There is criticism of the government owned and financed ABC and its balance, particularly since it has a charter that requires it to be balanced. This is difficult given that there are no identifiable conservatives involved in any of its prime-time news and opinion programs. A free press does not require a government funded organisation, there is considerable debate as to whether a $1.2B a year public media organisation operating across all media channels and not having to produce a profit is actually stifling any commercial competitors.
The thing with the ABC is a little tricky. Perhaps it does have a slight bias towards the left wing, largely because people on the right wing tend not to believe in the worth of a public broadcaster and therefore don't work for one. If there is a problem in balance of views at the ABC, I would say that the solution is not to cut funding/close it down/sell it off, but to encourage more journalists with right wing leanings to work there. And really, I don't think it's as bad as the right wing makes it out to be - presenters on shows like 7:30 haven't been known to pull their punches when interviewing Labor politicians.
Plus, I think it's important that there be a broadcaster who is able to show things that should be shown but don't make a compelling how-much-can-we-make-on-this argument for commercial broadcasters. And I really don't feel like the public broadcaster is stifling any commercial competitors when the volume of content on commercial broadcasters far outweighs the volume of content on the public one.
Labor claimed it was all about child porn, however, the method included total secrecy of what was being targeted, this meant that abuse of this power would be very difficult to control. You somehow missed commenting on Labor's attempts to regulate the press, completely outside of anything to do with child porn.
No matter what else happens, when you start getting into filtering the internet, abuses of that power would be very difficult to control. And since you want me to specifically comment on this, I think it is wrong for Labor to want to regulate the press. With that said, I also think that recent Labor leaderships have endured criticism of their government by the press a lot more gracefully than the current Liberal leadership has of theirs, and that Tony Abbott wanting to strike at the ABC has less to do with a concern for proper balance (I didn't see him criticise any Murdoch media for their blatant anti-Labor propaganda) and more to do with getting petty revenge on an organisation that dared to point out his government's shortcomings. But then maybe I'm biased. Who knows.
My preference is for a free internet, however, normally the courts could be used to effect orders against organisations that are breaking the law. With the internet, it is difficult for courts to extend their jurisdiction to the countries that are being used by organisations involved in the illegal distribution of materials. It's a tough problem, I'll wait for details on how they plan to enforce it.
I'll grant you that this is a bit of a difficult problem to face in the digital era, but for combating piracy, I feel the answer is to more effectively use the internet rather than restrict it. Piracy is, at its heart, a problem of service via legit channels being inadequate. While there will always be people who pirate because they're cheap bastards, for most people it's more a matter of how readily and conveniently available (and high quality) the legit thing is. When even paying for cable TV gets you the hot new TV shows a month later than the US and often edited, and bittorrent can get you it the next day and intact, this is why people pirate. Piracy is easily solved (easier than blocking all the avenues of piracy, anyway): be at least as quick and convenient as downloading.
Amazingly I was able to debate this without needing to evoke threats of violence or abus
Labor proposed to ban sites while keeping the reason and the site address secret, it also proposed government regulation of the free press and the ability to control the contents of blogs with readership of a few thousand hits a month.
And I thought that was wrong to do too. Plus I should note that Tony Abbott isn't exactly championing free press now that he's the one in government...
Brandis is proposing being able to shut down sites that illegally share copyrighted material. It's hardly in the same league.
Ultimately, same thing, different justification. Remember, according to Labor the internet filter was all about stopping child porn and protecting the children. No-one thought that would stop at what they claimed it's for, and you can't honestly believe this would.
I was never at all fond of Tony Abbott, but since he's come into power I've come to fucking detest him and everything he stands for. I hope he gets knifed for the Liberal leadership before long.
Aren't there plenty of other, and Free, ways to publish?
I believe there are, but they're probably not widely enough used to be worthwhile for the desired purpose: to communicate.
It's not the end of the world but when someone like Linus Torvalds does it I think it sends a message that undermines the value placed on FOSS systems.
I don't think so. I do not believe that the value of Free systems is undermined by making any use of any non-Free systems or components. For example, most (if not all) banks use proprietary software for their ATMs. This does not mean that I expect every prominent figure in the Free and Open Source software world to boycott ATMs and go to a human teller when they need to get some money out.
I'm a big believer in Free Software, but I also believe in being pragmatic. If something needs to be done or needs to work but is not possible with entirely Free software, I think it's better that it be done with as little non-Free software as practical, rather than not done with entirely Free software. Torvalds takes the former approach, Stallman takes the latter.
Though if memory serves, didn't Torvalds and Stallman have an argument on Google+? If even Stallman thinks Google+ is acceptable enough, it can't be that undermining to the value of Free systems.
I don't follow (though I'm not in any way well-informed regarding economics). If all the wine-bottle-owners of the world drank all the world's wine overnight, would that harm the economy?
Well, yes. The number of people off sick the next day nursing the most epic of hangovers alone would have an impact, not to mention the number dead or very sick with fucked livers and/or alcohol poisoning.
I once was asked the old job interview chestnut, "What is your greatest weakness?" I knew that you were supposed to lie and answer that one with a strength such as "I'm just too honest and hard-working."
Not necessarily. My mother has been on the asking end of that question, and one of the candidates she was interviewing gave the honest answer of being lazy. She gave this candidate the job, because it shows A) honesty, B) the ability to assess one's own flaws and therefore work around them, and C) lazy people tend to come up with good efficient solutions to problems. A and B are what she was really testing when asking that question.
It's also worth noting that being too honest and hard-working are actually pretty serious flaws in a potential employee. Someone who's too honest might say something to a client/customer/whoever that they really shouldn't. Someone who's too hard-working might push themselves too far and fuck their health to the point where they'll leave a critical hole in the workplace when it finally catches up to them.
Also lets take the tennis ball question, one that is so well known that I had never heard it before. It is a behavioural question. If the person sitting opposite me answers it accurately due to knowledge of aerodynamics it actually tells me very little. However if the person tries to guess, or freezes, or says "I have no idea" all tell you quite a lot about how they will approach their work.
Indeed. And personally, the answer I'd want to hear if I asked that in a job interview would be "Not sure off the top of my head, but give me a couple of minutes and I'll find out."
And after hiring a number of people that have been downright toxic to my business I now work on the premise that I will say no on even the barest hint the person I am talking to is a wanker. I'm sure I have missed some amazing talent now as a result but missing someone brilliant is a small price to pay for not getting a terrorist (terrorist - Good outcome, bad attitude).
I'd tend to agree there. Better to have a nice idiot than a genius arsehole.
To actually get the point across to them so they correct their behavior though, you need to do it politely. No-one likes being told "that was a fucking stupid question", and more often than not they'll think to themselves "well, that guy was an arsehole" and disregard what you said. "Thank you for your time, but the questions are straying a bit from what I thought would be relevant to the job, so I don't think this position is for me" has a better chance to get them thinking.
You do not really provide an argument other than your beliefs that it would take that long. At least I have one empirical data point.
It's kind of hard to have any data points on how well you would do something that you have never done and have absolutely no intention of doing, nor any compelling reason to do. Your data about typing speed with QWERTY vs Dvorak is interesting, but not conclusive of anything. Sure, you type faster now with Dvorak than you did with QWERTY, but is it certain that you would not have typed that fast with QWERTY given the same amount of time spent using it?
And even if I really would type faster using Dvorak, I don't feel that's enough to be worth all the trouble changing. Oh, you could provide all the data you like about how it was worth it for you, or even other people, but you and they are not me.
As someone who moved to Dvorak after 5 years of touch-typing Qwerty, I can tell you that this is not the case. A lot of the effort of learning to touch-type is in the motor/coordination skills in the fingers, not in memorizing which letter goes where.
If you've only been at it for 5 years, sure. I've been touch typing QWERTY for 20 years, and having to use a keyboard where the backslash is in a stupid spot or the enter key is an odd shape, or those keyboards with a rearranged insert/delete/home/end/pageup/pagedown block throw me off. Even ergonomic keyboards that have all the keys in the standard positions screw me over. Having to switch to Dvorak would be hell, and would take years to get as up to speed with as I am with QWERTY.
But the thing is... "revolutionary" doesn't necessarily mean "entirely good". I agree that Bitcoin is revolutionary. I also agree that Bitcoin is damaging to society in many ways. Maybe not as doom and gloom as what Stross is claiming, but it's certainly not the ideal that Bitcoin's proponents are claiming.
Now, there's no telling what he gave up to some real enemies of freedom.
From my point of view (not living in any of the three countries), there's no meaningful difference between China, Russia and the USA in terms of how much of an enemy of freedom they are. Oh, the US says they're all about freedom, but in practice they're about as bad as the others.
I am not an American citizen, nor do I live there, nor have any family ties to anyone who lives there. I have no malice towards America, but neither do I have any reason to care about their national security. If the NSA were to be disbanded tomorrow, I would feel it's a good thing for the people who it was unjustly spying on. I don't believe the loss of the NSA would bring the country down.
If anything, it seems like the country is on its way down anyway, and the NSA is at best not able to do anything to prevent that and at worst one of the factors actively (though not deliberately) contributing.
Hara-kiri isn't so much a symbol of suicide, but an admission of having done something seriously wrong
Not necessarily wrongdoing on the part of the person committing harakiri (or seppuku, if you prefer the more formal term), though. It's not unheard of for samurai who believe strongly that their lord is doing something wrong to commit seppuku to make their point if the lord won't listen to reason otherwise. Which, putting aside for the moment the fact that I don't think it actually calls for suicide here, is still kinda fitting. The "lord(s)" in question would just be the more senior NSA officials and/or Obama.
If you mean changing what political party is in charge right now, that won't make any difference at all. Probably even changing the system of government wouldn't do it.
The problem is the intelligence agencies. It would take completely disbanding them and seeing to it that none of the people currently involved can ever be part of the new ones or make any other kind of trouble.
I've always been aware of the director's intent, but feel that A) they should have made the movie its own thing instead of being so loosely based on a novel that had its own very different point to make about the military, and B) even as satire it's not terribly well done.
This is about your right to decide what goes into your own body, to keep the government away from it.
That's all well and good, but what goes into your body does have an effect on other people, not just you. For a wild hypothetical, if there's a choice between getting an injection and 100 people around you dying, you're just plain being an arsehole for refusing the injection, and a good case can be made for it being for the good to force you to get it. If it's a choice between you getting a shot that will kill you and 100 people around you dying, it's rather less clear cut... a generous enough person might accept and be the sacrifice, but while it is rather selfish it's not entirely unreasonable to refuse, and being forced to get the shot would be wrong.
Vaccines come somewhere between those two extremes. Negative effects of getting vaccines are pretty rare and tend to be relatively minor, but negative effects of not getting them can be devastating for far more people. And even if it is just you that dies if you don't get a shot, that's still a pretty negative effect for the family and friends that care about you and perhaps depend on you.
As such, I cannot in good conscience oppose certain vaccinations being mandated.
I wouldn't advise catching them "naturally", but I also don't like the mental picture of a child being restrained and being stabbed with a hypodermic by order of a court.
I don't like the mental picture of a child being forced to have a shot either (though it does happen basically all the time; kids typically aren't very willing to have a bit of sharp metal jabbed into them), but the mental picture of kids having these diseases is even less pleasant.
Slashdot Mirror
There is criticism of the government owned and financed ABC and its balance, particularly since it has a charter that requires it to be balanced. This is difficult given that there are no identifiable conservatives involved in any of its prime-time news and opinion programs. A free press does not require a government funded organisation, there is considerable debate as to whether a $1.2B a year public media organisation operating across all media channels and not having to produce a profit is actually stifling any commercial competitors.
The thing with the ABC is a little tricky. Perhaps it does have a slight bias towards the left wing, largely because people on the right wing tend not to believe in the worth of a public broadcaster and therefore don't work for one. If there is a problem in balance of views at the ABC, I would say that the solution is not to cut funding/close it down/sell it off, but to encourage more journalists with right wing leanings to work there. And really, I don't think it's as bad as the right wing makes it out to be - presenters on shows like 7:30 haven't been known to pull their punches when interviewing Labor politicians.
Plus, I think it's important that there be a broadcaster who is able to show things that should be shown but don't make a compelling how-much-can-we-make-on-this argument for commercial broadcasters. And I really don't feel like the public broadcaster is stifling any commercial competitors when the volume of content on commercial broadcasters far outweighs the volume of content on the public one.
Labor claimed it was all about child porn, however, the method included total secrecy of what was being targeted, this meant that abuse of this power would be very difficult to control. You somehow missed commenting on Labor's attempts to regulate the press, completely outside of anything to do with child porn.
No matter what else happens, when you start getting into filtering the internet, abuses of that power would be very difficult to control. And since you want me to specifically comment on this, I think it is wrong for Labor to want to regulate the press. With that said, I also think that recent Labor leaderships have endured criticism of their government by the press a lot more gracefully than the current Liberal leadership has of theirs, and that Tony Abbott wanting to strike at the ABC has less to do with a concern for proper balance (I didn't see him criticise any Murdoch media for their blatant anti-Labor propaganda) and more to do with getting petty revenge on an organisation that dared to point out his government's shortcomings. But then maybe I'm biased. Who knows.
My preference is for a free internet, however, normally the courts could be used to effect orders against organisations that are breaking the law. With the internet, it is difficult for courts to extend their jurisdiction to the countries that are being used by organisations involved in the illegal distribution of materials. It's a tough problem, I'll wait for details on how they plan to enforce it.
I'll grant you that this is a bit of a difficult problem to face in the digital era, but for combating piracy, I feel the answer is to more effectively use the internet rather than restrict it. Piracy is, at its heart, a problem of service via legit channels being inadequate. While there will always be people who pirate because they're cheap bastards, for most people it's more a matter of how readily and conveniently available (and high quality) the legit thing is. When even paying for cable TV gets you the hot new TV shows a month later than the US and often edited, and bittorrent can get you it the next day and intact, this is why people pirate. Piracy is easily solved (easier than blocking all the avenues of piracy, anyway): be at least as quick and convenient as downloading.
Amazingly I was able to debate this without needing to evoke threats of violence or abus
Labor proposed to ban sites while keeping the reason and the site address secret, it also proposed government regulation of the free press and the ability to control the contents of blogs with readership of a few thousand hits a month.
And I thought that was wrong to do too. Plus I should note that Tony Abbott isn't exactly championing free press now that he's the one in government...
Brandis is proposing being able to shut down sites that illegally share copyrighted material. It's hardly in the same league.
Ultimately, same thing, different justification. Remember, according to Labor the internet filter was all about stopping child porn and protecting the children. No-one thought that would stop at what they claimed it's for, and you can't honestly believe this would.
I was never at all fond of Tony Abbott, but since he's come into power I've come to fucking detest him and everything he stands for. I hope he gets knifed for the Liberal leadership before long.
I stand corrected then, though it was a very convincing fake. I still stand by the rest of the post, though.
Aren't there plenty of other, and Free, ways to publish?
I believe there are, but they're probably not widely enough used to be worthwhile for the desired purpose: to communicate.
It's not the end of the world but when someone like Linus Torvalds does it I think it sends a message that undermines the value placed on FOSS systems.
I don't think so. I do not believe that the value of Free systems is undermined by making any use of any non-Free systems or components. For example, most (if not all) banks use proprietary software for their ATMs. This does not mean that I expect every prominent figure in the Free and Open Source software world to boycott ATMs and go to a human teller when they need to get some money out.
I'm a big believer in Free Software, but I also believe in being pragmatic. If something needs to be done or needs to work but is not possible with entirely Free software, I think it's better that it be done with as little non-Free software as practical, rather than not done with entirely Free software. Torvalds takes the former approach, Stallman takes the latter.
Though if memory serves, didn't Torvalds and Stallman have an argument on Google+? If even Stallman thinks Google+ is acceptable enough, it can't be that undermining to the value of Free systems.
I don't follow (though I'm not in any way well-informed regarding economics). If all the wine-bottle-owners of the world drank all the world's wine overnight, would that harm the economy?
Well, yes. The number of people off sick the next day nursing the most epic of hangovers alone would have an impact, not to mention the number dead or very sick with fucked livers and/or alcohol poisoning.
I once was asked the old job interview chestnut, "What is your greatest weakness?" I knew that you were supposed to lie and answer that one with a strength such as "I'm just too honest and hard-working."
Not necessarily. My mother has been on the asking end of that question, and one of the candidates she was interviewing gave the honest answer of being lazy. She gave this candidate the job, because it shows A) honesty, B) the ability to assess one's own flaws and therefore work around them, and C) lazy people tend to come up with good efficient solutions to problems. A and B are what she was really testing when asking that question.
It's also worth noting that being too honest and hard-working are actually pretty serious flaws in a potential employee. Someone who's too honest might say something to a client/customer/whoever that they really shouldn't. Someone who's too hard-working might push themselves too far and fuck their health to the point where they'll leave a critical hole in the workplace when it finally catches up to them.
Also lets take the tennis ball question, one that is so well known that I had never heard it before. It is a behavioural question. If the person sitting opposite me answers it accurately due to knowledge of aerodynamics it actually tells me very little. However if the person tries to guess, or freezes, or says "I have no idea" all tell you quite a lot about how they will approach their work.
Indeed. And personally, the answer I'd want to hear if I asked that in a job interview would be "Not sure off the top of my head, but give me a couple of minutes and I'll find out."
And after hiring a number of people that have been downright toxic to my business I now work on the premise that I will say no on even the barest hint the person I am talking to is a wanker. I'm sure I have missed some amazing talent now as a result but missing someone brilliant is a small price to pay for not getting a terrorist (terrorist - Good outcome, bad attitude).
I'd tend to agree there. Better to have a nice idiot than a genius arsehole.
To actually get the point across to them so they correct their behavior though, you need to do it politely. No-one likes being told "that was a fucking stupid question", and more often than not they'll think to themselves "well, that guy was an arsehole" and disregard what you said. "Thank you for your time, but the questions are straying a bit from what I thought would be relevant to the job, so I don't think this position is for me" has a better chance to get them thinking.
You do not really provide an argument other than your beliefs that it would take that long. At least I have one empirical data point.
It's kind of hard to have any data points on how well you would do something that you have never done and have absolutely no intention of doing, nor any compelling reason to do. Your data about typing speed with QWERTY vs Dvorak is interesting, but not conclusive of anything. Sure, you type faster now with Dvorak than you did with QWERTY, but is it certain that you would not have typed that fast with QWERTY given the same amount of time spent using it?
And even if I really would type faster using Dvorak, I don't feel that's enough to be worth all the trouble changing. Oh, you could provide all the data you like about how it was worth it for you, or even other people, but you and they are not me.
Hell with that, if you plan to use your laptop as a portable music/video system, invest in some USB speakers.
As someone who moved to Dvorak after 5 years of touch-typing Qwerty, I can tell you that this is not the case. A lot of the effort of learning to touch-type is in the motor/coordination skills in the fingers, not in memorizing which letter goes where.
If you've only been at it for 5 years, sure. I've been touch typing QWERTY for 20 years, and having to use a keyboard where the backslash is in a stupid spot or the enter key is an odd shape, or those keyboards with a rearranged insert/delete/home/end/pageup/pagedown block throw me off. Even ergonomic keyboards that have all the keys in the standard positions screw me over. Having to switch to Dvorak would be hell, and would take years to get as up to speed with as I am with QWERTY.
But the thing is... "revolutionary" doesn't necessarily mean "entirely good". I agree that Bitcoin is revolutionary. I also agree that Bitcoin is damaging to society in many ways. Maybe not as doom and gloom as what Stross is claiming, but it's certainly not the ideal that Bitcoin's proponents are claiming.
Now, there's no telling what he gave up to some real enemies of freedom.
From my point of view (not living in any of the three countries), there's no meaningful difference between China, Russia and the USA in terms of how much of an enemy of freedom they are. Oh, the US says they're all about freedom, but in practice they're about as bad as the others.
Fuck their employee morale.
I am not an American citizen, nor do I live there, nor have any family ties to anyone who lives there. I have no malice towards America, but neither do I have any reason to care about their national security. If the NSA were to be disbanded tomorrow, I would feel it's a good thing for the people who it was unjustly spying on. I don't believe the loss of the NSA would bring the country down.
If anything, it seems like the country is on its way down anyway, and the NSA is at best not able to do anything to prevent that and at worst one of the factors actively (though not deliberately) contributing.
Hara-kiri isn't so much a symbol of suicide, but an admission of having done something seriously wrong
Not necessarily wrongdoing on the part of the person committing harakiri (or seppuku, if you prefer the more formal term), though. It's not unheard of for samurai who believe strongly that their lord is doing something wrong to commit seppuku to make their point if the lord won't listen to reason otherwise. Which, putting aside for the moment the fact that I don't think it actually calls for suicide here, is still kinda fitting. The "lord(s)" in question would just be the more senior NSA officials and/or Obama.
Time for a change in Government.
If you mean changing what political party is in charge right now, that won't make any difference at all. Probably even changing the system of government wouldn't do it.
The problem is the intelligence agencies. It would take completely disbanding them and seeing to it that none of the people currently involved can ever be part of the new ones or make any other kind of trouble.
I've always been aware of the director's intent, but feel that A) they should have made the movie its own thing instead of being so loosely based on a novel that had its own very different point to make about the military, and B) even as satire it's not terribly well done.
The US "health care system" was already broken. This is just showing why.
secondly unvaccinated persons are rare
But would be rather less rare if people don't get themselves and their kids vaccinated.
This is about your right to decide what goes into your own body, to keep the government away from it.
That's all well and good, but what goes into your body does have an effect on other people, not just you. For a wild hypothetical, if there's a choice between getting an injection and 100 people around you dying, you're just plain being an arsehole for refusing the injection, and a good case can be made for it being for the good to force you to get it. If it's a choice between you getting a shot that will kill you and 100 people around you dying, it's rather less clear cut... a generous enough person might accept and be the sacrifice, but while it is rather selfish it's not entirely unreasonable to refuse, and being forced to get the shot would be wrong.
Vaccines come somewhere between those two extremes. Negative effects of getting vaccines are pretty rare and tend to be relatively minor, but negative effects of not getting them can be devastating for far more people. And even if it is just you that dies if you don't get a shot, that's still a pretty negative effect for the family and friends that care about you and perhaps depend on you.
As such, I cannot in good conscience oppose certain vaccinations being mandated.
I wouldn't advise catching them "naturally", but I also don't like the mental picture of a child being restrained and being stabbed with a hypodermic by order of a court.
I don't like the mental picture of a child being forced to have a shot either (though it does happen basically all the time; kids typically aren't very willing to have a bit of sharp metal jabbed into them), but the mental picture of kids having these diseases is even less pleasant.
Yes, how hard can it be to maintain a fork of a major desktop environment for the sake of a single feature?
Well, it's to be expected since we created god in our own image.
Is it? I've never had a false positive in all the years I've been using GMail.