The most useful thing we can say is not how to make your project "succeed", but to tell you that your attitude doesn't work, and that you need a reality check.
If it seems that it is only you who gets all those dismissive responses, perhaps it's time to consider the possibility that the problem is yourself, not everybody else.
And if you're just for recognition instead of money, just state what brilliant idea you have in your mind, and at least you got a slashdot post to point at to claim credit when the idea goes popular.
It sounds like you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, and you don't know this. And it sounds like what you do is either impossible, or easily done within a week by a competent programmer.
I've heard it said that much of the Chinese government's restrictions on free speech, protest, etc. are to maintain social stability.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason? If so, why?
My take.
China has historically been a unitarian state. And no matter how you look at it, China is a *huge* country, and for a thousand years or so, the only one that actually managed to more or less hold itself together. Most other large empires simply dissolved into smaller states within a relatively short period.
And thus, particularly when China become "united" under one government during the Qin-Han periods (around 200BC), most of the scholars and intellectuals were concerned how to make this huge behemoth government work. There were quite a few schools of thought, mostly adapting and refining the ideas that floated around in earlier periods. I describe the two mainstream ones:
The "legalists" believed in rule *by* law, using incentives and punishments to make people keep in line with the government and boosting government efficiency. And by "punishment", I mean harsh punishments such as body mutilations for those who do not obey. The ruler sits on top of this system, and is above it, and is the only one who steers it. Everyone else is subject to the law.
The "confucians" believed in "cultural education", or what I call "propaganda". They sought to achieve social harmony by advocating obedience and subservience to higher authorities, and maintaining a strict social hierarchy consisting of the Emperor at the top, then various nobility and officials in the middle, then the commoners. The commoners would defer authority to higher ups, and in turn, the authorities should treat the commoners as if they were their children.
It should be obvious from the above why the idea of free speech never developed. The only kind of open political disagreement allowed was between high officials, and between high officials and the Emperor. Historically, it is a *virtue* for officials to admonish and risk being executed by the Emperor. I'm not kidding you. Historically, the price of speaking the truth, speaking for justice, speaking for a better society, is risk of death if your views happen to be different from the ruler.
It is under these conditions that Chinese culture developed. And historically, when China was divided into different states or factions, there were constant wars between those states. Millions if not billions of people are killed in these civil wars, and they happen *every time* the government is not strong enough to hold the nation together.
This is the only reason why the Chinese people have tolerated authoritarian governments one by one -- yes it's bad, but the alternatives simply stink.
If you bothered to quote it, you might as well quote the "elements" required to establish economic duress too. (By the way, they are all requirements, merely one doesn't suffice)
A fire department demanding a huge sum before putting out the fire *might* suffice for #1 "Wrongful or improper threat", depending on jurisdiction and the general position of the courts/judges. But definitely wouldn't suffice for #4 "The other party caused the financial distress".
It's been a while since I've studied contracts, but my faint memory of what is needed to establish economic duress is along the lines of what is written in the wikipedia article. One additional observation is that economic duress is pretty hard to establish (at least in the laws of jurisdictions i'm familiar with), given the traditional common law doctrine of "freedom of contract", and a general reluctance to make the courts a place to redeem bad deals.
By the way, I wonder whether a house burning down can be a bit more than merely economic duress, but I wouldn't want to drill into there.
If you're counting civil war casualties, economic failures, etc., then yeah, probably not *just* 50 Million.
The Amercian cold-war propaganda would like you to believe that they are all caused by an "evil mind" behind the communist regime. Drink your koolaid as you please.
And what would you want the direct descendants to do for their past "crimes", suppose the allegations are valid? Commit seppuku?
Some languages (the "dynamic") ones are much harder to compile into fast, static code.
Take the expression "a.b.c()" in Javascript. You'd at least need two hash table lookups to determine the type and value of b and c. I say at least, since you'd potentially have to look into the prototype and stuff.
In contrast, in C++ a similar expression could very likely be compiled into a single memory location. There's a reason why the "fast" C/C++ languages are designed to be so archaic and verbose. They are designed for the compiler to produce fast code, not for the ease of the programmer.
There's a reason why despite the battles in Javascript performance between IE, FF, Opera and Chrome, no one have really gotten it close to C/C++ speeds.
Not really. If enough people want those filesystems to cough up the money and resources to hire those developers, I can imagine that things will still work out somewhat...
It means we can breathe easy that a lot of crypto out there is now provably secure.
Wrong. It only means that the crypto based on NP-Complete problems are provably secure on classical computers.
Fact #1: RSA and many other crypto algorithms are not based on NP-Complete problems. Fact #2: While no sane person will bet that Quantum computers can efficiently solve NPC problems, this has yet to be proven. Fact #3: P!=NP does not imply that it will be easy to make crypto systems out of NP Complete problems. In fact (AFAIK) the reason why most crypto is based on weaker problems (eg. Integer Factorization) instead of NPC problems is because a random instance of an NPC problem can be easy to solve or approximate (for example, imagine a travelling salesman on a graph that resembles a linked list). Proving a crypto scheme secure probably involves having to prove that EVERY instance of the problem generated by the scheme is (very likely) hard enough that computers wouldn't be able to solve in reasonable time. This may actually be harder than proving P!=NP itself.
Proving that there are classes of NP that have no P just suggests certain crytographic algorithms MIGHT be NP.
Not a CS person here, but I know enough to nitpick. A problem that is in NP does not imply it is "hard". In fact, all the "easy" problems that are in P (eg. binary search, etc.) are also in NP. A more valid (but admittedly clumsy) restatement would be:
Proving that there are decision problems in NP that are not in P just suggests certain cryptographic algorithms MIGHT not be in P (or "MIGHT be 'hard'").
I do. I lose track of the releases when there's just one in every three years. I mean, I've used Woody for so long that Sarge always seems to be the new release code name......
But then, tell me why XP is older or newer than Vista? And why 2000 is older than 7?
As for figuring out when to upgrade... you'll know when to upgrade as you grow impatient as the world moves forward and yet you're still using antique versions of software from 3 years ago... Or, if you're perfectly happy to keep the old versions, you'll get another nudge when the Debian security team announces that they no longer support the older version.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been hearing lately that Apple is *worse* than Microsoft.
Please enlighten me how it is so.
I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.)
"Hello World" app in Debian: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/hello :)
a reliability of 1.0 equates to never fail.
Not really. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely
The most useful thing we can say is not how to make your project "succeed", but to tell you that your attitude doesn't work, and that you need a reality check.
If it seems that it is only you who gets all those dismissive responses, perhaps it's time to consider the possibility that the problem is yourself, not everybody else.
And if you're just for recognition instead of money, just state what brilliant idea you have in your mind, and at least you got a slashdot post to point at to claim credit when the idea goes popular.
Honestly, is this a bad joke, or a troll?
It sounds like you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, and you don't know this. And it sounds like what you do is either impossible, or easily done within a week by a competent programmer.
This is a prime example of a false dichotomy.
This is a prime example of a smart ass.
If passwords are as unique as walks, this could be used to violate privacy!!
Sorry :)
I've heard it said that much of the Chinese government's restrictions on free speech, protest, etc. are to maintain social stability.
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason? If so, why?
My take.
China has historically been a unitarian state. And no matter how you look at it, China is a *huge* country, and for a thousand years or so, the only one that actually managed to more or less hold itself together. Most other large empires simply dissolved into smaller states within a relatively short period.
And thus, particularly when China become "united" under one government during the Qin-Han periods (around 200BC), most of the scholars and intellectuals were concerned how to make this huge behemoth government work. There were quite a few schools of thought, mostly adapting and refining the ideas that floated around in earlier periods. I describe the two mainstream ones:
The "legalists" believed in rule *by* law, using incentives and punishments to make people keep in line with the government and boosting government efficiency. And by "punishment", I mean harsh punishments such as body mutilations for those who do not obey. The ruler sits on top of this system, and is above it, and is the only one who steers it. Everyone else is subject to the law.
The "confucians" believed in "cultural education", or what I call "propaganda". They sought to achieve social harmony by advocating obedience and subservience to higher authorities, and maintaining a strict social hierarchy consisting of the Emperor at the top, then various nobility and officials in the middle, then the commoners. The commoners would defer authority to higher ups, and in turn, the authorities should treat the commoners as if they were their children.
It should be obvious from the above why the idea of free speech never developed. The only kind of open political disagreement allowed was between high officials, and between high officials and the Emperor. Historically, it is a *virtue* for officials to admonish and risk being executed by the Emperor. I'm not kidding you. Historically, the price of speaking the truth, speaking for justice, speaking for a better society, is risk of death if your views happen to be different from the ruler.
It is under these conditions that Chinese culture developed. And historically, when China was divided into different states or factions, there were constant wars between those states. Millions if not billions of people are killed in these civil wars, and they happen *every time* the government is not strong enough to hold the nation together.
This is the only reason why the Chinese people have tolerated authoritarian governments one by one -- yes it's bad, but the alternatives simply stink.
I hope that answers your question.
Funniest comment I've read in a while.
Cao ni ma de b, bie zai zhe diao wo men zhong gwo ren de lian hao ma.
And I say this living two streets away from one of the best places to pick up Chinese chicks in the world.
If you bothered to quote it, you might as well quote the "elements" required to establish economic duress too. (By the way, they are all requirements, merely one doesn't suffice)
A fire department demanding a huge sum before putting out the fire *might* suffice for #1 "Wrongful or improper threat", depending on jurisdiction and the general position of the courts/judges. But definitely wouldn't suffice for #4 "The other party caused the financial distress".
It's been a while since I've studied contracts, but my faint memory of what is needed to establish economic duress is along the lines of what is written in the wikipedia article. One additional observation is that economic duress is pretty hard to establish (at least in the laws of jurisdictions i'm familiar with), given the traditional common law doctrine of "freedom of contract", and a general reluctance to make the courts a place to redeem bad deals.
By the way, I wonder whether a house burning down can be a bit more than merely economic duress, but I wouldn't want to drill into there.
IANAL.
Then why do you think Doctors are paid for medical expenses for treatment of cancer (suppose not covered by insurance)?
massacred/killed/genocided - Citation Needed?
If you're counting civil war casualties, economic failures, etc., then yeah, probably not *just* 50 Million.
The Amercian cold-war propaganda would like you to believe that they are all caused by an "evil mind" behind the communist regime. Drink your koolaid as you please.
And what would you want the direct descendants to do for their past "crimes", suppose the allegations are valid? Commit seppuku?
A really good lawyer finds a good cause in almost any situation.
Who cares if it is some obscure rule in a footnote, or some procedural glitch that the other party has overlooked.
As of now, the Chinese government is denying that there is an embargo over Rare Earth exports.
http://english.cri.cn/6826/2010/09/24/1821s596078.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTKB00705420100924
There might still be some element of truth to it, but all the reports are getting confusing.
Some languages (the "dynamic") ones are much harder to compile into fast, static code.
Take the expression "a.b.c()" in Javascript. You'd at least need two hash table lookups to determine the type and value of b and c. I say at least, since you'd potentially have to look into the prototype and stuff.
In contrast, in C++ a similar expression could very likely be compiled into a single memory location. There's a reason why the "fast" C/C++ languages are designed to be so archaic and verbose. They are designed for the compiler to produce fast code, not for the ease of the programmer.
There's a reason why despite the battles in Javascript performance between IE, FF, Opera and Chrome, no one have really gotten it close to C/C++ speeds.
I fail to see why a tablet with Linux pre-installed and big "web" icon on the start-up screen would not be just as good as the iPad.
Neither do I. Point me to such a tablet that has good performance and usability and stability, and I'd be tempted to buy it.
Not really. If enough people want those filesystems to cough up the money and resources to hire those developers, I can imagine that things will still work out somewhat...
Maybe referrer problem. Try copy and pasting manually.
http://imgur.com/4R1D4
Welcome to China.
A more accurate translation would be "dry fried duck", but I suppose there's a more elegant translation.
---
http://blog-imgs-38.fc2.com/o/t/t/ottovon/_20gb601.jpg
Welcome to Hong Kong -- this one actually made it to local news headlines for its hilarity.
[ Bold/top line is original text, middle line is google's translations (which sucks), and bottom is what it really means ]
Which part of "But if you like it, nice to have the choice" don't you understand?
It means we can breathe easy that a lot of crypto out there is now provably secure.
Wrong. It only means that the crypto based on NP-Complete problems are provably secure on classical computers.
Fact #1: RSA and many other crypto algorithms are not based on NP-Complete problems.
Fact #2: While no sane person will bet that Quantum computers can efficiently solve NPC problems, this has yet to be proven.
Fact #3: P!=NP does not imply that it will be easy to make crypto systems out of NP Complete problems. In fact (AFAIK) the reason why most crypto is based on weaker problems (eg. Integer Factorization) instead of NPC problems is because a random instance of an NPC problem can be easy to solve or approximate (for example, imagine a travelling salesman on a graph that resembles a linked list). Proving a crypto scheme secure probably involves having to prove that EVERY instance of the problem generated by the scheme is (very likely) hard enough that computers wouldn't be able to solve in reasonable time. This may actually be harder than proving P!=NP itself.
Proving that there are classes of NP that have no P just suggests certain crytographic algorithms MIGHT be NP.
Not a CS person here, but I know enough to nitpick. A problem that is in NP does not imply it is "hard". In fact, all the "easy" problems that are in P (eg. binary search, etc.) are also in NP. A more valid (but admittedly clumsy) restatement would be:
Proving that there are decision problems in NP that are not in P just suggests certain cryptographic algorithms MIGHT not be in P (or "MIGHT be 'hard'").
By the way, a lot of the crypto related problems are suspected to be in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP
I do. I lose track of the releases when there's just one in every three years. I mean, I've used Woody for so long that Sarge always seems to be the new release code name......
But then, tell me why XP is older or newer than Vista? And why 2000 is older than 7?
As for figuring out when to upgrade... you'll know when to upgrade as you grow impatient as the world moves forward and yet you're still using antique versions of software from 3 years ago... Or, if you're perfectly happy to keep the old versions, you'll get another nudge when the Debian security team announces that they no longer support the older version.
And your password does not contain the name of your ex-girlfriend!