In an adversarial system, the defense is supposed to put forward the most credible reasonable explanation to account for the evidence put forward by the prosecution.
The jury isn't a team of conspiracy makers who look for "reasonable explanations" for every piece of evidence, the defense has to provide the explanations and their task is to evaluate whether the explanations are credible.
No, it's very clear that his personality quirks played a large factor here. For instance, the judge laughed at him when he described not liking to make eye contact. Some of the jurors said that the fact that they thought he was odd played a large part in their decision. That's not the kind of thing that should remove reasonable doubt.
No, but where did you get that the jury convicted *only* because of his personality quirks? From what I read, the jury didn't like Hans (nor did the judge), but I suppose they have seen and heard much more than those quirks in court, things like evidence that are actually relevant to the case.
I mean, his personality sure didn't help him get away with it (people who put up a more pretty defense might... but that's another problem), but don't be so rash to think that the jury convicted *only* because he was a weird guy.
The fact that it turns out the jury got it right suggests that their decision making process was right. And mind you, "suggests", not prove.
On close reading this seems to be painfully close to the standard of proof "on balance of probabilities" usually applied in civil cases. Heck, "plain matter of buying and selling, or some such commonplace transaction" confuses even more.
In the end, what constitutes "reasonable" doubt can't be precisely defined. That's why there's a jury system, so that the standards of "normal" people could be applied. We all know that jury selection could be a contentious matter though.
Every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity, but at least the others have the decency to bow their heads and lie about it.
You're right to a certain degree, yet I don't know whether I personally would like to see the Chinese government lie about their deeds. It's a side effect of a lack of democratic process -- those in power don't need to please the unwashed masses with sugar coated words, and obviously that translates to a relative lack of ability to please foreign audiences. But that in itself doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.
I mean, if you accept that every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity (from time to time?), why not at least be honest and admit it's the darker side of human nature? Last I heard, honesty was a virtue. Or have those days gone by and all that matters now is the looks on the outside?
You may have problems with the Chinese government blatantly doing things considered atrocious in more civilized countries, but then sometimes I look at the USA and are relieved that my government isn't telling *jokes* (not even "lies") like "War on Terror". Both aren't nice, but it's the matter of which poison you're willing to take.
-- That being said, some of the more famous accusations towards the Chinese government are simply magnified out of proportion. If you really investigate into the details you with a neutral, non-biased viewpoint, you might realize that they aren't as bad as how most western media paints them.
Yes if it's not specific to the topic. You must be new here:)
Use the support forums of the distribution of your choice. Slashdot is to discuss metaphysical matters like whether Novel is EVIL, whether Saint Stallman would prevail over flying chairs, whether the Penguin would achieve world domination, whether the Daemon has died, and so on...
Sure, if he uses your ideas you will get referenced Which university hands out PhDs for dissertations with slashdot comments as references? Sign me up!!
Unless you have a really broad definition of "Computer Science".... what you've mentioned is computer engineering at its finest.
Computer Science isn't concerned with putting people on the moon. It isn't concerned with the finite physical limits of the hardware you have around, and definitely not concerned with a particular type of assembly language.
You might be correct that CS has a role to play in setting out the theoretical groundwork for these things to happen, but at first glance I don't see anything deep particularly on CS.
My impression to those pictures would be that it's great and spectacular engineering, but it's slightly different from what I perceive CS to be. Those pictures would be great for the Electrical or Mechanical Engineering Depts, or even Physics...
Point me a war which isn't a civil war, not a border conflict, and not a war China got into because it was invaded (or where invasion was imminent), in the last 300 years.
I think that's a reasonable qualification. Basically all you guys are worrying is that when China becomes a "superpower" it will start outright invading other countries. *That's* the stupid thing.
I'm Chinese, and I can read Chinese without any problems.
Depending on the number of Kanji in a piece of Japanese text, I can extract the meaning sometimes better than automatic online translations. I don't know any Japanese, but experience is that most of the important words are written in Kanji, while the Japanese characters are usually there for grammatical purposes.
Usually the problem when reading Japanese is the heavy use of Katakana, due to Japanese adopting a lot of western terms (even for things not of western origin).
For meaning of the characters, I can tell you that they aren't exactly the same, but are similar enough that usually Chinese are able to extract the general idea. The fact that Kanji was introduced to Japan a long time ago isn't really relevant. With a little bit of training a person who's proficient in (modern) Chinese can read ancient Chinese texts up to 2000 years ago (in its original form) without problem. The Chinese language has been remarkably stable/stagnant in the past 2000 years...
I'm not sure whether the Japanese could read Chinese without training though, I think they learn less Kanji than Chinese learn Chinese characters, and a difficult piece of Chinese text might be indecipherable...
There is the Chinese government. Then there are the Chinese "Nationalists", who IMHO are a bit insane. Most of these people are relatively young Chinese, having been indoctrinated a bit too heavily on "nationalistic" values, and probably aren't in any government positions.
The ones who threaten to "hack the universe" and "hitting powerplants" are the latter. The ones who claimed they didn't have the sophistication to do it is the former. (not that I fully believe the claims though)
Interestingly, people are saying "stop confusing the people from the government -- the Chinese government are NOT the Chinese people", and yet comments like this gets modded up:-/
The whole cultural revolution thing was basically an insane endemic.
You won't find the Chinese government saying it this bluntly, but any reasonable Chinese would agree it's not one of the finer moments in Chinese history.
That's like the US is "attempting" an occupation of Texas Given that Texas is the home of the current USA president, and that he seems to be trying to undermine the USA constitution, the more apt description would be "Texas attempting an occupation of the USA";-p
You must be Chinese because you know nothing of Chinese history. Heh. And you're the expert now?
How about the Korean war? As I understood it, it was the "western powers" who decided to invade Korea to install a puppet government, and their troops got dangerously close to the Chinese borders. At that time China was considered a "hostile commie state" and if China didn't do something about it there was a high risk of being invaded next.
And Tibet? There wasn't a "Tibetan war". You may be right on a forced occupation, but it wasn't war.
China is still slaughtering peaceful political dissenters. Source? Imprisonment yes, but I've yet to hear people actually being "slaughtered" over this...
And as a Chinese person you probably know nothing of the slaughter of dissenters at Tiananmen Square. And how is this related to "war"? If you're insisting on viewing the Chinese government as evil animals, it still doesn't refute the GP's argument that China isn't *stupid*. I'll give you a view consistent with both -- dissenters are easier to slaughter than militants of hostile enemy states.
China gets in wars/military actions like anyone else, but when they do it, the purpose is to take away freedoms. As I understand it there's no ulterior intent of China to invade other countries just to take away freedoms. That's just plain stupid, and that's what the GP is trying to refute. I don't mind people saying China is "evil" (many governments are), but I really can't stand it when stupid people assume that the Chinese government (and the Chinese in general) are as stupid as they are.
Of course, that being said, I have no idea what the GP is trying to say in general... (sounds like a rant by a drunken troll on crack) But the precise sentence you quoted is spot on. The point is it seems that people assume that China, when it gets "strong", would involve itself in stupid wars on intangible "ideologies", like "depriving other people of freedom", "anti-democracy", "evil oppression", etc. That's just bullsht.
If China was really that war-mongering, it'd have invaded Taiwan already. Instead, it's going through negotiations to improve cross strait relationships (as long as the Taiwanese government isn't pressing for outright "independence", whatever that means)... if it's not invading Taiwan, why on Earth would it try to invade other countries?
I guess you might be kidding, but have you tried "dim sum" for breakfast?
And well China is a geographically vast place. Different places have different preferences for breakfast, I'm just talking about the local tradition here.
We in the west have squandered our soft power and shown our hard power to be just about adequate for securing two barely armed third world shitholes. This just shows that might is not right.
It's not that the west is not "powerful" enough, but that their actions are not "just". When the occupation doesn't have at least a certain level of support from the local population, you can't really do anything, unless you're prepared to kill everybody (including the civilians -- give then a gun and they become militants).
The raw "power" was shown and proved when the USA army took over Iraq in matter of weeks. What's lacking is diplomacy, and good intentions.
Just a few articles back there was a discussion on Bush's impeachment and the inaction of Congress. Since Congress is democratically elected, it seems that many Americans who bother to dissent only do it by humiliating Bush & Co. to the world, but not doing anything substantial internally. In short, dissent to Americans seems to be shouting "OUR GOVERNMENT SUCKS" to the world and doing nothing about it.
Things are a bit different in China.
I don't know whether it's directly related, but in Chinese culture, bickering over family matters in public is rather shameful. There's a saying "shameful matters in the family should not be spread outside", and it's generally faux pas to intervene with another family's matters, and conventional wisdom is to restrain from doing so.
The country, in Chinese culture, is a huge extension of the concept of family. Perhaps it is this reason you won't see a lot of Chinese criticizing the government, and since bringing westerners into the equation is considered somewhat traitorous, you won't see a lot of criticisms written in English.
Of course, that being said, in the current political atmosphere people are more cautious in saying things, but you're wrong if you think the Chinese never criticize their government. They may not like *you* giving snide remarks etc (it's like if you hate your parents you still won't be happy if somebody calls your mom a b*ch), but that doesn't mean they are all sheep.
I agree that the "anti-anti-Chinese" movement has gone too far. But seriously, the anti-Chinese movement had gone too far for far too long. Decades of unfair criticism from western anti-Chinese propaganda does build up to rather intense sentiments that are bound to explode at a point.
So you mean, speech is free as long as it doesn't make any (illegal) impact? I find it hard to draw a line...
Say if I said "I think Santa Claus is the devil!", and some religious nuts go out and kill every person in a Santa costume, should be my speech be protected?
By the way, I think I do see a subtle distinction, and appreciate your points... but somehow to me the subtlety sounds kind of like "speech is free as long as it doesn't make any real impact".... which somehow defeats the purpose.... (I'm seriously suspecting I'm wrong on this one, but I really can't think of a better way to look at it)
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't open source supposed to be on technical merits rather than... uh I dunno, other things?
Anyway I never used reiserfs. ext3 for data I would hate to lose, and xfs for large files (eg. porn collection? ;-p)
and with hindsight: because (d) he did it.
In an adversarial system, the defense is supposed to put forward the most credible reasonable explanation to account for the evidence put forward by the prosecution.
The jury isn't a team of conspiracy makers who look for "reasonable explanations" for every piece of evidence, the defense has to provide the explanations and their task is to evaluate whether the explanations are credible.
No, it's very clear that his personality quirks played a large factor here. For instance, the judge laughed at him when he described not liking to make eye contact. Some of the jurors said that the fact that they thought he was odd played a large part in their decision. That's not the kind of thing that should remove reasonable doubt.
No, but where did you get that the jury convicted *only* because of his personality quirks? From what I read, the jury didn't like Hans (nor did the judge), but I suppose they have seen and heard much more than those quirks in court, things like evidence that are actually relevant to the case.
I mean, his personality sure didn't help him get away with it (people who put up a more pretty defense might... but that's another problem), but don't be so rash to think that the jury convicted *only* because he was a weird guy.
The fact that it turns out the jury got it right suggests that their decision making process was right. And mind you, "suggests", not prove.
Not great.
On close reading this seems to be painfully close to the standard of proof "on balance of probabilities" usually applied in civil cases. Heck, "plain matter of buying and selling, or some such commonplace transaction" confuses even more.
In the end, what constitutes "reasonable" doubt can't be precisely defined. That's why there's a jury system, so that the standards of "normal" people could be applied. We all know that jury selection could be a contentious matter though.
Every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity, but at least the others have the decency to bow their heads and lie about it.
You're right to a certain degree, yet I don't know whether I personally would like to see the Chinese government lie about their deeds. It's a side effect of a lack of democratic process -- those in power don't need to please the unwashed masses with sugar coated words, and obviously that translates to a relative lack of ability to please foreign audiences. But that in itself doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.
I mean, if you accept that every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity (from time to time?), why not at least be honest and admit it's the darker side of human nature? Last I heard, honesty was a virtue. Or have those days gone by and all that matters now is the looks on the outside?
You may have problems with the Chinese government blatantly doing things considered atrocious in more civilized countries, but then sometimes I look at the USA and are relieved that my government isn't telling *jokes* (not even "lies") like "War on Terror". Both aren't nice, but it's the matter of which poison you're willing to take.
--
That being said, some of the more famous accusations towards the Chinese government are simply magnified out of proportion. If you really investigate into the details you with a neutral, non-biased viewpoint, you might realize that they aren't as bad as how most western media paints them.
I know that the USA owns the Internet, but in a perfect world, the .mil, .gov, .edu, etc TLDs should be .mil.us, .gov.us, and .edu.us respectively.
Yes if it's not specific to the topic. You must be new here :)
Use the support forums of the distribution of your choice. Slashdot is to discuss metaphysical matters like whether Novel is EVIL, whether Saint Stallman would prevail over flying chairs, whether the Penguin would achieve world domination, whether the Daemon has died, and so on...
Unless you have a really broad definition of "Computer Science".... what you've mentioned is computer engineering at its finest.
Computer Science isn't concerned with putting people on the moon. It isn't concerned with the finite physical limits of the hardware you have around, and definitely not concerned with a particular type of assembly language.
You might be correct that CS has a role to play in setting out the theoretical groundwork for these things to happen, but at first glance I don't see anything deep particularly on CS.
My impression to those pictures would be that it's great and spectacular engineering, but it's slightly different from what I perceive CS to be. Those pictures would be great for the Electrical or Mechanical Engineering Depts, or even Physics...
I'm too lazy to read all the articles there.
Point me a war which isn't a civil war, not a border conflict, and not a war China got into because it was invaded (or where invasion was imminent), in the last 300 years.
I think that's a reasonable qualification. Basically all you guys are worrying is that when China becomes a "superpower" it will start outright invading other countries. *That's* the stupid thing.
I'm Chinese, and I can read Chinese without any problems.
Depending on the number of Kanji in a piece of Japanese text, I can extract the meaning sometimes better than automatic online translations. I don't know any Japanese, but experience is that most of the important words are written in Kanji, while the Japanese characters are usually there for grammatical purposes.
Usually the problem when reading Japanese is the heavy use of Katakana, due to Japanese adopting a lot of western terms (even for things not of western origin).
For meaning of the characters, I can tell you that they aren't exactly the same, but are similar enough that usually Chinese are able to extract the general idea. The fact that Kanji was introduced to Japan a long time ago isn't really relevant. With a little bit of training a person who's proficient in (modern) Chinese can read ancient Chinese texts up to 2000 years ago (in its original form) without problem. The Chinese language has been remarkably stable/stagnant in the past 2000 years...
I'm not sure whether the Japanese could read Chinese without training though, I think they learn less Kanji than Chinese learn Chinese characters, and a difficult piece of Chinese text might be indecipherable...
There are a few "they"s.
:-/
There is the Chinese government.
Then there are the Chinese "Nationalists", who IMHO are a bit insane. Most of these people are relatively young Chinese, having been indoctrinated a bit too heavily on "nationalistic" values, and probably aren't in any government positions.
The ones who threaten to "hack the universe" and "hitting powerplants" are the latter.
The ones who claimed they didn't have the sophistication to do it is the former. (not that I fully believe the claims though)
Interestingly, people are saying "stop confusing the people from the government -- the Chinese government are NOT the Chinese people", and yet comments like this gets modded up
The whole cultural revolution thing was basically an insane endemic.
You won't find the Chinese government saying it this bluntly, but any reasonable Chinese would agree it's not one of the finer moments in Chinese history.
Everyone blunders once a while...
Of course, that being said, I have no idea what the GP is trying to say in general... (sounds like a rant by a drunken troll on crack) But the precise sentence you quoted is spot on. The point is it seems that people assume that China, when it gets "strong", would involve itself in stupid wars on intangible "ideologies", like "depriving other people of freedom", "anti-democracy", "evil oppression", etc. That's just bullsht.
If China was really that war-mongering, it'd have invaded Taiwan already. Instead, it's going through negotiations to improve cross strait relationships (as long as the Taiwanese government isn't pressing for outright "independence", whatever that means)
Please enlighten me.
I guess you might be kidding, but have you tried "dim sum" for breakfast?
And well China is a geographically vast place. Different places have different preferences for breakfast, I'm just talking about the local tradition here.
We already have slave races. We call them animals...
Unless "hostile" means "leveraging an economic advantage over another", please enlighten me in what ways China is "hostile"...
Everyone knows that all Chinese citizens work in a sweatshop for the Chinese communists... ... even hackers.
A billion uneducated workers pounding on keyboards would eventually produce a sequence of packets which could break into Congress...
It's not that the west is not "powerful" enough, but that their actions are not "just". When the occupation doesn't have at least a certain level of support from the local population, you can't really do anything, unless you're prepared to kill everybody (including the civilians -- give then a gun and they become militants).
The raw "power" was shown and proved when the USA army took over Iraq in matter of weeks. What's lacking is diplomacy, and good intentions.
Interesting.
Just a few articles back there was a discussion on Bush's impeachment and the inaction of Congress. Since Congress is democratically elected, it seems that many Americans who bother to dissent only do it by humiliating Bush & Co. to the world, but not doing anything substantial internally. In short, dissent to Americans seems to be shouting "OUR GOVERNMENT SUCKS" to the world and doing nothing about it.
Things are a bit different in China.
I don't know whether it's directly related, but in Chinese culture, bickering over family matters in public is rather shameful. There's a saying "shameful matters in the family should not be spread outside", and it's generally faux pas to intervene with another family's matters, and conventional wisdom is to restrain from doing so.
The country, in Chinese culture, is a huge extension of the concept of family. Perhaps it is this reason you won't see a lot of Chinese criticizing the government, and since bringing westerners into the equation is considered somewhat traitorous, you won't see a lot of criticisms written in English.
Of course, that being said, in the current political atmosphere people are more cautious in saying things, but you're wrong if you think the Chinese never criticize their government. They may not like *you* giving snide remarks etc (it's like if you hate your parents you still won't be happy if somebody calls your mom a b*ch), but that doesn't mean they are all sheep.
I agree that the "anti-anti-Chinese" movement has gone too far. But seriously, the anti-Chinese movement had gone too far for far too long. Decades of unfair criticism from western anti-Chinese propaganda does build up to rather intense sentiments that are bound to explode at a point.
The subject and sig of your comment.... hmmm...
I don't know what to say.
Interesting.
So you mean, speech is free as long as it doesn't make any (illegal) impact? I find it hard to draw a line...
Say if I said "I think Santa Claus is the devil!", and some religious nuts go out and kill every person in a Santa costume, should be my speech be protected?
By the way, I think I do see a subtle distinction, and appreciate your points... but somehow to me the subtlety sounds kind of like "speech is free as long as it doesn't make any real impact".... which somehow defeats the purpose.... (I'm seriously suspecting I'm wrong on this one, but I really can't think of a better way to look at it)