1. French culture exists mainly to perpetuate itself. I know all cultures do this, but if you aren't a French-speaking Frenchman doing something French in France, they just don't like you.
The postmodern French art crowd likes Algerians and others from former French colonies right now.
2. For a country that derives so much of their income from tourism, they have the worst customer service I have ever experienced.
Were you speaking English?
I heard many stories of French rudeness, both from fellow North Americans and some by other Europeans. All of these people had spoken exclusively in English. Of course this is a totally reasonable thing to expect to be able to do, given the number of English-speaking tourists in France.
During the two weeks or so I spent with my girlfriend in France last summer, we spoke all French to people (her spoken French is a lot better than mine, so I let her do most of the talking). I don't remember specifically any instance of rudeness except once on the metro, when someone shoved me roughly aside to get by. However, this only helps my theory because I'd spent the last five minutes standing within earshot of the rude person and talking with my girlfriend in English.
Frequently, we were asked where we were from, as though the questioners were surprised to hear us speaking French. When we said we were Canadian, we got a clued-in "ahhh" look, and usually friendly service. I suppose this may also be related to anti-American or anti-British sentiment (i.e. they thought we were Americans or Brits, and are glad we were neither), though I don't know how good non-English speakers are at distinguishing English dialects, though the initial friendliness usually preceded the question.
So, I would guess most of the irrational rudeness is a linguistic thing, not a national/ethnic thing.
This is totally off topic, but in what twisted reality is it considered more acceptable to give these murderers some kind of credit by calling them "suicide bomber" instead of "homicide bomber"?
We want to choose words which convey precise meanings when this precision is desired by our audience.
"Murderer" doesn't cut it, because it doesn't distinguish a Palestianian with explosives strapped to his chest boarding an Israeli bus from Charles Manson. And I think this is an important distinction.
"Homicide bomber" doesn't cut either, because you can be a homicide bomber without blowing yourself up.
"Suicide bomber" does the job.
The fact that a suicide bomber is willing to kill himself as well as is targets is a very important and very relevant fact, simply because the human desire for self-preservation is very strong.
Obviously this distinction is important to most people reading the news, too, because otherwise the term 'suicide bomber' would never have been invented.
That is not correct. The standard deviation of a random variable is the square root of its variance. The variance is the squared expectation of the centralized variable (variable minus its mean). [...]
What isn't correct about what the original poster wrote? I think you're confusing practical statistics with formal probability theory.
In practice, people rarely know the exact density function before a sampling, sample a bunch of points, and try to pick a distribution that fits the curve (e.g. Gaussian with mean a and variance b) via least-squares or some other method.
Saying you don't need the points because you can just use the density function is kind of missing the point, since you need the points to compute an approximation of the density function.
Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God. So do I.
By the way, you can add Cauchy (a devout Catholic and fervent French Royalist) to that list.
Re:Can you tell a hutu from a tutsie on site?
on
ICANN Meets Annan
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· Score: 1
Especially with feudal cultures organized around familial alliances, that going to be a lot of dead bodies. And for what? We owe them NOTHING. They're not worth the bullets let alone American lives.
Well, one might well argue that 'we', meaning Europeans (and this includes North Americans) are responsible for their political situation, particularly since Hutu-Tutsi racism was explicitly encouraged and manipulated by Belgian colonialists. This event isn't because Rwandans are uncivilized primitives.
I can perhaps understand why you don't think Americans should be responsible for Belgian misdeeds, though the U.S. is also guilty of fostering ethnic hatred between Africans.
Putting aside the blame game, there is then the question of the value of the Rwandans' lives. For that I can't argue with you, because we obviously have different value systems. I have to say I find any value system that places such a marginal value on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people repulsive, though.
Next time a Christian nation wants to start excecuting Muslim populations wholesale, expect a more muted action from the US. I wouldn't hold it against an administration if they didn't want to get involved.
If you're concerned about terrorist attacks and stopping terrorism, I would hope you would blame the U.S. government if it chose not to get involved. The Israel/Palestine situation is a short step away from all-out civil war, which could include the sorts of mass executions you describe. Palestinians are already angry at the U.S. for no condemning the Yassin assassination. If the U.S. sat silently by while Israel conducted mass executions, don't you think the possibility of terrorist actions against the U.S. would increase?
You can only build so many walls and metal detectors. Eventually, you'll have to rely on goodwill, and sitting silently by while executions go on will create precious little of that.
Re:Information Super Highway... TO HELL
on
ICANN Meets Annan
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· Score: 1
Wow, that was amazingly predictable.
Well, if you'd read the rest of my post, you'd see I'm arguing that the UN is used as a scapegoat. Whenever a country does something respectable, it takes the credit. Whenever no one does anything, it's because "the UN did not follow through". For these reasons I feel that the charge that the UN is a toothless organization is overblown.
I mentioned the U.S. because that is the status quo. I did this not to argue that you were being a reactionary by favouring the status quo (I realize you were suggesting alternatives), but to argue that if we can mostly live with the faults of the current faulty U.S.-ICANN administration, it's possible we could mostly live with a UN-run administration, even with its faults.
I agree that the UN itself is far too political a body to administer things directly, and there are huge potential political consequences in letting. "non-free" countries exercise some measure of control over the DNS system. Preferable to me would be some third-party organization which has a UN mandate, but has a fair degree of independence from UN policy decisions.
Re:Information Super Highway... TO HELL
on
ICANN Meets Annan
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· Score: 1
This organization doesn't have a spine. It's corrupt. It happily changes it's tune when politically expedient.
Because, clearly, the U.S. government is free of all these faults.:)
I think the UN gets an unfair rap. I hear a lot of people speak with the strange idea that the UN is a single cohesive entity, somewhere else, who arbitrarily and unreasonably attempts to impose decisions upon them. Maybe this attitude arises from the habitual American distrust of government.
The UN serves as a convenient political mask for Western leaders who want to distance themselves from distasteful happenings elsewhere in the world. "Sure, it's a problem," they say, "but it's a global problem, so it's the UN's responsibility."
A recent memorable example is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which was starting up exactly 10 years ago, and could have easily been stopped with a capable intervention force, according to the UN general in Rwanda. His pleas for help in Rwanda were mostly met with indifference by the governments of the entire Western world, which was then preoccupied with the situation in Yugoslavia.
The UN administration also bears some guilt, for not trying harder to convince people, but most of the fault should still lie with the Western countries (specifically the U.S., France, and Belgium) who had troops in the area they could have mobilized and intelligence they could have shared, but chose not to. Yet it was only Kofi Annan who chose to apologize, and I consistently see American columnists describe 1994 as "the UN's failure to act", something which really incenses me.
And in fact a history writer in the UK got taken to court for doing the same thing and was found against and denounced by the judge.
If it's the case I'm thinking of, the one described in the book The Holocaust on Trial, then it happened a little differently.
In her book Denying the Holocaust, An American historian named Deborah Lipstadt accused prominent Holocaust-denier David Irving of lying about the facts (about the Holocaust having happened).
Irving sued her for libel, saying there wasn't enough proof to show he'd lied, because there wasn't enough proof to show the Holocaust had in fact happened.
Wow. Your entire argument is so fucking stupid that I don't need to reply, it's dumb enough to convey its stupidity by itself. The only reason I'm replying is this...
The guy is making a perfectly reasonable argument about rational self-interest. I see nothing obviously stupid about it.
Usually wikipedia is extremely good, but the articles (some of them linked in comments here on slashdot) look liked they just cut and past crap out of a graduate text book without explanation.
Theoretically, it's possible to weed through the hierarchy of definitions in either resource and figure out what was meant. Practically, you usually have to have advanced training in the subject to be able to put it all together.
But, really, you can't blame either site too much for using technical language this way. They're not making the concepts deliberately unintelligable: the vocabulary is there because it's the most convenient generally-accepted means of accurately describing the concepts involved.
It's comparatively rare that the general public, or even the general scientific public, takes an interest in conceptually advanced theorems such as this one. That's why there's little in the way of such resources.
Somehow, I think if you're on the list, the FBI will be a little more discrete than just return the list to the company and tell the company which people are suspected of being terrorsts.
As humorous as it is to think of the FBI being discrete (not continuous?):
As the AC said, if people would read newspapers instead of Chomsky, they'd know that Iraq had no meaningful weapons from the US.
This Guardian article mentions that the U.S. did not supply too much in the way of actual weapons, except some cluster bombs. They did supply access to biological material such as anthrax, though as we've seen, that probably didn't end up being used in either of the wars.
This seems rather beside the point though. The claim being argued was that money given to the American government can end up being flung back in ones face by foreign despots. Arguing that the contribution of the U.S. is small relative to those of Europeans is irrelevant to the point.
Whether or not the Americans actually sold bullets to Saddam, it's at least generally accepted that they provided some level of financial aid during the Iran-Iraq war, and money can buy bullets. These need not be all or even most of the bullets, to serve as an example.
Well, yes, the waste of good faith was the general point. But I still am confused, and I don't think I'm misreading the post. He (or she) said this:
He has the good fortune to be president on 9/11, which turns him into a pariah. Then he manipulates public sentiment about 9/11 to push forward the most extreme right-wing agenda in recent history.
I read this as saying 9/11 turned Bush into a pariah, and the wording suggests that the 'pariah' bit was a direct consequence of 9/11, and not Bush's reaction to it.
Obviously exactly the opposite was true: everyone was reaching out and sympathetic (at least in the West). That's why I guessed that 'pariah' had just not been used correctly.
Whatever, it's a moot point. We all seem to agree on the general idea here.
Did you really mean 'pariah' there? Being a pariah is a bad thing, while from the context it sounds like you're trying to emphasize how well Bush was regarded after 9/11.
I'm sure I'm just missing something here, but how does naming a building after the mothers of the cofounders of Microsoft build solidiarity with the OSS community in the least?
My best guess is that the poster thought the OSS community would be more pleased with a building named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers than a building named after Gates and Ballmer themselves.
Calling this 'retaining solidarity' is ridiculous, though. Since when did the OSS community have Harvard's solidarity to begin with?
Yes, you are being unfair. The spelling mistake is called a typo. And you may not know me personally, but I guess you now do know someone who has read Cantor's own words...me! I'm glad you met Aczel,
Sorry. I guess I shouldn't leap to conclusions like that.
Slashdot Mirror
1. French culture exists mainly to perpetuate itself. I know all cultures do this, but if you aren't a French-speaking Frenchman doing something French in France, they just don't like you.
The postmodern French art crowd likes Algerians and others from former French colonies right now.
2. For a country that derives so much of their income from tourism, they have the worst customer service I have ever experienced.
Were you speaking English?
I heard many stories of French rudeness, both from fellow North Americans and some by other Europeans. All of these people had spoken exclusively in English. Of course this is a totally reasonable thing to expect to be able to do, given the number of English-speaking tourists in France.
During the two weeks or so I spent with my girlfriend in France last summer, we spoke all French to people (her spoken French is a lot better than mine, so I let her do most of the talking). I don't remember specifically any instance of rudeness except once on the metro, when someone shoved me roughly aside to get by. However, this only helps my theory because I'd spent the last five minutes standing within earshot of the rude person and talking with my girlfriend in English.
Frequently, we were asked where we were from, as though the questioners were surprised to hear us speaking French. When we said we were Canadian, we got a clued-in "ahhh" look, and usually friendly service. I suppose this may also be related to anti-American or anti-British sentiment (i.e. they thought we were Americans or Brits, and are glad we were neither), though I don't know how good non-English speakers are at distinguishing English dialects, though the initial friendliness usually preceded the question.
So, I would guess most of the irrational rudeness is a linguistic thing, not a national/ethnic thing.
This is totally off topic, but in what twisted reality is it considered more acceptable to give these murderers some kind of credit by calling them "suicide bomber" instead of "homicide bomber"?
We want to choose words which convey precise meanings when this precision is desired by our audience.
"Murderer" doesn't cut it, because it doesn't distinguish a Palestianian with explosives strapped to his chest boarding an Israeli bus from Charles Manson. And I think this is an important distinction.
"Homicide bomber" doesn't cut either, because you can be a homicide bomber without blowing yourself up.
"Suicide bomber" does the job.
The fact that a suicide bomber is willing to kill himself as well as is targets is a very important and very relevant fact, simply because the human desire for self-preservation is very strong.
Obviously this distinction is important to most people reading the news, too, because otherwise the term 'suicide bomber' would never have been invented.
That is not correct. The standard deviation of a random variable is the square root of its variance. The variance is the squared expectation of the centralized variable (variable minus its mean). [...]
What isn't correct about what the original poster wrote? I think you're confusing practical statistics with formal probability theory.
In practice, people rarely know the exact density function before a sampling, sample a bunch of points, and try to pick a distribution that fits the curve (e.g. Gaussian with mean a and variance b) via least-squares or some other method.
Saying you don't need the points because you can just use the density function is kind of missing the point, since you need the points to compute an approximation of the density function.
It's the same reason Fox News and the Israelis call Palestinian bombers "homicide bombers" instead of the more accepted term "suicide bomber".
Does Israel do that too? I thought it was just a Fox News affectation.
Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God. So do I.
By the way, you can add Cauchy (a devout Catholic and fervent French Royalist) to that list.
Especially with feudal cultures organized around familial alliances, that going to be a lot of dead bodies. And for what? We owe them NOTHING. They're not worth the bullets let alone American lives.
Well, one might well argue that 'we', meaning Europeans (and this includes North Americans) are responsible for their political situation, particularly since Hutu-Tutsi racism was explicitly encouraged and manipulated by Belgian colonialists. This event isn't because Rwandans are uncivilized primitives.
I can perhaps understand why you don't think Americans should be responsible for Belgian misdeeds, though the U.S. is also guilty of fostering ethnic hatred between Africans.
Putting aside the blame game, there is then the question of the value of the Rwandans' lives. For that I can't argue with you, because we obviously have different value systems. I have to say I find any value system that places such a marginal value on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people repulsive, though.
Next time a Christian nation wants to start excecuting Muslim populations wholesale, expect a more muted action from the US. I wouldn't hold it against an administration if they didn't want to get involved.
If you're concerned about terrorist attacks and stopping terrorism, I would hope you would blame the U.S. government if it chose not to get involved. The Israel/Palestine situation is a short step away from all-out civil war, which could include the sorts of mass executions you describe. Palestinians are already angry at the U.S. for no condemning the Yassin assassination. If the U.S. sat silently by while Israel conducted mass executions, don't you think the possibility of terrorist actions against the U.S. would increase?
You can only build so many walls and metal detectors. Eventually, you'll have to rely on goodwill, and sitting silently by while executions go on will create precious little of that.
Wow, that was amazingly predictable.
Well, if you'd read the rest of my post, you'd see I'm arguing that the UN is used as a scapegoat. Whenever a country does something respectable, it takes the credit. Whenever no one does anything, it's because "the UN did not follow through". For these reasons I feel that the charge that the UN is a toothless organization is overblown.
I mentioned the U.S. because that is the status quo. I did this not to argue that you were being a reactionary by favouring the status quo (I realize you were suggesting alternatives), but to argue that if we can mostly live with the faults of the current faulty U.S.-ICANN administration, it's possible we could mostly live with a UN-run administration, even with its faults.
I agree that the UN itself is far too political a body to administer things directly, and there are huge potential political consequences in letting. "non-free" countries exercise some measure of control over the DNS system. Preferable to me would be some third-party organization which has a UN mandate, but has a fair degree of independence from UN policy decisions.
This organization doesn't have a spine. It's corrupt. It happily changes it's tune when politically expedient.
:)
Because, clearly, the U.S. government is free of all these faults.
I think the UN gets an unfair rap. I hear a lot of people speak with the strange idea that the UN is a single cohesive entity, somewhere else, who arbitrarily and unreasonably attempts to impose decisions upon them. Maybe this attitude arises from the habitual American distrust of government.
The UN serves as a convenient political mask for Western leaders who want to distance themselves from distasteful happenings elsewhere in the world. "Sure, it's a problem," they say, "but it's a global problem, so it's the UN's responsibility."
A recent memorable example is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which was starting up exactly 10 years ago, and could have easily been stopped with a capable intervention force, according to the UN general in Rwanda. His pleas for help in Rwanda were mostly met with indifference by the governments of the entire Western world, which was then preoccupied with the situation in Yugoslavia.
The UN administration also bears some guilt, for not trying harder to convince people, but most of the fault should still lie with the Western countries (specifically the U.S., France, and Belgium) who had troops in the area they could have mobilized and intelligence they could have shared, but chose not to. Yet it was only Kofi Annan who chose to apologize, and I consistently see American columnists describe 1994 as "the UN's failure to act", something which really incenses me.
And in fact a history writer in the UK got taken to court for doing the same thing and was found against and denounced by the judge.
If it's the case I'm thinking of, the one described in the book The Holocaust on Trial , then it happened a little differently.
In her book Denying the Holocaust , An American historian named Deborah Lipstadt accused prominent Holocaust-denier David Irving of lying about the facts (about the Holocaust having happened).
Irving sued her for libel, saying there wasn't enough proof to show he'd lied, because there wasn't enough proof to show the Holocaust had in fact happened.
Wow. Your entire argument is so fucking stupid that I don't need to reply, it's dumb enough to convey its stupidity by itself. The only reason I'm replying is this...
The guy is making a perfectly reasonable argument about rational self-interest. I see nothing obviously stupid about it.
Usually wikipedia is extremely good, but the articles (some of them linked in comments here on slashdot) look liked they just cut and past crap out of a graduate text book without explanation.
And that's probably even more true of PlanetMath.
Theoretically, it's possible to weed through the hierarchy of definitions in either resource and figure out what was meant. Practically, you usually have to have advanced training in the subject to be able to put it all together.
But, really, you can't blame either site too much for using technical language this way. They're not making the concepts deliberately unintelligable: the vocabulary is there because it's the most convenient generally-accepted means of accurately describing the concepts involved.
It's comparatively rare that the general public, or even the general scientific public, takes an interest in conceptually advanced theorems such as this one. That's why there's little in the way of such resources.
George Orwell's complete works, available online:
http://www.orwell.ru/
Somehow, I think if you're on the list, the FBI will be a little more discrete than just return the list to the company and tell the company which people are suspected of being terrorsts.
As humorous as it is to think of the FBI being discrete (not continuous?):
s/discrete/discreet/g
Drop the terrorist bit, it's old.
Actually, I was trying to make an ironic comment there, but the Slashdot comment system stripped out my >/SARCASM< tag.
Don't you mean the struggle between Israel and Islamofascist terrorists?
Sorry, I forgot to include quotes and the tag.
This will most certainly be used in the ongoing struggle between Israel and Palestine.
Don't you mean the struggle between Israel and Islamofascist terrorists?
"Computer...Take me to the pr0n!!"
And, since pr0n is not an English word, you'll get this.
As the AC said, if people would read newspapers instead of Chomsky, they'd know that Iraq had no meaningful weapons from the US.
This Guardian article mentions that the U.S. did not supply too much in the way of actual weapons, except some cluster bombs. They did supply access to biological material such as anthrax, though as we've seen, that probably didn't end up being used in either of the wars.
This seems rather beside the point though. The claim being argued was that money given to the American government can end up being flung back in ones face by foreign despots. Arguing that the contribution of the U.S. is small relative to those of Europeans is irrelevant to the point.
Whether or not the Americans actually sold bullets to Saddam, it's at least generally accepted that they provided some level of financial aid during the Iran-Iraq war, and money can buy bullets. These need not be all or even most of the bullets, to serve as an example.
Well, yes, the waste of good faith was the general point. But I still am confused, and I don't think I'm misreading the post. He (or she) said this:
He has the good fortune to be president on 9/11, which turns him into a pariah. Then he manipulates public sentiment about 9/11 to push forward the most extreme right-wing agenda in recent history.
I read this as saying 9/11 turned Bush into a pariah, and the wording suggests that the 'pariah' bit was a direct consequence of 9/11, and not Bush's reaction to it.
Obviously exactly the opposite was true: everyone was reaching out and sympathetic (at least in the West). That's why I guessed that 'pariah' had just not been used correctly.
Whatever, it's a moot point. We all seem to agree on the general idea here.
which turns him into a pariah.
Did you really mean 'pariah' there? Being a pariah is a bad thing, while from the context it sounds like you're trying to emphasize how well Bush was regarded after 9/11.
Henry. Reference: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Gates.Mirick.html
I'm sure I'm just missing something here, but how does naming a building after the mothers of the cofounders of Microsoft build solidiarity with the OSS community in the least?
My best guess is that the poster thought the OSS community would be more pleased with a building named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers than a building named after Gates and Ballmer themselves.
Calling this 'retaining solidarity' is ridiculous, though. Since when did the OSS community have Harvard's solidarity to begin with?
Hmm, "Richard Amerike", eh?
I think I'll go with Amerigo Vespucci until I hear back from the jury on that one.
Yes, you are being unfair. The spelling mistake is called a typo. And you may not know me personally, but I guess you now do know someone who has read Cantor's own words...me! I'm glad you met Aczel,
Sorry. I guess I shouldn't leap to conclusions like that.
Sure. Obviously the notion of infinities of different sizes and bijections to make these comparisons possible was only there after Cantor came along.