There's no concept of the Volk, none of the imaginary past and an appeal to a spiritualist return, nothing resembling the philosophical background that underlay Fascism. Fascism had interesting tensions between Romantic philosophers (particularly Herder), it was an explicit reaction against Enlightenment-type thinking and modernity and it was very backwards-looking.
I don't think being corporatist and not lassiez-faire in the western sense even puts China in the same ballpark as Fascist philosophy. China doesn't actually care a lot about what its people think and it's not trying to mold them, except to the extent that it wants to maintain the current political order. Anytime you see repression, you can trace it back to the leadership staving off a threat before it becomes threatening. Most of my (western) friends who have been to China describe it as being "differently free" than Western society - in many aspects business and personal liberties are greater than in most parts of the West (for better or worse).
I agree with you that it no longer should be considered communist or socialist - since Deng Xiaopeng, what was once a non-orthodox Marxist country has left socialism far behind. It probably merits a description like "mixed-market oligarchy".
There are plenty of game developers that would love to capture part of the Chinese market. It's mainly developers that operate a bit too close to prohibited levels of hedonism and a few other touchy subjects that will have problems, and it's not like Chinese need games tailored to them - people taking the effort to make a game could go worldwide if their game won't work in China.
I've been using redhat/fedora since at least RedHat5, having previously used Slackware. I thought SELinux was pretty sketchy, but this change is utterly ridiculous. I'm still on FC11, but until and unless they develop some sanity by FC13, I'm going to need to find a new distro (CentOS? Debian? I'm not sure yet)
Getting a large percent of the vote of a particular demographic is not the whole picture - sometimes you can shape the size of the demographic itself - if normally X number of that demographic shows up, but you manage to get Y, that can make a big difference.
If he had paired with someone sane, he would've had a shot at capturing the moderate vote. On the other hand, he might not've fired up the suburbanites and fundies and so he would've had fewer volunteers and a less energised base. It's hard to say if he could've won.
I'm considerably to the left of Obama, but I think McCain is worthy of respect - I don't like his policies that much but I respect him as a statesman.
Of course not. We let the market decide, because in our faith, consumers have the time and ability to be perfectly rational and omniscent in the economic sense. Any time a consumer is decieved, it's because they have sinned, and so they deserve it. To stand in the way of the invisible hand is to deny the will of God (or society, or something)...:)
Libel/Slander laws have little-to-nothing to do with free flow of culture.
It's not that manual labour and thinking are on different levels so much that the products of thought are categorically different than objects. Ideas are not diminished by being understood broadly, while sharing a physical object with too many people usually becomes impractical.
The first two - password type information, are not effectively culture - they occupy none of the same mental space that culture has traditionally been in society.
As for the last, if I shared it with one person, it would just be a breach of trust if they shared it further - I don't think I should be able to demand such things be stopped once they get out, any more than I could stop a rumour/gossip.
I would guess that what was done was one of two things:
Mechanical production of a cover through some device that, on "hearing" a tune, would attempt to duplicate it in some analogue way, thus producing what would be, under some definitional frameworks, a cover rather than a reproduction.
Computer-driven replication of a file through means that are not exactly copying, e.g. churning over random generation of bits of data and comparison with the original (either direct or medium-specific, e.g. audio). Done with high enough granularity a file that's either identical or acoustically practically identical to the original is produced (akin to how re-encoding a song in a different format can leave it essentially sounding the same).
With either of these, one might claim that no true procedural copying took place, just something that is functionally copying.
I would guess this because I occasionally thought about such things myself when I was much younger (and of the over-logicy libertarian mental flavour).
That statement is at best a vague intuition unless you can tell us all about what you mean by harm, what situations might change how that is to be understood, etc.
When we have inherent individual faults of some kind, it would be better to have society expect us to strive to overcome them. A mens rea is a big part of crime, but the effects of this kind of biological difference threaten to make grey a matter that the law (and society) relies on being reasonably clear - whether people are to be judged responsible for their actions. If people are drugged through no fault of their own, are insane, or are in a situation where they have little other choice, we may be lenient or forgive certain acts, and if crimes are part of a culture of abuse (gang violence, racial violence) we may judge them more harshly than normal, but accepting genetic inclinations to violence is going too far and is not something we should accept.
Either he requires meds and is responsible for not having had them, he should've been the ward of the state all along, or he's fully responsible.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no concept of the Volk, none of the imaginary past and an appeal to a spiritualist return, nothing resembling the philosophical background that underlay Fascism. Fascism had interesting tensions between Romantic philosophers (particularly Herder), it was an explicit reaction against Enlightenment-type thinking and modernity and it was very backwards-looking.
I don't think being corporatist and not lassiez-faire in the western sense even puts China in the same ballpark as Fascist philosophy. China doesn't actually care a lot about what its people think and it's not trying to mold them, except to the extent that it wants to maintain the current political order. Anytime you see repression, you can trace it back to the leadership staving off a threat before it becomes threatening. Most of my (western) friends who have been to China describe it as being "differently free" than Western society - in many aspects business and personal liberties are greater than in most parts of the West (for better or worse).
I agree with you that it no longer should be considered communist or socialist - since Deng Xiaopeng, what was once a non-orthodox Marxist country has left socialism far behind. It probably merits a description like "mixed-market oligarchy".
Well what? That's an inadequately brief description, but it still doesn't come even close to fitting China.
I don't think you know what fascism is if you're suggesting that the Chinese government fits the label.
There are plenty of game developers that would love to capture part of the Chinese market. It's mainly developers that operate a bit too close to prohibited levels of hedonism and a few other touchy subjects that will have problems, and it's not like Chinese need games tailored to them - people taking the effort to make a game could go worldwide if their game won't work in China.
I've been using redhat/fedora since at least RedHat5, having previously used Slackware. I thought SELinux was pretty sketchy, but this change is utterly ridiculous. I'm still on FC11, but until and unless they develop some sanity by FC13, I'm going to need to find a new distro (CentOS? Debian? I'm not sure yet)
Gallup Polls, I imagine
Getting a large percent of the vote of a particular demographic is not the whole picture - sometimes you can shape the size of the demographic itself - if normally X number of that demographic shows up, but you manage to get Y, that can make a big difference.
If he had paired with someone sane, he would've had a shot at capturing the moderate vote. On the other hand, he might not've fired up the suburbanites and fundies and so he would've had fewer volunteers and a less energised base. It's hard to say if he could've won.
I'm considerably to the left of Obama, but I think McCain is worthy of respect - I don't like his policies that much but I respect him as a statesman.
Concur.
There's nothing wrong about the EC trying to prevent monopolies/unacceptable mergers. They have a say too, because these companies operate there.
Sometimes being wrong in interesting ways about interesting things is quite good for starting discussions.
Of course not. We let the market decide, because in our faith, consumers have the time and ability to be perfectly rational and omniscent in the economic sense. Any time a consumer is decieved, it's because they have sinned, and so they deserve it. To stand in the way of the invisible hand is to deny the will of God (or society, or something) ... :)
S-O doesn't strike me as an insane amount of red tape.
I will, next time I submit a story.
Anytime you submit a story and one of your sentences starts with "Personally,", leave it out. We don't care.
Right, but I learned that phoneme acquisition began in embryonic states in a psycholinguistics class I took.
I thought this was a well-established fact -- I remember being taught this in one of my psych classes.
Libel/Slander laws have little-to-nothing to do with free flow of culture.
It's not that manual labour and thinking are on different levels so much that the products of thought are categorically different than objects. Ideas are not diminished by being understood broadly, while sharing a physical object with too many people usually becomes impractical.
It's not sarcasm. Copyright abolitionists are not that rare in our community.
The first two - password type information, are not effectively culture - they occupy none of the same mental space that culture has traditionally been in society.
As for the last, if I shared it with one person, it would just be a breach of trust if they shared it further - I don't think I should be able to demand such things be stopped once they get out, any more than I could stop a rumour/gossip.
I would guess that what was done was one of two things:
Mechanical production of a cover through some device that, on "hearing" a tune, would attempt to duplicate it in some analogue way, thus producing what would be, under some definitional frameworks, a cover rather than a reproduction.
Computer-driven replication of a file through means that are not exactly copying, e.g. churning over random generation of bits of data and comparison with the original (either direct or medium-specific, e.g. audio). Done with high enough granularity a file that's either identical or acoustically practically identical to the original is produced (akin to how re-encoding a song in a different format can leave it essentially sounding the same).
With either of these, one might claim that no true procedural copying took place, just something that is functionally copying.
I would guess this because I occasionally thought about such things myself when I was much younger (and of the over-logicy libertarian mental flavour).
Nope. Culture, information, we should never approve of shackles on these things. We should reject claims of ownership of ideas or data.
There's a better way - go after the fraud sites themselves. ISP blocklists are too messy for the state to involve itself with.
That statement is at best a vague intuition unless you can tell us all about what you mean by harm, what situations might change how that is to be understood, etc.
Law cannot be reduced to such sparse statements.
When we have inherent individual faults of some kind, it would be better to have society expect us to strive to overcome them. A mens rea is a big part of crime, but the effects of this kind of biological difference threaten to make grey a matter that the law (and society) relies on being reasonably clear - whether people are to be judged responsible for their actions. If people are drugged through no fault of their own, are insane, or are in a situation where they have little other choice, we may be lenient or forgive certain acts, and if crimes are part of a culture of abuse (gang violence, racial violence) we may judge them more harshly than normal, but accepting genetic inclinations to violence is going too far and is not something we should accept.
Either he requires meds and is responsible for not having had them, he should've been the ward of the state all along, or he's fully responsible.