be walking around your day-to-day life wearing the things. You'd want to make it as natural as possible for the trainees, and where possible use eye gear normal to the job; but some people will probably just have to use goofy glasses.
We had that happen a few times while I was overseas. This was before the DoD blanket ban on thumbdrives, so I'd take my unclass drive to my room, download whatever I couldn't get to, bring it back and install it. If it needed to go on a classified system I'd use my unclass system to burn it to non-writable media first.
At the time this was perfectly legal, though I suspect it would get you in a lot trouble now. What a difference a few years makes. I imagine you could still do it that way if you burn to CD directly on your home machine and brought the CD in through whatever document control your unit has setup. Bit more of a PITA, but doable in a pinch unless your unit is really hard assed.
My troubles came from senior officers that hadn't brought their own computers and wanted to plug their DoD laptops into the housing nets. I swear if I can afford a cheapo disposable laptop on a senior lieutenant's salary, you can certainly do so as a senior major. Go to the PX, get a cheap computer and stop trying to act like regulation doesn't apply to people above O-3.
Ever since I first heard of it I've thought augmented reality is going to be big some day. It's not much more than a toy right now (watching the video, it was clear that there's still a long way to go before it reaches it's full promise), but someday it'll be there. At my last job we used a lot of virtual reality modeling to do experimental training programs (learn to weld without real fire kind of stuff). Augmented reality will be so much better for this kind of thing. Think about it. A welder uses a real (modified) torch on a real piece of metal, but his goggles show the metal heating up and reforming. Or combine it with the tactile stuff from the other example and surgeon uses a "real" scalpel in a real operating room, but sees and feels a virtual patient. You could learn and practice very complicated procedures this way.
We're no where near being able to build holodecks, but between this tactile display tech and augmented reality we may not have to. Use the real world as your backdrop, put in real things where ever appropriate, and only simulate the stuff that you actually need to interact with.