Their stand is to provide as much information to the Chinese people as they can. They would rather provide information about 90% of the web (minus the Falun Gong and anti-Communist sites) than provide no information at all.
As much as we would all like them to, they CAN NOT provide uncensored info, as the govt would simply censor them. So they provide as much as they can. This aids the Chinese people much better than not providing anything.
Your solution to the problem of Chinese isolation is to isolate them further and let them all rot in the quasi-communist hell as punishment. This, you feel, is the moral thing to do, because you've shown that evil government. It doesn't however, at all help the 1 200 000 000 people living there.
You don't seem to notice that the increased Western presence in China (in the shape of cars, technology, movies, etc) has been steadily changing the Chinese society for the better. Increase in information, however limited, would have a similar result, and possibly much better, as information is more powerful than any car or mobile phone. Even a limited google is of much bigger service to the Chinese people and Chinese freedom than no google at all.
They *could* refuse to do business with these goons, but they'd rather fuck over their fellow man so they can make a few more bucks.
How would that help their fellow men in China? It would only limit their information even further. People might not know, but the internet in China is quite a closed system -- most people only frequent Chinese sites and have little interest in anything else. Having powerful engines such as google will increase the integration with the rest of the internet and increase the flow of information through forums, foreign news sites etc, and sooner rather than later, it will become impossible to censor everything. But you'd rather leave them to their darkness, out of your love and respect for them as human beings. Beautiful.
I've heard the same argument used with North Korea. People refuse to send food to the starving people because some of that food gets used by the govt to feed their army. Some of the food, though, does save lives of innocent civilians. Some people argue that you shouldn't send any foor to North Korea at all, to show your love and respect for the oppressed human beings there, by starving them to death. Beautiful.
True, but even a censored google increases the amount of information available to the Chinese citizens. With time, and as search engines and western media become more prevalent in the contemporary Chinese culture, it will become impossible to censor everything and the Chinese govt will simply have to open up, just like they are doing with capitalism.
You seem to think that the moral choice in this case would be to abandon the Chinese population completely and leave them to their government-imposed darkness.
I'd go even further and say that there is no such thing as a healthy diet, only a healthy lifestyle (which includes a diet).
Different people have completely different needs from their diets, depending on their lifestyles. There is nothing wrong with eating craploads of sugars and complex carbs if you are going to use them all in the course of the day.
Many athletes have diets which would make an average person unhealthy. Your diet has to match your lifestyle.
The positive effects attributed to wine are certainly not due to the alcohol content. Alcohol is a poison and the grandparent is correct in saying that. The positive effects you are seeing are due to different enzymes which come from grapes, not from ethanol.
If you want to watch your health, instead of drinking a glass of wine, drink a litre of grape juice, or a kilo of grapes. Much more healthy than intoxicating your liver with ethanol.
Come on, people here should be educated. Wine = alcohol. Wine = healthy, therefore alcohol = healthy? No.
Distcc on a few dozen of lab computers? Why not simply use the GRP disks and install already precompiled packages, with decent optimisation settings? You don't HAVE to compile on gentoo, you know?
Anyway, the user can always re-emerge world once he/she gets home if they feel so inclined -- my feeling is that very few people would.
As long as it can be written, it will be written. The OpenOffice KDE integration is far from complete too, but as long as there's an interest, things will happen. It's much easier to make a frontend for GIMP than to port the old GIMP codebase away from GTK+.
The gtk-qt engine is really cool and should be advertised to high hell, but it's not what I had in mind. I thought GIMP 2.0 was supposed to have a separate frontend and a backend, so alternative backends could be written for it (say, a Qt one).
The best thing is that Firefox will have a completely native look and feel. This means that they are making sure the entire Mozilla platform runs as native KDE applications. This is not only Firefox/Gecko, folks, this means Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird and anything based on Mozilla will in the future look and act as a native KDE app.
Mozilla: Can use KDE or GTK frontend. Firefox: Can use KDE or GTK frontend. OpenOffice: Can use KDE or GTK frontend. Xine/Mplayer: Can use KDE or GTK frontend. giFT: Can use KDE or GTK frontend. GIMP: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Are we really moving away from the Desktop Environment holy wars, and towards interoperability?
The easiest way to avoid what you're seeing is to use KWin as the window manager. The java applets unfortunately open new windows with other window-managers.
That's the simplest way to get online, for a typical Slashdot reader. Once there, you'd be instructed to download a user-friendly interface such as MUSHclient, SimpleMU or zMUD, and enjoy the coloured, clicky GUI goodness.
This isn't actually bout "war criminals", you know? It's about ordinary, common variety criminals.
No, the non-extradition treaty I was talking about is specifically about war criminals. And the US have never, nor will they ever, extradite US citizens to other countries. Other citizens, sure, but not US citizens. I believe it's a constitutional right over there.
But, but, there was no WMF/World Bank after WW2 to rebuild war-torn economies! How did Europe recover? Never mind. We paid for that, didn't we? Marshall Plan, and all that....
Western Europe was extremely developed before the war so bringing it back up to speed was easier, as the know-how was there already. This is not always the case with developing countries.
And the US funded much of Europe's recovery, through credits which were paid back, to the US' great benefit. I don't want to get into a WWII discussion, though.
So, the USA has to protect every little backwater (either by providing the coin to fund the UN, the troops to do the UN mandates, or doing it directly), but we're evil if we do so?
Nobody is saying the US has to protect every little backwater -- that's the job of the UN and all members, including US, should strengthen the UN's ability to do just that. Imagine the following situation:
You are being beaten by a thug to a bloody pulp. I walk by, see it, and stop the thug from beating you. Then I say that if you don't suck my dick, I'll let the thug beat you to death while I'm watching. That's still called coercion.
I didn't HAVE to stop and help you, but still I'm coercing you to suck my dick. Or sign a non-extradition treaty, whatever.
Not quite, since the most important concept of international law is the territoriality principle, which means you only have juristdiction over what happens on the territory of your own country. If you are in a different country when you commit the crime, then there is no crime.
You can't reason that 'your speech' is in the country, so the crime has been committed, or else Salman Rushdie could be extradited to Iran for writing a book. Even though he never said those words in Iran, his words did reach Iran.
So, what you are saying is that the USA doesn't help countries that don't help them? Terrible the way the USA abuses its sovereignty by advancing its own interests, isn't it?
No, I'm saying it's hypocritical to demand from other countries to do what you yourself don't want to do (extradite war criminals).
Are you suggesting that it is impossible to have a "normal life" without doing what we say? How odd!
Yes, I think it's impossible to rebuild a war-torn country without WMF/World Bank grants. Yes, I think it's impossible to start a decent economy if the majority of your spending has to go to the military because of the danger from your neighbours (joining NATO helps this tremendously). Yes, I think it is very difficult to attract foreign investments and companies to your country if you're not in the WTO.
Coerced is a strong word, but the US have a lot of influence in the UN, WTO, WMF, and (especially) NATO. Because of the ****ed up location and economy of many Eastern European countries, they depend on getting into/getting help from many of these organisations. The US can simply veto many such decisions for countries who do not comply.
As a result, they go out of their way to please the US government, doing things like signing non-extradition treaties, allowing nuclear submarines into territorial waters and around tourists, giving extremely expensive infrastructure contracts to American companies (Bechtel, Enron etc), letting the US build army bases, endangering or completely giving up diplomatic relations and trade with countries the US doesn't like, sending troops to places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, etc...
So, in order to get a chance at having a normal life, a whole country has to become a US lapdog. The EU also makes demands for the states wishing to join, but these demands generally consists of passing legislation which is compatible to the EU laws, strengthening the rule of law, strengthening democracy etc.
If you're into text adventures, you should check some of many Star Trek based text online games (MUSH'es and MUSE's). They offer an amazing depth of roleplaying experience, often modelling even the smallest aspects of ST universe. Sadly, with the advent of graphical online games, they've fallen behind in popularity.
A classic game based on TOS (which had Nimoy, Shatner and Kelley visit for chat sessions on several occasions) can be found on space.tos.net. To play, simply telnet to tos.tos.net, port 1701. Several empires to chose from, with fleets, a space system, economy, diplomacy, culture (especially important with Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans), language, etc. All based on roleplaying and some coded systems.
No he didn't, but if you stoop to using the same methods as he does, then you lose the moral high ground. Should we kill his relatives in retaliation, cause he killed yours (hypothetically). Should we set up concentration camps for German troops because they did the same in the Second World War? Should we rape Japanese women because Japanese soldiers did it to the Korean and Chinese?
Slashdot Mirror
You're a PhD student, and the only thing wrong you noticed with this heap of advice was the little part you quoted? Oh my. Good luck with your PhD! :-)
Their stand is to provide as much information to the Chinese people as they can. They would rather provide information about 90% of the web (minus the Falun Gong and anti-Communist sites) than provide no information at all.
As much as we would all like them to, they CAN NOT provide uncensored info, as the govt would simply censor them. So they provide as much as they can. This aids the Chinese people much better than not providing anything.
Your solution to the problem of Chinese isolation is to isolate them further and let them all rot in the quasi-communist hell as punishment. This, you feel, is the moral thing to do, because you've shown that evil government. It doesn't however, at all help the 1 200 000 000 people living there.
You don't seem to notice that the increased Western presence in China (in the shape of cars, technology, movies, etc) has been steadily changing the Chinese society for the better. Increase in information, however limited, would have a similar result, and possibly much better, as information is more powerful than any car or mobile phone. Even a limited google is of much bigger service to the Chinese people and Chinese freedom than no google at all.
They *could* refuse to do business with these goons, but they'd rather fuck over their fellow man so they can make a few more bucks.
How would that help their fellow men in China? It would only limit their information even further. People might not know, but the internet in China is quite a closed system -- most people only frequent Chinese sites and have little interest in anything else. Having powerful engines such as google will increase the integration with the rest of the internet and increase the flow of information through forums, foreign news sites etc, and sooner rather than later, it will become impossible to censor everything. But you'd rather leave them to their darkness, out of your love and respect for them as human beings. Beautiful.
I've heard the same argument used with North Korea. People refuse to send food to the starving people because some of that food gets used by the govt to feed their army. Some of the food, though, does save lives of innocent civilians. Some people argue that you shouldn't send any foor to North Korea at all, to show your love and respect for the oppressed human beings there, by starving them to death. Beautiful.
True, but even a censored google increases the amount of information available to the Chinese citizens. With time, and as search engines and western media become more prevalent in the contemporary Chinese culture, it will become impossible to censor everything and the Chinese govt will simply have to open up, just like they are doing with capitalism.
You seem to think that the moral choice in this case would be to abandon the Chinese population completely and leave them to their government-imposed darkness.
I'd go even further and say that there is no such thing as a healthy diet, only a healthy lifestyle (which includes a diet).
Different people have completely different needs from their diets, depending on their lifestyles. There is nothing wrong with eating craploads of sugars and complex carbs if you are going to use them all in the course of the day.
Many athletes have diets which would make an average person unhealthy. Your diet has to match your lifestyle.
The positive effects attributed to wine are certainly not due to the alcohol content. Alcohol is a poison and the grandparent is correct in saying that. The positive effects you are seeing are due to different enzymes which come from grapes, not from ethanol.
If you want to watch your health, instead of drinking a glass of wine, drink a litre of grape juice, or a kilo of grapes. Much more healthy than intoxicating your liver with ethanol.
Come on, people here should be educated. Wine = alcohol. Wine = healthy, therefore alcohol = healthy? No.
Oh, I like Konq, I use it exclusively. I was going to check if it worked on Konq 3.3 before filing a bug report.
Funny that, the second link kills Konqueror 3.2 flat every time.
Distcc on a few dozen of lab computers? Why not simply use the GRP disks and install already precompiled packages, with decent optimisation settings? You don't HAVE to compile on gentoo, you know?
Anyway, the user can always re-emerge world once he/she gets home if they feel so inclined -- my feeling is that very few people would.
And I'm willing to bet 20 of your favourite currency that you found that out the hard way :-)
+1 Most gratuitous use of the word 'flabbergasted'.
As long as it can be written, it will be written. The OpenOffice KDE integration is far from complete too, but as long as there's an interest, things will happen. It's much easier to make a frontend for GIMP than to port the old GIMP codebase away from GTK+.
The gtk-qt engine is really cool and should be advertised to high hell, but it's not what I had in mind. I thought GIMP 2.0 was supposed to have a separate frontend and a backend, so alternative backends could be written for it (say, a Qt one).
Did that idea die or what?
The best thing is that Firefox will have a completely native look and feel. This means that they are making sure the entire Mozilla platform runs as native KDE applications. This is not only Firefox/Gecko, folks, this means Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird and anything based on Mozilla will in the future look and act as a native KDE app.
Awesome!
I see a very encouraging pattern here:
Mozilla: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Firefox: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
OpenOffice: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Xine/Mplayer: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
giFT: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
GIMP: Can use KDE or GTK frontend.
Are we really moving away from the Desktop Environment holy wars, and towards interoperability?
The easiest way to avoid what you're seeing is to use KWin as the window manager. The java applets unfortunately open new windows with other window-managers.
That's the simplest way to get online, for a typical Slashdot reader. Once there, you'd be instructed to download a user-friendly interface such as MUSHclient, SimpleMU or zMUD, and enjoy the coloured, clicky GUI goodness.
This isn't actually bout "war criminals", you know? It's about ordinary, common variety criminals.
No, the non-extradition treaty I was talking about is specifically about war criminals. And the US have never, nor will they ever, extradite US citizens to other countries. Other citizens, sure, but not US citizens. I believe it's a constitutional right over there.
But, but, there was no WMF/World Bank after WW2 to rebuild war-torn economies! How did Europe recover?
Never mind. We paid for that, didn't we? Marshall Plan, and all that....
Western Europe was extremely developed before the war so bringing it back up to speed was easier, as the know-how was there already. This is not always the case with developing countries.
And the US funded much of Europe's recovery, through credits which were paid back, to the US' great benefit. I don't want to get into a WWII discussion, though.
So, the USA has to protect every little backwater (either by providing the coin to fund the UN, the troops to do the UN mandates, or doing it directly), but we're evil if we do so?
Nobody is saying the US has to protect every little backwater -- that's the job of the UN and all members, including US, should strengthen the UN's ability to do just that. Imagine the following situation:
You are being beaten by a thug to a bloody pulp. I walk by, see it, and stop the thug from beating you. Then I say that if you don't suck my dick, I'll let the thug beat you to death while I'm watching. That's still called coercion.
I didn't HAVE to stop and help you, but still I'm coercing you to suck my dick. Or sign a non-extradition treaty, whatever.
Not quite, since the most important concept of international law is the territoriality principle, which means you only have juristdiction over what happens on the territory of your own country. If you are in a different country when you commit the crime, then there is no crime.
You can't reason that 'your speech' is in the country, so the crime has been committed, or else Salman Rushdie could be extradited to Iran for writing a book. Even though he never said those words in Iran, his words did reach Iran.
So, what you are saying is that the USA doesn't help countries that don't help them? Terrible the way the USA abuses its sovereignty by advancing its own interests, isn't it?
No, I'm saying it's hypocritical to demand from other countries to do what you yourself don't want to do (extradite war criminals).
Are you suggesting that it is impossible to have a "normal life" without doing what we say? How odd!
Yes, I think it's impossible to rebuild a war-torn country without WMF/World Bank grants. Yes, I think it's impossible to start a decent economy if the majority of your spending has to go to the military because of the danger from your neighbours (joining NATO helps this tremendously). Yes, I think it is very difficult to attract foreign investments and companies to your country if you're not in the WTO.
How are they being coerced? Just curious.
Coerced is a strong word, but the US have a lot of influence in the UN, WTO, WMF, and (especially) NATO. Because of the ****ed up location and economy of many Eastern European countries, they depend on getting into/getting help from many of these organisations. The US can simply veto many such decisions for countries who do not comply.
As a result, they go out of their way to please the US government, doing things like signing non-extradition treaties, allowing nuclear submarines into territorial waters and around tourists, giving extremely expensive infrastructure contracts to American companies (Bechtel, Enron etc), letting the US build army bases, endangering or completely giving up diplomatic relations and trade with countries the US doesn't like, sending troops to places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, etc...
So, in order to get a chance at having a normal life, a whole country has to become a US lapdog. The EU also makes demands for the states wishing to join, but these demands generally consists of passing legislation which is compatible to the EU laws, strengthening the rule of law, strengthening democracy etc.
Well, a starbase like DS9 would make a good premise for a MMORPG. Or a planet, but then you kind of lose the space aspect of it.
If you're into text adventures, you should check some of many Star Trek based text online games (MUSH'es and MUSE's). They offer an amazing depth of roleplaying experience, often modelling even the smallest aspects of ST universe. Sadly, with the advent of graphical online games, they've fallen behind in popularity.
A classic game based on TOS (which had Nimoy, Shatner and Kelley visit for chat sessions on several occasions) can be found on space.tos.net. To play, simply telnet to tos.tos.net, port 1701. Several empires to chose from, with fleets, a space system, economy, diplomacy, culture (especially important with Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans), language, etc. All based on roleplaying and some coded systems.
No he didn't, but if you stoop to using the same methods as he does, then you lose the moral high ground. Should we kill his relatives in retaliation, cause he killed yours (hypothetically). Should we set up concentration camps for German troops because they did the same in the Second World War? Should we rape Japanese women because Japanese soldiers did it to the Korean and Chinese?