I think he is making the point that the Chinese form of government is far closer to fascism than to any socialist ideology. Fascism relies on an oligarchy controlling the economy and individuals working "for the good of the state".
Socialism is about putting cooperation over competition for the good of all, and in Marxist ideology a majority rule over a capitalist minority (and the eventual disintegration of the capitalist class which in Marxist ideology would lead to the end goal of communism, where the state whithers away as a means of power)
The problem China faces, that the Soviet Union also faced, was that they quickly descended into an oligarchy once it became clear that the revolutionary movements didn't have the mass support they needed.
It all boils down to both Lenin and Mao believing (mistakenly) that they could gain the support of the peasant populations that would have been needed for a socialist majority rule, and then their and their parties refusal to accept they were wrong.
Unfortunately this is a common theme in most revolutions - the most radical elements tend to also be the ones most willing to use violence to grab and hang onto power in part because they've had to get used to facing opposition that would do anything to get rid of them, and have had to spend a lot of time politically isolated from the mainstream but still keeping their faith in ultimate victory. It happened in the French revolution, it happened in Britain (during the civil wars in the mid 1600's), and it's happened in nearly all the Marxist inspired revolutions.
In nearly all such cases, these regimes paradoxically tend to start applying the same oppressive methods of the regimes they ousted as part of their effort to carry out their programmes of changes that often go much farther than what the general population - even those initially supporting a revolution - would support, and end up transforming into regimes with more in common with their old oppressors than with what they were struggling to become as a result of the fact that they see opposition as counter revolutionaries trying to revert to the old and themselves as liberators, ignoring the fact that these "counter revolutionaries" may very well enjoy as much or greater support than they do (see for example the Bolchevik oppression of the Mecheviks and Social Revolutionaries who managed to grow significant popular support after the Russian revolution).
The result in both the Soviet Union and China were that instead of getting a socialist majority rule nationalising the means of production for the benefit of all, the governments rapidly turned into stale oligarchic structures as the efforts at weeding out counter revolutionary forces quickly turned into an elimination of all opposition - whether or not it enjoyed support from the public - and as a result the nationalised industries quickly came under control of people that were able to put their personal interests first.
Paradoxically, considering these regimes claimed their basis in Marxism, is that Marx specifically warned about this. In "The German Ideology" he stated roughly that unless a revolution would happen in a country well developed enough to fullfill the needs of the masses without need, the "same shit" would happen all over again. And it did - only using different symbols and different language.
The Chinese government can pretend to be socialist all it wants, but given that they never removed the upper class, merely shifted the values around, and for decades have been slowly moving to a capitalist economy and introducing even larger economic differences, that is a rather silly charade.
Actually, they were just sold to an investment group that specialises in buying and turning around badly performing companies (such as Corel and Real Networks...). So if it didn't kill them, they haven't exactly demonstrated an ability to make much money from their product.
PDF isn't meant to be an editable format. It is a presentation format. If you need to be able to edit a document, you shouldn't be putting it in a PDF at all.
PDF is for the final product, and that is exactly one of the things that appeals to a lot of it's users.
RTFA. They are proposing to mandate OpenDocument and PDF. Reading/writing html or RTF wouldn't help. So unless Microsoft adds OpenDocument and PDF support they are tossing out MS.
Of course, until 2007 is more than enough time for MS to add OpenDocument support if they'd risk losing too much.
You mean assuming a) the person wouldn't mind installing another office suite, and keep using MS Office when they want to, as installing OpenOffice doesn't magically make MS Office disappear, and b) they are able to follow simple instructions, or c) they figure $5-$15 to order a CD instead of downloading it is an acceptable tradeoff compared to the ridiculous amounts charged for MS Office.
Besides, the point of this is not for the software to be free, but to guarantee that the documents are available in a format that isn't under the control of a company that can do as it pleases with it.
I know you were joking, but the reason diamonds are popular is exclusively a result of De Beer's marketing machine, and has nothing to do with any qualities of diamond and everything to do with whether or not De Beers control the supply of it.
Diamonds aren't even particularly scarce. Just scarce enough that De Beers have managed to keep the price articifically inflated through cartel like manipulation and control of large parts of the supply chain.
Diamonds only got popular after De Beers started their marketing campaigns to make them seem exclusive and glamorous. It's one of the greatest examples of artificially created demand ever.
Re:Why the Apple thing is silly
on
Has Google Peaked?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You better go back and read the article again. What he is suggesting is that when Apple releases a new version (i.e. 10.5) they should give away the old version on IPod's (i.e. 1.4) to woo new users to try it out.
Apple wouldn't make any money off those new users right away, but whatever percentage of them chose to keep using OS X would be candidates for buying an upgrade somewhere down the line, and perhaps even buying Apple hardware.
And I didn't see any suggestion anywhere that the IPod was suggested as the permanent storage - it could just as well be used just as install media.
The iPod suggestion was as a means to put OS X in the hands of Apple friendly Windows users to grow the base of OS X users. Putting out torrents might be a good idea for Apple too, but it would still require people to make a conscious decision to use a lot of time to download it as opposed to looking at a leaflet with their shiny new iPod and deciding to give it a spin and see what it's like.
You look at this the wrong way around. Alzheimers for instance eventually kills you. So does a wide range of the other problems that are associated with old age. Nobody dies just of old age, but of problems caused by decay of various parts of the body that makes various problems such as alzheimers, cancer and heart disease more likely to get you.
Any "anti-aging" gene would be unable to prevent you from dying unless it reduces your chance of dying of at least some of the main causes of death in old people today, and the way to do that without a treatment specific to a specific disease is to reduce the decay of at least parts of the body.
It may mean a shift in what ultimately kills us (the way cancer is far more likely to kill you today than what it was when the average lifespan was too short for most people to get to the age when cancer naturally starts becoming a serious problem), and it could mean a shift to more unpleasant ways of going such as alzheimers.
I suppose you don't wear clothes and live in a cave too, then, as nature seems to disagree with us about the need for human invented conveniences. And what are you doing on Slashdot? After all, nature has far more experience with communication than you and I don't see "her" having invented anything like the internet.
Yet despite all the charity, the US as a whole still gives less as a percentage of GDP than most other industrialised nations.
And while the governments decisions to give isn't directly tracable back to the individual voter, there is certainly a causal relationship there. If voters were so worried about their money being given to worthy causes abroad they'd have voted the governments that does so out of office.
Yet in the US we see the opposite - supporting increases in foreign aid is a good way of losing voter support - while at the same time individuals aren't giving enough to make up the difference when you compare the US with most European countries, for instance.
Newsflash for you: "Aggregating other sites content and piggybacking on their journalism" is what Slashdot has been doing since day one.
Some submitters have delusions of grandeur and try to write something around it (which generally tends to be inaccurate or blatantly wrong, or at least annoying), others just cut and paste a paragraph or so from the article.
If you don't like that, then why are you reading Slashdot in the first place?
But all of your objections apply to the shuttle as well. That's the main point - a shuttle isn't needed for, and is indeed an inefficient way of doing, repairs in orbit. Better to leave as much as possible of the mass in orbit than to take it up and down for each job.
Which is exactly why AJAX is great. A well written AJAX app means proper separation of application logic and userinterface. Personally I prefer to build a REST based interface, and let the web interface use that. That way it's trivially simple to build alternative clients if they like.
I think you better RTFA. The point being that a psycopathic manager, while many of the characteristics may seem desirable in isolation, is there only to serve his/her own goals and has no loyalty to the company. They do what they do for their own self interests, and if there are shortcuts that help them achieve it they will take those shortcuts even if it harms the company. Witness Enron, Worldcom and other companies that have collapsed as a result of their managers attempts to manipulate themselves to power and money.
Ultimately, these kinds of managers are a threat to shareholders because they have no empathy not only with the competitors, but also not to the employees nor to the shareholders they are responsible to. They don't care if the company collapses as long as they get out first (and sometimes they don't).
These people get hired because some of their traits are highly useful, but the people doing the hiring doesn't know about the remaining aspects of their personality. The goal of the test is exactly to expose those who aren't merely tough and able to detach themselves and do the difficult jobs when they have to, but who are actually psychopaths and will happily do something because they don't have any empathy or driven only by self interest.
There's a huge difference between someone that knows what is needed for the company to succeed and is willing to take tough decisions (like firing lots of staff) but that understands the effects that has on other people and only does it when it actually is needed, and someone who is a psycopath who would be ready to fire whoever they feel like using whatever excuse works if they think it will benefit themselves (ref. the example of Al Dunlap in the article) by impressing shareholders for instance.
Being able to determine if someone belongs to the former or latter categories would be immensely useful to a lot of companies.
Imagine putting something like this on a soldier in the battlefield with a high-yield explosive attacked to it.
Great. Now all the enemy has to do is target one soldier, and they create a huge explosion as surrounding soliders die and their explosives go off.
But for suicide bombers working alone it would be great, and would be trivial to build from off the shelf components (complete with audible alarms that could trivially be co-opted as triggers - just to pick the first ad I saw when searching).
I don't particularly enjoy Western style chicken dishes at all. I only rarely order chicken when I'm out unless I'm at a Chinese or Indian restaurant. Just today I had some amazingly juicy chicken at a Chinese place as part of lunch. It's hard to accept it comes from the same animal sometimes when you compare to the horribly dry stuff.
Personally, if the taste/texture is the same, I'd take meat that was grown in sterile, well managed industrial conditions over a filthy animal that's being slaughtered in conditions where the meat can come into contact with all kinds of nasty bacteria or viruses anyday.
I love rare meat, but I certainly have no illusions that it's somehow healthier than a lot of the alternatives I could pick instead.
Last time I went to the US (you don't get decent steaks in restaurants in the UK - at least I've been unable to locate anywhere decent in the 5 years I've lived here... Anyone know of any good places to get a steak, preferrably in the London area, let me know;) And "decent" means not drowned in sauce, burnt to a crisp or otherwise abused to utterly ruin it's natural flavors), I made sure to ask for steaks as "rare as they'd dare" and to my delight I could hear the waiter make a big point of it to the chef, and I actually got meat that was red all the way through... It was cured, so it wasn't as bloody as I like, but it was still great.
I really don't get what people are worried about - the chances of getting anything from well handled meat are so small that I wouldn't be surprised if these people make up for it by increased amounts of carcinogens while ruining their meat.
My fiancee on the other hand, won't consider eating meat unless it's boiled first and then almost burned to a crisp. But then she has an excuse - she grew up in Nigeria and is used to meat bought at markets where it may have been hanging for days in just the right temperatures to breed nasty stuff, and with live animals and dirt all around..
She still looks at me with disgust when I eat my steaks... But it's still worth it.
People are buying Quorn in reasonable quantities, and it doesn't even taste that good, though it's ok. If people are willing to buy fungus grown in vats as a meat replacement I think they'll be relatively tolerant to something that is actually closer to real meat.
I'm sure the market will grow slowly initially, but people had objections to microwaved food and irradiated spices originally too.
The tipping point will likely be when this can be made reasonably cheaper than "real" meat, combined with campaigns aiming for the "veggie sympathisers" that will figure that they can now take the step away from dead animals without giving up meat. Ensure it's grown very lean, so you can market it as a healthier alternative as well.
If it gets cheap enough it's bound to be a success eventually.
You're sort of right. Of course it is possible that something else will cause the same sort of breakdown of the immune system in the same way. However, that is really quite pointless to argue over as long as HIV is the only known thing that has been shown to cause this specific form of immune deficiency.
In other words, we know HIV causes AIDS, but the fact that AIDS is a syndrome means that we can't prove that nothing else can ever cause AIDS - we can just observe that so far there's not to my knowledge a single documented case of AIDS in a patient that does not have HIV. And so HIV is where it's worthwhile to focus, and HIV is what it's worthwhile for people to protect themselves against.
Slashdot Mirror
Socialism is about putting cooperation over competition for the good of all, and in Marxist ideology a majority rule over a capitalist minority (and the eventual disintegration of the capitalist class which in Marxist ideology would lead to the end goal of communism, where the state whithers away as a means of power)
The problem China faces, that the Soviet Union also faced, was that they quickly descended into an oligarchy once it became clear that the revolutionary movements didn't have the mass support they needed.
It all boils down to both Lenin and Mao believing (mistakenly) that they could gain the support of the peasant populations that would have been needed for a socialist majority rule, and then their and their parties refusal to accept they were wrong.
Unfortunately this is a common theme in most revolutions - the most radical elements tend to also be the ones most willing to use violence to grab and hang onto power in part because they've had to get used to facing opposition that would do anything to get rid of them, and have had to spend a lot of time politically isolated from the mainstream but still keeping their faith in ultimate victory. It happened in the French revolution, it happened in Britain (during the civil wars in the mid 1600's), and it's happened in nearly all the Marxist inspired revolutions.
In nearly all such cases, these regimes paradoxically tend to start applying the same oppressive methods of the regimes they ousted as part of their effort to carry out their programmes of changes that often go much farther than what the general population - even those initially supporting a revolution - would support, and end up transforming into regimes with more in common with their old oppressors than with what they were struggling to become as a result of the fact that they see opposition as counter revolutionaries trying to revert to the old and themselves as liberators, ignoring the fact that these "counter revolutionaries" may very well enjoy as much or greater support than they do (see for example the Bolchevik oppression of the Mecheviks and Social Revolutionaries who managed to grow significant popular support after the Russian revolution).
The result in both the Soviet Union and China were that instead of getting a socialist majority rule nationalising the means of production for the benefit of all, the governments rapidly turned into stale oligarchic structures as the efforts at weeding out counter revolutionary forces quickly turned into an elimination of all opposition - whether or not it enjoyed support from the public - and as a result the nationalised industries quickly came under control of people that were able to put their personal interests first.
Paradoxically, considering these regimes claimed their basis in Marxism, is that Marx specifically warned about this. In "The German Ideology" he stated roughly that unless a revolution would happen in a country well developed enough to fullfill the needs of the masses without need, the "same shit" would happen all over again. And it did - only using different symbols and different language.
The Chinese government can pretend to be socialist all it wants, but given that they never removed the upper class, merely shifted the values around, and for decades have been slowly moving to a capitalist economy and introducing even larger economic differences, that is a rather silly charade.
What part of the use of "except" and the full stop after "brain" was it you didn't understand?
XML doesn't in any way guarantee compatibility, so such a clause would certainly be worthwhile.
Actually, they were just sold to an investment group that specialises in buying and turning around badly performing companies (such as Corel and Real Networks...). So if it didn't kill them, they haven't exactly demonstrated an ability to make much money from their product.
PDF isn't meant to be an editable format. It is a presentation format. If you need to be able to edit a document, you shouldn't be putting it in a PDF at all. PDF is for the final product, and that is exactly one of the things that appeals to a lot of it's users.
Of course, until 2007 is more than enough time for MS to add OpenDocument support if they'd risk losing too much.
Besides, the point of this is not for the software to be free, but to guarantee that the documents are available in a format that isn't under the control of a company that can do as it pleases with it.
You miss the point: It's not about saving money. It's about openness and guaranteeing access to information for all citizens.
Diamonds aren't even particularly scarce. Just scarce enough that De Beers have managed to keep the price articifically inflated through cartel like manipulation and control of large parts of the supply chain.
Diamonds only got popular after De Beers started their marketing campaigns to make them seem exclusive and glamorous. It's one of the greatest examples of artificially created demand ever.
Apple wouldn't make any money off those new users right away, but whatever percentage of them chose to keep using OS X would be candidates for buying an upgrade somewhere down the line, and perhaps even buying Apple hardware.
And I didn't see any suggestion anywhere that the IPod was suggested as the permanent storage - it could just as well be used just as install media.
The iPod suggestion was as a means to put OS X in the hands of Apple friendly Windows users to grow the base of OS X users. Putting out torrents might be a good idea for Apple too, but it would still require people to make a conscious decision to use a lot of time to download it as opposed to looking at a leaflet with their shiny new iPod and deciding to give it a spin and see what it's like.
Any "anti-aging" gene would be unable to prevent you from dying unless it reduces your chance of dying of at least some of the main causes of death in old people today, and the way to do that without a treatment specific to a specific disease is to reduce the decay of at least parts of the body.
It may mean a shift in what ultimately kills us (the way cancer is far more likely to kill you today than what it was when the average lifespan was too short for most people to get to the age when cancer naturally starts becoming a serious problem), and it could mean a shift to more unpleasant ways of going such as alzheimers.
I suppose you don't wear clothes and live in a cave too, then, as nature seems to disagree with us about the need for human invented conveniences. And what are you doing on Slashdot? After all, nature has far more experience with communication than you and I don't see "her" having invented anything like the internet.
And while the governments decisions to give isn't directly tracable back to the individual voter, there is certainly a causal relationship there. If voters were so worried about their money being given to worthy causes abroad they'd have voted the governments that does so out of office.
Yet in the US we see the opposite - supporting increases in foreign aid is a good way of losing voter support - while at the same time individuals aren't giving enough to make up the difference when you compare the US with most European countries, for instance.
Some submitters have delusions of grandeur and try to write something around it (which generally tends to be inaccurate or blatantly wrong, or at least annoying), others just cut and paste a paragraph or so from the article.
If you don't like that, then why are you reading Slashdot in the first place?
But all of your objections apply to the shuttle as well. That's the main point - a shuttle isn't needed for, and is indeed an inefficient way of doing, repairs in orbit. Better to leave as much as possible of the mass in orbit than to take it up and down for each job.
Which is exactly why AJAX is great. A well written AJAX app means proper separation of application logic and userinterface. Personally I prefer to build a REST based interface, and let the web interface use that. That way it's trivially simple to build alternative clients if they like.
Ultimately, these kinds of managers are a threat to shareholders because they have no empathy not only with the competitors, but also not to the employees nor to the shareholders they are responsible to. They don't care if the company collapses as long as they get out first (and sometimes they don't).
These people get hired because some of their traits are highly useful, but the people doing the hiring doesn't know about the remaining aspects of their personality. The goal of the test is exactly to expose those who aren't merely tough and able to detach themselves and do the difficult jobs when they have to, but who are actually psychopaths and will happily do something because they don't have any empathy or driven only by self interest.
There's a huge difference between someone that knows what is needed for the company to succeed and is willing to take tough decisions (like firing lots of staff) but that understands the effects that has on other people and only does it when it actually is needed, and someone who is a psycopath who would be ready to fire whoever they feel like using whatever excuse works if they think it will benefit themselves (ref. the example of Al Dunlap in the article) by impressing shareholders for instance.
Being able to determine if someone belongs to the former or latter categories would be immensely useful to a lot of companies.
Great. Now all the enemy has to do is target one soldier, and they create a huge explosion as surrounding soliders die and their explosives go off.
But for suicide bombers working alone it would be great, and would be trivial to build from off the shelf components (complete with audible alarms that could trivially be co-opted as triggers - just to pick the first ad I saw when searching).
It's a joint venture with Softbank. Yahoo! Inc. is a minority shareholder.
I love rare meat, but I certainly have no illusions that it's somehow healthier than a lot of the alternatives I could pick instead.
I really don't get what people are worried about - the chances of getting anything from well handled meat are so small that I wouldn't be surprised if these people make up for it by increased amounts of carcinogens while ruining their meat.
My fiancee on the other hand, won't consider eating meat unless it's boiled first and then almost burned to a crisp. But then she has an excuse - she grew up in Nigeria and is used to meat bought at markets where it may have been hanging for days in just the right temperatures to breed nasty stuff, and with live animals and dirt all around..
She still looks at me with disgust when I eat my steaks... But it's still worth it.
It's not as if this will in any way change the ability to mess with the contents of food.
I'm sure the market will grow slowly initially, but people had objections to microwaved food and irradiated spices originally too.
The tipping point will likely be when this can be made reasonably cheaper than "real" meat, combined with campaigns aiming for the "veggie sympathisers" that will figure that they can now take the step away from dead animals without giving up meat. Ensure it's grown very lean, so you can market it as a healthier alternative as well.
If it gets cheap enough it's bound to be a success eventually.
In other words, we know HIV causes AIDS, but the fact that AIDS is a syndrome means that we can't prove that nothing else can ever cause AIDS - we can just observe that so far there's not to my knowledge a single documented case of AIDS in a patient that does not have HIV. And so HIV is where it's worthwhile to focus, and HIV is what it's worthwhile for people to protect themselves against.