I live in Asia so maybe I can chime in.
What I've found interesting while living in Asia is how much more pervasive spirituality and religion is there. It's embedded in the culture. Right.
Astrology there is more complex and taken more seriously there. You can buy books on how to use spiritual guides to help win the lottery. People who gamble aren't rational (a rational person wouldn't play in games aiming to win where his expected gain is negative) so you could toss that one out as universal phenomenon.
They still believe in things like phrenology. I can't count the times I've heard people say that a taller forehead means you're more intelligent. In China a school recently stated that kids with flatter heads were more apt to do poorly in school. Pretty much any part of someone's body can supposedly signify something. Well, yea. Such things are pretty prevalent here. My parents have a theory that people with longer/larger earlobes have longer lives, and people who have short/small/non-existent earlobes are likely to die early. They actually look for such signs when they see somebody die early, or when they see somebody well into their 90's on TV, etc. I mean, even they don't blindly believe in it 100% and try to look for evidence (probably not in a scientific manner, but they aren't scientists so I'd give them some slack) I don't have any pre-established views on the matter, except that I have less skepticism to these things than to the view that the Earth is 5000 years old.
No one really seems to question it. I think the reason is that there's no reason to. It doesn't interfere with normal day decision making. People don't support/reject things like gay marriage, abortion, etc because their religion tells them how to live. The actual impact of Asian mysticism on important decisions is like the impact of Santa Claus on Christmas. Largely symbolic, if even that.
The problem with most western religions is that they tell you how to live your life, and they tell you that they are the one and only truth. Most Asian mysticism doesn't claim so, and some practitioners will even tell you to take what they say with a grain of salt. Most Asian religions simply tell you what they believe WHEN ASKED, and are perfectly OK if you don't agree. There aren't any missionaries of Asian religions knocking on your door trying to tell you that their God is the best and tries every trick in their handbook to convince you of that.
Of course there are those who blindly believe in stuff like Feng Shui, etc. and spend thousands if not millions on hiring Feng-shui practitioners to set up their homes for them, but even those people restrict their superstitions in the confines of their privacy, and they don't try to legislate their neighborhood to be arranged in the harmony of Yin and Yang.
this certainly isn't unique to the United States. What's unique in the USA (mostly from what I hear on slashdot) is that religious people are actually trying to push for teaching ID in science classes. Even with the prevalence of Asian religion/superstition, the "creationist" stuff are taught in like kindergarten/early primary school as cultural stories (on par with Santa Claus) and not touted as having any connection with the truth.
Though, admittedly here in Hong Kong, many schools are organized by religious groups, and the best ones certainly are. And last I heard there wasn't any mention of evolution in high school science subjects, probably due to this very reason. Personal experience with studying in a school with religious connections is that besides being forced to study a subject called "religious studies" you don't have to put up with much religious crap.
Taoism is very much considered a religion, but it is also very much simply a celebration of mystery. Disclaimer: my thinking is extremely Taoist, though I've only recently realized.
Taoism, as I understand it, in its pure form, is a philosophy. It's a philosophy that requires a rather non-trivial amount intuition and contemplation to fully grasp, and somehow it's hard to explain in words. You can't simply teach it. The religious aspects of Taoism, in my view, is merely an exploitation of the mysticism surrounding the Taoist philosophy into superstitious beliefs for the unwashed minds.
And I don't think Taoism is a celebration of mystery, but more of trying to resolve the mystery.
The classical Taoist view on science would be "yeah it works... but so what? we're above these worldly matters".
The problem of arguing the fine points with religious people is that you'll inevitably inadvertently argue within their framework, and hence validating parts of their argument. You argue whether Jesus is God. Despite the fact that he might not even really existed, and despite the fact that the Bible could have as much historical value than LoTR. You argue whether the Earth is 6000 years old, but even arguing with this proposition gives undue credence to them since it's no better than arguing whether Santa Claus exists.
I mean, if you see a group of respected scientists arguing whether Santa Claus exists, then even if they come up with the conclusion that Santa is probably fake, a reasonable person could still have the lingering thought that *maybe* there's a small chance that he's real...
Embrace and Extend. Only by really understanding and sympathizing with the opponent's side you could win the argument by instilling a sense within them. Even if you don't win, you'll understand more about the other side, and a bit more understanding of the world (even if you don't agree with those views) never hurts.
It's not that big a step from "I shouldn't push down this old lady and steal her purse, because God will be angry" to "I shouldn't push down this old lady and steal her purse because I know it's a shitty thing to do, I'll feel guilty because I know that, I wouldn't want to be pushed down when I get old, and I don't want to live in a society where it's okay to do that to people." So you're basically saying that the "God" moral argument is simply syntactic sugar;-p
On a more serious note about the "ignorance is bliss" part. I think I'm comfortable with the claim that people could believe that they believe in things that they don't believe (wordings intentional). The human mind allows itself to be somewhat inconsistent. I believe if you REALLY try hard enough to dig inner truths and fears from some people, you might be able to get those religious types to admit that "no, in this case I'm better off not knowing the truth". Not a particularly nice thing to do, but I don't think that's impossible.
Yet I think the problem is partly that humans are hardwired to be religious -- by that I mean adhering to a religious social structure and adopting religious dogma.
Some people just *have* to believe in superstitious things. One religion dissolves, another comes into existence to take its place.
Duh. Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic here really. Disclaimer is that I, too, live in a place secular enough where you could stay away from religion if you don't want to.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA, the following discussion is not supposed to be US-centric.
eVoting has a potential to lessen the grips of "representatives" on the political system. Correctly implemented, it lowers the cost of voting, and makes it faster and more efficient, and less prone to error. This means that frequent voting could be more feasible.
In any established democracy, you often run into times where your choices of representatives don't really 100% represent you in matters that you are concerned about. You have situations where you vote for a candidate not because you agree with him(/her) but because you disagree more with the other. You have situations where you agree with the candidate 70%, and have no better choice.
Why do we put up with our representatives making all decisions for us (particularly since we don't agree 100% with them)? In a *REAL* democracy, stretched to the extreme, would be that every significant decision be passed by a majority of the population, directly. Of course, there are problems to this form of democracy, since that would force people to read bills all day instead of doing their work. But there are important issues where a "referendum" would be appropriate -- whether to send troops to a war zone, constitutional amendments, impeachment of high officials, etc.
It also guards against politicians not honoring their vows after getting elected. Usually when politicians are voted into office they get to stay there for a couple of years. During that time the only thing you can do is to hope they don't run amok, and to threaten to vote them out in the next election.
With a more fine grained control over the political process, through more issues being decided by more frequent direct polling, you theoretically solve the above problems by retaining political power instead of delegating it to politicians.
I'll agree that if there's no change to the political system, then eVoting doesn't help much. But my point is that it allows changing the system so that it has a potential to solve some inherent problems. I don't think I've did justice to my point since I've written it hastily, but hopefully you get a rough idea.
Ideally, there should be mathematical proof that the voting machine/network work either absolutely correct or not at all under any circumstances Actually, mathematical proof is overrated for non-"algorithmic" programs. By that I mean programs with little mathematics to be worked on. A proof of djikstra's algorithm's correctness is useful, because its correctness is not (for most people) immediately apparent. A proof of "hello world" is useless. A proof of a program that outputs integers from 1 to N is useless. Useless in that you *could* write a proof, but the program would be simpler than the proof, and easier to verify its correctness.
Keep in mind that a proof (of a program) should be at least simpler and easier to understand than the program itself, otherwise verifying the correctness of the proof would be at least as hard as verifying the correctness of the program.
A voting machine is conceptually simple. Just ask the user for input, and record them. The difference between having a proof and not is that when you don't have a proof, you ask a group of computer scientists / engineers to look at the machine and the program, and if they say "We can't spot any problems", you're reasonably sure that it's correct. When you have a "proof" of the program, you might need mathematicians to verify the proof and say "We can't spot any problems in the proof";-p
Yes and no. It appears that this is a contractual issue. The State of New Jersey signed licensing terms that does not allow an independent party to review the code. The state should not violate that contract. And I'll contract with you that no third party will be allowed to log my internet connection, wiretap my phone conversations, and track my physical and "cyberspace" habits.
I think the classical Turing machine is deterministic (i.e. no randomness involved). So unless I'm terribly mistaken, your example is conceptually wrong.
An example of hard-to-prove (presumably not impossible) is a program that stops until it finds an even number which isn't a product of two prines (Goldbach conjecture):
for n = 4 to infinity:
for a = 2 to n-2:
b = n - a
if a is prime, b is prime: OK
if not OK: halt
You can similarly link proving correctness of a program with even harder mathematical problems. (Intuitively) It's for this reason that the Halting problem is so "computationally" hard.
I'm no computer scientist / mathematician/logician, so feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.
PHP is actually smaller. Don't be deceived. This is a GOOD thing Thousands of functions in the global namespace isn't actually "smaller"...
I can't tell you how many times I've been asking myself "does this name clash with a built in function??" when writing PHP... I agree that.NET has a much larger standard library, but at least I don't have to find out whether they clash with my functions or variables...
Even more, the different classes are orthogonal, so you can mix and match different encodings, formattings, and file operations without the combinatoric explosion of having a separate function for every possible operation. It's an elegant design in my opinion. The problem is that instead of having a separate function for every possible operation, you have separate classes for every possible operation....
OOP is just convenient syntactic sugar. I'm not against it, but going all the way OO introduces problems as the old ones are seemingly solved.
To say a bit more on the matter. I do agree there is a rationale for the Java way of reading files, and in some sense it's superior and provides greater flexibility. But sometimes you just don't need that flexibility and just want to read a damn string from the file... why couldn't there be a "read everything from file into string" method? Admittedly such things are normally not commonly used in large "corporate" projects, but given the huge size of the standard library might as well add that too.
I have a less rosy view. If only out of a realistic assessment or common sense. You don't have soldiers don't wield a weapon, and you don't have soldiers who take beatings without retribution. I haven't read any reports saying the police/soldiers were passively receiving beatings, so you could rebut my view if you could point to any such reports.
Tanks in Beijing was clearly a military decision from somebody high up. A lowly officer could never get tanks running around in the capital city. That's almost the equivalent of having tanks parading in front of the White House.
Have you seen the BBC video where it appears that the protesters burn a soldier alive? No. Any pointers??
I *strongly* suspect the police and/or army at large were *not* armed with any live guns (probably had those stick things to protect themselves) I don't think I can believe that soldiers don't carry guns in places with violent conflict. (This is not "World War IV" yet;-p)
You stretch my points to the extreme.
so there is absolutely no one firewall tools will help? Firewall tools will help. A bit. Not much.
you can't imagine how a curious student might be able to get the tools and pass them out to friends? this escapes your imagination or is impossible for you to contemplate as a possibility? everyone who wants the info already has clean unfettered access? I can. I can also imagine the student obtaining information without using the firewall tools (to give an example, a few days ago I was in Guangzhou, and I could assess slashdot without any hacks. With all the discussion on Chinese politics and stuff on Tienanmen, Tibet etc. that's probably a starter). I can imagine the student creating such tools himself. There are many ways...
the firewall tools will let more people get more info. it will enable curiosity that is not being fulfilled now, it will get into hands through various channels
i can't possibly believe you are trying to tell me otherwise, that you can't imagine how the obvious isn't obvious You assert your statements again and again without giving at least SOME explanation, while I've given mine. Maybe you missed something??
where do you live? hong kong? taiwan? is it possible that your ability to access is a little superior than someone in nanjing? harbin? lanzhou? I live in Hong Kong. As mentioned, I was in mainland China a few days ago, and out of curiosity I tested a few sites to see whether they could be assessed. Slashdot was perfectly fine. Wikipedia was outright blocked. Searching for "July 4th" (i.e. the Tienanmen square incident) on google resulted in google being blocked for a few minutes. Everything else seems OK. I could ssh to my machine back home (Hong Kong). Obviously accessing wikipedia through the ssh connection worked. So, yes, I'm well aware that my access is not just a little superior than those living in the mainland.
you can't imagine someone there who would like info but can't get it? who would get tools and spread them around? do you need some asshole in new york city to make you aware of the obvious? really? You can't imagine Chinese people smart enough to be able to circumvent the firewall themselves? It's not like Chinese people are so stupid that they NEED your tools to circumvent the firewall...
I'm "arguing" because I think *you* misunderstand, and many people misunderstand, and I think your misunderstanding makes things worse for actual freedoms in China (for reasons I've outlined in my first post in this thread). I've put "arguing" in quotes because I really am not, I'm trying to give you another perspective, and if you don't accept it that's fine. You'll be going off thinking that I'm stubborn, and I'll be thinking the same to you.
Ok my final attempt.
Look, I'm not against firewall tools per se. I'm not saying that they don't matter. I'm saying they don't really matter as much as you think they do. I've given my reasons for my claim. Take it or leave it. There's no reason to get emotional here...
[Not trying to disagree with you, I simply hope to provide you with some facts and some alternate perspective.]
Many of the same people or their hand picked successors and protégés are still firmly in power
*Maybe* true regarding your argument about successors. There's this inconvenience with the current tightly controlled political system in China that you can't simply shrug off mistakes by saying "it's the previous administration's fault!". I say "maybe", you might understand why if I add a few facts.
You might have heard about Zhao Ziyang[1] and his role in the Tienanmen incident. He's often described (by western sources, not Chinese propaganda) as "sympathetic stance toward the student demonstrators". My point is that he's probably not the person who ordered the tanks to roll over them, and probably was against any such proposal. If you look closely notice the black and white photo, the current Premier Wen Jiabao is right behind him. I don't think that he was trying to "police" Zhao, so probably a more or less supportive role. My personal conclusion? The people in power in China now are not those who directly supported the forceful suppression of the protests. You might come to different conclusions, but if you take everything into account and think about it without presupposing a conclusion, it really makes you think.
and finally up until very recently in the grand scheme of things the Chinese viewed all outsiders and westerners in particular as "barbarians" or inferior peoples
"Up until very recently" was like more than 100 years ago (probably more like 150 years ago). After defeats in battles with foreign powers (and being outright invaded at a point), there were various movements among intellectuals at that time to "learn from westerners", calls for modernization (following a western model) etc. Nobody since then seriously suggested westerners were "barbarians" or inferior.
and this attitude has served to lessen their willingness to listen to external criticism from the "barbarians" concerning their "internal affairs" or "state secrets".
Not so much due to arrogance than mistrust. I'm pretty sure about that. Nobody in China is stupid enough to claim that western people are "barbarians" or "inferior", but as far as I understand there is a general (overly?) cautious attitude towards western influence, whether they come with good intentions or not. A large part due to the "war" between "western liberal ideals" and "communism" (use of quotes intentional), and the fact that until very recently criticism on China's democratic and human rights status was more of a political tool against China than anything really constructive.
I don't know whether you understand the situation, but this is the reason why the Chinese government is so resistant and indifferent to criticisms by outsiders. Not because they think western people are barbarians...
It is my opinion that this attitude, while less spoken of now that China is part of the WTO is still pervasive, at least among the older generations of Chinese
"Older generations?" More like ancestors;-p
Well to speak fairly there is admittedly some attitude that the "Chinese" way of doing things is better, but usually that comes with some more or less apparently rational explanation (look up on, eg. "Asian values"). Everybody has some "our way of doing things is better" attitude, I don't think the Chinese is particularly close minded.
Remember that it was Mao who said, "Political power flows from the barrel of the gun" and they still hang his portrait pro
the more access there is to more media sources, no matter what the source, and the more you are allowed to pursue that media without fear of repercussion or censure, the healthier the body politic, and the healthier the society I agree with you. Totally.
My point is firewall circumvention tools will only be used by those who are interested in knowing what their government doesn't want them to know (unless you're going to write a worm that spams infected hosts about Tibet, Tienanmen and whatnot). And those who wish to know those things already do, so it's not much help.
but the whole point is you will have LESS uninformed fools. and if that fact carries no weight with you, if that point fails to make an impression on you, then you're an empty useless negative cynic My point again, writing firewall circumvention tools don't lead to less uninformed fools. Maybe it would be of some convenience to those who are already seeking out censored materials, but you've got to tell me how your wonderful tools is supposed to reach uninformed fools.
your position is that censorship and propaganda don't actually effect people's opinions, and people's opinions stand as they would whether they had completely unfettered access to info, or completely limited access to info I never claimed that. My claim is that there isn't a "completely limited access to info", and that firewall circumvention tools don't really help. It *might* solve *some* of the symptoms, but the problem is much bigger than that, and those who tout firewall circumvention tools as a silver bullet simply misses the larger picture or problem.
Specifically my point is that this (at least now) isn't the case in China:
regular chinese escape their hermetically sealed tomb of sanitized braindead propaganda Since you seem to completely misunderstand my post, your strawman rant on morons and stupid assholes probably don't hold either. At any rate I see no need to start calling each others names.
Perhaps that's because you think I'm one of those pro-establishment people who think human rights and freedoms mean nothing. Well, no[1]. I'm just saying that some uniformed, impulsive attempts to solve problems actually don't help, or even make things worse.
[1]: Hate to plug offtopic stuff here, but if you think citation is needed on that claim you could google my name, which is "Sidney Fong" together with "protest". Thanks.
My non-crystal ball reading of the Chinese authorities view of Tienanmen incident is that it wasn't supposed to happen. Not even back then. Well probably not due to "human rights" concerns or the casualties, but in any case it was a mishandling of public dissent. I believe that's how they view the incident.
As another poster has pointed out, that was almost 20 years ago. Governments, people, and circumstances change. Why would you think that "not much has changed since then"? (this is intended as a legitimate question)
My (obviously incomplete) understanding is that those in China who really wants access to the information already do. And those who don't, don't really bother.
It's not like people in China are dying to know the dark side their government... most do, and due to one reason or the other, aren't particularly interested in digging further. Internet censorship is merely icing on the cake, so to speak. Yet most westerners act as if the Chinese were all sheep who believed 100% in government propaganda. Well, no.
Censorship is bad, but I don't think the correct way is to use technological means to circumvent it. Forcing "politically incorrect" content through the Internet simply makes the Chinese authorities more paranoid, and doesn't make things better.
My non-crystal ball reading of the Chinese authorities' concern is not much on the the content than the people who try to disperse the content, and the subtle ideas behind the apparent content -- most people behind anti-Chinese-government propaganda are simply comfortable with ideas I think would reasonably be called treason anywhere else.
I mean, most "politically incorrect" content portray problems inherent in China's political system, some of which logically leads to a "solution" of bringing down CCP, tearing down the constitution etc. One problem with a single party system is that you don't get to point fingers at the previous administration and say "it's all their fault, but WE ARE NOT THEM!". Which is why stuff like Tienanmen lingers for so long and people still seem so worked up on it...
In fact I think most educated Chinese people know what the problems are, but personally I don't see any way to resolve the political problems without a high risk of bloodshed, western powers and entities trying to "fix" China's problem are sometimes perceived to be trying to solve problems which are known (currently) unsolvable....
Of course, there's also ignorance and incompetence, and FUD within the Chinese government... but to think that you could do better than the guys at the top of the Chinese political hierarchy is simply outright arrogance.
regular chinese escape their hermetically sealed tomb of sanitized braindead propaganda We are not really that stupid... =.= Well, to speak of the truth, I haven't been directly subject to such propaganda, but to my knowledge most people in China (at least those with normal [i.e. censored] Internet access) already know the deal. Can't say for those in the poorer parts of the country who are struggling to get an education though, but those firewall circumvention tools won't help them anyway.
Sorry mate... hate to shatter your dreams but you can't make a difference.....
My understanding is that those in China who wish to find out about the stuff censored by the Great Firewall could do so, and those who don't simply don't care.
My personal interpretation is that the *true purpose* of censoring is mostly symbolic. By having a censor you know what topics the government doesn't want you to know about, so unless you're willing to put up with some political persecution, shut up on those matters. You also have a feeling of "Big Brother is watching you".
[ And maybe to prevent the mindless ones seeing the overhyped anti-PRC propaganda (there are entities and organizations that have a strongly vested interest in bringing down the Chinese Communist Party, and their claims are even more outrageous and ridiculous than the Chinese authorities' propaganda themselves) ]
This doesn't have a damn thing to do with the usability of the OS. Gasp and alarm! If there's some piece of software you want to use, under ANY OS, and it doesn't ship with the OS, you have to go and get it (legally or otherwise). This is the same for every OS which ever has been created, and ever will be created. And it's not a function of the OS. The OS' job is not to ship with software, it's to provide a stable platform for your apps to run on. The problem is, many complaints about Linux is that it doesn't have the apps they want already installed.... (reminder: c.f. the MP3 rant above)
Anyway I'll tell you what I perceive to be the most frustrating part of maintaining a Linux driver.
Erm, "far too much work" compared to what? Compared to another Linux driver? Compared to a Windows driver? Lots of people maintain Linux device drivers either as their job or in their spare time or both. The Windows kernel has major changes every few years. They have a relatively stable interface for writing device drivers.
The Linux kernel has major changes every few revisions (from months to even weeks). They have no standard interface whatsoever for writing device drivers. A driver that works in one version of the kernel would not necessarily work in another.
I think that's arguably "far too much work" if you ask me. That may change when Linux marketshare rises, but in the meantime if I'm managing a hardware company I don't think I'm going to spend a lot of resources to cater for that 1% of users.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with most western religions is that they tell you how to live your life, and they tell you that they are the one and only truth. Most Asian mysticism doesn't claim so, and some practitioners will even tell you to take what they say with a grain of salt. Most Asian religions simply tell you what they believe WHEN ASKED, and are perfectly OK if you don't agree. There aren't any missionaries of Asian religions knocking on your door trying to tell you that their God is the best and tries every trick in their handbook to convince you of that.
Of course there are those who blindly believe in stuff like Feng Shui, etc. and spend thousands if not millions on hiring Feng-shui practitioners to set up their homes for them, but even those people restrict their superstitions in the confines of their privacy, and they don't try to legislate their neighborhood to be arranged in the harmony of Yin and Yang. this certainly isn't unique to the United States. What's unique in the USA (mostly from what I hear on slashdot) is that religious people are actually trying to push for teaching ID in science classes. Even with the prevalence of Asian religion/superstition, the "creationist" stuff are taught in like kindergarten/early primary school as cultural stories (on par with Santa Claus) and not touted as having any connection with the truth.
Though, admittedly here in Hong Kong, many schools are organized by religious groups, and the best ones certainly are. And last I heard there wasn't any mention of evolution in high school science subjects, probably due to this very reason. Personal experience with studying in a school with religious connections is that besides being forced to study a subject called "religious studies" you don't have to put up with much religious crap.
Taoism, as I understand it, in its pure form, is a philosophy. It's a philosophy that requires a rather non-trivial amount intuition and contemplation to fully grasp, and somehow it's hard to explain in words. You can't simply teach it. The religious aspects of Taoism, in my view, is merely an exploitation of the mysticism surrounding the Taoist philosophy into superstitious beliefs for the unwashed minds.
And I don't think Taoism is a celebration of mystery, but more of trying to resolve the mystery.
The classical Taoist view on science would be "yeah it works... but so what? we're above these worldly matters".
Hmm. I guess it's a bit Offtopic
How, in this case, would your so called "religion" be different from science then?
The problem of arguing the fine points with religious people is that you'll inevitably inadvertently argue within their framework, and hence validating parts of their argument. You argue whether Jesus is God. Despite the fact that he might not even really existed, and despite the fact that the Bible could have as much historical value than LoTR. You argue whether the Earth is 6000 years old, but even arguing with this proposition gives undue credence to them since it's no better than arguing whether Santa Claus exists.
I mean, if you see a group of respected scientists arguing whether Santa Claus exists, then even if they come up with the conclusion that Santa is probably fake, a reasonable person could still have the lingering thought that *maybe* there's a small chance that he's real...
Embrace and Extend. Only by really understanding and sympathizing with the opponent's side you could win the argument by instilling a sense within them. Even if you don't win, you'll understand more about the other side, and a bit more understanding of the world (even if you don't agree with those views) never hurts.
So, yes, I agree.
On a more serious note about the "ignorance is bliss" part. I think I'm comfortable with the claim that people could believe that they believe in things that they don't believe (wordings intentional). The human mind allows itself to be somewhat inconsistent. I believe if you REALLY try hard enough to dig inner truths and fears from some people, you might be able to get those religious types to admit that "no, in this case I'm better off not knowing the truth". Not a particularly nice thing to do, but I don't think that's impossible.
I really hope that's the case.
Yet I think the problem is partly that humans are hardwired to be religious -- by that I mean adhering to a religious social structure and adopting religious dogma.
Some people just *have* to believe in superstitious things. One religion dissolves, another comes into existence to take its place.
Duh. Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic here really. Disclaimer is that I, too, live in a place secular enough where you could stay away from religion if you don't want to.
Easy. Require that all voting machines to be checked publicly before being put into use.
Then voting begins.
After the voting and the results being *automatically* generated, immediately allow the voting machines to be checked again by the public.
I don't see a feasible way to tamper with the results here.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the USA, the following discussion is not supposed to be US-centric.
eVoting has a potential to lessen the grips of "representatives" on the political system. Correctly implemented, it lowers the cost of voting, and makes it faster and more efficient, and less prone to error. This means that frequent voting could be more feasible.
In any established democracy, you often run into times where your choices of representatives don't really 100% represent you in matters that you are concerned about. You have situations where you vote for a candidate not because you agree with him(/her) but because you disagree more with the other. You have situations where you agree with the candidate 70%, and have no better choice.
Why do we put up with our representatives making all decisions for us (particularly since we don't agree 100% with them)? In a *REAL* democracy, stretched to the extreme, would be that every significant decision be passed by a majority of the population, directly. Of course, there are problems to this form of democracy, since that would force people to read bills all day instead of doing their work. But there are important issues where a "referendum" would be appropriate -- whether to send troops to a war zone, constitutional amendments, impeachment of high officials, etc.
It also guards against politicians not honoring their vows after getting elected. Usually when politicians are voted into office they get to stay there for a couple of years. During that time the only thing you can do is to hope they don't run amok, and to threaten to vote them out in the next election.
With a more fine grained control over the political process, through more issues being decided by more frequent direct polling, you theoretically solve the above problems by retaining political power instead of delegating it to politicians.
I'll agree that if there's no change to the political system, then eVoting doesn't help much. But my point is that it allows changing the system so that it has a potential to solve some inherent problems. I don't think I've did justice to my point since I've written it hastily, but hopefully you get a rough idea.
Keep in mind that a proof (of a program) should be at least simpler and easier to understand than the program itself, otherwise verifying the correctness of the proof would be at least as hard as verifying the correctness of the program.
A voting machine is conceptually simple. Just ask the user for input, and record them. The difference between having a proof and not is that when you don't have a proof, you ask a group of computer scientists / engineers to look at the machine and the program, and if they say "We can't spot any problems", you're reasonably sure that it's correct. When you have a "proof" of the program, you might need mathematicians to verify the proof and say "We can't spot any problems in the proof"
It's not a silver bullet....
Contract isn't law...
I think the classical Turing machine is deterministic (i.e. no randomness involved). So unless I'm terribly mistaken, your example is conceptually wrong.
/logician, so feel free to correct me where I'm wrong.
An example of hard-to-prove (presumably not impossible) is a program that stops until it finds an even number which isn't a product of two prines (Goldbach conjecture):
for n = 4 to infinity:
for a = 2 to n-2:
b = n - a
if a is prime, b is prime: OK
if not OK: halt
You can similarly link proving correctness of a program with even harder mathematical problems. (Intuitively) It's for this reason that the Halting problem is so "computationally" hard.
I'm no computer scientist / mathematician
I can't tell you how many times I've been asking myself "does this name clash with a built in function??" when writing PHP... I agree that
OOP is just convenient syntactic sugar. I'm not against it, but going all the way OO introduces problems as the old ones are seemingly solved.
To say a bit more on the matter. I do agree there is a rationale for the Java way of reading files, and in some sense it's superior and provides greater flexibility. But sometimes you just don't need that flexibility and just want to read a damn string from the file... why couldn't there be a "read everything from file into string" method? Admittedly such things are normally not commonly used in large "corporate" projects, but given the huge size of the standard library might as well add that too.
I also wrongly assumed GP's view until I actually RTFM-ed....
Tanks in Beijing was clearly a military decision from somebody high up. A lowly officer could never get tanks running around in the capital city. That's almost the equivalent of having tanks parading in front of the White House. Have you seen the BBC video where it appears that the protesters burn a soldier alive? No. Any pointers?? I *strongly* suspect the police and/or army at large were *not* armed with any live guns (probably had those stick things to protect themselves) I don't think I can believe that soldiers don't carry guns in places with violent conflict. (This is not "World War IV" yet
i can't possibly believe you are trying to tell me otherwise, that you can't imagine how the obvious isn't obvious You assert your statements again and again without giving at least SOME explanation, while I've given mine. Maybe you missed something?? where do you live? hong kong? taiwan? is it possible that your ability to access is a little superior than someone in nanjing? harbin? lanzhou? I live in Hong Kong. As mentioned, I was in mainland China a few days ago, and out of curiosity I tested a few sites to see whether they could be assessed. Slashdot was perfectly fine. Wikipedia was outright blocked. Searching for "July 4th" (i.e. the Tienanmen square incident) on google resulted in google being blocked for a few minutes. Everything else seems OK. I could ssh to my machine back home (Hong Kong). Obviously accessing wikipedia through the ssh connection worked. So, yes, I'm well aware that my access is not just a little superior than those living in the mainland. you can't imagine someone there who would like info but can't get it? who would get tools and spread them around? do you need some asshole in new york city to make you aware of the obvious? really? You can't imagine Chinese people smart enough to be able to circumvent the firewall themselves? It's not like Chinese people are so stupid that they NEED your tools to circumvent the firewall...
I'm "arguing" because I think *you* misunderstand, and many people misunderstand, and I think your misunderstanding makes things worse for actual freedoms in China (for reasons I've outlined in my first post in this thread). I've put "arguing" in quotes because I really am not, I'm trying to give you another perspective, and if you don't accept it that's fine. You'll be going off thinking that I'm stubborn, and I'll be thinking the same to you.
Ok my final attempt.
Look, I'm not against firewall tools per se. I'm not saying that they don't matter. I'm saying they don't really matter as much as you think they do. I've given my reasons for my claim. Take it or leave it. There's no reason to get emotional here...
Many of the same people or their hand picked successors and protégés are still firmly in power
*Maybe* true regarding your argument about successors. There's this inconvenience with the current tightly controlled political system in China that you can't simply shrug off mistakes by saying "it's the previous administration's fault!". I say "maybe", you might understand why if I add a few facts.
:-/)
You might have heard about Zhao Ziyang[1] and his role in the Tienanmen incident. He's often described (by western sources, not Chinese propaganda) as "sympathetic stance toward the student demonstrators". My point is that he's probably not the person who ordered the tanks to roll over them, and probably was against any such proposal. If you look closely notice the black and white photo, the current Premier Wen Jiabao is right behind him. I don't think that he was trying to "police" Zhao, so probably a more or less supportive role. My personal conclusion? The people in power in China now are not those who directly supported the forceful suppression of the protests. You might come to different conclusions, but if you take everything into account and think about it without presupposing a conclusion, it really makes you think.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Ziyang#Purged_after_Tiananmen_Square_Protests (a corollary of the unfortunate fact that mainland China has censored wikipedia, is that the politically sensitive stuff there is probably accurate...
and finally up until very recently in the grand scheme of things the Chinese viewed all outsiders and westerners in particular as "barbarians" or inferior peoples
"Up until very recently" was like more than 100 years ago (probably more like 150 years ago). After defeats in battles with foreign powers (and being outright invaded at a point), there were various movements among intellectuals at that time to "learn from westerners", calls for modernization (following a western model) etc. Nobody since then seriously suggested westerners were "barbarians" or inferior.
and this attitude has served to lessen their willingness to listen to external criticism from the "barbarians" concerning their "internal affairs" or "state secrets".
Not so much due to arrogance than mistrust. I'm pretty sure about that. Nobody in China is stupid enough to claim that western people are "barbarians" or "inferior", but as far as I understand there is a general (overly?) cautious attitude towards western influence, whether they come with good intentions or not. A large part due to the "war" between "western liberal ideals" and "communism" (use of quotes intentional), and the fact that until very recently criticism on China's democratic and human rights status was more of a political tool against China than anything really constructive.
I don't know whether you understand the situation, but this is the reason why the Chinese government is so resistant and indifferent to criticisms by outsiders. Not because they think western people are barbarians...
It is my opinion that this attitude, while less spoken of now that China is part of the WTO is still pervasive, at least among the older generations of Chinese
"Older generations?" More like ancestors ;-p
Well to speak fairly there is admittedly some attitude that the "Chinese" way of doing things is better, but usually that comes with some more or less apparently rational explanation (look up on, eg. "Asian values"). Everybody has some "our way of doing things is better" attitude, I don't think the Chinese is particularly close minded.
Remember that it was Mao who said, "Political power flows from the barrel of the gun" and they still hang his portrait pro
My point is firewall circumvention tools will only be used by those who are interested in knowing what their government doesn't want them to know (unless you're going to write a worm that spams infected hosts about Tibet, Tienanmen and whatnot). And those who wish to know those things already do, so it's not much help. but the whole point is you will have LESS uninformed fools. and if that fact carries no weight with you, if that point fails to make an impression on you, then you're an empty useless negative cynic My point again, writing firewall circumvention tools don't lead to less uninformed fools. Maybe it would be of some convenience to those who are already seeking out censored materials, but you've got to tell me how your wonderful tools is supposed to reach uninformed fools.
Specifically my point is that this (at least now) isn't the case in China: regular chinese escape their hermetically sealed tomb of sanitized braindead propaganda Since you seem to completely misunderstand my post, your strawman rant on morons and stupid assholes probably don't hold either. At any rate I see no need to start calling each others names.
Perhaps that's because you think I'm one of those pro-establishment people who think human rights and freedoms mean nothing. Well, no[1]. I'm just saying that some uniformed, impulsive attempts to solve problems actually don't help, or even make things worse.
[1]: Hate to plug offtopic stuff here, but if you think citation is needed on that claim you could google my name, which is "Sidney Fong" together with "protest". Thanks.
My non-crystal ball reading of the Chinese authorities view of Tienanmen incident is that it wasn't supposed to happen. Not even back then. Well probably not due to "human rights" concerns or the casualties, but in any case it was a mishandling of public dissent. I believe that's how they view the incident.
As another poster has pointed out, that was almost 20 years ago. Governments, people, and circumstances change. Why would you think that "not much has changed since then"? (this is intended as a legitimate question)
And those who don't, don't really bother.
It's not like people in China are dying to know the dark side their government... most do, and due to one reason or the other, aren't particularly interested in digging further. Internet censorship is merely icing on the cake, so to speak. Yet most westerners act as if the Chinese were all sheep who believed 100% in government propaganda. Well, no.
Censorship is bad, but I don't think the correct way is to use technological means to circumvent it. Forcing "politically incorrect" content through the Internet simply makes the Chinese authorities more paranoid, and doesn't make things better.
My non-crystal ball reading of the Chinese authorities' concern is not much on the the content than the people who try to disperse the content, and the subtle ideas behind the apparent content -- most people behind anti-Chinese-government propaganda are simply comfortable with ideas I think would reasonably be called treason anywhere else.
I mean, most "politically incorrect" content portray problems inherent in China's political system, some of which logically leads to a "solution" of bringing down CCP, tearing down the constitution etc. One problem with a single party system is that you don't get to point fingers at the previous administration and say "it's all their fault, but WE ARE NOT THEM!". Which is why stuff like Tienanmen lingers for so long and people still seem so worked up on it...
In fact I think most educated Chinese people know what the problems are, but personally I don't see any way to resolve the political problems without a high risk of bloodshed, western powers and entities trying to "fix" China's problem are sometimes perceived to be trying to solve problems which are known (currently) unsolvable....
Of course, there's also ignorance and incompetence, and FUD within the Chinese government... but to think that you could do better than the guys at the top of the Chinese political hierarchy is simply outright arrogance. regular chinese escape their hermetically sealed tomb of sanitized braindead propaganda We are not really that stupid... =.= Well, to speak of the truth, I haven't been directly subject to such propaganda, but to my knowledge most people in China (at least those with normal [i.e. censored] Internet access) already know the deal. Can't say for those in the poorer parts of the country who are struggling to get an education though, but those firewall circumvention tools won't help them anyway.
Sorry mate... hate to shatter your dreams but you can't make a difference.....
My understanding is that those in China who wish to find out about the stuff censored by the Great Firewall could do so, and those who don't simply don't care.
My personal interpretation is that the *true purpose* of censoring is mostly symbolic. By having a censor you know what topics the government doesn't want you to know about, so unless you're willing to put up with some political persecution, shut up on those matters. You also have a feeling of "Big Brother is watching you".
[ And maybe to prevent the mindless ones seeing the overhyped anti-PRC propaganda (there are entities and organizations that have a strongly vested interest in bringing down the Chinese Communist Party, and their claims are even more outrageous and ridiculous than the Chinese authorities' propaganda themselves) ]
This is getting OT but I have a bit of karma to burn...
Precisely what options have been taken from GNOME that has made you so resentful?
Anyway I'll tell you what I perceive to be the most frustrating part of maintaining a Linux driver. Erm, "far too much work" compared to what? Compared to another Linux driver? Compared to a Windows driver? Lots of people maintain Linux device drivers either as their job or in their spare time or both. The Windows kernel has major changes every few years. They have a relatively stable interface for writing device drivers.
The Linux kernel has major changes every few revisions (from months to even weeks). They have no standard interface whatsoever for writing device drivers. A driver that works in one version of the kernel would not necessarily work in another.
I think that's arguably "far too much work" if you ask me. That may change when Linux marketshare rises, but in the meantime if I'm managing a hardware company I don't think I'm going to spend a lot of resources to cater for that 1% of users.