So if two people film themselves shagging all night long, and then post it on YouTube, everyone would agree it's not porn? Porn is only when it's pretend, but if you do it for real, it stops being porn?
Well, that viewpoint works for me. Pornography, if I remember correctly, originally meant something like "depicting prostitutes", which in my view describes very well what the porn industry produces; it is void of any feeling of reality and sexuality. So, I'm all for using the term "eroticism" for amateur recordings.
Whether it should be regulated or not, and how, is an entirely different discussion. In general people should be free to do what they feel good about; but the web is already sufficiently overloaded with idiotic crap, and if we can reduce it, that counts to the plus side in my book.
If they've never had to deal with the artwork versus pornography issue, they're soon going to discover that banning National Geographic for images of unclothed peoples is just not educationally sound.
Nonsense. Nobody in their right mind has any difficulty distinguishing between depictions of nudity and pornography - the fundamental problem with porn is not that it depicts naked people engaged in the natural activity of copulation, but that it is so obviously false and artificial. Porn, in my view, does not make people obsessed with sex - it turns you off from it; especially if you imagine this is the way it should be.
Looks like we've got a new amusingly painful chapter ahead of us for Chinese internet users.
I'm not sure I can see that. Quite apart from the question whether it is "amusing" or not that other people have a "painful" experience, I don't think there is going to be anything painful about it. Contrary to common conceptions on slashdot, most people are not really all that interested in pornography - it is simply too shallow and artificial. So, just like people don't want to be bathed in ever more stupid and intrusive adverts when they browse, they also don't want to be annoyed with the imbecile ravings of those that think pornography is the most refined and advanced artform in the world. All in all, I think ridding the web of porn is going to be a very popular move, and I can't see that it is going to be much of a technological challenge either.
Western companies are very keen to be able to trade in the Chinese market, so they will comply, no doubt.
While this is a very interesting finding, I think the hermit crab's use of empty snails' shells is an already known example of similar tool use in an invertebrate.
Re:Something completely off topic
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 1
Describing it as laziness could be considered a bit of a faux pas.
Hey, I hope that the general tone of my post would be a hint of its entirely humorous intent. I have never heard any good explanation of why "X" ahould be pronounced "Z" when it stands first in syllable, that's all; being a Danish speaker, I am no stranger to pronouncing chains of consonants, so it puzzles me that Enhlish speakers seem to go to such lengths to avoid it, by inserting vowels or even changing the consonants completely.
Something completely off topic
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 1
- or nearly:
This book title is a wordplay on "Zen", obviously; which leads me, once again, to wonder why the hell English speakers think that "X" is pronounced "Z"? Is it just mental laziness? The depravity that inevitably comes with the filthy excesses of Capitalism? A conspiracy by the religious right?
In my experience "x" is pronounced "ks", as demonstrated in a word like "sex" - you don't pronounce it "sez" unless you've had a few pints more than what is good for you, in which case sex is probably irrelevant anyway. It doesn't take much effort to say "Ksen" (like it is spelled, not "ker-SEN", which seems like a more reasonable pronunciation of "Xen".
*huff, huff* Right, I feel much better now. Thank you for listening.
The only reason malware problems are smaller on Linux than Windows is because of the almost-non-existing desktop marketshare and that those who use it on desktop are usually more tech savvy.
So, there are actually two reasons, then?
Anyway, I don't agree. The big, fundamental difference between *nix and Windows is in the underlying architectural philosophy, if one desires to use some big words. UNIX was from the start designed to serve several, concurrent user sessions, whereas Windows was a GUI layer running on top of DOS - most of the design ideas were imported from X, as far as I can see, but the networking side of it were left out. IOW, it was never intended to be an OS, let alone a networked multiuser system; the design decisions that were made back then have haunted Windows ever since.
Windows has always tried to be a sort of easy to use, non-technical appliance OS, and Microsoft have been quite reluctant to improve on the flaws in the design; and when they finally tried their hands on it, they chose to go for the VMS model rather than the UNIX one, which was perhaps not such a good idea, since the event-driven design was not implemented with sufficient forethought - which is a least a contributing factor to why Windows keeps inviting malware attacks.
Where Windows was designed to please the unskilled user, UNIX has always been made for the higly skilled, like engineers; the design is simple, yet allows the full range of potential uses that one may contemplate, and it has always been open to inspection and criticism - in my view the most fundamentally important feature of UNIX. A lot of potential security flaws have been weeded out in UNIX because of that.
However, in recent years there has been an increasing trend towards making the X environment more and more Windows like, with too much focus on being "smart", whatever that means, and too little focus on the things that made UNIX good: simplicity and openness. This is why we now see exploits for Linux - the design decisions made to please the crowd simply invite that kind of things in.
Another important difference, I think, is the security models employed: the UNIX one is almost embarrassingly simple, yet reasonably effective, whereas the Windows one is bewilderingly complex. This seems to have the effect that UNIX users learn to live with the security system fairly quickly, while in Windows people too often give up and turn it down to the bare minimum.
That isn't what surprises me - what I find surprising is that it has taken so long for the system in America to take action against what is very obviously a criminal organisation. I would really like to understand why.
Not sure; I think the real deal is to stay low-profile, if you want to do something that is illegal - or even quit doing it. A bit like growing cannabis - if you grow a plant or two in your garden, you will probably get off with a warning, if the police go as far as intervening, which they may well not do, since they have far more important things to do, but if you grow a major crop of the stuff, they will of course come after you, and you will have a longish holiday.
1) It builds on a language called hypertalk, apparently; this seems to be something like what you could imagine COBOL would look like if it had been designed today. Not that COBOL is a bad language as such, but as anybody knows who has ever had to maintain old COBOL programs, the fact that it is supposed to be sort of "human language" like is a hindrance rather than a help to understanding.
COBOL, as well as hypertalk it seems, have been designed on the false assumption that what makes programming hard is the weird looking programming languages; the real truth is that programming is hard because it involves analysing a task in every detail, so you can write the code that does it, and it always turns out that doing even simple things encompasses a lot more detail than one would have imagined.
2) Isn't this "90%" claim simply an iteration of the old one that used to accompany all the interface design tools? It wasn't true then, and it isn't now either of course. It is true that you can whip out a prototype in no time with such tools; but there is always so much more to design and programming than that. It's like Oracle Forms - you can easily make a simple application that allows you to input and retrieve data from a single table, but a real application will involve perhaps tens of tables with any number of triggers and constraints that have to work together; and of course, you don't just display the raw data on-screen, there will be name lookups, pictures etc etc. Programming is complicated because real life is.
The article asks if this sort of "ease of programming" will dumb down programming? I don't think it will get worse than it is. Bad programmers will produce crap, good one will produce good programs; and Darwin is our friend and benefactor here (that's Charles Darwin, not the OS, BTW).
her insurance provider found photos of her on Facebook smiling and looking cheerful
This may well be an unfair action on the part of the insurance provider. Depression does not necessarily mean that you are gloomy 24/7; it is a lot more complicated than that, and this general misperception causes many to overlook or misinterpret what is actually a genuine depression. As an example of just one of the possible explanations for the woman's behaviour, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atypical_depression (Atypical Depression).
This just in: physicists have a pro-gravity bias. Geologists have an anti-flat-earth bias. Astronomers have a pro-heliocentric bias.
Well, not quite; physicists have observations of gravity, they have a well-tested theory and they will say that it is likely that gravity also works next time you test it, but nobody knows for sure;-)
As for the flat Earth - it is locally flat, isn't it? And while the Sun may be the centre of the solar system (as well as owned by Oracle), it is also true that any point in an infinite space could be declared to be the centre. So there.
Perhaps; I personally think scifi's big problem is that there no longer are great themes to play with concerning the future. For most of the last century we have sort of assumed that mankind could/would overcome all nature could throw at us, so we could on one hand have the optimistic scifi where everything was great and exciting, and we could have the pessimistic sort, that we could comfortably dismiss as "thought provoking". In recent years we have come to realize that this is not a realistic scenario.
Another thing is that science too doesn't seem to make any dramatic and inspiring progress; and how exciting is it to contemplate travel times of hundreds to thousands of years? We have simply run out of science, in a sense.
Finally, I think it has become too predictable with all these aliens that look suspiciously either like dressed up humans or some sort of mindless predator.
The way forward, I think, is to change some of these parameters. Like, explore life that is seriously different; explore physics in a universe where the laws of physics are not what we are used to, but still realistic in the sense that the mechanisms and the logic of the story has been applied thoughtfully and with great consequence.
Or how about exploring the schism between quantum mechanics and general relativity from the other side, in a setting where QM didn't have the "political upper hand", and where physical theories had been pursued more from the perspective of GR - eg. if Niels Bohr hadn't won the discussions with Einstein, and Einstein had been successful in finding a unified theory. Just my thoughts, of course.
.. the Mao years when he murdered tens of millions and the lucky ones merely froze in unheated factories and classrooms
He must have been a supremely active guy, doing all that single-handedly. It is cheap and easy to sing along on that tune; but it is such a shame, since you are not far from the truth of the matter. As you say, China has made massive progress, especially in recent decades, but even the years under Mao represent progress; the Communists would not have won without him, and China would probably not have made it to the top of the world as an independent nation under Guomindang.
Mao Zedong is far too often portrayed as a thoroughly evil person, which is nonsense. For one thing, nobody is thoroughly evil - if you can't acknowledge anything good about a person, then you are simply prejudiced. There is no doubt that some of his decisions in later years caused a number of major catastrophes; there is also no doubt that his leadership is what gave the Communists success. Where Guomindang's soldiers treated civilians with contempt and cruelty, the Communists did the opposite and therefore won the support of the people - and so on. If you study China's recent history without prejudice, you will find that Mao deserves at least a large part of the admiration he is regarded with in China; still, he should have left the power to more pragmatic types when the revolution was over. Great revolutionaries are rarely good administrators.
And it is not just China and the US - the whole world is in this together, not just when it comes to the economy. They have been talking about globalisation for years, but it has been happening all around while people have been staring blindly at the many failed efforts at cooperation on government-level.
What kind of question is that? Don't you know that America was that close to get a vice-president that wouldn't be able to find the US on a map of Nort America? I think you need to adjust your expectations a bit.
... why this isn't obvious, and being done already?
I think you answer your own question: the enormous amounts of data involved - that, as well as the fact that they are using different and probably incompatible ways of storing the data. And that is just the technical side of the problem; someone has to translate the data into actual knowledge first, so we know what to combine; and we still don't have computers that can do that.
This has always been the problem in scientific research; an enormous amount of knowledge is being generated, and nobody can keep up with it, let alone combine widely different streams of knowledge.
Clearly, the answer is that any samples and documentation should be destroyed
Clearly, you have overlooked the fact that we are talking about private companies here. What happens when a company goes bust? Another company buys it and its stock - in this case the DNA profiles etc. What did you expect? When you deal with private companies that is the way it is; which is why it would probably be better if it was handled by a public authority - they are after all somewhat accuntable to the public, and they don't go bankrupt so often.
Hmm, not so long ago it was "Those evil communists don't respect IP rights...", but now it is bad that they do? Is this not simply because to some people, China simply can't do anything right, no matter what? It works both ways, you know.
What we do NOT believe is that you can force your neighbors to pay the bill. Most Americans consider that theft of another man's labor (he works; you take the product of his work i.e. his money). We are amazed that Europeans do not.
You have such an amazingly narrow outlook on the world; and you seem to prefer to use strongly emotional words. Why is that? To me at least, it makes you less credible.
Surely, in a caring society full of caring people it is not a question of forcing anybody? If you see somebody in desperate need of help, don't you feel that you want to reach out and help? At least if it something you can easily do? I can assure you that I don't resent seeing people receiving public help, I am not that petty, and I don't believe for a moment that Americans are either. And I think you should remenber that you can all too easily end up in a situation where you are in need of public help - wouldn't it be nice in that situation to be able to get it?
From what I hear, it is not uncommon in America to lose everything if you are hit by a disease that requires expensive treatment. It seems to me that in America, a very, very few make it to be absurdly rich, but the rest can look forward to an old age full of worry. As a European, I can retire in the knowledge that because I have paid my taxes, I need not worry about health and a lot of other issues - I have the right to receive care.
Honestly I don't think obscenities would exist without a society, and probably a prudish Victorian one that makes everyone embarrassed when I say the word "cunt".
Perhaps, although I am not so sure. From Wiktionary: "A prude (Old French prude)[1] is a person who is described as being excessively concerned with decorum, modesty or propriety." So, while "cunt" seems offensive to a puritan, I think the essence of obscenity is the "wilful offensiveness".
All that aside, we should at least agree that Marxism has in its total caused far more harm than good, even if we cannot say the same for socialism and liberal democracy in general.
Again, I think perhaps this is more a question of what you understand by "Marxism". In my understanding, Marxism is simply the economic theory detailed by Karl Marx in "Das Kapital"; it has its merits as an input to the scientific discourse on economics, but I don't think it is fair to view it in the light of what people like Lenin and Stalin did in its name. That would be like judging all Christians based on what the Spanish Inquisition did.
I have a lot of sympathy for the socialist ideals; that doesn't preclude me from understanding that a lot of evil has been committed in its name. Still, I think it is wrong to summarily judge anything based on only one side of the story; when I was young I used to be very anti-American - nothing American could ever be good - but I have learned that there is always more to things. So, if I can go from that point of view to one where I can see that there is a lot of good as well as bad in America, it should be possible to do the same with respect to USSR, China, Iran,...
There is a lot of shit in the world today, but there is also a lot of good. It is within our power to make either Paradise or Hell on Earth; and whether we live in what is formally a democracy or not, we actually have a lot of influence on things - it doesn't have to be the way that it is.
destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance -- and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
We the people already held all the rights. We only consented to surrender SOME of them to form a limited social contract to secure life, liberty, and property. We don't have free speech because the government said we could....we have freedom of speech because we never gave it up.
"We the people..." - yeah, get the slogans out right from the start, so nobody starts thinking on their own. It's funny, they all talk about "the people", but it always means "the ones that agree with me". Objectively speaking, "the people" means everybody present - including the 55% that actually think society should care about its citizens (ie. including the "progressives, socialists, and the marxist democrats" in your language) as well as the ones who don't really care either way; all in all probably 99% of the people. If you don't want to be part of that kind of "We, the REAL people", it must mean that you want to be an outsider.
And you've got it wrong when you say that "we already held all the rights and agreed to surrender some of them". Humans are social animals, and living in social groups is part of our natural survival strategy. Giving up some freedoms in exchange for the freedom we enjoy because we are part of a socety is written in our genes. If you weren't part of a society, there is a lot of things you wouldn't have - but you would certainly have the freedom to stand on a mountain top and scream obscenities, if that is what you fancy.
Slashdot Mirror
So if two people film themselves shagging all night long, and then post it on YouTube, everyone would agree it's not porn? Porn is only when it's pretend, but if you do it for real, it stops being porn?
Well, that viewpoint works for me. Pornography, if I remember correctly, originally meant something like "depicting prostitutes", which in my view describes very well what the porn industry produces; it is void of any feeling of reality and sexuality. So, I'm all for using the term "eroticism" for amateur recordings.
Whether it should be regulated or not, and how, is an entirely different discussion. In general people should be free to do what they feel good about; but the web is already sufficiently overloaded with idiotic crap, and if we can reduce it, that counts to the plus side in my book.
Is that a problem? We shouldn't always be bound by what the most prudish in society put into words.
If they've never had to deal with the artwork versus pornography issue, they're soon going to discover that banning National Geographic for images of unclothed peoples is just not educationally sound.
Nonsense. Nobody in their right mind has any difficulty distinguishing between depictions of nudity and pornography - the fundamental problem with porn is not that it depicts naked people engaged in the natural activity of copulation, but that it is so obviously false and artificial. Porn, in my view, does not make people obsessed with sex - it turns you off from it; especially if you imagine this is the way it should be.
Looks like we've got a new amusingly painful chapter ahead of us for Chinese internet users.
I'm not sure I can see that. Quite apart from the question whether it is "amusing" or not that other people have a "painful" experience, I don't think there is going to be anything painful about it. Contrary to common conceptions on slashdot, most people are not really all that interested in pornography - it is simply too shallow and artificial. So, just like people don't want to be bathed in ever more stupid and intrusive adverts when they browse, they also don't want to be annoyed with the imbecile ravings of those that think pornography is the most refined and advanced artform in the world. All in all, I think ridding the web of porn is going to be a very popular move, and I can't see that it is going to be much of a technological challenge either.
Western companies are very keen to be able to trade in the Chinese market, so they will comply, no doubt.
While this is a very interesting finding, I think the hermit crab's use of empty snails' shells is an already known example of similar tool use in an invertebrate.
Describing it as laziness could be considered a bit of a faux pas.
Hey, I hope that the general tone of my post would be a hint of its entirely humorous intent. I have never heard any good explanation of why "X" ahould be pronounced "Z" when it stands first in syllable, that's all; being a Danish speaker, I am no stranger to pronouncing chains of consonants, so it puzzles me that Enhlish speakers seem to go to such lengths to avoid it, by inserting vowels or even changing the consonants completely.
- or nearly:
This book title is a wordplay on "Zen", obviously; which leads me, once again, to wonder why the hell English speakers think that "X" is pronounced "Z"? Is it just mental laziness? The depravity that inevitably comes with the filthy excesses of Capitalism? A conspiracy by the religious right?
In my experience "x" is pronounced "ks", as demonstrated in a word like "sex" - you don't pronounce it "sez" unless you've had a few pints more than what is good for you, in which case sex is probably irrelevant anyway. It doesn't take much effort to say "Ksen" (like it is spelled, not "ker-SEN", which seems like a more reasonable pronunciation of "Xen".
*huff, huff* Right, I feel much better now. Thank you for listening.
The only reason malware problems are smaller on Linux than Windows is because of the almost-non-existing desktop marketshare and that those who use it on desktop are usually more tech savvy.
So, there are actually two reasons, then?
Anyway, I don't agree. The big, fundamental difference between *nix and Windows is in the underlying architectural philosophy, if one desires to use some big words. UNIX was from the start designed to serve several, concurrent user sessions, whereas Windows was a GUI layer running on top of DOS - most of the design ideas were imported from X, as far as I can see, but the networking side of it were left out. IOW, it was never intended to be an OS, let alone a networked multiuser system; the design decisions that were made back then have haunted Windows ever since.
Windows has always tried to be a sort of easy to use, non-technical appliance OS, and Microsoft have been quite reluctant to improve on the flaws in the design; and when they finally tried their hands on it, they chose to go for the VMS model rather than the UNIX one, which was perhaps not such a good idea, since the event-driven design was not implemented with sufficient forethought - which is a least a contributing factor to why Windows keeps inviting malware attacks.
Where Windows was designed to please the unskilled user, UNIX has always been made for the higly skilled, like engineers; the design is simple, yet allows the full range of potential uses that one may contemplate, and it has always been open to inspection and criticism - in my view the most fundamentally important feature of UNIX. A lot of potential security flaws have been weeded out in UNIX because of that.
However, in recent years there has been an increasing trend towards making the X environment more and more Windows like, with too much focus on being "smart", whatever that means, and too little focus on the things that made UNIX good: simplicity and openness. This is why we now see exploits for Linux - the design decisions made to please the crowd simply invite that kind of things in.
Another important difference, I think, is the security models employed: the UNIX one is almost embarrassingly simple, yet reasonably effective, whereas the Windows one is bewilderingly complex. This seems to have the effect that UNIX users learn to live with the security system fairly quickly, while in Windows people too often give up and turn it down to the bare minimum.
That's what I mean by being surprised.
That isn't what surprises me - what I find surprising is that it has taken so long for the system in America to take action against what is very obviously a criminal organisation. I would really like to understand why.
Not sure; I think the real deal is to stay low-profile, if you want to do something that is illegal - or even quit doing it. A bit like growing cannabis - if you grow a plant or two in your garden, you will probably get off with a warning, if the police go as far as intervening, which they may well not do, since they have far more important things to do, but if you grow a major crop of the stuff, they will of course come after you, and you will have a longish holiday.
I've noted two things about this,
1) It builds on a language called hypertalk, apparently; this seems to be something like what you could imagine COBOL would look like if it had been designed today. Not that COBOL is a bad language as such, but as anybody knows who has ever had to maintain old COBOL programs, the fact that it is supposed to be sort of "human language" like is a hindrance rather than a help to understanding.
COBOL, as well as hypertalk it seems, have been designed on the false assumption that what makes programming hard is the weird looking programming languages; the real truth is that programming is hard because it involves analysing a task in every detail, so you can write the code that does it, and it always turns out that doing even simple things encompasses a lot more detail than one would have imagined.
2) Isn't this "90%" claim simply an iteration of the old one that used to accompany all the interface design tools? It wasn't true then, and it isn't now either of course. It is true that you can whip out a prototype in no time with such tools; but there is always so much more to design and programming than that. It's like Oracle Forms - you can easily make a simple application that allows you to input and retrieve data from a single table, but a real application will involve perhaps tens of tables with any number of triggers and constraints that have to work together; and of course, you don't just display the raw data on-screen, there will be name lookups, pictures etc etc. Programming is complicated because real life is.
The article asks if this sort of "ease of programming" will dumb down programming? I don't think it will get worse than it is. Bad programmers will produce crap, good one will produce good programs; and Darwin is our friend and benefactor here (that's Charles Darwin, not the OS, BTW).
her insurance provider found photos of her on Facebook smiling and looking cheerful
This may well be an unfair action on the part of the insurance provider. Depression does not necessarily mean that you are gloomy 24/7; it is a lot more complicated than that, and this general misperception causes many to overlook or misinterpret what is actually a genuine depression. As an example of just one of the possible explanations for the woman's behaviour, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atypical_depression (Atypical Depression).
I wonder if we are going to get one back: "Can you keep the ^%£$&^$*$&^ noise down!"
This just in: physicists have a pro-gravity bias. Geologists have an anti-flat-earth bias. Astronomers have a pro-heliocentric bias.
Well, not quite; physicists have observations of gravity, they have a well-tested theory and they will say that it is likely that gravity also works next time you test it, but nobody knows for sure ;-)
As for the flat Earth - it is locally flat, isn't it? And while the Sun may be the centre of the solar system (as well as owned by Oracle), it is also true that any point in an infinite space could be declared to be the centre. So there.
Perhaps; I personally think scifi's big problem is that there no longer are great themes to play with concerning the future. For most of the last century we have sort of assumed that mankind could/would overcome all nature could throw at us, so we could on one hand have the optimistic scifi where everything was great and exciting, and we could have the pessimistic sort, that we could comfortably dismiss as "thought provoking". In recent years we have come to realize that this is not a realistic scenario.
Another thing is that science too doesn't seem to make any dramatic and inspiring progress; and how exciting is it to contemplate travel times of hundreds to thousands of years? We have simply run out of science, in a sense.
Finally, I think it has become too predictable with all these aliens that look suspiciously either like dressed up humans or some sort of mindless predator.
The way forward, I think, is to change some of these parameters. Like, explore life that is seriously different; explore physics in a universe where the laws of physics are not what we are used to, but still realistic in the sense that the mechanisms and the logic of the story has been applied thoughtfully and with great consequence.
Or how about exploring the schism between quantum mechanics and general relativity from the other side, in a setting where QM didn't have the "political upper hand", and where physical theories had been pursued more from the perspective of GR - eg. if Niels Bohr hadn't won the discussions with Einstein, and Einstein had been successful in finding a unified theory. Just my thoughts, of course.
And you wouldn't recognise humour if it slapped you in the face. Cheer up, big fella.
You've now got a president to be proud of, so the American population weren't as daft as all that.
.. the Mao years when he murdered tens of millions and the lucky ones merely froze in unheated factories and classrooms
He must have been a supremely active guy, doing all that single-handedly. It is cheap and easy to sing along on that tune; but it is such a shame, since you are not far from the truth of the matter. As you say, China has made massive progress, especially in recent decades, but even the years under Mao represent progress; the Communists would not have won without him, and China would probably not have made it to the top of the world as an independent nation under Guomindang.
Mao Zedong is far too often portrayed as a thoroughly evil person, which is nonsense. For one thing, nobody is thoroughly evil - if you can't acknowledge anything good about a person, then you are simply prejudiced. There is no doubt that some of his decisions in later years caused a number of major catastrophes; there is also no doubt that his leadership is what gave the Communists success. Where Guomindang's soldiers treated civilians with contempt and cruelty, the Communists did the opposite and therefore won the support of the people - and so on. If you study China's recent history without prejudice, you will find that Mao deserves at least a large part of the admiration he is regarded with in China; still, he should have left the power to more pragmatic types when the revolution was over. Great revolutionaries are rarely good administrators.
And it is not just China and the US - the whole world is in this together, not just when it comes to the economy. They have been talking about globalisation for years, but it has been happening all around while people have been staring blindly at the many failed efforts at cooperation on government-level.
What kind of question is that? Don't you know that America was that close to get a vice-president that wouldn't be able to find the US on a map of Nort America? I think you need to adjust your expectations a bit.
... why this isn't obvious, and being done already?
I think you answer your own question: the enormous amounts of data involved - that, as well as the fact that they are using different and probably incompatible ways of storing the data. And that is just the technical side of the problem; someone has to translate the data into actual knowledge first, so we know what to combine; and we still don't have computers that can do that.
This has always been the problem in scientific research; an enormous amount of knowledge is being generated, and nobody can keep up with it, let alone combine widely different streams of knowledge.
Clearly, the answer is that any samples and documentation should be destroyed
Clearly, you have overlooked the fact that we are talking about private companies here. What happens when a company goes bust? Another company buys it and its stock - in this case the DNA profiles etc. What did you expect? When you deal with private companies that is the way it is; which is why it would probably be better if it was handled by a public authority - they are after all somewhat accuntable to the public, and they don't go bankrupt so often.
Hmm, not so long ago it was "Those evil communists don't respect IP rights...", but now it is bad that they do? Is this not simply because to some people, China simply can't do anything right, no matter what? It works both ways, you know.
What we do NOT believe is that you can force your neighbors to pay the bill. Most Americans consider that theft of another man's labor (he works; you take the product of his work i.e. his money). We are amazed that Europeans do not.
You have such an amazingly narrow outlook on the world; and you seem to prefer to use strongly emotional words. Why is that? To me at least, it makes you less credible.
Surely, in a caring society full of caring people it is not a question of forcing anybody? If you see somebody in desperate need of help, don't you feel that you want to reach out and help? At least if it something you can easily do? I can assure you that I don't resent seeing people receiving public help, I am not that petty, and I don't believe for a moment that Americans are either. And I think you should remenber that you can all too easily end up in a situation where you are in need of public help - wouldn't it be nice in that situation to be able to get it?
From what I hear, it is not uncommon in America to lose everything if you are hit by a disease that requires expensive treatment. It seems to me that in America, a very, very few make it to be absurdly rich, but the rest can look forward to an old age full of worry. As a European, I can retire in the knowledge that because I have paid my taxes, I need not worry about health and a lot of other issues - I have the right to receive care.
Honestly I don't think obscenities would exist without a society, and probably a prudish Victorian one that makes everyone embarrassed when I say the word "cunt".
Perhaps, although I am not so sure. From Wiktionary: "A prude (Old French prude)[1] is a person who is described as being excessively concerned with decorum, modesty or propriety." So, while "cunt" seems offensive to a puritan, I think the essence of obscenity is the "wilful offensiveness".
All that aside, we should at least agree that Marxism has in its total caused far more harm than good, even if we cannot say the same for socialism and liberal democracy in general.
Again, I think perhaps this is more a question of what you understand by "Marxism". In my understanding, Marxism is simply the economic theory detailed by Karl Marx in "Das Kapital"; it has its merits as an input to the scientific discourse on economics, but I don't think it is fair to view it in the light of what people like Lenin and Stalin did in its name. That would be like judging all Christians based on what the Spanish Inquisition did.
I have a lot of sympathy for the socialist ideals; that doesn't preclude me from understanding that a lot of evil has been committed in its name. Still, I think it is wrong to summarily judge anything based on only one side of the story; when I was young I used to be very anti-American - nothing American could ever be good - but I have learned that there is always more to things. So, if I can go from that point of view to one where I can see that there is a lot of good as well as bad in America, it should be possible to do the same with respect to USSR, China, Iran, ...
There is a lot of shit in the world today, but there is also a lot of good. It is within our power to make either Paradise or Hell on Earth; and whether we live in what is formally a democracy or not, we actually have a lot of influence on things - it doesn't have to be the way that it is.
destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance -- and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
We the people already held all the rights. We only consented to surrender SOME of them to form a limited social contract to secure life, liberty, and property. We don't have free speech because the government said we could....we have freedom of speech because we never gave it up.
"We the people ..." - yeah, get the slogans out right from the start, so nobody starts thinking on their own. It's funny, they all talk about "the people", but it always means "the ones that agree with me". Objectively speaking, "the people" means everybody present - including the 55% that actually think society should care about its citizens (ie. including the "progressives, socialists, and the marxist democrats" in your language) as well as the ones who don't really care either way; all in all probably 99% of the people. If you don't want to be part of that kind of "We, the REAL people", it must mean that you want to be an outsider.
And you've got it wrong when you say that "we already held all the rights and agreed to surrender some of them". Humans are social animals, and living in social groups is part of our natural survival strategy. Giving up some freedoms in exchange for the freedom we enjoy because we are part of a socety is written in our genes. If you weren't part of a society, there is a lot of things you wouldn't have - but you would certainly have the freedom to stand on a mountain top and scream obscenities, if that is what you fancy.