I think it's a shame that we're getting content with these small victories that are not.
All this is giving the Chinese government an opportunity to show-off it's 'openness' during the games, when tens of thousands of journalists from all over the world will be able to access international websites without much censorship.
On the contrary, we should let the Chinese government censor as much as they can during the Olympics and let the world media, the tourists and the sportsmen expose the pain of getting to the news they take for granted at home.
The Olympic Committee should be ashamed of this 'victory': 2 months of ban lifted is a f*g joke. It will only serve the interests of the Chinese government.
Let China 'reflect very poorly' when every eyes are on it!
Could some of the reticence to use the metric system be linked in some ways to the fact that it was invented by the French?
Grams, litres, meters were created in the 18th century in France as a way to unify the disparate units that were used at the time and have a unified system that simplified trade (no more inconsistent regionally-used units) and help standardise technology and simplify science.
I'm pretty sure the long reticence of the British to using SI in everyday life is probably due partly to not giving in to the French on that front: politically, it probably was seen as dangerous to try to enforce a unit system that came out of the ideas of the Revolution. In the UK there is still a mix of imperial and SI in everyday life but the younger generations tend to only learn SI at school. Of course everyone knows their weight in stones and pounds and their height in feet and inches but at last meters and kilograms are slowly being accepted and the Fahrenheit is almost on its way out.
For the US, it's a huge economical issue: moving to SI would take at least 2-3 generations and the cost would be staggering. It's not an impossible thing to achieve, but in the current political climate, I see no politician having the guts to push this on the people and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be long before some douchebag TV host starts reminding people that SI was invented by the French and is therefore anti-American...
right after the quake access was fine. It's only the next day that things started to go awry.
From what I could verify, packets were dropped after only 2 hops in Hong Kong.
It seemed that the ISP cut access to the outside on purpose for a while, I presume to lower traffic and let big institutions get better bandwidths.
Day by day the situation is getting better, but when teh ISP allowed outside access again, you could see the packet loss as you got further from Asia: some hops had more than 90% packet loss making connections very unreliable.
For access, the best thing I found was using proxies. I used findnot.com as they have nearly 30 SSH proxy servers around the world, some of them in Malaysia which were accessible.
From these servers you could have better connectivity to the rest of the world, although overall is was not very fast and connections would often time-out.
We're still suffering from spotty connections here but it's getting better day by day. What I find a bit scarry is how easy a local event like the quake could affect such a large area and bring it to its knees for days. I'm pretty sure there are good reasons for having all these sea cbales connect in souther taiwan but it strikes me of odd that an area prone to so many earthquakes be chosen as a major connection point.
If Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and most of China had been disconnected for longer over a non-holiday period I'm pretty sure the consequences for all major financial institutions and local economies would have been major, not just for Asia but the world at large.
If you use your own server, I'd suggest adding greylisting capabilities to it.
I too had a serious increased of spam like anybody else and even after heavy filtering I used to have at least 50 spam a day getting through.
I recently added greyslisting and now I'm down to 1, maybe 2 at most a day.
I'd say that 99% of the connection attempts to my mail server are for delivering spam, that's for me a few thousand mails a day that I don;t have to deal with.
If we're talking about grey market products, they are the real thing, just imported from outside of the control of the local official representative of the brand.
In Hong Kong we get grey market stuff from everywhere. Most laptops or camera from Sony come from grey market imports from Japan, outside of the control of Sony Hong Kong and they are 15-30% cheaper.
It doesn't mean that the equipment is fake. Companies may been keen on reporting grey imports as fake to justify a legal ban or instill FUD into their users but, in most cases, I doubt that it is true.
Grey imports just bypass and don't benefit the local 'official' representative.
Until 1999 (or around, can't remember), nearly all of the CD found in HMV stores in Hong Kong were grey market imports. None were fake, they just came from different countries and could be sold cheaper.
Now the law has changed to curb on piracy and because it's harder to track the origins of grey imports HMV now mostly sells officially sanctioned imports: they could still have the same origin as before, but now cost more to the consumer.
Now, actual fakes are a different matter. There probably exist fake cards manufactured in China that mimic a particular function and are sold under well known brand names but I doubt that this is very common for non-generic hardware beyond simple network cards and the like.
I've recently watched a BBC Horizon episode "The Hawking Paradox" (available on BT I believe) where you see him working with his current assistant, a young French mathematician, and you must admire the patience of Hawking and the people around him to actually get communication flowing.
Hawking's ability to use his clicker to pick-up words on his computer has deteriorated and making a sentence is a really tough job for him: you have to guess what he wants to say and watch his eyes for confirmation... it must be a maddening thing to know all that knowledge and all those ideas bottled up inside that brain that can barely communicate a few words a minute...
With all our technology, you'd think that we could do a better job of helping people with such crippling diseases to allow them communicate more fluently.
It's sad that this great mind may never be able to give us all it can, even if some of his ideas end up being wrong, there is still enough material there to make great advances in science.
Wow, an open source project that supports Harun Yahya (look at the top right of the page).
Harun Yahya is a "thinker" that promotes all kinds of completely bogus pseudo-scientific garbage in the support of Islam.
Have a look at their main site, it's the Muslim equivalent of intelligent design.
Now an open source project that clearly supports/sponsors such nonsense is an issue to me.
That everyone is free to think what he/she wants and be as wrong as delusional as they wish is their problem, but when an organised entity that is non-political and non-religious in nature explicitly supports objectionable views, is it moral to support that entity and give credence to their views by using their products and services, be they free and open?
Re:IE7 Browser Usage and Design Decisions
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AJAX and IE7?
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I don't think that's going to happen like you said.
Like it or not, MS still dominates the browser market, and whatever decision they make is the benchmark which web sites and web applications have to reach if they ever want to hope to be successful for the majority of their visitors.
Big organisations may control which browser they install on they PC, but the immense majority of home users can barely use copy and paste effectively, so asking them to ditch IE in favour of Opera or Firefox is never going to reach beyond the more tech-savvy who understand the issues at hand and are capable of making that decision.
That leaves us with whatever version of IE still being dominant because Windows is the dominant OS and most users do not have the sufficient technical skills to assess -or even have an opinion on- security and standard compliance.
At any rate, it's really unlikely that MS would break compatibility with IE6 in a big way. There will be compromises and some minor things and bugs may break some particular implementations, but the stakes are sufficiently high for MS to ensure that the new browser adoption is not going to let down all those intranets and websites that their large customers currently use. Doing otherwise could slow down the adoption of Vista and that's certainly not something MS would wish.
I think that we're looking at an age of better interoperability between browsers as they converge to support a rich common set of features. They are and will always be differences in the way some of the details are implemented, for historical or standard interpretation reasons, but overall, there is sufficient common ground to built applications that behave in the same way on multiple browsers, and IE7 is certainly going to be a better replacement to IE6 as it becomes more standard compliant.
if you are going to use an application to manage your books, why sort them on the shelves?
Classifying 3500 neatly into cabinets shelves and rooms is going to be a nightmare or wasted time since all the information you need to search will be in the computer already.
Why not adapt another inventory management technique that simply records the shelf number along with the book?
You would just have to number and code each area of storage with a barcode, scan that barcode before going through all the books in that location to register them.
When you take out a book or return it, you'll have to scan the area code as well. Nice thing is that you wouldn't have to return it to the same area and getting more books is easier to manage as you just add them where you have room for them.
If you were sorting your collection -which is probably the size of a small library- you would need to spend so much time re-arranging the shelves that it would require you to become a part-time librarian. Additionally, sorting the shelves means that you need to be very disciplined about where you put them back, otherwise they may be lost forever if filed in the wrong place.
Just use that simple location code based inventory technique and you'll spend less time sorting books and more time reading them.
It annoys me every time I hear that some people voted to decide what is science and what is not.
Science is not a democratic process: you don't get to vote for the theories you like. Theories stand on the evidences to support them, how well they predict experimentation and how good of a model they represent for reality.
Darwin's explanation of the origin of species is a fact of science. It's not a viewpoint for non-sciencists in the field to debate.
That fact may clash with your belief system but unless you incoporate it in it, it's not going to go away. You can wish that the earth is flat and believe all you want that it is, you can even vote to make it mandatory for kids to learn it at school, you can pass it into law, that's still not going to make it true.
We are free to live in a delusion but it should be a personal choice: suppressing or undermining the best explanations we have for reality is not going to allow us to make informed choices.
I think it's time to get off the moral high-ground and look at reality.
I certainly do not agree with any company being forced to comply to the censorship requirement of a country but the way I see it, I'd rather have google in China than a 100% owned Chinese company offering the same services.
The choice is simple:
Googles teaches morality to the Chinese government and ensures never to enter the Chinese market, making its engine and its information not available to the people of China.
Googles complies with local requirements to the letter and is thus able to offer content to the people of China.
The first choice is of no benefit to anyone. The second at least has the merit to get information that cannot be 100% controlled by the Chinese government.
To ban something, it must have been accessible at some point, meaning that at least some people may have had access to it before it was noticed by the censors.
It's always going to be a game of cat and mouse: the dissidents will always be able to outsmart the censors by being creative: using common names to replace forbidden ones, query base on phonetics rather than exact characters, queries in foreign languages, cleverer queries to circumvent forbidden words (like "what happened in Beijing in 1989").
All may have varying degrees of success, but there are ways to circumvent some of the censorship.
Google also includes a notice at the bottom of its result pages that the content is filtered according to local laws. That is in itself a a smack in the face of the censors because it notifies users that more information actually exists.
This is the kind of subversive behaviour that local service provider would never do.
The situation is less than ideal, but it's not in the interest of the people of China not to have access to google, even to a censored google.
There are plenty of local players who would be glad if American companies never set foot in China, and the US is naive to believe that China really needs US IT that bad that they can't do it themselves.
The Chinese are very proud people and they may lack sophistication in some technological area but they learn very fast and already produce a vast portion of the electronics we all use.
Believe me, they will try everything. I have been living in Hong Kong for the past 10 years and have dealt with Chinese companies enough to know that it's easy to be condescending about their competences, but it is always dangerous to do so and doubt their determination.
In the end, being there and being able to stay there is what will count as it increases people's exposure to the outside and dramatically changes their way of life. Not being there because we don't like their government is only going to reduce people's exposure to outside influence and ensure that China keep total control over itself.
It's a moral dilemma but I don't think it's an either/or solution. There is a hard compromise to do that certainly cannot content everyone but that may still be better for everyone than doing nothing at all.
Doing business in China is difficult for foreign companies, not just becasue of the way the legal system is subject to "interpretations" or because of the administrative requirements, but also because of what the chinese call GuanXi ()http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi.
GuanXi is usually described as simply "relationship", but that's more complicated than that. While China has tough anti-bribery laws (you get shot in the head, how's that for a deterrent?), GuanXi permeates business relationships; who-you-know and what-you-can-do-for-them is the key. So accounting measures are nice, but GuanXi is not just about plain old dollar bills, it's more subtle, it's about what you can do to help the director's niece get into a nice university, how you "entertain" the people in charge of that contract you so desperatly want, in short, how you make a moquery of a small thing called "integrity".
It happens at all levels of business transactions: your suppliers will find it absolutely part of their duties to invite you for dinner or karaoke, and to please you any way you want. They'll send girls to your room, sometime without even asking you. It's incidious and a very clever way of exploiting human emotions: by corrupting you with little things, they manage to deepen the relationship, force you to become friends. Before you know it, the relationship that was strictly business has just become a "partnership" between old friends. It's very hard to fight that without offending them. Often, if you refuse to play the game, they won't trust you. It's so engrainned in their expectations of what doing business means that they are sometimes very upset at not being able to please you.
When tendering for contracts in China, some things are expected, like paying for dozen of people to come and "visit" your facilities in Europe or the US, having to pay for their expenses, their flight, their hotel and of course getting them gifts for their wife and pocket money for their taxi. Whether they actually visit your facilities is irrelevant of course, it's usually just a sight-seeing holiday at your expense.
By the way, you don't have to propose it to them, they'll ask and often times even go as far as to include it in contracts or tender offers, usually under a vague wording that allows stretching of intepretation.
I'm not dicing chinese culture and I know of chinese business men who actually have integrity, but foreign companies have a hard time adjusting to the complex inter-personnal requirements of doing business in China and the less-than-ethical way of doing certain things.
It's a very thin and blurry line between friendly relationship and outright corruption.
So yes, any company that succeeds in China has done what it needed to do to succeed there: know lots of people in the right places, and did the right things to make it possible for them to get the contracts they needed.
Most often, when you dont want to get your own hands too dirty, you get other people to do it for you: people with family connections or retired officials make excellent lobbyists that you can pay to do all the dirty work for you whithout ever knowing exactly what they did: helps to make you sleep like a baby.
If you think that a good price and an excellent technical offer ought to be enough, then you're naive and will lose a lot of money in China and never get a contract, that's guaranteed.
So, goig back to google, the question is simple: it's certain they played the GuanXi card like any other company, and it's unlikely that any imposed accounting measures would catch anything suspect. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is all nice and icertainly helps in some cases, but it's self-deceiving as it doesn't guarantee that a company that fullfils the requirements is of a higher ethical standing.
I'm quite happy with my bank, the HSBC here in Hong Kong: they have started to provide their customers with a hardware security device that generate encrypted sequences of 6 digits at the press of a button: you need to register your device once online with its unique serial number and then, every time you login or you do a bank transfer online, you're requested to input the digits generated by the device.
This effectively makes phising impossible since all they can do is collect your login and password, but won;t be able to access your account with that information alone: they would need to be able to generate proper security codes as well (and getting a single instance of that code won't be enough).
Only way left for scammers and thugs to get into your account is by stealing your physical device and your login info. Always possible, but not very likely.
If the market really dictates what it wants, I can't see how DRM can work without people retaliating at some point.
The real basic flaw in DRM is that it alienates legitimate users: it's harder for them to listen to their files, harder to play their games or use their software than for those who just get cracked copies.
Buy a song from iTune (btw, the phonetic pronoucination of "tune" in French is slang for "money", just thought I would share that) and it won't play on anything else than Apple software or Apple hardware. It means you get vendor lock-in as each publishing house devise its own rules about what is acceptable and what is not. People can't buy from anyone else once they start with one a publising house; not because they don't have the illusion of choice, but because it becomes completely impractical to have more than a single, maybe two for those courageous enough, music suppliers.
2 out of 3 times when I buy a game with my hard-earned money, I run into issues when installing or trying to play it because of DRM.
You then have to spend hours in the user forums, publisher's knowledge bases or unofficial websites to find out that the game won't play because the plublisher doesn't like that particular CD-R/W in your machine or something equally studpid.
In the end, I often have to resort to a pirated copy or a crack to get the game to play on my machine. A game that I bought in its original form!
How do you think I feel after spending all that money, all that time, all that frustration trying to do the right thing because I understand that people who work on these products need to make a living?
I feel cheated, alienated, and I'm really not enclined any longer to buy a DRM product just to try it: ended the CD purchases of groups I don't know, ended the games that I might like. But I won't download them for free either: I just don't play games anymore, and I get and pay my music from people who actually "get it", like http://www.magnatune.com/.
Microsft Press indicated that they now have technology to enforce DRM on thr books they publish by requiring readers to use a special pair of glasses that will be permanently bolted onto their face.
The device will ensure that only the genuine reader will be able to access the content of the book by demodulating the photons emitted by the book printed using a special patented process.
Initial trials have shown the product to work well, but concurrent technology from other publishers and technology giants such as Adobe propose different optical systems, requiring a reader to be fitted with multiple layers of technology, most incompatible with each other.
"The issue", explains Adobe's DRMopt+ Chief Researcher John Begood, "is that each system is influencing the output of the other. This will be a tough one to solve, but at the moment, it's low priority as that choice is in the hands of the user."
Shares in both Microsoft Press and Adobe International hvae increase by respectively 12 and 8 percent following the annoucement.
Agreed, but think about the usefulness of those descrete phenomena to activities that actually need high probability of occurence to be useful, such as medecine.
Another question that is more important than rethoric about the reality of a phenomenon is: where does the knowledge of homeopathic practices come from?
If science has a problem studying the effectiveness of homeopathy because it is build on the assumption that it only works during unquantifiable descrete phenomena, then how can the homeopaths actually prescribe anything and claim that it will work?
Again, where did they get the necessary knowledge to be able to make a treatment?
If they know how to harness the phenomena, then their claims become falsifiable and are therefore testable.
Saying that a claim that promises wonders cannot be tested but still works consistently doesn't make any sense.
If the occurence is too statistically low to isolate the phenomena from statistical noise then how can we claim it exist at all unless there is other means of proving it?
Placing all he stuff that science cannot prove under the hood of unknown physical properties is just a convenient way of pulling the claims out of reach of any enquiry. I must however object that all paranormal activities claim consistent tangible benefits and interraction with physical objects.
So, which way is it? Can't be both out-of-reach of testing and act in measurable ways on our physical world.
What strikes me most with these dubious practices is that they are built on nothing more than the "vision" or "belief" or a simple untested theory from someone who then becomes a mystic figure for a movement that would never question its founder, perpetuating the "truth" against all evidence to the contrary.
Oh yeah, that and the fact that homeopathy is now very big business and that the labs producing those little sugar pills are here to stay: imagine: people paying for a whole lot of nothingess! Just by 1g of anything and dilute it beyond recognition. What better business model: no R&D costs, no more raw materials appart from sugar!
I'm glad to learn that homeopathy had a positive impact on you but that should not detract anyone from the biggest picture.
A treatment is not confirmed to be working on the basis of testimony alone. There are good reasons for that and in particular the fact that following a new treatment also includes a change in lifestyle and without knowing which parameters count and which do not, you can't infer that any progress is attributable to the treatment alone.
Another reason is the lack of properly measurable quantity to actually define improvement. For some it will be subjective, for others it will be objective, but what counts is to quantify that improvement and verify it over a large sample of people being treated for the same symptoms folowing the same methods.
Honest people have come to believe very strongly in all sort of stuff because it worked for them, however it is very hard to shake the notion that it isn't enough to confirm actual effectiveness.
Would you take a treatment that was found to work in only 1% of cases?
Such a treatment wouldn't even be considered interesting, especially if others exist that have a better success rate.
Now if you're one of the 1% for which that treatment was effective -for whatever reason-, then you too would be a strong believer in that treatment because it worked for you, but that doesn't translate in it being an effective treatment that should be recommended.
The fact that homeopathy was born out of thin air 200 years ago at a time when medical science was in its infancy, and that it has not changed its practices even though progress in other sciences have been unable to find any trace of supporting evidence to those practices should be a big red signal that there is something off with homeopathy.
That being said, if it works for you, then by all mean use it. However, dont be too quick to see your homeopath before seing actual doctors next time you have something: Medecine's goal is to actually help patients using methods that are proven to work most of the time.
There is no such thing as "alternative medecine": medecine will use whatever works for real, that's why it actually progresses. Alternatives have to call themselve that way simply because they have not been able to make a sufficiently strong case for themselves, otherwise they would be embraced. That's the difference between herbalism and pharmacognosy for instance: the former can't prove effectiveness and is rooted in unwavering faith for "traditional wisdom" and the latter actually uses the plants that are proven to work to help people.
When I was mentionning taht Randi helped real science, I was not thinking about his testing of paranormal claims (although that is still helpful) but of his collaboration with scientists into building better experimental frameworks, like he did during the testing of the "Memory of Water" experiment for Nature when they asked him to help in straightening the experiment. He only had to interve in a couple of place where, again, people where in position to interpret data subjectively or comit outright fraud.
Randi's flair for the dramatic shouldn't detract from his real and serious comitment to science and its advancement.
Regarding the protocols for testing paranormal claims by the James Randi Fundation http://www.randi.org/ you should know that they are elaborated in agreement with the person being tested: the experiment has to be agreable to both parties, otherwise it would be too easy to do like you've just done and dismiss Randi's experiment design as being unjustly difficult and designed to fail the claim.
If no agreement on the procedure can be made, no test is done. I believe that the tested actually has to sign his agreement to the protocol before the experiment is started.
Dowsing has been tested elsewhere using similar methods as the one you describe, always in complete agreement with the dowser being tested: part of the test protocol actually asks for the dowser to confirm that he gets a positive readings for the pipes when he is shown beforehand that they actually contain water. Once that is established, the double-blind experiment can start, and eventually show the real accuracy of the paranormal detection method, ie. the usual no-more-than-chance.
Your point is silly.
Randi doesn't try to convince you to believe in what he says: either his observations are right and accurate or they aren't.
Randi, as a stage magician, is able to see where there could be potential issues in an experiment where the state of mind of the experimenter could influence the outcome of what he is researching.
You need a good grasp of human psychology to be able to detach yourself from those very human flaws (at least as far as scientific enquiry goes).
Guys like Randi may not always be liked as they are more artists than scientists themselves, but science is intrinsically unable to deal with deception as trust in your fellow scientists and your human subjects is paramount to the scientific endeavour.
Having people like Randi around is actually very beneficial to science as they can point out those pesky human flaws that can jeopardize any good experiment.
Whether you like him or not is irrelevant: he's helping real scientists devise real experiments that have reliable and replicable results.
His actions in that field of human enquiry speak for themselves.
It seems that part of the problem in the Belfast findings may be due to the fact that the cells that had a reaction were manually counted, possibly introducting a bias known as "the experimenter effect", of which little is really known apart from the fact that it exists (a bit like the placebo effect).
There is little doubt that the experimenter acted in good faith, but the fact was that the very controlled experiment commissioned by the Horizon (involving the Royal Society and a number of specialists in various relevant fields) ended up showing a statistical no-greater-than-chance result.
Now, before you say "how can you trust a TV show", I'll say that Horizon is no ordinary TV show. It's probably the best, most balanced and scientific accurate show ever to grace the screen. Those who are lucky enough to be able to watch it will probably agree.
There is another large scale experiment being done at the moment on homeopathy, invoving both homeopaths, scientists and people like James Randi.
Randi predicted that the experiment will show no more than we already know today, that homeopathy is not worth much as a medical practice, but that most believer will be undeterred by any amount of evidence.
The real question to test a practitionner of alternative medecine is to ask: what would it take you to admit that it doesn't work? For many, nothing will.
But it's worth investigating anyway, I'm ready to consider that there is some benefit to it if tangible, undisputable proof was found. It would certainly help to use homeopathy if its field of action -if there is any- was actually well known, and if it is doing better there than other types of medecine.
http://www.homeowatch.org/
China is currently doing all it can to "re-invent" everything that carries information.
There are reasons for this:
- Chinese are very nationalisitc by definition (in chinese, China (Zhong Guo) mean the "Kindgom of the middle", they really thought -and still do to a certain extent- that China is the center of the world) and they are proud to "re-invent" or "re-conquer" to make it their own.
- they do not want to license foreign Intellectual Property, so they develop their own video format for instance, for both pride and economic reasons as well.
- The Chinese government think it needs to control information.
I believe that the latest is probably behind the move to IPv9.
By encouraging non-standard protocols, they ensure that the equipment has more chance to be manufactured in China, and they have more ways to control the information passing through it.
China recognizes the importance of the Internet and know it is essential to its progress, yet they also realize that it is the most dangerous way to propagate those "subversive" ideas like democracy and freedom of speech. So the best thing to do is probably to "embrace and extend"...
Now, where have I heard that before...?
What about reducing the need for oil?
Reducing dependency on fossil fuel is certainly a great improvement, but we're still talking about oil byproducts getting in the environment.
Isn't it time to maybe -maybe- think about making cars and other combustion engines a tiny bit more efficient, particularly say... in North America for instance?
Slashdot Mirror
All this is giving the Chinese government an opportunity to show-off it's 'openness' during the games, when tens of thousands of journalists from all over the world will be able to access international websites without much censorship.
On the contrary, we should let the Chinese government censor as much as they can during the Olympics and let the world media, the tourists and the sportsmen expose the pain of getting to the news they take for granted at home.
The Olympic Committee should be ashamed of this 'victory': 2 months of ban lifted is a f*g joke. It will only serve the interests of the Chinese government. Let China 'reflect very poorly' when every eyes are on it!
http://btjunkie.org/search?q=horizon+homeopathy
I really recommend it to anyone interested in science, how it works, and how homeopathy fails when you do your science right.
Could some of the reticence to use the metric system be linked in some ways to the fact that it was invented by the French?
Grams, litres, meters were created in the 18th century in France as a way to unify the disparate units that were used at the time and have a unified system that simplified trade (no more inconsistent regionally-used units) and help standardise technology and simplify science.
I'm pretty sure the long reticence of the British to using SI in everyday life is probably due partly to not giving in to the French on that front: politically, it probably was seen as dangerous to try to enforce a unit system that came out of the ideas of the Revolution.
In the UK there is still a mix of imperial and SI in everyday life but the younger generations tend to only learn SI at school. Of course everyone knows their weight in stones and pounds and their height in feet and inches but at last meters and kilograms are slowly being accepted and the Fahrenheit is almost on its way out.
For the US, it's a huge economical issue: moving to SI would take at least 2-3 generations and the cost would be staggering.
It's not an impossible thing to achieve, but in the current political climate, I see no politician having the guts to push this on the people and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be long before some douchebag TV host starts reminding people that SI was invented by the French and is therefore anti-American...
This is fine as long as you can access the web2mail website...
It seemed that the ISP cut access to the outside on purpose for a while, I presume to lower traffic and let big institutions get better bandwidths.
Day by day the situation is getting better, but when teh ISP allowed outside access again, you could see the packet loss as you got further from Asia: some hops had more than 90% packet loss making connections very unreliable.
For access, the best thing I found was using proxies. I used findnot.com as they have nearly 30 SSH proxy servers around the world, some of them in Malaysia which were accessible.
From these servers you could have better connectivity to the rest of the world, although overall is was not very fast and connections would often time-out.
We're still suffering from spotty connections here but it's getting better day by day. What I find a bit scarry is how easy a local event like the quake could affect such a large area and bring it to its knees for days. I'm pretty sure there are good reasons for having all these sea cbales connect in souther taiwan but it strikes me of odd that an area prone to so many earthquakes be chosen as a major connection point.
If Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and most of China had been disconnected for longer over a non-holiday period I'm pretty sure the consequences for all major financial institutions and local economies would have been major, not just for Asia but the world at large.
I recently added greyslisting and now I'm down to 1, maybe 2 at most a day. I'd say that 99% of the connection attempts to my mail server are for delivering spam, that's for me a few thousand mails a day that I don;t have to deal with.
Don't know if it's of any interest to anyone, but I've got an extensive article on how to set-up your own mail server on Linux: http://etc.nkadesign.com/EmailServer/EmailServer
Have a look at this article: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/436 1/1/ then choose amongst the more mature projects: Coda http://coda.cs.cmu.edu/ and OpenAFS http://www.openafs.org/. Intermezzo looked promising but hasn't been updated in a long while so it's probably dead.
Hope this helps.
If we're talking about grey market products, they are the real thing, just imported from outside of the control of the local official representative of the brand.
In Hong Kong we get grey market stuff from everywhere. Most laptops or camera from Sony come from grey market imports from Japan, outside of the control of Sony Hong Kong and they are 15-30% cheaper.
It doesn't mean that the equipment is fake. Companies may been keen on reporting grey imports as fake to justify a legal ban or instill FUD into their users but, in most cases, I doubt that it is true.
Grey imports just bypass and don't benefit the local 'official' representative.
Until 1999 (or around, can't remember), nearly all of the CD found in HMV stores in Hong Kong were grey market imports. None were fake, they just came from different countries and could be sold cheaper.
Now the law has changed to curb on piracy and because it's harder to track the origins of grey imports HMV now mostly sells officially sanctioned imports: they could still have the same origin as before, but now cost more to the consumer.
Now, actual fakes are a different matter. There probably exist fake cards manufactured in China that mimic a particular function and are sold under well known brand names but I doubt that this is very common for non-generic hardware beyond simple network cards and the like.
Hawking's ability to use his clicker to pick-up words on his computer has deteriorated and making a sentence is a really tough job for him: you have to guess what he wants to say and watch his eyes for confirmation... it must be a maddening thing to know all that knowledge and all those ideas bottled up inside that brain that can barely communicate a few words a minute...
With all our technology, you'd think that we could do a better job of helping people with such crippling diseases to allow them communicate more fluently.
It's sad that this great mind may never be able to give us all it can, even if some of his ideas end up being wrong, there is still enough material there to make great advances in science.
Harun Yahya is a "thinker" that promotes all kinds of completely bogus pseudo-scientific garbage in the support of Islam.
Have a look at their main site, it's the Muslim equivalent of intelligent design.
Now an open source project that clearly supports/sponsors such nonsense is an issue to me.
That everyone is free to think what he/she wants and be as wrong as delusional as they wish is their problem, but when an organised entity that is non-political and non-religious in nature explicitly supports objectionable views, is it moral to support that entity and give credence to their views by using their products and services, be they free and open?
Like it or not, MS still dominates the browser market, and whatever decision they make is the benchmark which web sites and web applications have to reach if they ever want to hope to be successful for the majority of their visitors.
Big organisations may control which browser they install on they PC, but the immense majority of home users can barely use copy and paste effectively, so asking them to ditch IE in favour of Opera or Firefox is never going to reach beyond the more tech-savvy who understand the issues at hand and are capable of making that decision.
That leaves us with whatever version of IE still being dominant because Windows is the dominant OS and most users do not have the sufficient technical skills to assess -or even have an opinion on- security and standard compliance.
At any rate, it's really unlikely that MS would break compatibility with IE6 in a big way. There will be compromises and some minor things and bugs may break some particular implementations, but the stakes are sufficiently high for MS to ensure that the new browser adoption is not going to let down all those intranets and websites that their large customers currently use. Doing otherwise could slow down the adoption of Vista and that's certainly not something MS would wish.
I think that we're looking at an age of better interoperability between browsers as they converge to support a rich common set of features. They are and will always be differences in the way some of the details are implemented, for historical or standard interpretation reasons, but overall, there is sufficient common ground to built applications that behave in the same way on multiple browsers, and IE7 is certainly going to be a better replacement to IE6 as it becomes more standard compliant.
Classifying 3500 neatly into cabinets shelves and rooms is going to be a nightmare or wasted time since all the information you need to search will be in the computer already.
Why not adapt another inventory management technique that simply records the shelf number along with the book? You would just have to number and code each area of storage with a barcode, scan that barcode before going through all the books in that location to register them. When you take out a book or return it, you'll have to scan the area code as well. Nice thing is that you wouldn't have to return it to the same area and getting more books is easier to manage as you just add them where you have room for them.
If you were sorting your collection -which is probably the size of a small library- you would need to spend so much time re-arranging the shelves that it would require you to become a part-time librarian. Additionally, sorting the shelves means that you need to be very disciplined about where you put them back, otherwise they may be lost forever if filed in the wrong place.
Just use that simple location code based inventory technique and you'll spend less time sorting books and more time reading them.
Science is not a democratic process: you don't get to vote for the theories you like. Theories stand on the evidences to support them, how well they predict experimentation and how good of a model they represent for reality.
Darwin's explanation of the origin of species is a fact of science. It's not a viewpoint for non-sciencists in the field to debate.
That fact may clash with your belief system but unless you incoporate it in it, it's not going to go away. You can wish that the earth is flat and believe all you want that it is, you can even vote to make it mandatory for kids to learn it at school, you can pass it into law, that's still not going to make it true.
We are free to live in a delusion but it should be a personal choice: suppressing or undermining the best explanations we have for reality is not going to allow us to make informed choices.
I certainly do not agree with any company being forced to comply to the censorship requirement of a country but the way I see it, I'd rather have google in China than a 100% owned Chinese company offering the same services.
The choice is simple:
-
Googles teaches morality to the Chinese government and ensures never to enter the Chinese market, making its engine and its information not available to the people of China.
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Googles complies with local requirements to the letter and is thus able to offer content to the people of China.
The first choice is of no benefit to anyone. The second at least has the merit to get information that cannot be 100% controlled by the Chinese government.To ban something, it must have been accessible at some point, meaning that at least some people may have had access to it before it was noticed by the censors.
It's always going to be a game of cat and mouse: the dissidents will always be able to outsmart the censors by being creative: using common names to replace forbidden ones, query base on phonetics rather than exact characters, queries in foreign languages, cleverer queries to circumvent forbidden words (like "what happened in Beijing in 1989").
All may have varying degrees of success, but there are ways to circumvent some of the censorship.
Google also includes a notice at the bottom of its result pages that the content is filtered according to local laws. That is in itself a a smack in the face of the censors because it notifies users that more information actually exists.
This is the kind of subversive behaviour that local service provider would never do.
The situation is less than ideal, but it's not in the interest of the people of China not to have access to google, even to a censored google.
There are plenty of local players who would be glad if American companies never set foot in China, and the US is naive to believe that China really needs US IT that bad that they can't do it themselves.
The Chinese are very proud people and they may lack sophistication in some technological area but they learn very fast and already produce a vast portion of the electronics we all use.
Believe me, they will try everything. I have been living in Hong Kong for the past 10 years and have dealt with Chinese companies enough to know that it's easy to be condescending about their competences, but it is always dangerous to do so and doubt their determination.
In the end, being there and being able to stay there is what will count as it increases people's exposure to the outside and dramatically changes their way of life. Not being there because we don't like their government is only going to reduce people's exposure to outside influence and ensure that China keep total control over itself.
It's a moral dilemma but I don't think it's an either/or solution. There is a hard compromise to do that certainly cannot content everyone but that may still be better for everyone than doing nothing at all.
GuanXi is usually described as simply "relationship", but that's more complicated than that. While China has tough anti-bribery laws (you get shot in the head, how's that for a deterrent?), GuanXi permeates business relationships; who-you-know and what-you-can-do-for-them is the key. So accounting measures are nice, but GuanXi is not just about plain old dollar bills, it's more subtle, it's about what you can do to help the director's niece get into a nice university, how you "entertain" the people in charge of that contract you so desperatly want, in short, how you make a moquery of a small thing called "integrity".
It happens at all levels of business transactions: your suppliers will find it absolutely part of their duties to invite you for dinner or karaoke, and to please you any way you want. They'll send girls to your room, sometime without even asking you. It's incidious and a very clever way of exploiting human emotions: by corrupting you with little things, they manage to deepen the relationship, force you to become friends. Before you know it, the relationship that was strictly business has just become a "partnership" between old friends. It's very hard to fight that without offending them. Often, if you refuse to play the game, they won't trust you. It's so engrainned in their expectations of what doing business means that they are sometimes very upset at not being able to please you.
When tendering for contracts in China, some things are expected, like paying for dozen of people to come and "visit" your facilities in Europe or the US, having to pay for their expenses, their flight, their hotel and of course getting them gifts for their wife and pocket money for their taxi. Whether they actually visit your facilities is irrelevant of course, it's usually just a sight-seeing holiday at your expense.
By the way, you don't have to propose it to them, they'll ask and often times even go as far as to include it in contracts or tender offers, usually under a vague wording that allows stretching of intepretation.
I'm not dicing chinese culture and I know of chinese business men who actually have integrity, but foreign companies have a hard time adjusting to the complex inter-personnal requirements of doing business in China and the less-than-ethical way of doing certain things.
It's a very thin and blurry line between friendly relationship and outright corruption. So yes, any company that succeeds in China has done what it needed to do to succeed there: know lots of people in the right places, and did the right things to make it possible for them to get the contracts they needed.
Most often, when you dont want to get your own hands too dirty, you get other people to do it for you: people with family connections or retired officials make excellent lobbyists that you can pay to do all the dirty work for you whithout ever knowing exactly what they did: helps to make you sleep like a baby.
If you think that a good price and an excellent technical offer ought to be enough, then you're naive and will lose a lot of money in China and never get a contract, that's guaranteed.
So, goig back to google, the question is simple: it's certain they played the GuanXi card like any other company, and it's unlikely that any imposed accounting measures would catch anything suspect. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is all nice and icertainly helps in some cases, but it's self-deceiving as it doesn't guarantee that a company that fullfils the requirements is of a higher ethical standing.
I'm quite happy with my bank, the HSBC here in Hong Kong: they have started to provide their customers with a hardware security device that generate encrypted sequences of 6 digits at the press of a button: you need to register your device once online with its unique serial number and then, every time you login or you do a bank transfer online, you're requested to input the digits generated by the device.
This effectively makes phising impossible since all they can do is collect your login and password, but won;t be able to access your account with that information alone: they would need to be able to generate proper security codes as well (and getting a single instance of that code won't be enough).
Only way left for scammers and thugs to get into your account is by stealing your physical device and your login info. Always possible, but not very likely.
The real basic flaw in DRM is that it alienates legitimate users: it's harder for them to listen to their files, harder to play their games or use their software than for those who just get cracked copies.
Buy a song from iTune (btw, the phonetic pronoucination of "tune" in French is slang for "money", just thought I would share that) and it won't play on anything else than Apple software or Apple hardware. It means you get vendor lock-in as each publishing house devise its own rules about what is acceptable and what is not.
People can't buy from anyone else once they start with one a publising house; not because they don't have the illusion of choice, but because it becomes completely impractical to have more than a single, maybe two for those courageous enough, music suppliers.
2 out of 3 times when I buy a game with my hard-earned money, I run into issues when installing or trying to play it because of DRM.
You then have to spend hours in the user forums, publisher's knowledge bases or unofficial websites to find out that the game won't play because the plublisher doesn't like that particular CD-R/W in your machine or something equally studpid.
In the end, I often have to resort to a pirated copy or a crack to get the game to play on my machine. A game that I bought in its original form!
How do you think I feel after spending all that money, all that time, all that frustration trying to do the right thing because I understand that people who work on these products need to make a living?
I feel cheated, alienated, and I'm really not enclined any longer to buy a DRM product just to try it: ended the CD purchases of groups I don't know, ended the games that I might like.
But I won't download them for free either: I just don't play games anymore, and I get and pay my music from people who actually "get it", like http://www.magnatune.com/.
The device will ensure that only the genuine reader will be able to access the content of the book by demodulating the photons emitted by the book printed using a special patented process.
Initial trials have shown the product to work well, but concurrent technology from other publishers and technology giants such as Adobe propose different optical systems, requiring a reader to be fitted with multiple layers of technology, most incompatible with each other.
"The issue", explains Adobe's DRMopt+ Chief Researcher John Begood, "is that each system is influencing the output of the other. This will be a tough one to solve, but at the moment, it's low priority as that choice is in the hands of the user."
Shares in both Microsoft Press and Adobe International hvae increase by respectively 12 and 8 percent following the annoucement.
Another question that is more important than rethoric about the reality of a phenomenon is: where does the knowledge of homeopathic practices come from?
If science has a problem studying the effectiveness of homeopathy because it is build on the assumption that it only works during unquantifiable descrete phenomena, then how can the homeopaths actually prescribe anything and claim that it will work?
Again, where did they get the necessary knowledge to be able to make a treatment?
If they know how to harness the phenomena, then their claims become falsifiable and are therefore testable.
Saying that a claim that promises wonders cannot be tested but still works consistently doesn't make any sense.
If the occurence is too statistically low to isolate the phenomena from statistical noise then how can we claim it exist at all unless there is other means of proving it?
Placing all he stuff that science cannot prove under the hood of unknown physical properties is just a convenient way of pulling the claims out of reach of any enquiry. I must however object that all paranormal activities claim consistent tangible benefits and interraction with physical objects.
So, which way is it? Can't be both out-of-reach of testing and act in measurable ways on our physical world.
What strikes me most with these dubious practices is that they are built on nothing more than the "vision" or "belief" or a simple untested theory from someone who then becomes a mystic figure for a movement that would never question its founder, perpetuating the "truth" against all evidence to the contrary.
Oh yeah, that and the fact that homeopathy is now very big business and that the labs producing those little sugar pills are here to stay: imagine: people paying for a whole lot of nothingess! Just by 1g of anything and dilute it beyond recognition. What better business model: no R&D costs, no more raw materials appart from sugar!
Now I wish I had thought of something like that!
A treatment is not confirmed to be working on the basis of testimony alone. There are good reasons for that and in particular the fact that following a new treatment also includes a change in lifestyle and without knowing which parameters count and which do not, you can't infer that any progress is attributable to the treatment alone.
Another reason is the lack of properly measurable quantity to actually define improvement. For some it will be subjective, for others it will be objective, but what counts is to quantify that improvement and verify it over a large sample of people being treated for the same symptoms folowing the same methods.
Honest people have come to believe very strongly in all sort of stuff because it worked for them, however it is very hard to shake the notion that it isn't enough to confirm actual effectiveness.
Would you take a treatment that was found to work in only 1% of cases?
Such a treatment wouldn't even be considered interesting, especially if others exist that have a better success rate.
Now if you're one of the 1% for which that treatment was effective -for whatever reason-, then you too would be a strong believer in that treatment because it worked for you, but that doesn't translate in it being an effective treatment that should be recommended.
The fact that homeopathy was born out of thin air 200 years ago at a time when medical science was in its infancy, and that it has not changed its practices even though progress in other sciences have been unable to find any trace of supporting evidence to those practices should be a big red signal that there is something off with homeopathy.
Homeopathy is armless (http://www.homeowatch.org/articles/jaroff.html) except that it may detract people from the treatment they actually need.
That being said, if it works for you, then by all mean use it. However, dont be too quick to see your homeopath before seing actual doctors next time you have something: Medecine's goal is to actually help patients using methods that are proven to work most of the time.
There is no such thing as "alternative medecine": medecine will use whatever works for real, that's why it actually progresses. Alternatives have to call themselve that way simply because they have not been able to make a sufficiently strong case for themselves, otherwise they would be embraced. That's the difference between herbalism and pharmacognosy for instance: the former can't prove effectiveness and is rooted in unwavering faith for "traditional wisdom" and the latter actually uses the plants that are proven to work to help people.
Randi's flair for the dramatic shouldn't detract from his real and serious comitment to science and its advancement.
Regarding the protocols for testing paranormal claims by the James Randi Fundation http://www.randi.org/ you should know that they are elaborated in agreement with the person being tested: the experiment has to be agreable to both parties, otherwise it would be too easy to do like you've just done and dismiss Randi's experiment design as being unjustly difficult and designed to fail the claim.
If no agreement on the procedure can be made, no test is done. I believe that the tested actually has to sign his agreement to the protocol before the experiment is started.
Dowsing has been tested elsewhere using similar methods as the one you describe, always in complete agreement with the dowser being tested: part of the test protocol actually asks for the dowser to confirm that he gets a positive readings for the pipes when he is shown beforehand that they actually contain water. Once that is established, the double-blind experiment can start, and eventually show the real accuracy of the paranormal detection method, ie. the usual no-more-than-chance.
Randi doesn't try to convince you to believe in what he says: either his observations are right and accurate or they aren't.
Randi, as a stage magician, is able to see where there could be potential issues in an experiment where the state of mind of the experimenter could influence the outcome of what he is researching.
You need a good grasp of human psychology to be able to detach yourself from those very human flaws (at least as far as scientific enquiry goes).
Guys like Randi may not always be liked as they are more artists than scientists themselves, but science is intrinsically unable to deal with deception as trust in your fellow scientists and your human subjects is paramount to the scientific endeavour.
Having people like Randi around is actually very beneficial to science as they can point out those pesky human flaws that can jeopardize any good experiment.
Whether you like him or not is irrelevant: he's helping real scientists devise real experiments that have reliable and replicable results.
His actions in that field of human enquiry speak for themselves.
Not long ago (in 2002), there was a very good, very scientific test done by Horizon on the BBC using the very same technique.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2512105.stm
It seems that part of the problem in the Belfast findings may be due to the fact that the cells that had a reaction were manually counted, possibly introducting a bias known as "the experimenter effect", of which little is really known apart from the fact that it exists (a bit like the placebo effect).
There is little doubt that the experimenter acted in good faith, but the fact was that the very controlled experiment commissioned by the Horizon (involving the Royal Society and a number of specialists in various relevant fields) ended up showing a statistical no-greater-than-chance result.
Now, before you say "how can you trust a TV show", I'll say that Horizon is no ordinary TV show. It's probably the best, most balanced and scientific accurate show ever to grace the screen. Those who are lucky enough to be able to watch it will probably agree.
There is another large scale experiment being done at the moment on homeopathy, invoving both homeopaths, scientists and people like James Randi.
Randi predicted that the experiment will show no more than we already know today, that homeopathy is not worth much as a medical practice, but that most believer will be undeterred by any amount of evidence.
The real question to test a practitionner of alternative medecine is to ask: what would it take you to admit that it doesn't work?
For many, nothing will.
But it's worth investigating anyway, I'm ready to consider that there is some benefit to it if tangible, undisputable proof was found. It would certainly help to use homeopathy if its field of action -if there is any- was actually well known, and if it is doing better there than other types of medecine. http://www.homeowatch.org/
China is currently doing all it can to "re-invent" everything that carries information.
There are reasons for this:
- Chinese are very nationalisitc by definition (in chinese, China (Zhong Guo) mean the "Kindgom of the middle", they really thought -and still do to a certain extent- that China is the center of the world) and they are proud to "re-invent" or "re-conquer" to make it their own.
- they do not want to license foreign Intellectual Property, so they develop their own video format for instance, for both pride and economic reasons as well.
- The Chinese government think it needs to control information.
I believe that the latest is probably behind the move to IPv9.
By encouraging non-standard protocols, they ensure that the equipment has more chance to be manufactured in China, and they have more ways to control the information passing through it.
China recognizes the importance of the Internet and know it is essential to its progress, yet they also realize that it is the most dangerous way to propagate those "subversive" ideas like democracy and freedom of speech. So the best thing to do is probably to "embrace and extend"...
Now, where have I heard that before...?
What about reducing the need for oil?
Reducing dependency on fossil fuel is certainly a great improvement, but we're still talking about oil byproducts getting in the environment.
Isn't it time to maybe -maybe- think about making cars and other combustion engines a tiny bit more efficient, particularly say... in North America for instance?