I always wondered, in the American way of things, what stopps a very rich very influential defendant from just "buying" a technicality? It's the easyest thing possible for a cop or someone from the prosecuter's office... just make in "honest mistake" and retire.
You are welcome to believe anything you want about people who are in some way different from you. But the instant you step over the line of treating them differently because of that belief, you have marked yourself as evil.
Yeah, right. Sorry dude, if i meet somebody who tells me the moon landing was a fake, I am gonna treat him differently because of his opinions. Muhahaha... look at how evil I am. Get real. What's wrong is making too broad generalisations, and treating whole categories differently from the start. And even that isn't evil... based on my whole childhood in the "hood" (well, kinda, i'm from romania) I am going to watch my pockets better when I'm near a gipsy in a bus. That's not evil, it's common sense. You don't like it, tough. Get robbed, your business.
What IS really wrong (and it's light years from what you said) is when the governement, institutions or organisations treat people differently based on such categorisation.
Something tells me you're american... this PC of yours lost its brakes some time in the '90s.
Incidents like this become even more disturbing when you think that police officers are also prone to PTSD and itchy trigger fingers, and a considerable percentage of Iraq veterans with much worse cases of either/both will probably find their way into some sort of police force after their tour (or tours) of duty.
Heh heh... what if those cops tried to do the same to Iraq veteran? His reflexes probably wouldn't let him just be grabbed and tased for no good reason... and we'd have three very blue cops.
Maybe you are setting the standards too high? Of course religion is stupid, but there is a sort of "shhh! don't say it out loud" understanding that usually prevents people from posting rants like yours. Also, do you have any ideea how hard it is to live without a point of support? Well, you probably do, but let me remind you anyways: hard. So most people don't bother, since they'll be happier anyways believing in something.
And lastly, Larry Wall. An exception, true, but reason enough to avoid blanket statements like "all religious people are idiots".
Don't get me wrong btw:) I _really_ enjoyed your post. Found it refreshing. Feel free to post the links you were threatening with earlier...
Oh COME ON! Don't people get tired of this copyright bullshit already?! Art is _FREE_. Period. It has been for as long as we've drawn paintings on the walls of caves. Every, EVERY song for as long as anyone can remember has been inspired from others, and most times plainly copied and adapted. Only in recent times all this crap about how this is _my_ song and you can't play it unless i let you. If you don't want people to play your songs then only play them in a vault. Being COPIED is the greatest praise an artist can receive. It means his work will likely survive longer then him.
This is the POV people should start with. Everything else is pure brainwashing done in the last hundred years by people who didn't write a song in their lives.
And no, i'm not a diehard libertarian or anything. I understand the ideea behind copyright. However, the copyright is the EXCEPTION here. Under very very restrictive conditions you are not allowed to do some very specific things. Not the other way around, like the common wisdom starts beeing in the last years.
Unfortunately, this doesn't make them more likely to be right when they're totaly uninformed. That's the main problem with a bipartisan system, it takes an expert to know who's "more right" at any given time.
Thanks for the links. I took a peek and they're interesting but don't look like they're ready for the real world just yet.
I discovered Lisp last year. Unfortunately I don't have time to learn beyond simple programs (though i still intend to) but i loved the concept of tackling the problem from the other end: instead of having an environment simple enough for everybody to use, have one so powefull that skilled programers can turn it into specific languages for specific problems. I don't know how this applies to the interface problem, but reading this in your links my mind automaticaly went to lisp. Helps a lot that the basic syntax can be learned in a minute: (function parameter1 parameter2... parameterN). The rest can be as problem-specific as needed.
Mod the parent up. It's the best example of code reuse and component programming in history.
The big problem with software components is the interface. Not the software interface, the other one: the GUI. No matter if it's browser-based or window-based, it remains a fact that a small change in interface requires a similar change on many levels of depth along the chain of components.
At the very least, you have to separate the software in Interface Software and Do Stuff Software, and to put them together is considerable effort. This is pretty much the multi-tier philosophy of web applications. It's good enough, but it's far from "cut and paste" component programming.
That's partly why components work very well in non-UI environments (libraries, unix shell). If anyone finds a way to go around this problem, lots of programmers will be out of jobs:p But the remaining ones will be much happier.
One argument is that it's hard to "shuffle" the paper tickets so it's possible to guess who voted what. Of course, the solution is... to shuffle them:)
I've lived for a while in a less developed country (although not poor by far). Anyways, I remember how we dealt with having all computers a generation or two behind the rest of the world: very well. My personal minimum requirements for any computing tasks are: 386 processors. I worked a lot on older PC-s (XT and such) and they were ok, but linux works from 386 and up. The newer software just didn't exist or was a luxury. In today terms, we'd be using windows 98 and office 97 - perfectly suitable for anything that doesn't involve the newest game.
Anything, and I mean anything, can be done with such computers. Except, of course, the little useless things we consider "the most important thing about computers" like watching youtube videos or playing last generation games or visiting flash-loaded web pages. But I'd have no problem building a business software for a thousand-employees company with 50 offices. Why? Because it's been done already. The Apollo missions had about as much processing power as a contemporary keyboard. Ok, a fancy keyboard.
This only mentions the the denial of Holocaust. Earlier prohibitions may have existed, such as the display of Nazi symbols. But you do beat me at googling:) I couldn't find any direct mention of them.
Anyways, my original point was that the war was the primary cause for these laws, and given that Germany is in the top of the countries having them, it's still a valid point. As for France... it's no surprise they are a bit touchy when it comes to this subject. They may not have started it, but they were at the receiving end of the war and as such quite eager to prevent anything like that from happening again.
I DO want mp3's in my phone. I have a Sony-Ericsson now, after the slow and paintful death of my old very simple very dear Siemens A35. The only thing I really like in my new phone is that after I stop the alarm in the morning I press one more button and it plays music, so I won't go back to sleep again. And sometimes I let it playing all through the morning ritual and on the way to the car.
Other than that... I don't use the camera, I don't browse the net on the thing (brr) and I don't let it make me coffe. Probably my next phone will be a Sony Walkman, but for both my parents for example I'd buy the motorola without second thought.
There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" in science. Science simply _is_.
LOL!
Ok, now seriously. You said science isn't a tool, it's a process. I said science is a sucky tool. Is there really such a big difference? As far as beliving in science... I don't get your point. Or at least I don't know how it touches mine. Maybe you could re-read it? I meant that the current generation sees science as something to believe in, like some magic that works. Few bother to understand the inner workings and limit themselves to faith (not bad btw, I DO take on faith that "differences in air pressure can hold a chunk of metal in the sky", because I never bothered to understand the whole underlying mechanism). But this leads to strange opinions when discussing science vs feng shui, for example.
Feng Shui is not science. Feng Shui is a *tool*. It's up to you to use it or not, but science NEVER claimed to be the only or even the best tool for the job. In most things, science is by far not complete enough to work in real time. Try dancing with science only. Or writing. Or cooking. Or having sex. Or getting a job. Or programming. Or... anyways, get a list of verbs and fill in the blanks. Science is a sucky tool for most things.
What science is very very good at is verifying things and establishing landmarks. The earth is round, so all theories that include earth staying on a giant turtle should be re-checked. Sickness is caused by microbes, so certain behaviour around sick people is valid, and taking blood less so.
Not even specialists use pure science. Doctors and engineers also use tools, tools designed by true scientists or by years of experience, but I've seen to many doctors in my life (and my family) not to know they use experience and intuition a lot more then theory.
I don't mean at all Feng Shui is a good tool. I don't know Feng Shui. I also suspect (from common sense) most books on the subject don't know Feng Shui either. But I strongly disagree the opinion that anything that isn't based on science is bad, and anything that is must be good. This comes from a generation of people born with TV's and Internet who believe in science like the ancient humans believed in spirits.
As far as I can tell (if I got it right), this is the second or third time I hear the same story: fan gets letter telling him/her (nicely) that he's breaking copyright. Fan says sorry and does what the letter says. A few days later comes a different letter, from a different source inside the same corporation, telling in very not-nice terms (read threatening) that he's breaking copyright, and he'd better start dancing on a chair on the table, painted in blue, or else he'll lose his house and spend a few years in jail.
Fan is... upset by this.
So again, the problem is not with the corporation protecting their profits. The problem is with sending a very threatening letter to a person who's been helping their interests for a while now. And again, for the fan it's not an abstract matter. It's a real letter, from very real lawyers, saying they're going to ruin him and not even miss lunch over it. For selling t-shirts with serenity on them.
You cost me a good 10 minutes of googling... All I could find is that Basic Law was promulgates in May 1949, and none of the changes since mentioned freedom of opinion. Could you please provide a link?
Not quite crossing the line perhaps... but if not, then getting dangerously close.
Guess what? I actually read one of the blogs. And I liked it. The first couple of pages are anti-censorship rants that would be quite at home here on slashdot. Later it gets "racial", and rather subjective, but after all that's what the blog is about. It doesn't make a motto from being politicaly correct...
One thing from their rant at the beginning struck me though... and I was a bit embarassed for not noticing myself. From the article: The blog posts photographs and full names of anti-racism activists from Australia and New Zealand, in effect making this information available to those who wish to do these activists physical harm.
Very bad, isn't it? A little later, in the same article:
Mr Stokes said that the owner of the Patriot Alliance Downunder blog was Ben Weerheym, convicted for being a getaway driver in a racist graffiti attack by neo-Nazi group Australian Nationalist Movement.
Oops... so they are allowed to name names, but the competition isn't. I also wonder how much in the last sentence is fact-checked. For one thing, that guy doesn't seem to be the owner of the PAD blog anymore. And "getaway driver in a racist graffiti attack"... come on.
Disclamer: I only "researched" one of the sides, the PDA blog, because I considered the article to be somewhat on FightDemBack!'s side, showing only their side of the story. And also, I'm not a journalist and i'm lazy. Also, when I said I like the blog I didn't mean I share its views. I did enjoyed reading it for 10 minutes, and I didn't find obvious stupidity or blindness in it. Only, like I said, a good measure of subjectivism.
First, I'm sorry if I seemed to encurage breaking the law. I don't. Well, I do in some particular cases, but that's not what I tried to say here. And I especialy don't think google should break chinese law (although it's very very well that everybody is aware of what they do because of it).
I don't like absolutes more then the next person, but I do stand by what I said earlier: That's entirely subjective. What if instead of a movie, you make a cure to AIDS, and since it's yours, you decide that you're not going to sell a dose of it for less than a million bucks? I have a really hard time seeing how that's _right_.
You realise you just killed thousands of people, right? No, not metaphorically, you just did. Or you would have if the people who matter would have taken you seriously. If I'm a pharmaceutical company and I'm about to invest 50 million in research, and I have 6 different directions to go, where would I put the money? In AIDS research, knowing the government may come and force me to sell the product at a certain price, or at least I'll get lots and lots of bad press about how I make money from the suffering of others? Or in: anti-depressants, acnee treatment, dandruff shampoo, cosmetic products, aspirine replacement. All making the same profit, without the hassle.
Or what if your free flow of ideas is making up some completely malicious and slanderous lie about a business rival and telling all of his or her customers about it and taking out a front-page ad in the USA Today to tell everyone your lie? Again, I have a really hard time seeing how that's not _wrong_.
Well, it happens. So what?
The standard solution for this kind of thing is for me (the victim) to sue for slander, and prove that what the competition said is a lie. While this does offer some possibility for abuse, it places the burden on the party trying to suppress the information. The problems starts to apear when the same thing can be done with a phone call.
Now you may notice here that the difference here isn't 6 feet wide and 20 tall... it's more a matter of procedure. If it's likely that a big company with money can sue a little competitor and accuse him of slander, and then get away with it, there is no "free flow of information". Same thing with a government official doing things without checks and supervisions.
Either way, it there are enough channels for the victim to set things straight, it's much better than any coercion. Censorship may refer only to government control, but the issue is much broader. If there are no ways for the little guy to make himself heard when he's right, there is no freedom of speech. If you can make the masses believe what you want, and it only costs you six or seven figures... still no freedom of speech. The internet is by far the best tool for such a concept. However the danger here doesn't come from firewalls or regulations, but from the all-covering noise of traditional media. When 99% of all news passes through the same 30-50 entities, what's the difference?
That's the problem with metaphores. The difference is, in absolute terms, ownership is a good thing and the censorsip is a bad one. No matter what the law says, if I make a movie it's mine and that's _right_, and no matter what the law says, to censor the free flow of ideeas is _wrong_. If the law says otherwise, it's either mistaken or has a damn good reason. For example, hate laws in Germany are a penalty for losing the World War.
Oh, and I do believe the resonable penalty for file-sharing (for non-commercial use) is arould the value of a parking ticket. But it's still not ok.
It's very interesting to read your post in the light of the earlier corruption discussion. Corruption is probably the enemy of the 21 century. I was born in an ex-communist country, and I've seen up close how having a world of possibilities means nothing if the ruling class thinks only of its pockets. I don't blame them, as persons - they did whatever was best for them, and they were allowed to do it. I can't blame the people either - they were so naive right after the Revolution. It take lots and lots of years to learn how to vote right, and the political class has always stayed two steps ahead. Even now I don't know who I should vote for to change things... After all, corruption is not evil. It's simply the absence of civilisation, of collective wisdom, of a better system. There is nothing to fight against, only things to fight for.
Returning to the subject at hand, imigration. All those "new neighbours" as you call them don't live in your bed, don't eat your food, don't take anything for you. They are however using a system that took lots of time and effort to build. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, righs? Actually it isn't:) on the contrary. But there is something to keep an eye for: what influence the newcommers have on the system. Personaly, I do believe the system will influence the people much more then the other way around. After all, how many first-generation imigrants enter politics?
Some time in the next 20-30 years we'll have a resonably priced thought-controlled mouse. What should we patent now?... Yes, 1-thought-orders, thought-controlled games, thought-controlled-paying bills... What do you mean that's just an ideea and I have no clue how it's gonna be done? What, IBM described HTTP in its patents?
Yes, or holograms. Let's patent a holographic device used in cars for anything from "selling" the car during a drive test to GPS navigation.
The ideea behind textbooks isn't not to buy new ones any more. You're forgetting this is a wiki, so any content is bound, and intended, to be improved. So the ideea is to have a base from which to create high quality content.
The implications are way more reaching then just savin 20 bucks. Education in all countries (including developed ones, eventually) will become cheaper and of better quality. With the textbook problem solved, and well, all efforts will now go into different directions, and new and beautiful things may appear.
I read some cognitive psyhology and it makes perfect sense. One, lower level thought processes are automatic. Lower it is, less "intentional". Understanding human speech is obviously pretty low. Then there is this thing called lateral inhibition. The closer two tasks are, the easier it is to get into conflict. Watching TV and listening the sound of the TV in the same time is ok, listening to the sound and reading the subtitles is a bit harder, listening/watching two TVs or reading two texts impossible. So when listening (on purpose or not) to a conversation, all tasks related to this are more or less impaired. I'd guess listening, reading and writing are most affected, but anything that has to do with words qualifies.
There is a catch to all this, and that's atention. If what you do is interesting or important enough, the distraction isn't big. But if you're bored and do just routine stuff... it counts.
This is Slashdot, so don't take the criticism too seriously. Like I said above, I liked it. I work from home and mostly at night, but remembering the days of office space I wish I had this around. Especially when trying to cover a coworker's heavy metal headphones with my own soft music headphones... didn't work:)
Except it works:) Won't buy it, I work from home, but it looks like it works well enough. I think it's because distraction in noise comes mostly from our brain trying to understand what's beeing said/what the sound is. Once the chatter covers all inteligible speech, the brain just registers that people are speaking and doesn't try to understant what.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you in Finland are civilised.
I always wondered, in the American way of things, what stopps a very rich very influential defendant from just "buying" a technicality? It's the easyest thing possible for a cop or someone from the prosecuter's office... just make in "honest mistake" and retire.
You are welcome to believe anything you want about people who are in some way different from you. But the instant you step over the line of treating them differently because of that belief, you have marked yourself as evil.
Yeah, right. Sorry dude, if i meet somebody who tells me the moon landing was a fake, I am gonna treat him differently because of his opinions. Muhahaha... look at how evil I am. Get real. What's wrong is making too broad generalisations, and treating whole categories differently from the start. And even that isn't evil... based on my whole childhood in the "hood" (well, kinda, i'm from romania) I am going to watch my pockets better when I'm near a gipsy in a bus. That's not evil, it's common sense. You don't like it, tough. Get robbed, your business.
What IS really wrong (and it's light years from what you said) is when the governement, institutions or organisations treat people differently based on such categorisation.
Something tells me you're american... this PC of yours lost its brakes some time in the '90s.
Incidents like this become even more disturbing when you think that police officers are also prone to PTSD and itchy trigger fingers, and a considerable percentage of Iraq veterans with much worse cases of either/both will probably find their way into some sort of police force after their tour (or tours) of duty.
Heh heh... what if those cops tried to do the same to Iraq veteran? His reflexes probably wouldn't let him just be grabbed and tased for no good reason... and we'd have three very blue cops.
Maybe you are setting the standards too high? Of course religion is stupid, but there is a sort of "shhh! don't say it out loud" understanding that usually prevents people from posting rants like yours. Also, do you have any ideea how hard it is to live without a point of support? Well, you probably do, but let me remind you anyways: hard. So most people don't bother, since they'll be happier anyways believing in something.
:) I _really_ enjoyed your post. Found it refreshing. Feel free to post the links you were threatening with earlier...
And lastly, Larry Wall. An exception, true, but reason enough to avoid blanket statements like "all religious people are idiots".
Don't get me wrong btw
Oh COME ON! Don't people get tired of this copyright bullshit already?! Art is _FREE_. Period. It has been for as long as we've drawn paintings on the walls of caves. Every, EVERY song for as long as anyone can remember has been inspired from others, and most times plainly copied and adapted. Only in recent times all this crap about how this is _my_ song and you can't play it unless i let you. If you don't want people to play your songs then only play them in a vault. Being COPIED is the greatest praise an artist can receive. It means his work will likely survive longer then him.
This is the POV people should start with. Everything else is pure brainwashing done in the last hundred years by people who didn't write a song in their lives.
And no, i'm not a diehard libertarian or anything. I understand the ideea behind copyright. However, the copyright is the EXCEPTION here. Under very very restrictive conditions you are not allowed to do some very specific things. Not the other way around, like the common wisdom starts beeing in the last years.
Unfortunately, this doesn't make them more likely to be right when they're totaly uninformed. That's the main problem with a bipartisan system, it takes an expert to know who's "more right" at any given time.
Thanks for the links. I took a peek and they're interesting but don't look like they're ready for the real world just yet.
... parameterN). The rest can be as problem-specific as needed.
I discovered Lisp last year. Unfortunately I don't have time to learn beyond simple programs (though i still intend to) but i loved the concept of tackling the problem from the other end: instead of having an environment simple enough for everybody to use, have one so powefull that skilled programers can turn it into specific languages for specific problems.
I don't know how this applies to the interface problem, but reading this in your links my mind automaticaly went to lisp. Helps a lot that the basic syntax can be learned in a minute: (function parameter1 parameter2
Mod the parent up. It's the best example of code reuse and component programming in history.
The big problem with software components is the interface. Not the software interface, the other one: the GUI. No matter if it's browser-based or window-based, it remains a fact that a small change in interface requires a similar change on many levels of depth along the chain of components.
At the very least, you have to separate the software in Interface Software and Do Stuff Software, and to put them together is considerable effort. This is pretty much the multi-tier philosophy of web applications. It's good enough, but it's far from "cut and paste" component programming.
That's partly why components work very well in non-UI environments (libraries, unix shell). If anyone finds a way to go around this problem, lots of programmers will be out of jobs
One argument is that it's hard to "shuffle" the paper tickets so it's possible to guess who voted what. Of course, the solution is... to shuffle them
I've lived for a while in a less developed country (although not poor by far). Anyways, I remember how we dealt with having all computers a generation or two behind the rest of the world: very well. My personal minimum requirements for any computing tasks are: 386 processors. I worked a lot on older PC-s (XT and such) and they were ok, but linux works from 386 and up.
The newer software just didn't exist or was a luxury. In today terms, we'd be using windows 98 and office 97 - perfectly suitable for anything that doesn't involve the newest game.
Anything, and I mean anything, can be done with such computers. Except, of course, the little useless things we consider "the most important thing about computers" like watching youtube videos or playing last generation games or visiting flash-loaded web pages. But I'd have no problem building a business software for a thousand-employees company with 50 offices. Why? Because it's been done already. The Apollo missions had about as much processing power as a contemporary keyboard. Ok, a fancy keyboard.
This only mentions the the denial of Holocaust. Earlier prohibitions may have existed, such as the display of Nazi symbols. :) I couldn't find any direct mention of them.
But you do beat me at googling
Anyways, my original point was that the war was the primary cause for these laws, and given that Germany is in the top of the countries having them, it's still a valid point.
As for France... it's no surprise they are a bit touchy when it comes to this subject. They may not have started it, but they were at the receiving end of the war and as such quite eager to prevent anything like that from happening again.
I DO want mp3's in my phone. I have a Sony-Ericsson now, after the slow and paintful death of my old very simple very dear Siemens A35. The only thing I really like in my new phone is that after I stop the alarm in the morning I press one more button and it plays music, so I won't go back to sleep again. And sometimes I let it playing all through the morning ritual and on the way to the car.
Other than that... I don't use the camera, I don't browse the net on the thing (brr) and I don't let it make me coffe. Probably my next phone will be a Sony Walkman, but for both my parents for example I'd buy the motorola without second thought.
You're an idiot, aren't you?
No, you're an idiot! *throws poo*
There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" in science. Science simply _is_.
LOL!
Ok, now seriously.
You said science isn't a tool, it's a process. I said science is a sucky tool. Is there really such a big difference?
As far as beliving in science... I don't get your point. Or at least I don't know how it touches mine. Maybe you could re-read it?
I meant that the current generation sees science as something to believe in, like some magic that works. Few bother to understand the inner workings and limit themselves to faith (not bad btw, I DO take on faith that "differences in air pressure can hold a chunk of metal in the sky", because I never bothered to understand the whole underlying mechanism). But this leads to strange opinions when discussing science vs feng shui, for example.
Feng Shui is not science. Feng Shui is a *tool*. It's up to you to use it or not, but science NEVER claimed to be the only or even the best tool for the job. In most things, science is by far not complete enough to work in real time. Try dancing with science only. Or writing. Or cooking. Or having sex. Or getting a job. Or programming. Or ... anyways, get a list of verbs and fill in the blanks. Science is a sucky tool for most things.
What science is very very good at is verifying things and establishing landmarks. The earth is round, so all theories that include earth staying on a giant turtle should be re-checked. Sickness is caused by microbes, so certain behaviour around sick people is valid, and taking blood less so.
Not even specialists use pure science. Doctors and engineers also use tools, tools designed by true scientists or by years of experience, but I've seen to many doctors in my life (and my family) not to know they use experience and intuition a lot more then theory.
I don't mean at all Feng Shui is a good tool. I don't know Feng Shui. I also suspect (from common sense) most books on the subject don't know Feng Shui either. But I strongly disagree the opinion that anything that isn't based on science is bad, and anything that is must be good. This comes from a generation of people born with TV's and Internet who believe in science like the ancient humans believed in spirits.
As far as I can tell (if I got it right), this is the second or third time I hear the same story: fan gets letter telling him/her (nicely) that he's breaking copyright. Fan says sorry and does what the letter says. A few days later comes a different letter, from a different source inside the same corporation, telling in very not-nice terms (read threatening) that he's breaking copyright, and he'd better start dancing on a chair on the table, painted in blue, or else he'll lose his house and spend a few years in jail.
Fan is... upset by this.
So again, the problem is not with the corporation protecting their profits. The problem is with sending a very threatening letter to a person who's been helping their interests for a while now. And again, for the fan it's not an abstract matter. It's a real letter, from very real lawyers, saying they're going to ruin him and not even miss lunch over it. For selling t-shirts with serenity on them.
You cost me a good 10 minutes of googling... All I could find is that Basic Law was promulgates in May 1949, and none of the changes since mentioned freedom of opinion. Could you please provide a link?
Not quite crossing the line perhaps ... but if not, then getting dangerously close.
... come on.
Guess what? I actually read one of the blogs. And I liked it. The first couple of pages are anti-censorship rants that would be quite at home here on slashdot. Later it gets "racial", and rather subjective, but after all that's what the blog is about. It doesn't make a motto from being politicaly correct...
One thing from their rant at the beginning struck me though... and I was a bit embarassed for not noticing myself.
From the article:
The blog posts photographs and full names of anti-racism activists from Australia and New Zealand, in effect making this information available to those who wish to do these activists physical harm.
Very bad, isn't it? A little later, in the same article:
Mr Stokes said that the owner of the Patriot Alliance Downunder blog was Ben Weerheym, convicted for being a getaway driver in a racist graffiti attack by neo-Nazi group Australian Nationalist Movement.
Oops... so they are allowed to name names, but the competition isn't. I also wonder how much in the last sentence is fact-checked. For one thing, that guy doesn't seem to be the owner of the PAD blog anymore. And "getaway driver in a racist graffiti attack"
Disclamer: I only "researched" one of the sides, the PDA blog, because I considered the article to be somewhat on FightDemBack!'s side, showing only their side of the story. And also, I'm not a journalist and i'm lazy.
Also, when I said I like the blog I didn't mean I share its views. I did enjoyed reading it for 10 minutes, and I didn't find obvious stupidity or blindness in it. Only, like I said, a good measure of subjectivism.
First, I'm sorry if I seemed to encurage breaking the law. I don't. Well, I do in some particular cases, but that's not what I tried to say here. And I especialy don't think google should break chinese law (although it's very very well that everybody is aware of what they do because of it).
I don't like absolutes more then the next person, but I do stand by what I said earlier:
That's entirely subjective. What if instead of a movie, you make a cure to AIDS, and since it's yours, you decide that you're not going to sell a dose of it for less than a million bucks? I have a really hard time seeing how that's _right_.
You realise you just killed thousands of people, right? No, not metaphorically, you just did. Or you would have if the people who matter would have taken you seriously.
If I'm a pharmaceutical company and I'm about to invest 50 million in research, and I have 6 different directions to go, where would I put the money? In AIDS research, knowing the government may come and force me to sell the product at a certain price, or at least I'll get lots and lots of bad press about how I make money from the suffering of others? Or in: anti-depressants, acnee treatment, dandruff shampoo, cosmetic products, aspirine replacement. All making the same profit, without the hassle.
Or what if your free flow of ideas is making up some completely malicious and slanderous lie about a business rival and telling all of his or her customers about it and taking out a front-page ad in the USA Today to tell everyone your lie? Again, I have a really hard time seeing how that's not _wrong_.
Well, it happens. So what?
The standard solution for this kind of thing is for me (the victim) to sue for slander, and prove that what the competition said is a lie. While this does offer some possibility for abuse, it places the burden on the party trying to suppress the information. The problems starts to apear when the same thing can be done with a phone call.
Now you may notice here that the difference here isn't 6 feet wide and 20 tall... it's more a matter of procedure. If it's likely that a big company with money can sue a little competitor and accuse him of slander, and then get away with it, there is no "free flow of information". Same thing with a government official doing things without checks and supervisions.
Either way, it there are enough channels for the victim to set things straight, it's much better than any coercion. Censorship may refer only to government control, but the issue is much broader. If there are no ways for the little guy to make himself heard when he's right, there is no freedom of speech. If you can make the masses believe what you want, and it only costs you six or seven figures... still no freedom of speech. The internet is by far the best tool for such a concept. However the danger here doesn't come from firewalls or regulations, but from the all-covering noise of traditional media. When 99% of all news passes through the same 30-50 entities, what's the difference?
That's the problem with metaphores. The difference is, in absolute terms, ownership is a good thing and the censorsip is a bad one. No matter what the law says, if I make a movie it's mine and that's _right_, and no matter what the law says, to censor the free flow of ideeas is _wrong_.
If the law says otherwise, it's either mistaken or has a damn good reason. For example, hate laws in Germany are a penalty for losing the World War.
Oh, and I do believe the resonable penalty for file-sharing (for non-commercial use) is arould the value of a parking ticket. But it's still not ok.
It's very interesting to read your post in the light of the earlier corruption discussion.
:) on the contrary. But there is something to keep an eye for: what influence the newcommers have on the system. Personaly, I do believe the system will influence the people much more then the other way around. After all, how many first-generation imigrants enter politics?
Corruption is probably the enemy of the 21 century. I was born in an ex-communist country, and I've seen up close how having a world of possibilities means nothing if the ruling class thinks only of its pockets. I don't blame them, as persons - they did whatever was best for them, and they were allowed to do it. I can't blame the people either - they were so naive right after the Revolution. It take lots and lots of years to learn how to vote right, and the political class has always stayed two steps ahead. Even now I don't know who I should vote for to change things...
After all, corruption is not evil. It's simply the absence of civilisation, of collective wisdom, of a better system. There is nothing to fight against, only things to fight for.
Returning to the subject at hand, imigration. All those "new neighbours" as you call them don't live in your bed, don't eat your food, don't take anything for you. They are however using a system that took lots of time and effort to build. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, righs? Actually it isn't
Gee.... let's see.
Some time in the next 20-30 years we'll have a resonably priced thought-controlled mouse. What should we patent now?...
Yes, 1-thought-orders, thought-controlled games, thought-controlled-paying bills... What do you mean that's just an ideea and I have no clue how it's gonna be done? What, IBM described HTTP in its patents?
Yes, or holograms. Let's patent a holographic device used in cars for anything from "selling" the car during a drive test to GPS navigation.
The ideea behind textbooks isn't not to buy new ones any more. You're forgetting this is a wiki, so any content is bound, and intended, to be improved. So the ideea is to have a base from which to create high quality content.
The implications are way more reaching then just savin 20 bucks. Education in all countries (including developed ones, eventually) will become cheaper and of better quality. With the textbook problem solved, and well, all efforts will now go into different directions, and new and beautiful things may appear.
I read some cognitive psyhology and it makes perfect sense. One, lower level thought processes are automatic. Lower it is, less "intentional". Understanding human speech is obviously pretty low.
Then there is this thing called lateral inhibition. The closer two tasks are, the easier it is to get into conflict. Watching TV and listening the sound of the TV in the same time is ok, listening to the sound and reading the subtitles is a bit harder, listening/watching two TVs or reading two texts impossible.
So when listening (on purpose or not) to a conversation, all tasks related to this are more or less impaired. I'd guess listening, reading and writing are most affected, but anything that has to do with words qualifies.
There is a catch to all this, and that's atention. If what you do is interesting or important enough, the distraction isn't big. But if you're bored and do just routine stuff... it counts.
This is Slashdot, so don't take the criticism too seriously. Like I said above, I liked it. I work from home and mostly at night, but remembering the days of office space I wish I had this around. Especially when trying to cover a coworker's heavy metal headphones with my own soft music headphones... didn't work :)
Except it works :) Won't buy it, I work from home, but it looks like it works well enough. I think it's because distraction in noise comes mostly from our brain trying to understand what's beeing said/what the sound is. Once the chatter covers all inteligible speech, the brain just registers that people are speaking and doesn't try to understant what.