It is staggering. I mean, if Pakistan released a movie where all the bad guys lived in a city called Zion, and the film was about how the evil city of Zion had to be wiped off the face of the earth, you know, people in Israel wouldn't have any problem with that, they'd understand that hell, Zion is just a four character moniker for some fictional evil city in a film.
Now, I'm not condoning censorship, but it's silly to ignore the power of symbolism. The fact that the human city is called Zion has everything to do with the US's Judeo Christian roots, even if most people here don't realise it.
A similar comparison is when we see footage of the middle east with people saying "God willing we will be victorious. Allah is great! ". It sounds like primitive religious zealotry. But compare it with:
"Jesus, I'm like really praying we win, like please God, come on, let's do it! Yeah!"
Both phrases are full of religious invective, but the second just sounds like a regular cheer.
but modern philosophy doesn't recognize empiricism as a valid approach (and in fact tries to deny it by placing much of its supposition in the fantasy realm of the 'metaphysical').
No shit sherlock. That's rather like saying "Modern carpenters don't recognise making stuff out of plastic as a valid approach". We all know that lots of stuff is stronger, cheaper and lighter if made out of plastic rather than wood, but that doesn't mean all carpenters are losers because they insist on using wood.
It is not the job of philosophy of make generalisations based on empirical evidence. That's the job of science. Because of this, I am glad that scientists design aircraft and philosophers don't. However, that doesn't mean philosophy is a grand waste of time. There are many questions where empirical observation does not seem to help at all:
"What is truth" "What is knowledge" "What is meaning" "What if all observations were deeply flawed"
And some where both reason and observation may have a role:
"Is the mind the same as the brain?" "What makes me me?" "Can two different things occupy exactly the same space and time?"
As for the supposedly fantasic metaphysical, that's just a terminology problem. The word is so much abused by anyone in search of a cool word that most people view it as a fake science fiction word at this point. However, it has a more formal meaning in metaphysics. I think you'd agree that 'time' was not a physical thing, and yet physical phenomena, it is obviously very important - thus it is metaphysical. See also metadata, metalanguage etc. etc.
In any case, you cannot say that philosophy places supposition in the metaphysical. Whatever philosophy does, it doesn't suppose things. The scientist supposes things all the time (I do x 10 times and each time y happens, so I suppose every time I do x then y will happen).
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for profiteering off of one's countrymen.
That's terrible. I mean Microsoft releasing frequent patches for their products - and then the users are finding those patches so easy to download and install that they keep doing it!
That's so typical of Microsoft. They don't care about the little ISPs, they just want their customer base to have free, simple, access to frequent updates and fixes, without giving a damn about the impact that has on Internet traffic.
I mean, at least when slashdot directs huge amounts of traffic to some dumb site about making a spaceship out of a floppy disc or whatever, they have the courtesy to always cache the site so that it doesn't take down the whole ISP that hosts that page.
"Fact: After the ravages of the Saddam regime, Iraq is in desperate need of modernization."
I don't think that's true. It was under Saddam that Iraq became the most prosperous arab state. It is the sanctions since 1991 that have crippled it. I think Iraq is still sufficiently entrepreneurial and cohesive that it could actually recover really quite fast if it were allowed to. But to do this, it would have to be allowed to exploit it's main historical trade routes - to Russia and to France. And I don't think the US wants that, do they?
Yeah, the dupes are increasing. But I don't think it's a big deal. What's also increasing is the number of stories I've come across somewhere else first. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm starting to suspect/. is no longer most people's first port of call when looking for breaking news. It's shifting from being a site that reports breaking stories and under-the-radar stories, to one that just rounds up the pick of the week, so to speak.
Put the crack down, eh? Where do you get this stuff from? Do you think peer review is the same as editing?
Scientific journals are expensive to make. Sure, some companies still charge outrageous prices due to the rather odd nature of the market, and there is room for improvement, but the notion that somehow you could do this for free is massively massively flawed.
So what? The internet is a very narrow part of computing. Furthermore, there is a big difference between software that is released with a freedom-loving license (BSD, GPL, Artistic, whatever) and software that was developed in a distributed open source way.
The pre-cursors of Apache, NCSA and CERN servers, were both AFAIK developed by a cohesive group of programmers employed by one organisation in one place (more or less). They then released with (I think...) BSD type licenses and Apache took off.
I don't deny that there _are_ examples of open source innovation, but I think they are rare compared with tradition development environments (regardless of the final licensing of the software).
Where open source software is innovative, it is so because of an individual, not becuase of some kind of distributed innovation.
I have a few innovative ideas for software. I'm not a programmer. Here's two scenarios:
1. I post my innovation to a mailing list. Ignored.
2. I tell my development team to implement my innovation. Implemented.
Which results in innovative new software faster? What am I doing managing developers if I can't even program? Well, I'm doing it because I have innovative ideas. Now how often does _that_ happen in open source world.
[disclaimer - I do know how to program, I do manage developers, and I don't have _that_ many innovative ideas, really:)]
Gee, I wonder why we don't have a special name for that point. Maybe, I dunno, South Spot? Southern Point? Bit at the Bottom? Nah, it's never catch on...
This is very important. If our monuments are destroyed, we have to build them again exactly as they were before. That's because the key thing about monuments is not what they represent, but their particular physical specifications. By rebuilding exactly as before, we send a message to the terrorists that we keep very good records, and aren't afraid to use them.
Contrast this to the way our enemies behave. When we bomb their command centers, rather than rebuilding them exactly as they were before, they rebuild them to be more bomb proof. This shows how little respect for their own history they have.
"In the past, journals were expensive for a legitimate reason: printing a small press run (and let's face it, most academic journals have circulations measured in the hundreds or low thousands) resulted in a very high unit cost. "
No. Journals are expensive because editing them requires an enormous amount of skill and expertise, and they have a miniscule target market. To edit a scientific journal requires editors, copy editors, and librarians who are additionally specialists in the scientific field covered by the journal. In the case of where I work, that means we have people who have maybe 12 years of medical training, as researchers or consultants in major hospitals and 6 years editorial experience including maybe national newspapers. That sort of person is not easy to find.
Do you know how long it takes to edit a scientific paper? To check the numbers? To check every reference - to have an external specialist in another country review the paper? Do you know how hard it is just to find someone with enough knowledge to be _able_ to review some of the submitted papers?
Unless you want science to be as accurate and careful as a Slashdot story, someone's going to have to pay for it.
Hey, come on, we can live with a little operator overloading in natural languages.
The only other time I've come across ontology is in philosophy, where it has a precise and well understood (among philosophers) meaning. I don't think there will be much general confusion.
I agree that the sort of behaviour you talk about is bad when it causes an old meaning of a word to become useless, because people confuse it with the new meaning. In this case we are talking about a rather arcane word being co-opted from philosophers by information scientists. There's little reason to use the word in general conversation, and little chance that either of the two groups above will confuse the word or use it sloppily.
Now, the abuse of the word 'enormity' is a different story altogether...
You may be right. However, no public transportation system anywhere makes money. They are not profit vehicles, they are national infrastructure. Complaining that public transport isn't profitable is like complaining that the Police force isn't profitable - it completely misses the point. If your city is a lawless ghetto, all the businesses will move out, and your tax revenue will plummet by far more than the Police ever cost you.
Likewise, if the city is a polluted car-bound concrete hell, you'll have a hard time attracting business and rich people who want to live there and contribute to the city's coffers.
As to the US love of personal transport, I agree that it's a big cultural difference compared with Europe (although the UK is somewhat similar). However - that can change.
I fail to understand the whole 'bandwidth is free' mentality. As someone who has worked for a telco that did everything from lay fibre to manage routers, I can assure you that bandwidth is not free. Users who saturate their connections should not pay the same as users who occassionally browse the web, but like to do so at high speed. The sooner people pay per meg of data moved, the sooner we see:
* Legislation against spam * Fewer stupid graphic heavy websites * Smaller more efficient programs * Greater use of zlib
Furthermore, it means I can:
* Stop subsidising college geeks trying to collect 40Gb of ripped music for the hell of it.
Now, at the _commercial_ level, it's a different story, and I'd hate to see the removal of peering arrangements and so on. But at consumer level, gee, let's just pay for what we use and not pay for what we don't. Is it really so hard?
Ideally, signup and connection to broadband should be trivially cheap, and then payment should be usage based. This opens broadband to poorer people, with amount of usage based on inclination and ability to pay. Currently, broadband is expensive to signup for, meaning its users are exclusively rich people who then think they should be able to host websites / download mp3's eternally as a basic human right. Feh.
Yup, I do. Near the beginning of the web, NCSA kept a 'what's new' page, that listed every new website created that week. It grew exponentially of course, and became pretty useless pretty fast, and was then stopped. The archives are still available, e.g.
"They punish you additionally for what you think, rather than only based on what you do."
That's true, but in fact it is true for a great many other crimes as well. If I kill my husband because he always comes home drunk and calls me a slut, and one day I crack and kill him, that's judged a lesser crime than if I kill him because I like watching people die.
Personally, if someone commits GBH because "He was a Paki and I don't like Pakis" that doesn't strike me as morally worse than because "He failed to give me all his money when I asked" but that's just me, I guess.
The fact is, we consider states of mind to have moral value, and although we aren't suggesting criminalising states of mind, we can still say that the moral value of a (criminal) action is in some part based on the moral value of the (supposedly) causal (but non-criminal) state of mind. I think the 'slipper slope' argument does not hold here. The latter is not an inevitable forunner of the former.
I think there are more worrying things currently under discussion in the UK, where people deemed likely to commit crimes by dint of a severe mental illness are to be locked up in 'secure hospitals' for 'care'. That _does_ seem to be rather close to criminalising a state of mind, albeit it rather odd state of mind.
That pretty much sums it up. It's a complete pain to implement. Getting your management to sit down and write (and sign off on) a decent privacy policy is hard enough, but to then translate that into some arcane XML format both difficult and pointless.
"So, remind me why our extremely clear and readable privacy policy that explains the nuances of medical ethics and the Internet has to be re-hashed into someone elses over-complex set of quasi-technical categories?"
"It's so that users can simply select from a small number of generic pre-set privacy levels, and let their browser manufacturer tell them whether we take good care of their data!"
It's a dumb idea. It's a miss-appliance of technology.
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless American Airlines and its affiliates from and against any and all claims, demands, proceedings, suits and actions, including any related liabilities, obligations, losses, damages, deficiencies, penalties, taxes, levies, fines, judgments, settlements, expenses (including legal and accountants' fees and disbursements) and costs (collectively, "Claims"), based on, arising out of or resulting from your use of the Site,
This says that (among other things) if you buy a ticket on the site, and they make a profit, leading to the need to pay taxes, you need to pay those taxes for them. Really. Read it again !
I say
AARRGGH!! No it freaking doesn't. This is one of the most standard clauses in any contract anywhere, and it says that if _I_ incur penalties, taxes, etc as a result of using AA's service, then AA are not responsible.
I'm not a lawyer, but my job is to provide technical advice on legal contracts that are software and technology related, so I get used to this kind of language. Please try to be accurate...
Slashdot Mirror
It is staggering. I mean, if Pakistan released a movie where all the bad guys lived in a city called Zion, and the film was about how the evil city of Zion had to be wiped off the face of the earth, you know, people in Israel wouldn't have any problem with that, they'd understand that hell, Zion is just a four character moniker for some fictional evil city in a film.
Now, I'm not condoning censorship, but it's silly to ignore the power of symbolism. The fact that the human city is called Zion has everything to do with the US's Judeo Christian roots, even if most people here don't realise it.
A similar comparison is when we see footage of the middle east with people saying "God willing we will be victorious. Allah is great! ". It sounds like primitive religious zealotry. But compare it with:
"Jesus, I'm like really praying we win, like please God, come on, let's do it! Yeah!"
Both phrases are full of religious invective, but the second just sounds like a regular cheer.
Hmmm. I think you'll find the methodologies of the commercial world count for nothing when it comes to space-craft. XP indeed......
. ht ml
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff
That's what they do, and I'm glad I don't.
And as for domain expertise not counting for much, that may be true for some domains, but sure as hell is not for mine (medical informatics).
No shit sherlock. That's rather like saying "Modern carpenters don't recognise making stuff out of plastic as a valid approach". We all know that lots of stuff is stronger, cheaper and lighter if made out of plastic rather than wood, but that doesn't mean all carpenters are losers because they insist on using wood.
It is not the job of philosophy of make generalisations based on empirical evidence. That's the job of science. Because of this, I am glad that scientists design aircraft and philosophers don't. However, that doesn't mean philosophy is a grand waste of time. There are many questions where empirical observation does not seem to help at all:
"What is truth"
"What is knowledge"
"What is meaning"
"What if all observations were deeply flawed"
And some where both reason and observation may have a role:
"Is the mind the same as the brain?"
"What makes me me?"
"Can two different things occupy exactly the same space and time?"
As for the supposedly fantasic metaphysical, that's just a terminology problem. The word is so much abused by anyone in search of a cool word that most people view it as a fake science fiction word at this point. However, it has a more formal meaning in metaphysics. I think you'd agree that 'time' was not a physical thing, and yet physical phenomena, it is obviously very important - thus it is metaphysical. See also metadata, metalanguage etc. etc.
In any case, you cannot say that philosophy places supposition in the metaphysical. Whatever philosophy does, it doesn't suppose things. The scientist supposes things all the time (I do x 10 times and each time y happens, so I suppose every time I do x then y will happen).
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for profiteering off of one's countrymen.
:)
either way, it's not 'insightful'
That's terrible. I mean Microsoft releasing frequent patches for their products - and then the users are finding those patches so easy to download and install that they keep doing it!
/. ?
That's so typical of Microsoft. They don't care about the little ISPs, they just want their customer base to have free, simple, access to frequent updates and fixes, without giving a damn about the impact that has on Internet traffic.
I mean, at least when slashdot directs huge amounts of traffic to some dumb site about making a spaceship out of a floppy disc or whatever, they have the courtesy to always cache the site so that it doesn't take down the whole ISP that hosts that page.
Why can't MS be more like
"Fact: After the ravages of the Saddam regime, Iraq is in desperate need of modernization."
I don't think that's true. It was under Saddam that Iraq became the most prosperous arab state. It is the sanctions since 1991 that have crippled it. I think Iraq is still sufficiently entrepreneurial and cohesive that it could actually recover really quite fast if it were allowed to. But to do this, it would have to be allowed to exploit it's main historical trade routes - to Russia and to France. And I don't think the US wants that, do they?
68996 is a low id? ;-)
/. is no longer most people's first port of call when looking for breaking news. It's shifting from being a site that reports breaking stories and under-the-radar stories, to one that just rounds up the pick of the week, so to speak.
Yeah, the dupes are increasing. But I don't think it's a big deal. What's also increasing is the number of stories I've come across somewhere else first. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm starting to suspect
"they edit the journals for free"
Put the crack down, eh? Where do you get this stuff from? Do you think peer review is the same as editing?
Scientific journals are expensive to make. Sure, some companies still charge outrageous prices due to the rather odd nature of the market, and there is room for improvement, but the notion that somehow you could do this for free is massively massively flawed.
No, that's exactly what teens do. Look at Europe, SMS is massively driven by the teen market sending each other crap like that. It's a huge industry.
So what? The internet is a very narrow part of computing. Furthermore, there is a big difference between software that is released with a freedom-loving license (BSD, GPL, Artistic, whatever) and software that was developed in a distributed open source way.
:)]
The pre-cursors of Apache, NCSA and CERN servers, were both AFAIK developed by a cohesive group of programmers employed by one organisation in one place (more or less). They then released with (I think...) BSD type licenses and Apache took off.
I don't deny that there _are_ examples of open source innovation, but I think they are rare compared with tradition development environments (regardless of the final licensing of the software).
Where open source software is innovative, it is so because of an individual, not becuase of some kind of distributed innovation.
I have a few innovative ideas for software. I'm not a programmer. Here's two scenarios:
1. I post my innovation to a mailing list. Ignored.
2. I tell my development team to implement my innovation. Implemented.
Which results in innovative new software faster? What am I doing managing developers if I can't even program? Well, I'm doing it because I have innovative ideas. Now how often does _that_ happen in open source world.
[disclaimer - I do know how to program, I do manage developers, and I don't have _that_ many innovative ideas, really
"southernmost point of Antarctica"
Gee, I wonder why we don't have a special name for that point. Maybe, I dunno, South Spot? Southern Point? Bit at the Bottom? Nah, it's never catch on...
This is very important. If our monuments are destroyed, we have to build them again exactly as they were before. That's because the key thing about monuments is not what they represent, but their particular physical specifications. By rebuilding exactly as before, we send a message to the terrorists that we keep very good records, and aren't afraid to use them.
Contrast this to the way our enemies behave. When we bomb their command centers, rather than rebuilding them exactly as they were before, they rebuild them to be more bomb proof. This shows how little respect for their own history they have.
Arg. I meant to say "This is the best post I've read on /. for a very long time."
You preview your post 3 times to get the HTML right and you still forget to read your own words!
May I offer this guide to all things unicode:
Unicode terms, FAQs, and mistakes?
It helps clear up confusion between things like 'character sets' and 'encodings' and 'code points'.
ROFL
/. for a long time (see above for best thing).
Giggle. That's the second best thing I've read on
"In the past, journals were expensive for a legitimate reason: printing a small press run (and let's face it, most academic journals have circulations measured in the hundreds or low thousands) resulted in a very high unit cost.
"
No. Journals are expensive because editing them requires an enormous amount of skill and expertise, and they have a miniscule target market. To edit a scientific journal requires editors, copy editors, and librarians who are additionally specialists in the scientific field covered by the journal. In the case of where I work, that means we have people who have maybe 12 years of medical training, as researchers or consultants in major hospitals and 6 years editorial experience including maybe national newspapers. That sort of person is not easy to find.
Do you know how long it takes to edit a scientific paper? To check the numbers? To check every reference - to have an external specialist in another country review the paper? Do you know how hard it is just to find someone with enough knowledge to be _able_ to review some of the submitted papers?
Unless you want science to be as accurate and careful as a Slashdot story, someone's going to have to pay for it.
Hey, come on, we can live with a little operator overloading in natural languages.
The only other time I've come across ontology is in philosophy, where it has a precise and well understood (among philosophers) meaning. I don't think there will be much general confusion.
I agree that the sort of behaviour you talk about is bad when it causes an old meaning of a word to become useless, because people confuse it with the new meaning. In this case we are talking about a rather arcane word being co-opted from philosophers by information scientists. There's little reason to use the word in general conversation, and little chance that either of the two groups above will confuse the word or use it sloppily.
Now, the abuse of the word 'enormity' is a different story altogether...
You may be right. However, no public transportation system anywhere makes money. They are not profit vehicles, they are national infrastructure. Complaining that public transport isn't profitable is like complaining that the Police force isn't profitable - it completely misses the point. If your city is a lawless ghetto, all the businesses will move out, and your tax revenue will plummet by far more than the Police ever cost you.
Likewise, if the city is a polluted car-bound concrete hell, you'll have a hard time attracting business and rich people who want to live there and contribute to the city's coffers.
As to the US love of personal transport, I agree that it's a big cultural difference compared with Europe (although the UK is somewhat similar). However - that can change.
*News Flash* *News Flash* *News Flash*
Oh my God - This just in:
20 something American saw cool lifestyle portrayed in T.V. add - now pissed that reality is not the same.
I'm really crying for you buddy, oh yeah.
I fail to understand the whole 'bandwidth is free' mentality. As someone who has worked for a telco that did everything from lay fibre to manage routers, I can assure you that bandwidth is not free. Users who saturate their connections should not pay the same as users who occassionally browse the web, but like to do so at high speed. The sooner people pay per meg of data moved, the sooner we see:
* Legislation against spam
* Fewer stupid graphic heavy websites
* Smaller more efficient programs
* Greater use of zlib
Furthermore, it means I can:
* Stop subsidising college geeks trying to collect 40Gb of ripped music for the hell of it.
Now, at the _commercial_ level, it's a different story, and I'd hate to see the removal of peering arrangements and so on. But at consumer level, gee, let's just pay for what we use and not pay for what we don't. Is it really so hard?
Ideally, signup and connection to broadband should be trivially cheap, and then payment should be usage based. This opens broadband to poorer people, with amount of usage based on inclination and ability to pay. Currently, broadband is expensive to signup for, meaning its users are exclusively rich people who then think they should be able to host websites / download mp3's eternally as a basic human right. Feh.
Yup, I do. Near the beginning of the web, NCSA kept a 'what's new' page, that listed every new website created that week. It grew exponentially of course, and became pretty useless pretty fast, and was then stopped. The archives are still available, e.g.
c /D ocs/old-whats-new/whats-new-0693.html
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosai
Of course search engines were still important, but everyone just used archie for searching FTP sites, or maybe Veronica for searching Gopher sites.
A lot of places in this world don't have computers, and those people survive just fine.
"They punish you additionally for what you think, rather than only based on what you do."
That's true, but in fact it is true for a great many other crimes as well. If I kill my husband because he always comes home drunk and calls me a slut, and one day I crack and kill him, that's judged a lesser crime than if I kill him because I like watching people die.
Personally, if someone commits GBH because "He was a Paki and I don't like Pakis" that doesn't strike me as morally worse than because "He failed to give me all his money when I asked" but that's just me, I guess.
The fact is, we consider states of mind to have moral value, and although we aren't suggesting criminalising states of mind, we can still say that the moral value of a (criminal) action is in some part based on the moral value of the (supposedly) causal (but non-criminal) state of mind. I think the 'slipper slope' argument does not hold here. The latter is not an inevitable forunner of the former.
I think there are more worrying things currently under discussion in the UK, where people deemed likely to commit crimes by dint of a severe mental illness are to be locked up in 'secure hospitals' for 'care'. That _does_ seem to be rather close to criminalising a state of mind, albeit it rather odd state of mind.
That pretty much sums it up. It's a complete pain to implement. Getting your management to sit down and write (and sign off on) a decent privacy policy is hard enough, but to then translate that into some arcane XML format both difficult and pointless.
"So, remind me why our extremely clear and readable privacy policy that explains the nuances of medical ethics and the Internet has to be re-hashed into someone elses over-complex set of quasi-technical categories?"
"It's so that users can simply select from a small number of generic pre-set privacy levels, and let their browser manufacturer tell them whether we take good care of their data!"
It's a dumb idea. It's a miss-appliance of technology.
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless American Airlines and its affiliates from and against any and all claims, demands, proceedings, suits and actions, including any related liabilities, obligations, losses, damages, deficiencies, penalties, taxes, levies, fines, judgments, settlements, expenses (including legal and accountants' fees and disbursements) and costs (collectively, "Claims"), based on, arising out of or resulting from your use of the Site,
This says that (among other things) if you buy a ticket on the site, and they make a profit, leading to the need to pay taxes, you need to pay those taxes for them. Really. Read it again !
I say
AARRGGH!! No it freaking doesn't. This is one of the most standard clauses in any contract anywhere, and it says that if _I_ incur penalties, taxes, etc as a result of using AA's service, then AA are not responsible.
I'm not a lawyer, but my job is to provide technical advice on legal contracts that are software and technology related, so I get used to this kind of language. Please try to be accurate...