"open show of hands in a room one that everyone in the room can count for himself is self-enforcing"
Everyone can see the result! Coercion aside, the result is unfakable. Unless you have a Mao Zedong/Big Brother-type reality distortion where what the big man says, goes. Sort of the opposite of King Canute.
Isn't all that horrible? Imagine the industry that would still exist in the USA without this - EPA-regulated industry and US labor protections instead of the 19th century smokestacks and Dickensian labor conditions of the Indias and Chinas of today...
I have a site with a keyword that occurs only in relation to my topic. Before, I was #5 in search, with the wikipedia page and the government site above mine, then 2.com websites that feature a ton of other content besides my topic. The new search dumped the two.com sites, ha ha, now I'm #3! I'm sure they did a ton of SEO to get there, because I used to be #3 about 2 years ago until they came on the scene and bumped me down.
Stupid wikipedia link is stuck at #1 and has been forever. And it's not because more sites link there (nobody does) or it's the best site to read on the topic (see if you can spot the errors! bonus points if you can spot the times I corrected an error only to have it reverted.) Government website is highly clicked on & linked to, but is actually rather not useful at all. It's crap, actually, and lots of the important info hasn't been updated since 2006. But I suppose Google looks at the domain name and gives it bonus mushroom levels if it matches some developer's idea of what should come first.
"Dude, what?" Are you joking or intentionally misunderstanding?
Software is property, of course people will protect their property. Unless you're some sort of zealot who doesn't mind giving up his own property, but finds it funny that the entire world doesn't share his viewport. The sort of zealot who is so isolated with like-minded people that he thinks it's normal.
Civ and chess are not for smart people, they merely have a steep learning curve. Chess, moreso, but I thought we established a long time ago that ability to play chess means nothing other than the ability to play chess? Civ merely has a ton of different units and rules. It doesn't particularly need a smart person to play it...wasn't it Game Of The Year several times?
Sounds like the article is all about nothing written as the musings of a non technical [person].
Yeah, slashdot gets a lot of those today. Some guy will spout off about something he knows nothing about, and yet he's considered newsworthy enough to get posted. A commentary on ordinary people not being about to tell jargon-laced bullshit from technical knowledge. Heck, a lot of elite executives are the same way.
Look at me! I'm so smart! I'm also a vapid hipster who plays Pac-Man for intellectual stimulation! I also think that games that are difficult to learn are only for smart people (like me!) The author goes on to speculate that there might be more people like him out there, but he's not sure, can any smart people in the audience post some confirmation in the comments?
Get your godliness the hell out of here. Idiotic Christians like you can dominate all the other discussions with your fundie crap, but stay out of evolution threads, MMMkay? Thx.
Yikes, have you ever actually *seen* Chinese domestic movies? Ugh...I thought Hollywood was unimaginative and relied on spinning the wheel-o-tropes to generate stories, but the Chinese movies are even worse. The really bad part is that now the "edgy" films are aping Western films and doing coming-of-age flicks and modern alienation. You'd think that kung fu flicks would get done less, too, but nooooo.
Small-c crusader, not the proper noun. "A vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse." The cause? Islam. The abuse? Christians. It's an entirely correct usage. I just subverted the meaning, which evidently causes certain people's brains to explode and reject anything that's not playing on CNN or NPR 24 hours a day.
Frankly, I think of it as subverting the Obama brand. It's not just a name, it's a brand. And words have power. Referring to him in such a manner robs him of the messianic power of the "Big Mr. O who will save all of us from certain destruction" meme that is very prevalent (heck, it's a religion in certain quarters...i.e. the mainstream media.)
All I heard for decades was how vitally important it was to subvert the existing authority in every possible way. Funny how subversion is a bad thing as soon as you become the establishment, eh?
Huh? The 'incumbent feudal regime' was deposed in 1949, decades before the CR. Right-wingers (and suspected right-wingers) were regularly imprisoned and executed. The movement was nothing other than Mao getting back into power using the only lever available to him, the Red Guards (i.e. stupid youth who knew nothing other than what's fed to them...for modern examples see apeish idolation of Eminem, N.W.A., G.W. Bush's religous police who condemned American citizens to Gitmo, Last Poets, Run DMC, etc. The only ones 'raped' during the CR were the workers themselves, who suffered horribly. Funny thing, that: the workers have to die to extirpate the sins of the educated - ever seen that trope before?
WTF dude? Why did you 'HAVE' to do this? In another age, you would have been a bomber aircrew with a singleminded determination to esacpe a Nazi prison camp (the real kind, not the Wolfenstein 3D kind.) Or you would have been a crusader with the determination to wipe out all Christians from the Holy Land. Or you would have been a crewman on a British frigate, determined that Spain should not have hegemony of the seas. What happened to us, such that our best and brightest waste their talents on imaginary worlds instead of the real one?
Threat to what, exactly? To the continential United States? That the Wehrmacht would somehow come out of nowhere on landing craft and invade New York City? This when they couldn't even get across 22 miles of water to invade England! So the USA was in mortal danger? As if!!!
This is just a symptom of hoarding disorder. Likewise the article in the summary. For whatever reason, some people just can't feel good without FINISHING. A Warcraft level is finite, the real world much less so. What would happen if the completion counter on GTA3 (or whatever game) only went up to 99% and never 100%? Imagine the groaning and gnashing of teeth! And if the reason was revealed as "some developer with a subversive sense of humor made it so nobody could get 100% complete?" Oh, my, there would be blood. The real krovvy kind, not the kind that turns to green when you hit the parental guidance icon.
Rape of the labor force led to the Cultural Revolution? WTF dude? The CR was caused by Mao Zedong losing control of the CCP and trying (successfully) to regain control.
If you actually read any Chinese history, you discover that they regulary destroy themselves. This makes sense when you realize that China is not and has never been an expansionist power. Heck, even Zheng He (that admiral dude before Columbus) only went to see other nations not for colonization, but so that the heathens could be collected so as to properly pay respect to the best nation in the world.
The only way they have to get free from the past is to destroy their own history. During the CR, priceless Buddhist relics were destroyed, temples razed, university education was denounced as right-wing (and therefore punishable by death penalty, or reeducation camp [which was pretty much the same thing]), and class enemies such as writers and intellectuals were 'airplaned' for the entertainment of the public.
China's historical reserves, artifacts and sites of interest suffered devastating damage as they were thought to be at the root of "old ways of thinking". Many artifacts were seized from private homes and often destroyed on the spot. There are no records of exactly how much was destroyed. Western observers suggest that much of China's thousands of years of history was in effect destroyed during the short ten years of the Cultural Revolution, and that such destruction of historical artifacts is unmatched at any time or place in human history.
from Wikipedia English edition, which is not blocked while I'm in America. I'm going right now to save a copy of the Chinese edition of this page, for seditious use when I go back to China.;)
I was on a project with Telekom Malaysia back in '01, went to Kuala Lumpur for a month. Random observations, in no particular order: Telekom is pretty good, other than falling for my company's crappy spiel about our product that barely worked and which could bring an E10000 to its knees with a load of 100 messages per minute. KL was a pretty modern place, with big buildings, good restaurants, shops, etc. The ringgit was set at 4.25 to the dollar (the explanation was that it had protected the Malay economy against George Soros' currency manipulation that helped to cause the Asian Financial Crisis.) This had the odd effect that all the prices were generally what I would expect in America, only 4.25 times less. A plate of [whatever] plus fries and drink at the mall food court would be 5.75, only in local currency, not in dollars (this was back when the USD was actually worth something overseas.) KL was also my first experience with Asian fake markets...hell yeah I came back with a suitcase full of CDs and Kung Fu VCDs (I didn't have a DVD player or DVD drive at the time IIRC.) The bars there sucked, but I suppose that comes with the territory, being an Islamic country and all. I mean, I wouldn't expect the bar scene in Cow's Asshole, Alabama to be thriving, either. There were ads in the newspaper for apartments and jobs, specifically listing the religions, ages, and sexes of the people eligible to apply. Seriously, the ads would say something like "30 sq meters, private bath, window with good view of sunset, unmarried Muslim girls 18-30 only, call 03-77445678." This was quite shocking to me coming from America, with its history of rigidly enforcing civil rights, at gunpoint if necessary. But Malaysia has rigid enforcement if its religious laws - every citizen's national ID card has a field where it says "religion". A friend of mine related this anecdote: he was in Malaysia to visit the factory, at some restaurant somewhere with the factory people. The factory manager got a tap on her shoulder from the waiter, and she had to go up to the front of the restaurant. She was gone for some time, which caused my buddy to become concerned. She returned in due course, explaining that the JAWI (religious police) came into the restaurant, and she had left her ID card in her car. She had to go all the way out and get it, to prove that she was a Hindu, and therefore not subject to jail for eating during daytime (it was Ramadan at the time of his visit). The JAWI apologized and said that she looked Muslim.
I'm not surprised a country like this has decided to join China by firewalling the outside world. They have a lot to lose (by their standards) and little to gain (again, by their standards) by allowing unfettered access. And since post-modern thought says that there is no truth, only differing points of view, who can disagree with this decision? No matter how you come down on the censorship debate, there is always another equally valid point of view on the opposite side.
Sites *inside* China are blindingly fast. I went to a lot of trouble to learn specialized Chinese characters (which are rather useless in daily conversation) just to be able to read Chinese bittorrent sites. The government slows down traffic going overseas to make foreign sites less attractive. And don't tell me it's because of infrastructure or distance from the Pacific...BS, Hong Kong and Japan have very well-homed facilities where the only impediment is the speed of light.
As far as the GP poster's "OK" goes, well censorship is working "OK" to keep the citizenry ignorant of issues that they don't need to know about. For historical comparisons, try wartime censorship in the USA during WWII (i.e., why are we devoting 90% of our effort to fighting Germany when Japan is the one who attacked us?)
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone can see the result! Coercion aside, the result is unfakable. Unless you have a Mao Zedong/Big Brother-type reality distortion where what the big man says, goes. Sort of the opposite of King Canute.
Wow, guy makes fanfic of his own comic book in concept album format? That's narcissistific!
Isn't all that horrible? Imagine the industry that would still exist in the USA without this - EPA-regulated industry and US labor protections instead of the 19th century smokestacks and Dickensian labor conditions of the Indias and Chinas of today...
Stupid wikipedia link is stuck at #1 and has been forever. And it's not because more sites link there (nobody does) or it's the best site to read on the topic (see if you can spot the errors! bonus points if you can spot the times I corrected an error only to have it reverted.) Government website is highly clicked on & linked to, but is actually rather not useful at all. It's crap, actually, and lots of the important info hasn't been updated since 2006. But I suppose Google looks at the domain name and gives it bonus mushroom levels if it matches some developer's idea of what should come first.
Software is property, of course people will protect their property. Unless you're some sort of zealot who doesn't mind giving up his own property, but finds it funny that the entire world doesn't share his viewport. The sort of zealot who is so isolated with like-minded people that he thinks it's normal.
Civ and chess are not for smart people, they merely have a steep learning curve. Chess, moreso, but I thought we established a long time ago that ability to play chess means nothing other than the ability to play chess? Civ merely has a ton of different units and rules. It doesn't particularly need a smart person to play it...wasn't it Game Of The Year several times?
Yeah, slashdot gets a lot of those today. Some guy will spout off about something he knows nothing about, and yet he's considered newsworthy enough to get posted. A commentary on ordinary people not being about to tell jargon-laced bullshit from technical knowledge. Heck, a lot of elite executives are the same way.
Look at me! I'm so smart! I'm also a vapid hipster who plays Pac-Man for intellectual stimulation! I also think that games that are difficult to learn are only for smart people (like me!) The author goes on to speculate that there might be more people like him out there, but he's not sure, can any smart people in the audience post some confirmation in the comments?
Get your godliness the hell out of here. Idiotic Christians like you can dominate all the other discussions with your fundie crap, but stay out of evolution threads, MMMkay? Thx.
Yikes, have you ever actually *seen* Chinese domestic movies? Ugh...I thought Hollywood was unimaginative and relied on spinning the wheel-o-tropes to generate stories, but the Chinese movies are even worse. The really bad part is that now the "edgy" films are aping Western films and doing coming-of-age flicks and modern alienation. You'd think that kung fu flicks would get done less, too, but nooooo.
It's like what somebody said about buying your wife a gun: it's like you've decided to commit suicide, but you want it to be a surprise.
Small-c crusader, not the proper noun. "A vigorous concerted movement for a cause or against an abuse." The cause? Islam. The abuse? Christians. It's an entirely correct usage. I just subverted the meaning, which evidently causes certain people's brains to explode and reject anything that's not playing on CNN or NPR 24 hours a day.
All I heard for decades was how vitally important it was to subvert the existing authority in every possible way. Funny how subversion is a bad thing as soon as you become the establishment, eh?
Obviously, I was talking about being a Muslim crusader. They had them, you know. Broaden your mind.
Huh? The 'incumbent feudal regime' was deposed in 1949, decades before the CR. Right-wingers (and suspected right-wingers) were regularly imprisoned and executed. The movement was nothing other than Mao getting back into power using the only lever available to him, the Red Guards (i.e. stupid youth who knew nothing other than what's fed to them...for modern examples see apeish idolation of Eminem, N.W.A., G.W. Bush's religous police who condemned American citizens to Gitmo, Last Poets, Run DMC, etc. The only ones 'raped' during the CR were the workers themselves, who suffered horribly. Funny thing, that: the workers have to die to extirpate the sins of the educated - ever seen that trope before?
WTF dude? Why did you 'HAVE' to do this? In another age, you would have been a bomber aircrew with a singleminded determination to esacpe a Nazi prison camp (the real kind, not the Wolfenstein 3D kind.) Or you would have been a crusader with the determination to wipe out all Christians from the Holy Land. Or you would have been a crewman on a British frigate, determined that Spain should not have hegemony of the seas. What happened to us, such that our best and brightest waste their talents on imaginary worlds instead of the real one?
Threat to what, exactly? To the continential United States? That the Wehrmacht would somehow come out of nowhere on landing craft and invade New York City? This when they couldn't even get across 22 miles of water to invade England! So the USA was in mortal danger? As if!!!
This is just a symptom of hoarding disorder. Likewise the article in the summary. For whatever reason, some people just can't feel good without FINISHING. A Warcraft level is finite, the real world much less so. What would happen if the completion counter on GTA3 (or whatever game) only went up to 99% and never 100%? Imagine the groaning and gnashing of teeth! And if the reason was revealed as "some developer with a subversive sense of humor made it so nobody could get 100% complete?" Oh, my, there would be blood. The real krovvy kind, not the kind that turns to green when you hit the parental guidance icon.
If you actually read any Chinese history, you discover that they regulary destroy themselves. This makes sense when you realize that China is not and has never been an expansionist power. Heck, even Zheng He (that admiral dude before Columbus) only went to see other nations not for colonization, but so that the heathens could be collected so as to properly pay respect to the best nation in the world.
The only way they have to get free from the past is to destroy their own history. During the CR, priceless Buddhist relics were destroyed, temples razed, university education was denounced as right-wing (and therefore punishable by death penalty, or reeducation camp [which was pretty much the same thing]), and class enemies such as writers and intellectuals were 'airplaned' for the entertainment of the public.
from Wikipedia English edition, which is not blocked while I'm in America. I'm going right now to save a copy of the Chinese edition of this page, for seditious use when I go back to China. ;)
I'm not surprised a country like this has decided to join China by firewalling the outside world. They have a lot to lose (by their standards) and little to gain (again, by their standards) by allowing unfettered access. And since post-modern thought says that there is no truth, only differing points of view, who can disagree with this decision? No matter how you come down on the censorship debate, there is always another equally valid point of view on the opposite side.
As far as the GP poster's "OK" goes, well censorship is working "OK" to keep the citizenry ignorant of issues that they don't need to know about. For historical comparisons, try wartime censorship in the USA during WWII (i.e., why are we devoting 90% of our effort to fighting Germany when Japan is the one who attacked us?)
Wow! I had no idea I had so many fans. Actaully I had forgotten that that feature of slashdot existed. Cool!
The discussion was over a couple of weeks ago. WTF man?
What if people got AIDS from donating money to Bush's reelection campaign?
What if people got AIDS from donating money to TV preachers? Would you still support the urgent crash research to discover a cure?