Bzzt wrong. China is still capital-C Communist. They just released their new Five-Year Plan, for Pete's sake. The difference is that after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road. For those of you who didn't go to university and hence weren't exposed to Marxism, "capitalist roaders" are a heresy of Communism. They still want to achieve socialism, but by the wrong methods. According to Mao, the Soviet Union suffered this fate after Stalin died.
The Chinese government still directly controls huge swathes of the Chinese economy. Companies are owned by the state and operate for its benefit. Americans having trouble with this unfamiliar idea could perhaps think of Amtrak, or the conversion of General Motors into an arm of the federal government a few years ago. The baby milk scandals are due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms. In so many words, there are few laws and fewer inspectors. Moreover, Chinese culture places no value on people you don't know - they might as well not exist, so who cares if you poison them or not? This is how you get crowds of people standing around gawking at accident victims instead of rendering aid (first one to help has to pay the victim's hospital bills).
Unfortunately, there are those out there to whom socialism is an unassailable holy concept, and when a communist country takes the capitalist road, an attempt is made to classify the whole shebang as EEEVIL in order to make capitalism look bad. It's like old Soviet documentaries about the United States that focused on the poor and homeless, in order reinforce the conclusion that was preordained anyway.
I am shocked to see such jingoism on Slashdot. Just look at the summary, it drips with a false "us/them" mentality. On one side, the side of goodness and light, "the West" (whatever that means) and on the other side, "the Other", which takes the form of the main villain of the 21st century, those scary Chinese. It is simply assumed that "the Chinese" will sabotage any network they come in contact with...because...well, because uh...why, exactly? It's just the Western mindset of "everyone is always out to get us" that requires the creation of these scarecrows. Much like the McCarthy witch-hunt, this is going in search of a scary monster that doesn't exist. There was no WMD in Iraq, there were no communists in the State Department, and the Chinese are not out to get us. The parallels between these situations are eerily similar.
Some of the most inept people I know are serious chess players. How many of them do you know? They spend all their time studying chess, when they could have spent their time learning something useful. Don't take my word for it, though, another man said it better 500 years ago:
"[Chess] is certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement, but it seems to have one defect, which is that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game. Thus, I think a very unusual thing happens in this, namely that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."
- Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, Book II para. 31, Singleton translation
Wow, that comment came out of left field, didn't it? How's this applicable to chess? Stupid Americans, always relating to the world by thinking of themselves first...it's not all about you. Really.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also states that families are a man and a woman, and they are entitled to have as many children as they like. Having too many children is a shortcut to the Dark Ages.
Since when is opposition to Western values a bad thing? Ever heard of colonialism?
Even though the nazi party committed crimes against humanity on a regular basis Germany wasn't an evil empire with sole purpose of doing evil. The leadership did everything they could to fortify and extend their power but there were also normal people living their everyday lives trying to build better future for their children.
Did you really believe *all* that western propaganda that insisted everything done in Germany from 1933-1945 was evil? Also that any rightwing thought == fascism == evil?
We really don't need any UN-bashing here. Slashdot is usually very good about this, I don't know how this story got through the editing process. Look, it's an inconvenient truth, one which should be quietly ignored. All they were trying to do was alarm people and get them to stand up and take notice, so we could do something about global warming. The fact that the prediction didn't exactly turn out the exact way it was said is immaterial. What's important is that we make progress on climate change legislation. Let's all remember in 2005, Kyoto wasn't a dead deal and there was a lot of room to influence the process in a positive direction.
So, here, there have been two "violations". First, obtaining data, then publishing it. By only doing the second, Wikileaks keeps its hands clean and wears white and is free from any responsibility for its actions. So, which is the sin? Obtaining the data, or publishing it? And if either one of these is evil, then why is the 'ORRIBLE BIASED MEDIA being criticized for it (observe in this thread educated people publically spewing vile hatred), and Manning and Wikileaks get the exact same people writing stirring defenses of the same behavior?
You know as well as I do that views change according to who can be villainized. It's an inconvenient truth.
So, when wikileaks does it, it's important to have this information out in the open. When The Evil, Evil People[tm] do the exact same thing, it's a horrible miscarriage of the expectation of privacy and needs to be loudly denounced.
Aren't we just biasing our views based on if the story portrays the "correct" people as the villains? It's amusing to see the really hateful attitudes and spittle-flecked invective.
That's bullshit. This is the BBC we're talking about here. You know, the very definition of objective journalism? Maybe it's good that a CEO be called out and exposed as the lying bastard that he is?
Imagine an internet where everyone had to sign in as their real name, and trolling became obsolete. Teabaggers could easily be identified, fired from their jobs, and publically ostracized for their disgusting racism. Every American who expressed negative feelings about the President would be suspected of racism. This would be noted on each citizen's permanent record and easily viewable by anyone who cared to search. How would this be a bad thing, exactly? Freedom of speech is one thing, but freedom of speech doesn't cover hate speech.
Obviously, the developers didn't give a rat's ass about focus. I have the same problem with Opera web browser - a flash application will "take focus", even though it is not in the active window. I do something like "mouse gesture close current window" and a background window closes. Why? Because the flash app had focus. Why does this happen? Because developers are just racing to implement a raft of features from a bullet point list in a powerpoint presentation somewhere. Who the hell cares if it actually works for users out in the wild? That's not the metric by which developers' work is measured. Nobody ever got a bonus or promotion by attending to nitpicky user-experience details.
Ok, well, rather than take the default "Democracy let loose the Freedom Bombs LOLZ" viewpoint...is the FSB correct? Can the use of Google become a threat to Russia's security? Yes or no? And if yes, then what are the appropriate steps that Russia should take to secure itself? Let's all remember that Google is no mere provider of neutral information services...as an American corporation Google has been, sadly, repeatedly guilty of overt acts that can only be labeled as pro-American.
You say that like there's something wrong with Marxism. What's the big deal? If there was something wrong with Marxism, then certainly it wouldn't be taught at universities or be so beloved of our government officials.
22,000 people died in the tsunami. TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND. So why isn't the tsunami getting more press? Answer: your elites can't score political points from a tsunami.
Science is quite separate from cultural values and ideologies. Another Western idea. Seriously, you don't even think to question the foundations of your thinking...such as if members of other cultures think the same way as you and share your Western values.
Just a thought: does anyone outside of your civilization regard the entire planet as "our civilization"? Western ideas aren't as universal as you might have been mislead into thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzt wrong. China is still capital-C Communist. They just released their new Five-Year Plan, for Pete's sake. The difference is that after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road. For those of you who didn't go to university and hence weren't exposed to Marxism, "capitalist roaders" are a heresy of Communism. They still want to achieve socialism, but by the wrong methods. According to Mao, the Soviet Union suffered this fate after Stalin died.
The Chinese government still directly controls huge swathes of the Chinese economy. Companies are owned by the state and operate for its benefit. Americans having trouble with this unfamiliar idea could perhaps think of Amtrak, or the conversion of General Motors into an arm of the federal government a few years ago. The baby milk scandals are due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms. In so many words, there are few laws and fewer inspectors. Moreover, Chinese culture places no value on people you don't know - they might as well not exist, so who cares if you poison them or not? This is how you get crowds of people standing around gawking at accident victims instead of rendering aid (first one to help has to pay the victim's hospital bills).
Unfortunately, there are those out there to whom socialism is an unassailable holy concept, and when a communist country takes the capitalist road, an attempt is made to classify the whole shebang as EEEVIL in order to make capitalism look bad. It's like old Soviet documentaries about the United States that focused on the poor and homeless, in order reinforce the conclusion that was preordained anyway.
I am shocked to see such jingoism on Slashdot. Just look at the summary, it drips with a false "us/them" mentality. On one side, the side of goodness and light, "the West" (whatever that means) and on the other side, "the Other", which takes the form of the main villain of the 21st century, those scary Chinese. It is simply assumed that "the Chinese" will sabotage any network they come in contact with...because...well, because uh...why, exactly? It's just the Western mindset of "everyone is always out to get us" that requires the creation of these scarecrows. Much like the McCarthy witch-hunt, this is going in search of a scary monster that doesn't exist. There was no WMD in Iraq, there were no communists in the State Department, and the Chinese are not out to get us. The parallels between these situations are eerily similar.
"[Chess] is certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement, but it seems to have one defect, which is that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game. Thus, I think a very unusual thing happens in this, namely that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."
- Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, Book II para. 31, Singleton translation
Wow, that comment came out of left field, didn't it? How's this applicable to chess? Stupid Americans, always relating to the world by thinking of themselves first...it's not all about you. Really.
Since when is opposition to Western values a bad thing? Ever heard of colonialism?
Did you really believe *all* that western propaganda that insisted everything done in Germany from 1933-1945 was evil? Also that any rightwing thought == fascism == evil?
Go to any business school. They teach this maxim: "A businessman's role is not to make profits, but to maximize profits.
We really don't need any UN-bashing here. Slashdot is usually very good about this, I don't know how this story got through the editing process. Look, it's an inconvenient truth, one which should be quietly ignored. All they were trying to do was alarm people and get them to stand up and take notice, so we could do something about global warming. The fact that the prediction didn't exactly turn out the exact way it was said is immaterial. What's important is that we make progress on climate change legislation. Let's all remember in 2005, Kyoto wasn't a dead deal and there was a lot of room to influence the process in a positive direction.
Blah...you forget one angle bracket in an HTML tag...stupid not previewing my own comments...the correct site is convertfiles.com
For those annoying web videos that you can't download, use to convert that embedded video into .avi, .mp4, .mkv, or any other of a wide choice of formats. The site goes out, downloads the video for you, converts it to your favorite format, and lets you download the completed file. It's freakin' great. Make sure you click on some of their ads if you use the service. I'm not associated with them, I just find their website fantastically useful...especially for those, *cough*, uh, female flexibility testing videos from that academic research site xvideos.com.
What are you talking about? It's some guy with an oversize bluetooth headset. Isn't this story about mobile devices? It's on-topic. STFU.
So, here, there have been two "violations". First, obtaining data, then publishing it. By only doing the second, Wikileaks keeps its hands clean and wears white and is free from any responsibility for its actions. So, which is the sin? Obtaining the data, or publishing it? And if either one of these is evil, then why is the 'ORRIBLE BIASED MEDIA being criticized for it (observe in this thread educated people publically spewing vile hatred), and Manning and Wikileaks get the exact same people writing stirring defenses of the same behavior?
You know as well as I do that views change according to who can be villainized. It's an inconvenient truth.
So, when wikileaks does it, it's important to have this information out in the open. When The Evil, Evil People[tm] do the exact same thing, it's a horrible miscarriage of the expectation of privacy and needs to be loudly denounced.
Aren't we just biasing our views based on if the story portrays the "correct" people as the villains? It's amusing to see the really hateful attitudes and spittle-flecked invective.
That's bullshit. This is the BBC we're talking about here. You know, the very definition of objective journalism? Maybe it's good that a CEO be called out and exposed as the lying bastard that he is?
Imagine an internet where everyone had to sign in as their real name, and trolling became obsolete. Teabaggers could easily be identified, fired from their jobs, and publically ostracized for their disgusting racism. Every American who expressed negative feelings about the President would be suspected of racism. This would be noted on each citizen's permanent record and easily viewable by anyone who cared to search. How would this be a bad thing, exactly? Freedom of speech is one thing, but freedom of speech doesn't cover hate speech.
Obviously, the developers didn't give a rat's ass about focus. I have the same problem with Opera web browser - a flash application will "take focus", even though it is not in the active window. I do something like "mouse gesture close current window" and a background window closes. Why? Because the flash app had focus. Why does this happen? Because developers are just racing to implement a raft of features from a bullet point list in a powerpoint presentation somewhere. Who the hell cares if it actually works for users out in the wild? That's not the metric by which developers' work is measured. Nobody ever got a bonus or promotion by attending to nitpicky user-experience details.
So the American bourgeoisie are finally getting slammed? Well, here's the world's tiniest violin. They had it coming for a long time.
Ok, well, rather than take the default "Democracy let loose the Freedom Bombs LOLZ" viewpoint...is the FSB correct? Can the use of Google become a threat to Russia's security? Yes or no? And if yes, then what are the appropriate steps that Russia should take to secure itself? Let's all remember that Google is no mere provider of neutral information services...as an American corporation Google has been, sadly, repeatedly guilty of overt acts that can only be labeled as pro-American.
Uh, no. As a matter of fact, I live outside the United States. What's wrong with Marxism, though? I'm drawing a blank here.
You say that like there's something wrong with Marxism. What's the big deal? If there was something wrong with Marxism, then certainly it wouldn't be taught at universities or be so beloved of our government officials.
False equivalency. Much can be done against natural disasters, but none of it serves an agenda. Always ask yourself: who benefits from this?
22,000 people died in the tsunami. TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND. So why isn't the tsunami getting more press? Answer: your elites can't score political points from a tsunami.
I never trust a native speaker who cannot use his own language correctly. "look at what we just did in only 100 lines or fewer".
Use fewer with objects that can be counted one-by-one.
Use less with qualities or quantities that cannot be individually counted. Incorrect: There were less days below freezing last winter.
Correct: There were fewer days below freezing last winter. (Days can be counted.)
Correct: I used less flour to bake the cake than she did. (you cannot say 'one flour, two flour')
The more you know!
Science is quite separate from cultural values and ideologies.
Another Western idea. Seriously, you don't even think to question the foundations of your thinking...such as if members of other cultures think the same way as you and share your Western values.
Just a thought: does anyone outside of your civilization regard the entire planet as "our civilization"? Western ideas aren't as universal as you might have been mislead into thinking.