Wow, this is the same school board that mandated the teaching of Creationism. I say that once we finish off the Taliban, we go hunt down the Kansas school board!
No, the idea is that as instructors, we don't have to take leaps of faith. When the website finds plagiarism, there's no guesswork involved anymore.
Remember that we live in an age when the university gets sued by students and/or their parents if they feel they are being accused falsely. With these sites, it's easy to gather such obvious evidence that even the most irrational parents and the most bratty students shut the hell up. So, we instructors feel like we have a safety net, like we don't need to go out on a limb or to make judgement calls. I'm pretty happy about that.
You make it sound like it's the prime priority of a university to protect its reputation. Why would you think that? I think it's the prime priority of a university to educate its students. If they coast through by cheating, they're not taking the time to have their own thoughts, and when that happens, we fail as educators.
Look, I don't think you guys need to freak out about this. TurnItIn reserves only the right to archive and search through all the stuff that's turned in to them. They can't publish it or sell it--so it's not like they take over all the rights to your work. As someone else has pointed out, how would they catch cheaters unless they could compare their work with the others? This would be impossible if they didn't keep the old papers on file.
I teach at a US university, and I am quite sure that an instructor has the right to keep a copy of everything that is turned in by the students as a part of coursework. Nobody freaks out about this, nor thinks their rights are being violated. It is also my right to consult with my colleagues regarding an assignment that is turned in to me. This pagiarism service does nothing more than what has been going on legally, though on a much smaller scale, at out universities.
Oh, and about worries whether these online services might falsely accuse someone of plagiarism, only total ignorance of how this works could give rise to such an objection. It's not like they send you email saying "your plagiarism test came out positive, congratulations". What they do is send you references to all of the original sources which share identical sections of text with the paper being investigated. Then I, the instructor, must decide whether the overlap between the paper and the other source is a symptom of plagiarism or of something else.
I have collegues who send every paper they receive to these services, and they catch many cheaters. Because I don't do this I might have missed some (but I like to think my assignments are so specific to my course that anything which is a cut and paste from the internet will not look like an answer to my essay question). However, when I get a paper I am suspicious about, I quickly OCR it and send it to plagiarism.org. They do five free checks per email address, and then charge you $1 for every additional check, which my department would pay if I wanted them to. It's great to call a cheating bastard into my office hour when you have absolute proof they cheated. I tell them I suspect plagiarism, and give them a chance to withdraw their paper (most of my colleagues are not this kind). So far, only one has refused. When she did I quoted to her a long passage from a website, which was identical to a section of her paper. Then I asked her to not return to my class. She got an F and the fact that she broke the law was appended to her permament university record. In this case I was very happy that finding incontrovertible proof was so little work for me, because I have better stuff to do than to search around for original sources. If it weren't for the website, I still would have known that she cheated; a couple of probing questions about the text she turned would reveal that. Still, I might feel torn about the F and the permanent black mark, because there are some people who can write stuff they can't explain verbally. With proof, though, I didn't need to feel torn at all.
"Maybe memory manufacturers could buy the miserable company and do a proper JEDEC serial ram standard."
Hey, I like this idea, but let's not float it too soon. I think they should let Rabmus go bankrupt first and buy up the IP at the liquidation auction. There is no hurry, and if this announcement is right (and applies to all lines of future Intel chips) we won't have to wait long anyway. You can bet that Rambus people will be trying agressively to sell their IP pretty soon. I hope they get stonewalled.
Check Pricewatch before claiming DDR costs less. Really, it's about the same price as RDRAM. If Rambus weren't such a lame and litigious company, I'd be sad at hearing this announcement. I think the technology is good. I hope their engineers, who have done a decent job, get really pissed off that their stupid marketing/legal departments stunk up the company so badly that even Intel couldn't stay in bed with them. If I were a start techie at Rambus, I'd put up my resume today!
I know the article was terse, but it did say that they had this hammer chip running in a box at a trade show. That seems close enough to release to warrant us talking about it, especially when several key decisions need to be made now. For example, should we take the architecture seriously enough to try to optimize current software for it so they're ready when it's released? Windows seems to still be saying "no" and Linux people think "yes".
I hope that with your "don't give it a thought until it's released" attitude you never get promoted to be a manager of some kind. You would suck!
hey, just wondering... does anyone know how they set up WINE in this distro? Am I to assume that if you try to run an.exe file from inside Linux, it would fire up WINE and try to run it? If so, I congratulate them. Getting WINE to run has been a bit of a black art, and if these guys figured out how to autoconfigure it on install, that would be a huge step forward for Linux.
We can talk all we want about how we want people to transition over from Windows, and I'm certain many would like to, but they are addicted to a specific windows program that isn't on Linux (perhaps a filesharing program, a game, Nandub, or some such thing). A working WINE would win over so many peeople to Linux that the effect could be huge. Linux advocates simply can't get in through their heads that you can't do everything in Linux that you can do in Windows. When they tell users the opposite and their lie is found out, it makes people bitter, turns them off, and makes them wonder what other lies are a part of standard Linux advocacy. WINE is the way to fix that. If we want to dramatically increase the Linux user base (and it's not obvious that we should) WINE is the answer. I'm glad this distro is taking it seriously, and I hope others do too.
Take the train from Germany into the Czech Republic. You'll see huge piles of garbage just over the border. All of it is unrecyclable German crap. Sure, some early Czech administrators got a bit of money to take this stuff, then they pocketed it and ran. Well, at least the Germans are sort of embarassed about the whole thing... though they're not about to take the stuff back.
Much worse stuff goes on with European ships on the scrapping beaches in India and other places. Hundreds of people die just to take those things apart, something that would cost millions to do "by the book" in a western country.
So yes, Americans aren't the only shitheads regarding this.
Look, this rationalization is stupid. I bet you think that paying some poor bum a couple of bucks so that you can do medical experiments on him is just fine too once he accepts the money.
What's worse about this case is we know that the Chinese government will not dispose of this responsibly, but instead leave the stuff to poison their own people. Yet we still keep sending it to them. Can there be any other explanation other than that we just don't care about those people? It does not make it any more moral when some American idiot like you (correctly) observes that their own government doesn't care about them either. Hell, let's sell S. Hussein some biowaste so he could poison those annoying rebels. Hell, once he hands us the check, it's out of our hands, right?
I don't think the article suggested that the US goverment sponsor the station, but rather US companies, like Apple.
But even if we consider your idea, that the government does it. Surely it would not be hard to set up some sort of a donation fund for the station that accepts money anonymously. The article didn't mention there was one, but if not, there should be. This way, the station can act like it's probably Iranian dissidents in the west that are making contributions (and that's not so unrealistic, when the salary of a single surgeon kept the station running this long).
You're probably right that the US government would probably insist on screwing around with the content, probably regarding antisemetism, like you say. Then the cover would be blown and the station would be treated as another Voice of America, which isn't really taken very seriously in the reigeon because the propaganda on it is pretty heavy-handed. Have you ever actually listened to the VOA? They lay it on pretty thick; they might have "editorial independence" but if so, it seems their editors really enjoy marching and flag-waving. That's why everybody ignores it and listens to the BBC, which delivers propaganda much less blatantly.
Now I wish Americans would watch alternative media
on
The Satellite Subversives
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This article really reminds me of a certain poverty in the USA, a poverty that is obviously absent in Iran. The scene in Iran is like it used to be in the old Communist block: few people really paid attention to the state radio, because they were too savvy accept it uncritically. According to some studies, "alternative media", which in that case meant news from the west, had 80% penetration. They undertook considerable risk to obtain and circulate foreign stuff, but they still did it, because they had a hunger to know what the outside world was like.
It seems the same sort of sentiment is very much alive in Iran, and I think that's wonderful. It's quickly dying in Eastern Europe (people read more foreign media before it became legal). However, the spirit is totally dead in the USA. I've realized that American propaganda is the best in the world. This is because it not only succeeds in displacing or marginalizing all serious dissent, but it manages to convince its consumers that it's hiding nothing.
Iranians are obviously not naive enough to think that their national media tells it like it is, but Americans think exactly this of our own domestic media. To someone who has lived in many parts of the world and makes an effort to closely follow world events in the world press, FOX news and the Washington Post seem almost the same. It's telling that Americans perceive the former as being ultra-right-wing and the latter as being very liberal--as though any political positions outside of this range can only be entertained by the insane. That range, in fact, is very narrow, and it's constantly narrowing further as the government clamps down on media outlets, and as they slowly consolidate into mega-info-corporations.
No, we are not getting the straight story in the USA. That should be no surprise, as our government and the media sources themselves have interests to protect. It's no different anywhere else in the world. But really, would any American take time off work to watch a crappy satellite channel that provides a dissenting and balancing view? Hell no! We leave that task to... the American media, who conveniently beam news into prime time and leave it on our doorsteps. These guys manage to stir up very vigorous debates about mere details of policy. We watch it and think "great, I'm hearing both sides of the issue" but we forget how close the two sides were to being with. We ignore all the stuff that is NOT being debated.
For example, since we're on the topic of Iran: the two sides of the policy debate go as follows. The "hawks" think that the vigorous efforts of Iranian scientists to master rocketry must be destroyed ASAP with some cluster bombs and daisy cutters, because if they learn how to build rockets, they become able to attack our allies, and perhaps eventually the USA itself. The doves think that we should instead funnel money and support (=weapons) into the fledgling democracy movements so that the clerical government is overthrown the "natural" way. Or, perhaps the pressure will force them to abandon their research. So, we think the issue to ponder is: who's right, the hawks or the doves? Nobody in the US press could ever even float the following idea: "Maybe Iran has a right to defend its people with modern weapons, just like we do." Or how about "Since Iran is obviously making the transition to military modernization, we should see to it that they end up our allies." Well, I'm sure you could think of many more such insane and out-of-bounds position which, from a neutral point of view, have quite a bit of sense to them. But don't expect them to be even considered by the US media. Their grip on our political thoughts is so tight that the average Iranian citizen is effectively exposed to a much larger diversity of political views. For shame!
Here, alternative points of view are limited to the rants of kooks on/.--and nobody really listens to them.
If Sun plans to migrate to a Mozilla-like structure where the commercial version will be based on the OSS version, and most of the code written by Sun employees in merged into the OSS version, then I like this move. However, it might not turn out this way.
I can easily imagine Sun diverting its developers to improve StarOffice only, and leave OpenOffice to the rabble of volunteers. If this had happened with Mozilla (say, when Netscape got bought out), it wouldn't even be a contender today. I know that the GPL prevents blatant variants of this strategy, but it still allows them to add closed-source "modules" which could eventually become a big chunk of the whole system.
The US government currently holds hundreds of people in jail on no charges at all. Basically, it's because they are Muslim men of a certain age from a certain neighborhood. I guess I fail to see the moral difference between this and China's dissidents.
Sometimes I think that if the US had dissent movement which was as strong, developed and dangerous as the one in China, we would respond even more repressively than China does. Fortunately for our government, and unfortunately for our people, the US media has convinced its consumers that it's independent of the government, despite being nothing more than its mouthpiece. The Chinese media has not succeeded in the same regard, and most Chinese citizens know better than to trust it completely. They instead seek a balanced view by comparing local media with stuff from overseas (which the government can't prevent them from seeing, though it occationally tries). Americans, on the other hand, are easy. We don't even bother looking at non-US viewpoints in the foreign media, even though we can. For us, something is balanced when we have seen both the opinion of the reactionary Republicans (FOX news) and centrist Democrats (Washington Post). Still, the real range of reasonable political views is much broader than this. Both of these sources, as well as the rest in the US, are just bitches of the two barely-articulated wings of the same government. In this way, China is far more advanced and effectively less totalitarian than the US. Their citizens are exposed to far more political ideas than US citizens have ever seen.
Umm, all that we've seen so far is the review of what appears to be a hastily slapped together first impression of the english localization of Red Flag. Since the primary purpose of this distribution is to serve China, this seems pretty stupid. I want to read a review from someone who has spent a week or so with the Chinese installation. Anyone?
BTW--I wish I could set up a filter to block all slashdot political ranting. You guys make me sick. Before posting more blather, think about which government is killing and torturing more innocent people, yours or China's. Hint: if you're US-American, the correct answer won't stoke your patriotism.
Holy crap, I'm starting to question the sanity of Slashdot. While it's well documented that "we are being lied to by the corporate media," the solution to this is not a website which is less accurate and less well-researched than the mainstream media itself. If you are interested in investigative reporting that is too uncomfortable for the US press, check out
projectcensored.org as a start. Also, learn foreign languages and read non-english papers. But for fuck's sake, don't read disinfo.com and expect them to do all the work for you.
The actual "information" on there is only slightly more accurate than astrology. Seriously, it is alternative news for idiots looking to reinforce their predjudices. If you find one piece there with serious investigative reporting that presents credible evidence for its thesis, please reply to this post.
Two things: first, there is no evidence that a single person responsible for the attack was captured or killed in the Afghanistan massacre. If there is any sense in the "eye for eye" idea, it's that you should take the eye of the person who took yours, not just any old eye which makes an easy target.
Second, the attack was not unprovoked--or rather, if you think our response was provoked, than by the same standard, so was the attack. Its victims had much more responsibility for international crimes than did the 4,000+ innocent Afghani citizens which we killed in our raids. (Many more were maimed.) After all, WTC victims are overwhelmingly citizens in a democracy, and as such had the power to stop their government in the atrocious starvation of Iraq, the destruction of the only medical supply factory in Sudan (which meant tens of thousands of Sudanese people died from treatable diseases), the arming of Israel,... well, I could go on. The American people are not innocent of these crimes. It was in our power to prevent them, and we chose not to. On the other hand, when the leaders in Afghanistan acted criminally, the ordinary citizens had no recourse. Thus, they were innocent in a way that the even the WTC victims weren't. I'm not a fan of revenge killings, but our brutal actions don't even rise to the level of revenge. Revenge requires that we cause suffering to the people who wronged us. So far, I see no evidence that this has happened. We did cause a lot of suffering to people who did no wrong at all, and upon witnessing the destruction, found it somehow gratifying. That's not even taking an eye for an eye; it's just plain sick. I've never been more ashamed to be an American. Shitheads like you with comments like the above certainly don't help.
I always assumed that the source would be a whole set of DVDs, not a single disk. Wow! Obviously, it was compressed. Do you remember whether it was MPEG-2, or what? Also, what was the resolution?
As far as piracy goes, I know that for music, whatever is playable on a computer is rippable (at worst by using the digital out on the sound card). Now I assume that the link between the Linux machine's graphics card and the projector is digital; it would hardly make sense to do D/A and A/D conversion. But if that's so, couldn't we run this raw video signal into an "in" on a different computer, say a laptop, and save it on the hard drive? Then we'd be free to re-compress it as we saw fit. All the sudden, a pimply movie usher could become haxor supreme.
Well said! The only advantage that will remain for movie theaters is that they will get movies a few months sooner than the video store. Not a terribly big advantage, as far as I'm concerned.
I, for one, wouldn't mind destroying the industry. We need a change of culture. My vision is like this: I set up a kick ass screen and sound system in my living room, and we set aside "movies" nights. Price of admission for my friends is a 6 of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (cheaper than a movie ticket), or a nice bottle of wine, depending on the movie.
What we need before we get there is a little technology (HD-DVDs and better screens) and a big attitude adjustment. I for one will do my part to make this happen. To make the revolution complete: don't rent your DVD from Blockbuster; chances are they have it in your public library. I'm not kidding. I connected to my library's catalog started doing searches for movies that I'm interested in seeing, and found that about 80% are available on DVD, and that number grows every month. Week-long loan periods, no fees... Ah, but I digress....
The point is, the MPAA are little pricks, and we should use their new technology to screw them. They deserve it! Next time you're thinking about going to a movie, think to yourself: will this be more fun than throwing a party?
Oh, how quickly we forget Alba, the first cloned pet. Of course, the Alba story was much more interesting because he was an albino rabbit with jellyfish genes to make him glow.
Hey, thank you for the thoughtful reply. I guess I agree with you about the fuzzyness of intelligence testing, the importance of the environment, and stuff like that.
I really don't know the literature in the field; actually, I don't know much more than what filters out into Scientific American and other pop magazines. Still, I had the impression that many of these IQ results were generated in tests on adopted children, controlling for the IQ of the adoptive parents. If I remember right, results show that IQ scores of children resemble the genetic parents more closely than they do adoptive parents. I admit, my memory about this is pretty shady. I'm no social scientist or psychologist, but if I were and found that no study like this had been done, I'd do it. The problem is, nobody likes results that make us feel like genetics have more influence on our behavior than the environment. Even I don't like it, but now that I suspect it's true, I say it's time we get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, this is the same school board that mandated the teaching of Creationism. I say that once we finish off the Taliban, we go hunt down the Kansas school board!
Remember that we live in an age when the university gets sued by students and/or their parents if they feel they are being accused falsely. With these sites, it's easy to gather such obvious evidence that even the most irrational parents and the most bratty students shut the hell up. So, we instructors feel like we have a safety net, like we don't need to go out on a limb or to make judgement calls. I'm pretty happy about that.
You make it sound like it's the prime priority of a university to protect its reputation. Why would you think that? I think it's the prime priority of a university to educate its students. If they coast through by cheating, they're not taking the time to have their own thoughts, and when that happens, we fail as educators.
I teach at a US university, and I am quite sure that an instructor has the right to keep a copy of everything that is turned in by the students as a part of coursework. Nobody freaks out about this, nor thinks their rights are being violated. It is also my right to consult with my colleagues regarding an assignment that is turned in to me. This pagiarism service does nothing more than what has been going on legally, though on a much smaller scale, at out universities.
Oh, and about worries whether these online services might falsely accuse someone of plagiarism, only total ignorance of how this works could give rise to such an objection. It's not like they send you email saying "your plagiarism test came out positive, congratulations". What they do is send you references to all of the original sources which share identical sections of text with the paper being investigated. Then I, the instructor, must decide whether the overlap between the paper and the other source is a symptom of plagiarism or of something else.
I have collegues who send every paper they receive to these services, and they catch many cheaters. Because I don't do this I might have missed some (but I like to think my assignments are so specific to my course that anything which is a cut and paste from the internet will not look like an answer to my essay question). However, when I get a paper I am suspicious about, I quickly OCR it and send it to plagiarism.org. They do five free checks per email address, and then charge you $1 for every additional check, which my department would pay if I wanted them to. It's great to call a cheating bastard into my office hour when you have absolute proof they cheated. I tell them I suspect plagiarism, and give them a chance to withdraw their paper (most of my colleagues are not this kind). So far, only one has refused. When she did I quoted to her a long passage from a website, which was identical to a section of her paper. Then I asked her to not return to my class. She got an F and the fact that she broke the law was appended to her permament university record. In this case I was very happy that finding incontrovertible proof was so little work for me, because I have better stuff to do than to search around for original sources. If it weren't for the website, I still would have known that she cheated; a couple of probing questions about the text she turned would reveal that. Still, I might feel torn about the F and the permanent black mark, because there are some people who can write stuff they can't explain verbally. With proof, though, I didn't need to feel torn at all.
Hey, I like this idea, but let's not float it too soon. I think they should let Rabmus go bankrupt first and buy up the IP at the liquidation auction. There is no hurry, and if this announcement is right (and applies to all lines of future Intel chips) we won't have to wait long anyway. You can bet that Rambus people will be trying agressively to sell their IP pretty soon. I hope they get stonewalled.
Check Pricewatch before claiming DDR costs less. Really, it's about the same price as RDRAM. If Rambus weren't such a lame and litigious company, I'd be sad at hearing this announcement. I think the technology is good. I hope their engineers, who have done a decent job, get really pissed off that their stupid marketing/legal departments stunk up the company so badly that even Intel couldn't stay in bed with them. If I were a start techie at Rambus, I'd put up my resume today!
Long live the People's Revolution!
I hope that with your "don't give it a thought until it's released" attitude you never get promoted to be a manager of some kind. You would suck!
We can talk all we want about how we want people to transition over from Windows, and I'm certain many would like to, but they are addicted to a specific windows program that isn't on Linux (perhaps a filesharing program, a game, Nandub, or some such thing). A working WINE would win over so many peeople to Linux that the effect could be huge. Linux advocates simply can't get in through their heads that you can't do everything in Linux that you can do in Windows. When they tell users the opposite and their lie is found out, it makes people bitter, turns them off, and makes them wonder what other lies are a part of standard Linux advocacy. WINE is the way to fix that. If we want to dramatically increase the Linux user base (and it's not obvious that we should) WINE is the answer. I'm glad this distro is taking it seriously, and I hope others do too.
Much worse stuff goes on with European ships on the scrapping beaches in India and other places. Hundreds of people die just to take those things apart, something that would cost millions to do "by the book" in a western country.
So yes, Americans aren't the only shitheads regarding this.
What's worse about this case is we know that the Chinese government will not dispose of this responsibly, but instead leave the stuff to poison their own people. Yet we still keep sending it to them. Can there be any other explanation other than that we just don't care about those people? It does not make it any more moral when some American idiot like you (correctly) observes that their own government doesn't care about them either. Hell, let's sell S. Hussein some biowaste so he could poison those annoying rebels. Hell, once he hands us the check, it's out of our hands, right?
But even if we consider your idea, that the government does it. Surely it would not be hard to set up some sort of a donation fund for the station that accepts money anonymously. The article didn't mention there was one, but if not, there should be. This way, the station can act like it's probably Iranian dissidents in the west that are making contributions (and that's not so unrealistic, when the salary of a single surgeon kept the station running this long).
You're probably right that the US government would probably insist on screwing around with the content, probably regarding antisemetism, like you say. Then the cover would be blown and the station would be treated as another Voice of America, which isn't really taken very seriously in the reigeon because the propaganda on it is pretty heavy-handed. Have you ever actually listened to the VOA? They lay it on pretty thick; they might have "editorial independence" but if so, it seems their editors really enjoy marching and flag-waving. That's why everybody ignores it and listens to the BBC, which delivers propaganda much less blatantly.
It seems the same sort of sentiment is very much alive in Iran, and I think that's wonderful. It's quickly dying in Eastern Europe (people read more foreign media before it became legal). However, the spirit is totally dead in the USA. I've realized that American propaganda is the best in the world. This is because it not only succeeds in displacing or marginalizing all serious dissent, but it manages to convince its consumers that it's hiding nothing.
Iranians are obviously not naive enough to think that their national media tells it like it is, but Americans think exactly this of our own domestic media. To someone who has lived in many parts of the world and makes an effort to closely follow world events in the world press, FOX news and the Washington Post seem almost the same. It's telling that Americans perceive the former as being ultra-right-wing and the latter as being very liberal--as though any political positions outside of this range can only be entertained by the insane. That range, in fact, is very narrow, and it's constantly narrowing further as the government clamps down on media outlets, and as they slowly consolidate into mega-info-corporations.
No, we are not getting the straight story in the USA. That should be no surprise, as our government and the media sources themselves have interests to protect. It's no different anywhere else in the world. But really, would any American take time off work to watch a crappy satellite channel that provides a dissenting and balancing view? Hell no! We leave that task to ... the American media, who conveniently beam news into prime time and leave it on our doorsteps. These guys manage to stir up very vigorous debates about mere details of policy. We watch it and think "great, I'm hearing both sides of the issue" but we forget how close the two sides were to being with. We ignore all the stuff that is NOT being debated.
For example, since we're on the topic of Iran: the two sides of the policy debate go as follows. The "hawks" think that the vigorous efforts of Iranian scientists to master rocketry must be destroyed ASAP with some cluster bombs and daisy cutters, because if they learn how to build rockets, they become able to attack our allies, and perhaps eventually the USA itself. The doves think that we should instead funnel money and support (=weapons) into the fledgling democracy movements so that the clerical government is overthrown the "natural" way. Or, perhaps the pressure will force them to abandon their research. So, we think the issue to ponder is: who's right, the hawks or the doves? Nobody in the US press could ever even float the following idea: "Maybe Iran has a right to defend its people with modern weapons, just like we do." Or how about "Since Iran is obviously making the transition to military modernization, we should see to it that they end up our allies." Well, I'm sure you could think of many more such insane and out-of-bounds position which, from a neutral point of view, have quite a bit of sense to them. But don't expect them to be even considered by the US media. Their grip on our political thoughts is so tight that the average Iranian citizen is effectively exposed to a much larger diversity of political views. For shame!
Here, alternative points of view are limited to the rants of kooks on /.--and nobody really listens to them.
Didn't you read the article? They did!
I can easily imagine Sun diverting its developers to improve StarOffice only, and leave OpenOffice to the rabble of volunteers. If this had happened with Mozilla (say, when Netscape got bought out), it wouldn't even be a contender today. I know that the GPL prevents blatant variants of this strategy, but it still allows them to add closed-source "modules" which could eventually become a big chunk of the whole system.
Sometimes I think that if the US had dissent movement which was as strong, developed and dangerous as the one in China, we would respond even more repressively than China does. Fortunately for our government, and unfortunately for our people, the US media has convinced its consumers that it's independent of the government, despite being nothing more than its mouthpiece. The Chinese media has not succeeded in the same regard, and most Chinese citizens know better than to trust it completely. They instead seek a balanced view by comparing local media with stuff from overseas (which the government can't prevent them from seeing, though it occationally tries). Americans, on the other hand, are easy. We don't even bother looking at non-US viewpoints in the foreign media, even though we can. For us, something is balanced when we have seen both the opinion of the reactionary Republicans (FOX news) and centrist Democrats (Washington Post). Still, the real range of reasonable political views is much broader than this. Both of these sources, as well as the rest in the US, are just bitches of the two barely-articulated wings of the same government. In this way, China is far more advanced and effectively less totalitarian than the US. Their citizens are exposed to far more political ideas than US citizens have ever seen.
BTW--I wish I could set up a filter to block all slashdot political ranting. You guys make me sick. Before posting more blather, think about which government is killing and torturing more innocent people, yours or China's. Hint: if you're US-American, the correct answer won't stoke your patriotism.
Holy crap, I'm starting to question the sanity of Slashdot. While it's well documented that "we are being lied to by the corporate media," the solution to this is not a website which is less accurate and less well-researched than the mainstream media itself. If you are interested in investigative reporting that is too uncomfortable for the US press, check out projectcensored.org as a start. Also, learn foreign languages and read non-english papers. But for fuck's sake, don't read disinfo.com and expect them to do all the work for you. The actual "information" on there is only slightly more accurate than astrology. Seriously, it is alternative news for idiots looking to reinforce their predjudices. If you find one piece there with serious investigative reporting that presents credible evidence for its thesis, please reply to this post.
Second, the attack was not unprovoked--or rather, if you think our response was provoked, than by the same standard, so was the attack. Its victims had much more responsibility for international crimes than did the 4,000+ innocent Afghani citizens which we killed in our raids. (Many more were maimed.) After all, WTC victims are overwhelmingly citizens in a democracy, and as such had the power to stop their government in the atrocious starvation of Iraq, the destruction of the only medical supply factory in Sudan (which meant tens of thousands of Sudanese people died from treatable diseases), the arming of Israel, ... well, I could go on. The American people are not innocent of these crimes. It was in our power to prevent them, and we chose not to. On the other hand, when the leaders in Afghanistan acted criminally, the ordinary citizens had no recourse. Thus, they were innocent in a way that the even the WTC victims weren't. I'm not a fan of revenge killings, but our brutal actions don't even rise to the level of revenge. Revenge requires that we cause suffering to the people who wronged us. So far, I see no evidence that this has happened. We did cause a lot of suffering to people who did no wrong at all, and upon witnessing the destruction, found it somehow gratifying. That's not even taking an eye for an eye; it's just plain sick. I've never been more ashamed to be an American. Shitheads like you with comments like the above certainly don't help.
Wow, she's human!
As far as piracy goes, I know that for music, whatever is playable on a computer is rippable (at worst by using the digital out on the sound card). Now I assume that the link between the Linux machine's graphics card and the projector is digital; it would hardly make sense to do D/A and A/D conversion. But if that's so, couldn't we run this raw video signal into an "in" on a different computer, say a laptop, and save it on the hard drive? Then we'd be free to re-compress it as we saw fit. All the sudden, a pimply movie usher could become haxor supreme.
I, for one, wouldn't mind destroying the industry. We need a change of culture. My vision is like this: I set up a kick ass screen and sound system in my living room, and we set aside "movies" nights. Price of admission for my friends is a 6 of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (cheaper than a movie ticket), or a nice bottle of wine, depending on the movie.
What we need before we get there is a little technology (HD-DVDs and better screens) and a big attitude adjustment. I for one will do my part to make this happen. To make the revolution complete: don't rent your DVD from Blockbuster; chances are they have it in your public library. I'm not kidding. I connected to my library's catalog started doing searches for movies that I'm interested in seeing, and found that about 80% are available on DVD, and that number grows every month. Week-long loan periods, no fees ... Ah, but I digress....
The point is, the MPAA are little pricks, and we should use their new technology to screw them. They deserve it! Next time you're thinking about going to a movie, think to yourself: will this be more fun than throwing a party?
Thanks! Hey, I learned something on Slashdot!
Oh, how quickly we forget Alba, the first cloned pet. Of course, the Alba story was much more interesting because he was an albino rabbit with jellyfish genes to make him glow.
I really don't know the literature in the field; actually, I don't know much more than what filters out into Scientific American and other pop magazines. Still, I had the impression that many of these IQ results were generated in tests on adopted children, controlling for the IQ of the adoptive parents. If I remember right, results show that IQ scores of children resemble the genetic parents more closely than they do adoptive parents. I admit, my memory about this is pretty shady. I'm no social scientist or psychologist, but if I were and found that no study like this had been done, I'd do it. The problem is, nobody likes results that make us feel like genetics have more influence on our behavior than the environment. Even I don't like it, but now that I suspect it's true, I say it's time we get over it.