Yeah, because without anti-terror laws, I'm sure it's perfectly legal to plot to behead a public official in Canada. How could they possibly have let that gaping hole in the criminal code reopen?!?
You've nailed it in my case. Most of the music I'm buying these days isn't in genres that are well represented on Emusic or any of the all-the-electric-guitar-and-electronica-you-can-ea t sites. And no, not because I'm buying Britney Spears albums -- my last purchase was an import CD of early 20th century recordings of Chinese folk music, to give you some idea.
If you like listening to trance or house music, you have been overflowing in DRM-free purchase options for years already. If you like alternative rock (whatever that means exactly) or acid jazz, you're in okay shape. Classical, the selection starts to get pretty limited. And if you like mainstream pop or a lot of foreign-language music, you're pretty much stuck buying CDs, putting up with DRM, or pirating it. Music is not a fungible commodity -- you can't just replace your favorite artist with some no-name hack and be equally satisfied.
If you define "tinker" and "innovate" as "sit there playing World of Warcraft all day," anyway. Which is pretty much what you see if you walk into any Internet cafe in a major Chinese city, if my experience there is typical. Occasionally I'd see someone reading email, but mostly it's WoW from one end of the cafe to the other.
They would have to apply for the jobs first. At my current job (Silicon Valley area) I have interviewed perhaps fifty candidates for engineering positions. All of them were either East Asian (both sexes in about equal numbers) or a South Asian or white male, with two exceptions, an Indian woman and a Hispanic man. The latter of whom, by the way, I recommended hiring. I have not interviewed a single black person or white woman. It's impossible to display a selection bias against people who aren't in your sample set!
I'm happy to find someone who knows their stuff technically. What they look like or what accent they have is perhaps not 100% irrelevant -- it is impossible to completely eliminate my biases, though I try -- but it's far, far, far down the list compared to their ability to write code, their history of making reasonable design choices, their familiarity with the technologies they'll be working with on the job, and their enthusiasm for learning new things.
As for state universities, honestly I pay close to zero attention to the "education" part of the resume unless they're fresh out of school, in which case what I want to see is interesting projects I can ask them about. If I see someone has graduated from Middle-o-nowhere University in Wisconsachussetts, I have no idea if that's the best school in the region or some one-room schoolhouse with no electricity, and I don't care. Well-connected idiots graduate from top-tier schools all the time and smart people wind up at low-end schools for all sorts of reasons.
That said, if someone is top of the class at MIT, they probably have some measure of technical skill -- but in an interview I will use that as a starting assumption, not a conclusion. A couple weeks ago I gave a thumbs down to a guy who was (according to his resume) top of his class at IIT; he was clearly very smart and insanely expert at his narrow specialty but told me straight up he had no interest in stepping outside it, and my company requires its engineers to be able to wear different hats on a fairly regular basis. The decision had nothing to do with his school or his race or his age and everything to do with his suitability for the job.
I'm not saying the biases you cite don't exist, but they are certainly not universal in the valley. Many of us just want good people who can attack a range of problems. We'll take them wherever we can find them.
Your professor misled you. Yeah, sure, sometimes I'm up past midnight pounding out code.
But then the next day I get to sleep in until noon if I want.
"How late you stay up working" is only half the picture -- there's the unspoken assumption that you arrive in the office at the same time as everyone else, which is absolutely not necessarily the case. Every single programming job I've had (I've been in the industry for close to 20 years, worked at a couple big companies and a bunch of small ones) has had flexible schedules and sane comp time policies. And this is including a couple dot-com-boom startups. Now, maybe it's different if you're at a non-tech company, but the point is there are tons of jobs out there that don't require you to spend every waking hour working.
You can burn yourself out at any job. Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience. And the trend toward longer hours is an American disease, not a CS one; you'll probably run into it no matter what industry you enter. (That's assuming you're in the US, which of course I don't actually know, so bad me if you're not.)
Nah, you just missed the footnote. It's the party of "less government interference*" (* unless people are doing something we don't like).
Oddly, so is the Democratic Party.
At the end of the day, strident "liberals" and "conservatives" have exactly the same political philosophy: the government should get its nose out of the business of people who are doing things I approve of, but spare no expense stopping people from doing things that make me feel uneasy.
a majority of us can no longer discern it from shine-ola.
Since you imply this is a change in the situation... What evidence do you have that this was ever not the case? Please be specific. Or was David Hannum just anticipating today's pinko commie public school system when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute" in 1869? I seem to recall reading about a fair bit of snake oil being sold back in the day.
It would, I admit, be great if the past had been as glorious as you say. Sadly, I suspect it's more likely the case that people are still people, same as ever: most of them are gullible, about half of them are dumber than average, and almost all of them would rather eat bread and attend circuses than contemplate the nature of truth.
Most strident atheist world-views center around coping strategies for dealing with this particular bit of Bad News.
Whereas most religious world-views center around denial of the Bad News. No need to face the implications of your own mortality -- you aren't really mortal! How convenient!
If you're really a scientist, then surely you recognize the fallacy of shaping your data to match your desired conclusion. That's exactly what you're doing, though: "I can't figure out what to live for if there isn't a God, and I want to live for something, so therefore there's a God."
Your life could actually be 100% meaningless if "meaning" must by definition be supplied by some cosmic superuser and that entity doesn't actually exist -- or if it exists and created you just for the hell of it, no particular purpose in mind. The fact that you don't like that possibility has very little bearing on whether or not it's true. (Which isn't an argument that God doesn't exist, by the way; just that your desire one way or the other is irrelevant to the question.)
I also wonder how strong the "God exists because I am going to die and I don't like it" idea would be if the SENS guys turned out to be right and one could become very very old indeed without becoming the least bit decrepit.
I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.
That's one direction the medium is going, to be sure, and honestly I doubt we'll ever get there with handwritten narratives; to achieve that goal will require something like the book in "The Diamond Age" with sufficient smarts to make up a compelling story as it goes along.
But there are plenty of games out there with much more constrained narratives that make no attempt to be wide open, and I don't think they'll be going away any time soon either.
There are really two sorts of story-driven games in my opinion; in one sort (the Grand Theft Auto school) the game primarily serves as an environment, and while there's often a narrative one is meant to explore, the exploration itself is the gameplay. The other sort of game (the Final Fantasy school) is a challenge-reward system where the gameplay is the challenge and the reward is finding out what happens next in the predetermined story. Game writers have a lot more latitude to tell interesting, complex stories in that kind of game, mostly because they can concentrate on just one plotline, or a small number of alternatives, rather than trying to fill in all the possible blanks for everything the player does. But at the same time the player is necessarily more constrained in that kind of game.
In my opinion both kinds of games can be done very well, and (barring the invention of a really good story-generating and dialogue-speaking AI) they will tend to deliver very different experiences. I enjoy both styles but I don't expect the two types of games to act or feel the same; the similarities between the two are more superficial than they appear. I don't think either style is inherently better or worse than the other; they're just different.
I think games today are in the position cinema was when it first started: a plaything medium that "serious" writers wouldn't be caught dead having anything to do with. It took longer than people tend to remember for screenwriting to become a respectable profession. And after cinema, TV had the same experience; nowadays we take material like "The Wire" for granted but for a long time you'd've been laughed out of the room if you suggested that TV writing could ever be considered a serious form of literature.
We'll get there. It'll just take time: time for the medium to have been technically mature during the formative years of tomorrow's great writers. Then it'll take a couple of them blazing the trail and showing their peers that there's some interesting unexplored potential. I'm convinced it'll happen.
Sorry. I was a huge fan of OS 9, and while OS X still infuriates me a lot less than Windows, it infuriates me a lot more than previous Macintosh versions did.
Different strokes, I guess. I had no use for OS 9, but I bought my Mac because I like having a UNIX workstation on my desk. I've had Linux desktops in the past (even Solaris ones!) but IMO the Mac UI is generally more pleasant than any of the X environments I've used. I can do almost all my server-side coding locally.
Which isn't to say it's perfect -- I could go on at length about little nits of mine, e.g. the way it shuffles my windows around needlessly when I plug in a second monitor -- but then, nothing is.
Hear hear. That stupid wireless networking popup has got to be the most annoying UI element in the known universe. Its absence alone makes me very happy I'm typing this on a Mac instead of my old Windows laptop.
"Hi! You're now connected to the same wireless network you were connected to before you closed your laptop, the only wireless network available, in fact, and your signal strength is Excellent in case there was some doubt about your ability to get a clear signal from the wireless access point sitting in the closet six feet away from you. Please stop what you're doing and move the cursor down to me to acknowledge this critical information!"
What's absurd is that Westerners have such a myopic view of China that they can't think of anything but a student protest 17 years ago when they hear the name of one of Beijing's most well-known landmarks. You may not have heard of Tiananmen Square before 1989, but the Chinese had -- the protests took place there in part because the place was already a well-known national symbol to them. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese visit Tiananmen Square every year.
Think St. Peter's Square or the Champs d'Elysee or Trafalgar Square or (to a lesser extent) the National Mall in Washington DC. When you Google "national mall" you don't get a page full of stories about Martin Luther King or Vietnam War protests or the Million Man March, but nobody seems to think that's absurd; when you do that search, chances are you care more about the place itself than about any particular historical event that took place there.
Which isn't to say that it's right for the Chinese government to force search engines to make it harder to dig up stories about that protest. (You might be surprised that a lot of Chinese do know about it, and simply don't consider it the source of outrage we Westerners do, but they should still be able to find out more about it without interference.) But honestly, the results Google returns on its home page are probably what most Chinese people actually want when they enter that search term. It's the English-language Google results for that term that are out of whack in my opinion.
I wonder where you get the notion that the Chinese people "might (otherwise) be unaware of" government censorship and repression
From dating a Chinese woman for a year and a half, and remaining friends with her now that she's living in Shanghai. From spending time in China myself. From observing countless discussions on the net where ordinary Chinese people say with a straight face that if the government is filtering anything, it's only immoral stuff they'd be better off not seeing. I'm not just pulling that notion out of my ass -- there are, without a doubt, a lot of Chinese who are aware of and concerned about government censorship, but there are vastly more of them who don't know about it in anything more than a vague sense and make no effort to find out about it. (Getting too interested in censorship issues in a totalitarian country is usually not the short path to a happy prosperous life.)
Helping someone or some country to suppress and censor information is just what it is, no matter what you may call it: censorship.
Totally agreed. And my point is that by refusing to go into China, Google would have done exactly that: made it easier for the Chinese government to suppress or censor information without people noticing, by virtue of the fact that baidu.com and the like don't even tell people they're doing exactly the same suppression of search results.
If you're trying to get me to admit that Google is practicing censorship, rest easy; I never disputed that. My claim is not that they are not censoring, but that the way they're doing it is, at the end of the day, producing a better situation than would exist if they were out of the picture completely. Not every instance of censorship is precisely equivalent, in either a practical or a moral sense.
Do you even realize how cynical your post is?
Is it cynical to base one's opinion on the available evidence? If so, then guilty as charged. As I said in another reply, please name one instance -- just one, is all I ask -- of the Chinese government relaxing its censorship in any way whatsoever in response to a foreign company's refusal to comply. If you can find one I'll happily eat my words, but I bet you can't.
You sound as though you knew for sure what is "a good thing for the millions of people in China".
*shrug* So do you, and so does everyone debating this issue.
If they refused to censor, it would have drawn more attention to the issue if and when the government cracks down on it.
Whose attention? Western observers? They already know China censors the net, and they've already objected to it, and China has already ignored their objections. The Chinese? Not really -- the whole point of government censorship is that the government controls what people get to find out. Chinese net users would not read the "Google valiantly refused to bow down to censorship, and China booted them out!" stories we'd read; they'd instead get, at best, "After violating the law, Google agreed to withdraw their service for now." The average net user might not be happy about that situation, but it would be trivial to spin the news such that any ire people felt would be toward Google, not the government.
It would have put some rare pressure on not only the government, but also other businesses who have similar policies.
That kind of pressure, the Chinese government has shown no indication of caring about. They've shut down plenty of businesses for violating censorship rules before (independent newspapers, for example) so realistically, what reason is there to think they'd have any compunction about doing the same to Google? Can you name one example in the 50+-year history of the PRC where the government has caved in to pressure from a foreign company -- or even a foreign government -- in that area?
As for other companies, Google getting kicked out of China would more likely have exactly the opposite effect from the one you're hoping for: they wouldn't be shamed into doing the same, they'd breathe a sigh of relief and congratulate themselves for not being so foolish, and possibly redouble their censorship efforts to be sure they were steering clear of similar trouble. The only way other companies would move in the same direction would be if Google refused to censor and got away with it for an extended period of time. And China's recent history has very few examples (none that I know of, in fact) of that being a good bet to make.
[The possibility of a homegrown alternative is] not very good moral justification, for obvious reasons.
I think it's an excellent moral justification, unless one's concept of morality is that it should exist in a vacuum! Considering the likely eventual effects of one's possible courses of action and choosing the one that produces the most generally beneficial outcome is, to me, the very essence of moral reasoning.
That Google's choice is also the profitable one is good too -- but it's pretty easy to see that Google is not simply choosing maximal profit and justifying it after the fact. If they were, they would have Gmail servers in China rather than forcing Chinese users to use the ones in the US. They are voluntarily giving up webmail market share (hitting Gmail's servers from China is slow) in order to avoid having to turn over information about their users.
Bah, stupid Slashdot filtered out my Chinese characters. (Can't have anyone using Chinese in a discussion about China, now can we?) Go to google.cn and do a search for something and you'll see the message I tried to quote at the bottom of the page.
and I think, by virtue of the fact that they haven't actually changed what they're doing, that they agree.
Millions of Chinese Internet users have better access to information now than they would have if Google had decided to take "the principled position" and refuse to play ball. What seems to fly over the heads of people who advocate that position is that the result would not have been the Chinese government caving in and saying, "Okay, you're right, we shouldn't force you to censor." The result would have been "Okay, then you don't get to do business in our country," and, as much as that might make Westerners feel all warm and fuzzy inside (Hooray! We have held fast in the face of evil!) it would not be a good thing for the millions of people in China who are now able to use Google every day.
Further, not only would Google have been shut out of China, but a homegrown alternative would undoubtedly have taken its place -- and you can bet that the alternative would not have taken the pains Google has to point out to its Chinese users that their search results are in fact censored. That fact is spelled out in no uncertain terms on google.cn's search results pages: they say "" which means more or less "In order to comply with local regulations, some search results have been removed."
Google is helping millions of people more efficiently access information, and it is pointing out the existence of government interference with said information to people who might otherwise be unaware of it.
Taking their ball and going home would improve on that situation how, exactly?
Universal HD (available on DirecTV, possibly other places too) shows Battlestar Galactica in high-def, but they lag a fair bit behind the Sci-Fi schedule.
I put OOO on my girlfriend's Windows laptop (replacing a pirated copy of MS Office) and it's been a mixed bag for her. Writer works fine for most of what she needs to do. Impress is okay but not great -- when she looks at other people's PowerPoint presentations, they are usually at least legible, but most often the formatting is messed up in some way or another. But Calc is a source of frustration. Last night she wanted to make a simple X-Y graph and it took us a solid 15 minutes of clicking around different dialog boxes to get what she wanted -- and even then I had to modify the spreadsheet to get it to work (it doesn't really like the Y axis values to be in the column before the X axis values, for example.) The default formatting was lousy; one of the columns was nothing but whole numbers yet Calc decided to put in grid lines for fractional values and display the numbers with three trailing decimal places. And so forth. All eventually fixable -- we got the graph -- but not fun.
I just fired up Excel to compare the experience, and I had the same graph in under a minute with no after-the-fact fussing around with properties panels. Its defaults were what I wanted and it let me put my columns in any order (though the UI for specifying column ranges needs a little help IMO).
This was the first time I'd used Excel in maybe a year, and the first time I'd made a graph in Excel in... well, I can't remember the previous time. Whereas I use OOO pretty frequently. So I am no MS fanboy -- but OOO does have some catching up to do in places.
Notice, by the way, that the above example has nothing to do with file formats or proprietary languages. I'm willing to cut OOO some slack when it has trouble rendering a document that uses some obscure undocumented formatting feature of MS Word, but that wasn't the case here.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, I bet NASA had never heard of micrometeoroids before. Good thing you warned them.
Yeah, because without anti-terror laws, I'm sure it's perfectly legal to plot to behead a public official in Canada. How could they possibly have let that gaping hole in the criminal code reopen?!?
If you like listening to trance or house music, you have been overflowing in DRM-free purchase options for years already. If you like alternative rock (whatever that means exactly) or acid jazz, you're in okay shape. Classical, the selection starts to get pretty limited. And if you like mainstream pop or a lot of foreign-language music, you're pretty much stuck buying CDs, putting up with DRM, or pirating it. Music is not a fungible commodity -- you can't just replace your favorite artist with some no-name hack and be equally satisfied.
Well, there were patent issues -- the GIF patent expired in 2003.
If you define "tinker" and "innovate" as "sit there playing World of Warcraft all day," anyway. Which is pretty much what you see if you walk into any Internet cafe in a major Chinese city, if my experience there is typical. Occasionally I'd see someone reading email, but mostly it's WoW from one end of the cafe to the other.
I'm happy to find someone who knows their stuff technically. What they look like or what accent they have is perhaps not 100% irrelevant -- it is impossible to completely eliminate my biases, though I try -- but it's far, far, far down the list compared to their ability to write code, their history of making reasonable design choices, their familiarity with the technologies they'll be working with on the job, and their enthusiasm for learning new things.
As for state universities, honestly I pay close to zero attention to the "education" part of the resume unless they're fresh out of school, in which case what I want to see is interesting projects I can ask them about. If I see someone has graduated from Middle-o-nowhere University in Wisconsachussetts, I have no idea if that's the best school in the region or some one-room schoolhouse with no electricity, and I don't care. Well-connected idiots graduate from top-tier schools all the time and smart people wind up at low-end schools for all sorts of reasons.
That said, if someone is top of the class at MIT, they probably have some measure of technical skill -- but in an interview I will use that as a starting assumption, not a conclusion. A couple weeks ago I gave a thumbs down to a guy who was (according to his resume) top of his class at IIT; he was clearly very smart and insanely expert at his narrow specialty but told me straight up he had no interest in stepping outside it, and my company requires its engineers to be able to wear different hats on a fairly regular basis. The decision had nothing to do with his school or his race or his age and everything to do with his suitability for the job.
I'm not saying the biases you cite don't exist, but they are certainly not universal in the valley. Many of us just want good people who can attack a range of problems. We'll take them wherever we can find them.
But then the next day I get to sleep in until noon if I want.
"How late you stay up working" is only half the picture -- there's the unspoken assumption that you arrive in the office at the same time as everyone else, which is absolutely not necessarily the case. Every single programming job I've had (I've been in the industry for close to 20 years, worked at a couple big companies and a bunch of small ones) has had flexible schedules and sane comp time policies. And this is including a couple dot-com-boom startups. Now, maybe it's different if you're at a non-tech company, but the point is there are tons of jobs out there that don't require you to spend every waking hour working.
You can burn yourself out at any job. Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience. And the trend toward longer hours is an American disease, not a CS one; you'll probably run into it no matter what industry you enter. (That's assuming you're in the US, which of course I don't actually know, so bad me if you're not.)
Oddly, so is the Democratic Party.
At the end of the day, strident "liberals" and "conservatives" have exactly the same political philosophy: the government should get its nose out of the business of people who are doing things I approve of, but spare no expense stopping people from doing things that make me feel uneasy.
Since you imply this is a change in the situation... What evidence do you have that this was ever not the case? Please be specific. Or was David Hannum just anticipating today's pinko commie public school system when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute" in 1869? I seem to recall reading about a fair bit of snake oil being sold back in the day.
It would, I admit, be great if the past had been as glorious as you say. Sadly, I suspect it's more likely the case that people are still people, same as ever: most of them are gullible, about half of them are dumber than average, and almost all of them would rather eat bread and attend circuses than contemplate the nature of truth.
"Was Here"
If you're really a scientist, then surely you recognize the fallacy of shaping your data to match your desired conclusion. That's exactly what you're doing, though: "I can't figure out what to live for if there isn't a God, and I want to live for something, so therefore there's a God."
Your life could actually be 100% meaningless if "meaning" must by definition be supplied by some cosmic superuser and that entity doesn't actually exist -- or if it exists and created you just for the hell of it, no particular purpose in mind. The fact that you don't like that possibility has very little bearing on whether or not it's true. (Which isn't an argument that God doesn't exist, by the way; just that your desire one way or the other is irrelevant to the question.)
I also wonder how strong the "God exists because I am going to die and I don't like it" idea would be if the SENS guys turned out to be right and one could become very very old indeed without becoming the least bit decrepit.
They would know, man, don't you see?!?!?
Or, perhaps, that it does, and the people who say that are often trying to convince themselves that it's okay their finances are a mess?
"What Writing For Games Is Really Like" was posted yesterday.
But there are plenty of games out there with much more constrained narratives that make no attempt to be wide open, and I don't think they'll be going away any time soon either.
There are really two sorts of story-driven games in my opinion; in one sort (the Grand Theft Auto school) the game primarily serves as an environment, and while there's often a narrative one is meant to explore, the exploration itself is the gameplay. The other sort of game (the Final Fantasy school) is a challenge-reward system where the gameplay is the challenge and the reward is finding out what happens next in the predetermined story. Game writers have a lot more latitude to tell interesting, complex stories in that kind of game, mostly because they can concentrate on just one plotline, or a small number of alternatives, rather than trying to fill in all the possible blanks for everything the player does. But at the same time the player is necessarily more constrained in that kind of game.
In my opinion both kinds of games can be done very well, and (barring the invention of a really good story-generating and dialogue-speaking AI) they will tend to deliver very different experiences. I enjoy both styles but I don't expect the two types of games to act or feel the same; the similarities between the two are more superficial than they appear. I don't think either style is inherently better or worse than the other; they're just different.
I think games today are in the position cinema was when it first started: a plaything medium that "serious" writers wouldn't be caught dead having anything to do with. It took longer than people tend to remember for screenwriting to become a respectable profession. And after cinema, TV had the same experience; nowadays we take material like "The Wire" for granted but for a long time you'd've been laughed out of the room if you suggested that TV writing could ever be considered a serious form of literature.
We'll get there. It'll just take time: time for the medium to have been technically mature during the formative years of tomorrow's great writers. Then it'll take a couple of them blazing the trail and showing their peers that there's some interesting unexplored potential. I'm convinced it'll happen.
Which isn't to say it's perfect -- I could go on at length about little nits of mine, e.g. the way it shuffles my windows around needlessly when I plug in a second monitor -- but then, nothing is.
"Hi! You're now connected to the same wireless network you were connected to before you closed your laptop, the only wireless network available, in fact, and your signal strength is Excellent in case there was some doubt about your ability to get a clear signal from the wireless access point sitting in the closet six feet away from you. Please stop what you're doing and move the cursor down to me to acknowledge this critical information!"
New York's Attorney General is a Democrat.
Think St. Peter's Square or the Champs d'Elysee or Trafalgar Square or (to a lesser extent) the National Mall in Washington DC. When you Google "national mall" you don't get a page full of stories about Martin Luther King or Vietnam War protests or the Million Man March, but nobody seems to think that's absurd; when you do that search, chances are you care more about the place itself than about any particular historical event that took place there.
Which isn't to say that it's right for the Chinese government to force search engines to make it harder to dig up stories about that protest. (You might be surprised that a lot of Chinese do know about it, and simply don't consider it the source of outrage we Westerners do, but they should still be able to find out more about it without interference.) But honestly, the results Google returns on its home page are probably what most Chinese people actually want when they enter that search term. It's the English-language Google results for that term that are out of whack in my opinion.
If you're trying to get me to admit that Google is practicing censorship, rest easy; I never disputed that. My claim is not that they are not censoring, but that the way they're doing it is, at the end of the day, producing a better situation than would exist if they were out of the picture completely. Not every instance of censorship is precisely equivalent, in either a practical or a moral sense.
Is it cynical to base one's opinion on the available evidence? If so, then guilty as charged. As I said in another reply, please name one instance -- just one, is all I ask -- of the Chinese government relaxing its censorship in any way whatsoever in response to a foreign company's refusal to comply. If you can find one I'll happily eat my words, but I bet you can't. *shrug* So do you, and so does everyone debating this issue.As for other companies, Google getting kicked out of China would more likely have exactly the opposite effect from the one you're hoping for: they wouldn't be shamed into doing the same, they'd breathe a sigh of relief and congratulate themselves for not being so foolish, and possibly redouble their censorship efforts to be sure they were steering clear of similar trouble. The only way other companies would move in the same direction would be if Google refused to censor and got away with it for an extended period of time. And China's recent history has very few examples (none that I know of, in fact) of that being a good bet to make.
I think it's an excellent moral justification, unless one's concept of morality is that it should exist in a vacuum! Considering the likely eventual effects of one's possible courses of action and choosing the one that produces the most generally beneficial outcome is, to me, the very essence of moral reasoning.That Google's choice is also the profitable one is good too -- but it's pretty easy to see that Google is not simply choosing maximal profit and justifying it after the fact. If they were, they would have Gmail servers in China rather than forcing Chinese users to use the ones in the US. They are voluntarily giving up webmail market share (hitting Gmail's servers from China is slow) in order to avoid having to turn over information about their users.
Bah, stupid Slashdot filtered out my Chinese characters. (Can't have anyone using Chinese in a discussion about China, now can we?) Go to google.cn and do a search for something and you'll see the message I tried to quote at the bottom of the page.
Millions of Chinese Internet users have better access to information now than they would have if Google had decided to take "the principled position" and refuse to play ball. What seems to fly over the heads of people who advocate that position is that the result would not have been the Chinese government caving in and saying, "Okay, you're right, we shouldn't force you to censor." The result would have been "Okay, then you don't get to do business in our country," and, as much as that might make Westerners feel all warm and fuzzy inside (Hooray! We have held fast in the face of evil!) it would not be a good thing for the millions of people in China who are now able to use Google every day.
Further, not only would Google have been shut out of China, but a homegrown alternative would undoubtedly have taken its place -- and you can bet that the alternative would not have taken the pains Google has to point out to its Chinese users that their search results are in fact censored. That fact is spelled out in no uncertain terms on google.cn's search results pages: they say "" which means more or less "In order to comply with local regulations, some search results have been removed."
Google is helping millions of people more efficiently access information, and it is pointing out the existence of government interference with said information to people who might otherwise be unaware of it.
Taking their ball and going home would improve on that situation how, exactly?
Universal HD (available on DirecTV, possibly other places too) shows Battlestar Galactica in high-def, but they lag a fair bit behind the Sci-Fi schedule.
I just fired up Excel to compare the experience, and I had the same graph in under a minute with no after-the-fact fussing around with properties panels. Its defaults were what I wanted and it let me put my columns in any order (though the UI for specifying column ranges needs a little help IMO).
This was the first time I'd used Excel in maybe a year, and the first time I'd made a graph in Excel in... well, I can't remember the previous time. Whereas I use OOO pretty frequently. So I am no MS fanboy -- but OOO does have some catching up to do in places.
Notice, by the way, that the above example has nothing to do with file formats or proprietary languages. I'm willing to cut OOO some slack when it has trouble rendering a document that uses some obscure undocumented formatting feature of MS Word, but that wasn't the case here.