Well, Slashdot is full of people who jump to conclusions without bothering to read the whole thread.
Even without me taking any side, I've already been clubbed with one side and attacked, and now my arguments are now strawman arguments.
Anyway, eventually, it would be nice if we could be in a society where any and all kinds of union be allowed, but I do not think we're ready for that yet.
Similar to the disadvantages of giving technology to a backward culture, forcing cultural and social freedoms on a people before they are ready for it could be bad in the long run.
Disclaimer - I'm not Christian, nor was I raised one. I'm an agnost and none of my views on marriage are religiously motivated.
That said, anybody marrying anything has a few problems - for instance, I could marry Liz Hurley, without her having to marry me. Extending this further, an American citizen could marry a Chinese pig. Does the pig get the status of a citizen?
Basically, as you mentioned in your original post, it introduces some serious legal complications that need to be tackled. As a people, we are not ready for that yet.
I'm all for open-mindedness, but only if the social, economic and political structure can handle it. Civilization is defined not by what you think, but also by what others think of your thoughts. Ergo, while there maybe a percentage of people who are fairly open about things, not everybody is. And you would be stepping on a lot of toes (and quite honestly, offending just about every major religion and faith out there) by doing so.
It's unfortunate, but it's also the truth. There are a lot of things a lot of people would like to do, however society does not accept those, and you have to adhere. This is one such example, that is all.
And your final statement is exactly the kind of bone I have to pick - marriage is more than a social contract. It is unfortunate that it has been reduced to one, but there is still a very large percentage of people to whom it means a lot. Anybody marrying anything would only make it worse, ergo my reluctance at making that happen.
Umm, I made no such claim. In fact, if you looked at my comment, I made no claim at all.
I just said that gay and lesbian marriage propnents ignore a particular attribute of marriage, and that the idea of "anybody marrying anything" need not necessarily be as wonderful as it may seem.
*shakes head*
Personally, you are free to do what you want, as long as you let me do what I want. Swing the hands, but mind the nose, to paraphrase Shaw.
Well, marriage is supposed to be an institution, primarily designed to help raise children in a healthy environment.
Are there couples out there who, despite being married, violate its very purpose? Yes.
Does that make marriage worthless and defeat its purpose? Nope, because there is still a significant percentage of folks to whom it still has value and who raise children in such environments.
Gay and lesbian marriages largely ignore this, and concentrate only on the first. Exceptions don't make rules. Anybody marrying anything does not exactly speak well of us as a people or as a civilization.
You know, Slashdot titles aren't aimed at being perfect - they are aimed at being catchy, and most do a good job of it.
Since this is not particularly a scientific journal, I'd rather have the former and have it catch my eye than being drab and something that I'd skip over.
Ummm, let's see now. The age of Earth is 4.35 billion years, and we just know of the Third Atmosphere that's existed for around 1 billion years, and very little of what was before that.
Never mind, out of the billion years of our present atmosphere's existence, we have observed data of about about 300 years and deduced data of around a couple of hundred thousand years.
Of course, let's leave all that aside for the moment. A few hundred years ago, due to the Maunder minima, Earth's temperature dropped down and the climate became colder. And in the past, the planet has been a lot hotter than it is today. And of course, a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere is because of volcanic activity and the like, something which humans have no control over. Not to mention the fact that we are at the end of an ice-age - and that we do not even know if Global Warming is bad - it may actually have helped us from going into another ice age [1].
And right, there are like really accurate models of the weather, right? I mean, we all see how well our models take into consideration things like solar activity, volcanic activity and other things - which we can very accurately predict. Right? Right? Oh wait. We can't. And even ignoring all this, the only science behind the community is one of consensus, not real science.
Before you go browbeating others, look at some publications - the probability values of some of those predictions are not even in the high 50s. Their p values are chosen to be manipulative, they work more by deducing "educated guess" causal behvaiors from correlations. Blah.
The day that the climatologists can to the dot predict the weather and climate will be the day I buy into their work - it can't even be called a theory, because a theory requires a basis, not a consensus.
Actually, if you'd read the article, you'd have read that Google was not the only company that was called - Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and Microsoft were called -- all the top 4 companies with Internet presence.
The submitter made it seem like it was just Google, but it seemed to be a human rights panel calling forth all the companies that could do something about censorship in China.
This is supposed to be the land of the free, home of the brave. The US is supposed to pride itself as being the beacon of light of democracy and the free world.
Instead, everything here has become so much driven by money that ethics and values become irrelevant when it comes to business. Oh, please don't give me that relativistic bullshit.
The Chinese government has killed thousands of its own citizens in massacres and throws its people into jail without a trial for speaking out against the establishment. They've a record of human rights violations, which is definitely evil by any stretch. I mean, shooting dead protesters and imprisoning and torturing people for speaking out - this is what Google is abetting a government to hide and keep away from its own citizens.
Like the article said, the Internet was something new, something that was a new medium that might help bring about a change and bring to light these things. Companies like Google and Yahoo! had the power to do something about it, the power to stand up to it and say NO. To say that despite everything, we've values and we have a backbone.
Instead, they gave in. More than anything, I'm disappointed in Google. I'm saddened that a company that preached so much about "doing no evil" turned out to be a bloody hypocrite. You know, deep down you knew that it was a corporation and like most corporations, its driven by greedy ass executives who don't care two hoots about anything - but you always had a hope that it would stand upto something and show some nerve.
Nope.
"All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing" -- Edmund Burke.
Which is why, I'd rather have Microsoft be a monopoly and make billions and use a chunk of that to help the world, rather than a lot of other companies and executives (Darth McBride, Larry Ellison) who just have all that money and do no good with it. Well, no good for the world that is.
For humanitarian things, definitely Gates.
If I wanted opinions on being stylish and wearing turtlenecks, I'd ask Jobs.
Thank you - I did not want to respond most of the other folks who'd responded, mostly because they were not trying to understand the fact that if Google was really morally righteous (as I'd believed them to be anyway), they'd have taken a stance against it.
But they did not, and that is what really disappointed me.
Disappointed - that's the right word. More than anything, I'm angry at Google for this. Oh, sure, I know that their shareholders come before everything yada yada yada. But they did fool us for a bit, unfortunately.
Had it been any other company, I would not have cared. But the point is, if you are a company that says "Do No Evil" and use that as a corporate strategy to try and earn good karma, you'd better hold on to it.
Did Microsoft say that they would do no evil? No, they did not.
On the other hand, Google tries to project the image of being Oh-so-Good and is being hypocritical about it.
If you are going to have a corporate value, stick to the bloody thing. Else don't flaunt it or be selective in its use.
This is what made me lose respect for Google - the fact that their so-called-values disappear at the first sign of money. Bah, what's the point then?
Google uses its values for no reason other than for purely strategy purposes:
Do no evil gets it good karma among the folks who think Google is a benign company
Open source serves its strategy well
Of course, most folks don't realize that like every other company, the moment money comes into picture, all values go out of the window.
Do no evil, my ass. They're worse than companies which do evil, because they don't preach something and practice hypocrisy.
Actually, his sentence makes sense - the term briefly qualifies his working period. If he'd said, "A guy I worked with was briefly Chinese" the qualifier would have been for him being Chinese.
I doubt Google was doing that just for the purposes of data gathering, though.
Imagine - they were able to scale the system to process 1 BILLION webpages. That is a significant achievement, which means that somewhere in Google, they have the ability to not only gather and sort/search a lot of data, but also derive meaning from it (statistical or otherwise).
That is a significant achievement.
Data by itself becomes fairly pointless after a while, however finding relations and meaning within that data is what makes it hard. And doing so for large amounts of data is even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if nature wanted a two men or two women to be together, they'd have been able to have babies.
*shrug*
Biology is implicitly partial.
Offtopic?! The article had a mistake and I tried mailing Daddypants, which did not work.
Blah.
I've been having trouble mailing daddypants@slashdot.org - and this is not the first time where I've had this problem.
Have any other subscribers had similar problems? I just get a mailer daemon error from pudge@andover.net.
Weird.
Well, Slashdot is full of people who jump to conclusions without bothering to read the whole thread.
Even without me taking any side, I've already been clubbed with one side and attacked, and now my arguments are now strawman arguments.
Anyway, eventually, it would be nice if we could be in a society where any and all kinds of union be allowed, but I do not think we're ready for that yet.
Similar to the disadvantages of giving technology to a backward culture, forcing cultural and social freedoms on a people before they are ready for it could be bad in the long run.
Disclaimer - I'm not Christian, nor was I raised one. I'm an agnost and none of my views on marriage are religiously motivated.
That said, anybody marrying anything has a few problems - for instance, I could marry Liz Hurley, without her having to marry me. Extending this further, an American citizen could marry a Chinese pig. Does the pig get the status of a citizen?
Basically, as you mentioned in your original post, it introduces some serious legal complications that need to be tackled. As a people, we are not ready for that yet.
I'm all for open-mindedness, but only if the social, economic and political structure can handle it. Civilization is defined not by what you think, but also by what others think of your thoughts. Ergo, while there maybe a percentage of people who are fairly open about things, not everybody is. And you would be stepping on a lot of toes (and quite honestly, offending just about every major religion and faith out there) by doing so.
It's unfortunate, but it's also the truth. There are a lot of things a lot of people would like to do, however society does not accept those, and you have to adhere. This is one such example, that is all.
And your final statement is exactly the kind of bone I have to pick - marriage is more than a social contract. It is unfortunate that it has been reduced to one, but there is still a very large percentage of people to whom it means a lot. Anybody marrying anything would only make it worse, ergo my reluctance at making that happen.
Umm, I made no such claim. In fact, if you looked at my comment, I made no claim at all.
I just said that gay and lesbian marriage propnents ignore a particular attribute of marriage, and that the idea of "anybody marrying anything" need not necessarily be as wonderful as it may seem.
*shakes head*
Personally, you are free to do what you want, as long as you let me do what I want. Swing the hands, but mind the nose, to paraphrase Shaw.
Well, marriage is supposed to be an institution, primarily designed to help raise children in a healthy environment.
Are there couples out there who, despite being married, violate its very purpose? Yes.
Does that make marriage worthless and defeat its purpose? Nope, because there is still a significant percentage of folks to whom it still has value and who raise children in such environments.
Gay and lesbian marriages largely ignore this, and concentrate only on the first. Exceptions don't make rules. Anybody marrying anything does not exactly speak well of us as a people or as a civilization.
You know, Slashdot titles aren't aimed at being perfect - they are aimed at being catchy, and most do a good job of it.
Since this is not particularly a scientific journal, I'd rather have the former and have it catch my eye than being drab and something that I'd skip over.
It maybe so, but that doesn't change the fact that what these companies are doing is wrong.
Both are without principles, bottomline.
Umm, no sex though.
Microsoft sticking it to censorship and Google shamelessly censoring.
:-/
Now I'm really confused whom to hate.
Help me?
Ummm, let's see now. The age of Earth is 4.35 billion years, and we just know of the Third Atmosphere that's existed for around 1 billion years, and very little of what was before that.
Never mind, out of the billion years of our present atmosphere's existence, we have observed data of about about 300 years and deduced data of around a couple of hundred thousand years.
Of course, let's leave all that aside for the moment. A few hundred years ago, due to the Maunder minima, Earth's temperature dropped down and the climate became colder. And in the past, the planet has been a lot hotter than it is today. And of course, a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere is because of volcanic activity and the like, something which humans have no control over. Not to mention the fact that we are at the end of an ice-age - and that we do not even know if Global Warming is bad - it may actually have helped us from going into another ice age [1].
And right, there are like really accurate models of the weather, right? I mean, we all see how well our models take into consideration things like solar activity, volcanic activity and other things - which we can very accurately predict. Right? Right? Oh wait. We can't. And even ignoring all this, the only science behind the community is one of consensus, not real science.
Before you go browbeating others, look at some publications - the probability values of some of those predictions are not even in the high 50s. Their p values are chosen to be manipulative, they work more by deducing "educated guess" causal behvaiors from correlations. Blah.
The day that the climatologists can to the dot predict the weather and climate will be the day I buy into their work - it can't even be called a theory, because a theory requires a basis, not a consensus.
[1] Refer leading palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman's work
Yes, because we've billions of years of data and not just mere hundreds on this process, right?
Oh, wait.
Global warming implies that the Earth is warming up, which is certainly true.
However, does that mean authors can also jump to conclusions on what is causing this warming?
One fact could be used to imply other things, which may not be factual/unproven.
Actually, if you'd read the article, you'd have read that Google was not the only company that was called - Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and Microsoft were called -- all the top 4 companies with Internet presence.
The submitter made it seem like it was just Google, but it seemed to be a human rights panel calling forth all the companies that could do something about censorship in China.
This is supposed to be the land of the free, home of the brave. The US is supposed to pride itself as being the beacon of light of democracy and the free world.
Instead, everything here has become so much driven by money that ethics and values become irrelevant when it comes to business. Oh, please don't give me that relativistic bullshit.
The Chinese government has killed thousands of its own citizens in massacres and throws its people into jail without a trial for speaking out against the establishment. They've a record of human rights violations, which is definitely evil by any stretch. I mean, shooting dead protesters and imprisoning and torturing people for speaking out - this is what Google is abetting a government to hide and keep away from its own citizens.
Like the article said, the Internet was something new, something that was a new medium that might help bring about a change and bring to light these things. Companies like Google and Yahoo! had the power to do something about it, the power to stand up to it and say NO. To say that despite everything, we've values and we have a backbone.
Instead, they gave in. More than anything, I'm disappointed in Google. I'm saddened that a company that preached so much about "doing no evil" turned out to be a bloody hypocrite. You know, deep down you knew that it was a corporation and like most corporations, its driven by greedy ass executives who don't care two hoots about anything - but you always had a hope that it would stand upto something and show some nerve.
Nope.
"All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing" -- Edmund Burke.
That quote has never seemed so apropos.
Umm, let's see - great (hypothetical) strides in computing versus helping solve world hunger, cure diseases and AIDS.
Man, tough, tough choice.
That OS thread is definitely more important than all of those, absolutely!
Without a doubt.
Which is why, I'd rather have Microsoft be a monopoly and make billions and use a chunk of that to help the world, rather than a lot of other companies and executives (Darth McBride, Larry Ellison) who just have all that money and do no good with it. Well, no good for the world that is.
For humanitarian things, definitely Gates.
If I wanted opinions on being stylish and wearing turtlenecks, I'd ask Jobs.
*Hush*
You are not supposed to say that.
Principles don't matter if you're a fanboy, didn't you know?
This should be fun.
Google-heads vs. Apple-heads.
GARGHHH! Do no evil (*) and Trendy Jeans & Turtleneckers.
*restrictions apply
Thank you - I did not want to respond most of the other folks who'd responded, mostly because they were not trying to understand the fact that if Google was really morally righteous (as I'd believed them to be anyway), they'd have taken a stance against it.
But they did not, and that is what really disappointed me.
Disappointed - that's the right word. More than anything, I'm angry at Google for this. Oh, sure, I know that their shareholders come before everything yada yada yada. But they did fool us for a bit, unfortunately.
Had it been any other company, I would not have cared. But the point is, if you are a company that says "Do No Evil" and use that as a corporate strategy to try and earn good karma, you'd better hold on to it.
Did Microsoft say that they would do no evil? No, they did not.
On the other hand, Google tries to project the image of being Oh-so-Good and is being hypocritical about it.
If you are going to have a corporate value, stick to the bloody thing. Else don't flaunt it or be selective in its use.
This is what made me lose respect for Google - the fact that their so-called-values disappear at the first sign of money. Bah, what's the point then?
Google uses its values for no reason other than for purely strategy purposes:
Of course, most folks don't realize that like every other company, the moment money comes into picture, all values go out of the window.
Do no evil, my ass. They're worse than companies which do evil, because they don't preach something and practice hypocrisy.
Sheesh, shameless folks.
Actually, his sentence makes sense - the term briefly qualifies his working period. If he'd said, "A guy I worked with was briefly Chinese" the qualifier would have been for him being Chinese.
(well, not that it's not funny...)
I would think that tokenise-ing and statistically analyzing such data would not be a trivial task for that large a sample.
Then again, maybe someone from Google could tell us? (Chris?)
I doubt Google was doing that just for the purposes of data gathering, though.
Imagine - they were able to scale the system to process 1 BILLION webpages. That is a significant achievement, which means that somewhere in Google, they have the ability to not only gather and sort/search a lot of data, but also derive meaning from it (statistical or otherwise).
That is a significant achievement.
Data by itself becomes fairly pointless after a while, however finding relations and meaning within that data is what makes it hard. And doing so for large amounts of data is even better.