What a lot of bizarre, whining comments I see on this list and elsewhere. This is democracy - sometimes your party wins, sometimes not; but you are expected to accept it with good grace and make the best of it. At least you can't say that this was not won fair and square. Well, I suppose those on the losing side are entitled to feel a bit sore - I'm sure you will get over it.
Let us look a bit on what has happened here: For one thing, Obama and his team have organized a brilliant and effective campaign; that shows he has determination, organisation skills and leadership. So, he is actually qualified for the job. Another thing we have seen is that he raised a staggering amount of campaign money, much of it in the form of small individual contributions - to me that says that a lot of ordinary people really wanted what he has to offer, not just rich corporations. All in all, this really is the people of America that has spoken, loudly and clearly. And what is he actually suggesting? As I hear it, he talks about solving problems by talking to people rather than ripping out the biggest gun you've got and start blasting away; he talks about being responsible in money matters and about not giving taxpayers money to those least in need: rich people. What is wrong with that?
But I don't think that is the most important thing that has happened, really. What has really happened is that people have thrown off the fear and insecurity that the NeoCons and the religious right have used to keep them down. Yes, it is hugely important that he is the first non-white president, but the really important thing is that people have chosen not to cower in fear any longer, but instead stand up and face it. And I think it is also remarkable that they have chosen what looks like an entirely unknown new direction - that is how much they didn't like the old ways.
How about names that are ambiguous, like "Randy"? Which I understand is a male name in the US, but means "sexually aroused" in UK - should the icon depend on which part of the world you live in? And if so, what should the UK avatar be like?
You know, I don't really disagree with you. A child growing up in a healthy, loving family isn't usually harmed by physical punishment; although arguably in such a family there will rarely be the need for such measures. If physical discipline is used on a regular basis, it is likely to be a symptom of more fundamental problems in the family - humans, like most comparable mammals, have deep instincts for protecting our young, and it takes a lot to break through those instincts.
Used to work that way, unfortuantly, you get some crazy things today. For example, just getting hauled in front of a judge is a great expense - legal fees for the lawyer, time out of work, etc...
But then the problem is in the way your legal system works; if justice depends on your income, it isn't justice. Aren't we supposed to be equal to the law?
I'm sure you know what a gun is better than I. As you can guess, I can't see that there is any legal need for a civilian to own military-grade weapons; correct me if I am wrong, but I think we in Europe still are behind the US as far as violent crime goes, unless you put on the special argue-in-favour-of-weapons glasses. I think you can see this expressed in how safe people feel - in many European countries families with young children are not worried about letting them run outside without supervision or placing their prams - with their babies inside - on the pavement oustide a shop. This is certainly true in Scandinavia, but I remember one horror story some years ago, about a Danish couple on holiday in New York, who went to a restaurant; they left the baby just outside the window and went to sit on the inside so they could see the pram while enjoying a cup of coffee. They almost lost their child - not to criminals, though, unless you see your police as criminals. Clearly Americans feel far less safe in their own environment than the Danes; and the only explanations I can see all have the easy access to all kinds of weapons as a significant factor. I mean, it isn't because Danish people are better and more law-abiding than Americans - we are just people.
But maybe you can explain why the average American has an overpowering need to own heavy artillery? I don't think the civil militia argument holds any more, since America now has a well-educated and well-regulated police. You don't need a machine gun for hunting, not if you are a sportsman. I don't buy that you need it for personal protection - if you pull out a gun against an armed robber, one of you is likely to get hurt, and the robber is more desperate so he will hesitate less. The sensible thing is to give him what he wants and claim it on the insurance.
"we have the right to respond to deadly force with deadly force"
Well, I believe that is the case everywhere. If you are threatened on your life, you can legally use deadly force to defend yourself. Of course, in most of Europe you can't put up a sign on your lawn saying "Armed response" and then shoot down anybody you deem to be trespassing; there has to be an actual danger to your life. And we do have gun rights, they are just not as easily obtained.
I think the main reason why guns are so important in America is that you have a huge and politically powerful arms industry. Any regulation will endanger their profit margins; and that points to a much more fundamental problem in the States: your political system is only democratic in a very limited way. You are allowed to - sorry, you have the right to - vote for certain politicians, but as I hear again and again, politicians don't hold the real power in America - that belongs to big interest groups, like the gun lobby, oil lobby etc as well as the religious fringes, none of which are democratically elected or accountable to the public.
People cannot yell, spank, or otherwise discipline their children in public places because some do gooder will freak out and claim its abuse.
Perhaps, but I doubt that this is what is intended. The problem is, however, that while it is relatively easy to decide objectively whether a parent has smacked their child, it was incredibly difficult to convict even somebody who regularly beat up the kids, if they can say "I have a right to discipline my children". I suppose the idea was that it would be easier to get to a fair verdict if the starting point is that any corporeal punishment is illegal. Ideally, if a parent has smacked their child because, say, they had a tantrum in a dangerous situation, the judge should say "Well, this is illegal, but in the circumstances, permissible". I don't know if it works that way.
There is no doubt that the government doesn't handle these things very well - on the other hand, public servants are not paid very well and the whole area of public care is massively underfunded. So you get what you pay for, I think.
Compared with socialist-leaning political types we see in Europe,...
You have some curious notions, I think. A bit like saying that the Archbishop of Canterbury leans towards Satanism because he is not as far to the extreme right as the average American Creationist. And the funny things is, quite a lot of Americans I know seem to agree with a lot of Socialist ideas, as long as it isn't called Socialism. As far as I can see, you Americans are distributed politically exactly like people in Europe, only you call it something different, because you have grown up fearing the words "socialism" and "communism".
I don't think European scepticism about McCain has as much to do with him as with Sarah Palin; she may have put the "hot in hot", as I heard recently, but she's also put the "alas" into "Alaska". You are probably right - it doesn't matter much whether it is one or the other; except for the threat of Palin getting into power. Because to a great extent, the situation in the world is going to dictate which decisions the next president will make, if he has any common sense. McCain has, Obama has, Biden has, but I am not sure what Sarah Palin has.
I don't know what it is with you guys about "small government"; I mean, you do want public roads, education for all as well as judicial system, police and military, don't you? I doubt that many would prefer all those things to be privatised. And you cling to your guns like a drug addict to his next fix; it isn't even as if people who wanted to own a gun wouldn't be able to. I mean, if I want to own a gun in UK, I can do so legally; it is just not something you can buy in the local car boot sale.
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die. There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be.
The idiocy of this statement is beyond belief. Oh yes, it is very natural that species die out, just like it is natural for people to die when they get a nuclear missile in the head. That doesn't exonerate us from being the main if not the only cause for the current mass extinction. Amphibians have been around far longer than both mammals and reptiles - they have lived through several mass extinctions already, so they are clearly able to adapt. Which means that when they can't in the present situation, there may be cause for concern.
And your idea that historical events can be more significant than climate change and the collapse of the ecosystem reveals a staggering lack of insight. Do you think that humanity isn't part of nature, somehow? That we can breathe without air and eat without food? Ecosystems are intimately connected, and when crucial parts disappear, they collapse. And then we lose out too.
The sad truth is that we humans throughout our existence have have had a major, negative impact on nature. Just compare the diversity of species in areas where no humans live, with what we find in cultivated fields. Or look at what happend in the fall-out zone around Chernobyl: People evacuated, and suddenly the bio-diversity shoots up dramatically; there's even wild boars there now - and that is in an area with high levels of radioactive pollution.
To sum it up: we are fishing the seas dry, we are shaving the rainforests away, we pollute and waste resources like there is no tomorrow - and I suppose there isn't likely to be one either, the way we go about things - and one day we won't be able to do it any more; I wonder how muc comfort people like you will find in your words about "adapt or die". Right now there is enough food to feed everybody, but that depends on being able to maintain the current levels of fishing, and the current intensity of agriculture - which in turn depends on massive amountds of synthetic fertiliser, insecticides, growth regulators, herbicides etc. Which in turn depends on our access to cheap energy.
We can choose one of the following: we can continue as usual, steadily increasing our numbers and our use of resources. When they run out, we will probably be living in a world where there are little other than our unsustainable, energy intensive agriculture; few fish in the seas, few animals on land, no natural forests etc. But lots of people, who are now facing starvation. Or we can change our ways, preserve nature, stop wasting resources on stupid crap, reverse population growth etc; and maybe we won't end up in quite as grim a situation.
Welcome to the newest in FUD technology! Which just happens to be the same as the old version, but stated more emphatically - again, again, again,... [echoes fading into to the background] - This time from samzenpus; well, who would have thought it?
As others have noted, if you were to actually go to China and try the internet, you would find that it works pretty much the same as elsewhere. And just as elsewhere you will sometimes have trouble with your connection - last I was in Beijing (~1 month ago) I found that I couldn't connect to Wikipedia. So I waited half an hour and could. The same thing can happen in UK; and my daughter, in Denmark, can't connect to RyanAir for some reason - don't ask why I don't know and I don't care. But I don't automatically assume that this is because the government is trying to block anything.
But they do have censorship - not unlike what several ISPs in the West do, I hear. Not many years ago certain ISPs wouldn't let you access certain websites because they had naughty words on them; one of the funnier ones was a BBS for birdwatchers, where they used filthy language such "A magnificent cock robin" and "the lovely tits outside my window". In China, we are told, you are not allowed to discuss "democracy" or "Tibet"; it may even be true. I can certainly see their point - one thing is that words like "democracy" and "freedom" come cheap, but is American style democracy and/or freedom the only or even the best there is? Perhaps they just want to figure out the right way for themselves; I would think that is their right.
And the same goes for religion - if they just open the doors, they know very well that the country will be flooded with America peddlers trying to push their McJesus, the fast-food version of Christian faith. As far as I can see, the world would be a better place if there were less mind-benders around. Apart from that, I don't think the Chinese people will tolerate being flooded with foreign religions any more than we in West generally do; if we care about the freedom of the Chinese people, shouldn't we respect their freedom to say no?
Then, of course, there is the security aspect of the thing - I think all Americans can understand that one, considering that muslims and anybody who looks vaguely Middle-Eastern is automatically considered suspect by a major section of Americans. Having a large percentage of your population influenced by American fundamentalist Christians, who openly declare that they are enemies of the Chinese state, is not something they see as attractive, I imagine.
No, I'm not going to put down Minefield, which I haven't tried yet, but I have been worried for a long while what is happening in the world of browsers. Well, I say browsers, but I mean Firefox, the only one I have used regularly for many years. There was a point a couple of years ago when Firefox seemed to change from being the free browser for the people and began to become a way to introduce Google into everything we do on the Web. I really resent that, it takes away some of my freedom to choose, but even more, it pushes a product that I haven't asked for; if I want to use Google, I will go to their website.
What I'm talking about is the fact that if you type something in the address field, it gets sent off to Google as a search entry; that may be OK if that is what you expected and wanted - in my opinion it isn't OK if you simply mistyped an address. I'm not interested in "Buy the cheapest http//oracle.com at eBay", to be perfectly honest - I just want an error message.
And when start looking around in Firefox there are several of these tie-ins that they seem to try to sneak under your radar; like the exception lists that come as default: "Block popups (except from Google, etc...)" and others like it. It it the kind of things that make me feel that they are being dishonest and that is not a nice feeling. They didn't have to sneak around like they were ashamed of themselves - a lot of people think it is a great thing that access to Google is built in from the start - they could have said up front that this is a vehicle to promote Google without losing anything, but they chose not to; and for that I don't trust them like I used to.
OK, it is a small complaint and hardly has any bearing on the subject; so to try to save that a little bit - does Minefield display the same tendencies? And can you use Firefox's extensions with it?
Well, trust a guy called "lazynomer" to not read or understand what I wrote and then go on to rebuke me for not understanding; ironic, really. As I pointed out, the dictionary offers the interpretation that you suggest; I just can't see how that meaning fits in with other, more natural meanings. I also tried to lighten the tone of my posting by joking about it - I suppose my error was that I used something akin to sarcasm without surrounding it with "[sracasm]... [/sarcasm]". My fault entirely (whoops, there I go again; I just don't learn)
And now for some political and technological dynamite! No, sorry actually - just a rather trivial question about language, and not even a programming one.
...the calibration images were 'nominal'
Just out of curiosity - what is this about the word 'nominal'? According to the Wiktionary, 'nominal' has a number of meanings, including: "Of, resembling, relating to, or consisting of a name or names" and "Insignificantly small; trifling", both of which make sense, considering that it comes from 'nomen' (='name'). It also means "According to plan or design" and that doesn't seem to make any sense. Is this a mispronunciation that has become mainstream, along the same lines as 'nucular', which actually means "Of or related to a nucule -- a section of a compound (usually hard) fruit"?
It's not a difficult language, only very clunky. I learned it by first lying to get a job, then writing programs with the manual beside me; and that was the IBM mainframe COBOL manual, not the easiest read in the world. Here is a link to where you can supposedly get a free COBOL compiler for Linux:
What he actually said was that he has discovered flaws in the ideology that he followed, which is a much more fundamental thing. This is from BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7687101.stm):
... the former bank boss said he had made a "partially" wrong decision in thinking that relying on banks to use their self-interest would be enough to protect shareholders and their equity.
In other words, the assumption underlying the idea that unregulated market will end up making the best decisions, is wrong, at least "partially".
It seems like a paradox to me that we have heard endlessly from the so-called climate sceptics that we don't know enough about the climate, the atmosphere or anything else to say anything about global warming; but on the other hand, we are all too willing to throw ourselves, arms and legs flailing, into trying to modify the global environment to cool the planet down. After all we know even less about what will happen if we try to do any of that, than we do about modeling the planet's climate as it is now.
No matter what effect modifications of this sort might have on our climate, the very first thing we must do is to stop burning fossil fuels. Otherwise we are just going to paint ourselves into a corner, where we start cooling the planet down, but never get around to stopping the CO2 emissions. CO2 doesn't just warm the planet up, it has a large number of other harmful effects, acidification of the oceans just being one example. If we live in a filthy house, we can cover the bad smell with perfume for a while - but if we don't clean up and stop throwing waste on the floor, the house will end up being unihabitable, even if it doesn't smell too bad.
The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor
Nor are they going to want to pay for software they have been used to download for free. This sounds more like the wishful thinking of somebody who really wants open source and free software to go away.
If you have been travelling the world, you will probably have noticed that the poorer the country, the more generous the people. Which makes sense, I think - when you have little, you can understand the plight of others, but when you have much more than you need, you have probably never felt hardship and tend to think that poor people are just lazy.
And when you think about, didn't OSS start out exactly because there were clever, but poor people, who couldn't afford to buy expensive software? That alone should tell us that open source will become more prevalent in times of hardship.
I can't see what is so surprising here. Basically when you do research, you are groping in darkness - after all, it wouldn't really be worth doing if the results were already known, would it? Approaching a new problem is a bit like looking at the notorious elephant through a keyhole; different people will have different guesses as to what it is and most will be wrong, until at some point enough observations are made and you can construct a more complete picture.
When you publish scientific articles you don't claim that "THIS IS THE TRUTH" - you are merely putting forward your opinion and then somebody else comes along and says "No, because...". And even the articles with the "wrong" results are valuable, because they tell us that this particular interpretation is not the right one. It can take a lot of false turns before you find the right way through a maze, and in fact it tells us something about the generally high quality of research that we are not seeing about 90% wrong results.
The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns
Hedge fund investor? In other words someone who makes money without actually producing anything, to put it bluntly? And this guy has suddenly seen the light and knows how to solve all the problems in the world? He's right about one thing, though - the current form of government in the US is not working optimally.
The idea he is proposing is far from new - it seems to be the standard "solution" whenever it gets a bit tough, and it always ends with a bunch of idiots in an ivory tower - IOW, aristocrats. Nope, democracy is still the way forward, despite all its inefficiency and shortcomings. Government in general shouldn't be efficient - it should be accountable and it should plan far ahead. The inefficiency is part of the "checks and stops", it forces those in government to think before they act. If the goverment was efficient, we would soon have a wild-eyed George Bush, foaming around the mouth, hurling the country into stupid wars. Haven't we had enough of kings and aristocrats?
What we really need is to make a few, clever adjustments to things. More accountability, more openness, for starters, as well as a considerable tightening of the rules for how much private money and religion may influence politics. One of the biggest problems for American democracy is that the country is in effect being ruled by a very small minority of either the hyper rich or fringe groups that have influence because they are loud. I don't know - make it illegal (ie, a crime) to receive more than the typical membership fee from any private entity, make it illegal for companies, churches and the like to pay for political adverts of any sort during an election campaign. Give each candidate the same amount of airtime, make it a capital offence to be a professional lobbyist; whatever it takes to keep out undue influence on the processes of democracy.
A democracy worth its name should represent the will of the people, and I think it is worth protecting. Even if it means limiting the general laissez-faire version of "freedom of speech" on certain occasions.
I would start with Article 12 from this... http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html i.e. "Article 12 : No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Please note the little word "arbitrary". Is it arbitrary when it happens systematically? Such philosophical questions aside, what this article really says is that these must not occur except as allowed by law. This is just like when the polica can't arrest you on a whim, "just because" - that would be "arbitrary" - but they can still arrest you if they suspect you of committing a crime, because there is a law that says so.
In the same way, if the legislators decide to make a law that decides which web-sites you are allowed to visit, it is no longer arbitrary, and the only way to get around it, as far as I can see, is by either proving that it is unconstitutional or by getting somebody elected that are willing to repeal this law.
...is actually pointless (that is, of no commercial value)...
It's an interesting definition of "pointless" he's got there; symptomatic of the ultra-capitalistic mindset that has just been demonstrated to be far from optimal by the current financial crisis. Look at it this way: He is saying that the only thing that matters in the world is whether you can make a profit. This is the ideological basis for such things a the lack of regulations that have brought us the crisis; it is also the reason why making a fast profit has been giving priority over long-term financial stability in so many companies, banks not least.
Apart from that - basic research is not pointless, even if there are no short-term profits to be made. Basic research is necessary because we are not able to tell what we are going to need to know in the future - take the early research into quantum mechanics. It was basic research, utterly pointless according to this definition, but we wouldn't have semiconductors today, and thus no PCs nor the endless numbers of electronic gadgets we have now, were it not for that "pointless" research.
It really is time to stop dreaming about "the market" as something magical that will sort everything out for us without requiring us to think and take responsibility.
How is this different from what is already in place? Phone companies and ISPs already keep logs and records of these things; how else would the phone company be able to send you a itemised bill? Tne new thing is that they want to collect it in one, central database for convenience.
Nobody in their right mind would imagine that any government authority would be able to listen to all phone conversations happening in the UK or read all emails being sent - let alone analyse them and understand them. And that's just the meaningful emails - add SPAM to that; it just can't be done. So where is actually the big, bad surveillance? As far as I can see, the reason why they want this is because it takes too long to go and retrieve the records from individual ISPs and phone companies - it was a lot easier when there was only one phone company. Speed is of the essence in dealing with crime, especially since they can't get through with extending the period the police can retain terror suspects, and having it all in one database will make it a lot faster to find out who communicated with your suspect when and where.
So, is it worth making a big fuss about? Not to my mind. What does worry me is that this is yet another big project that a public authority will let EDS handle. That combination has in the past led to too many failures and I think they are going to waste a lot of money at a time when it would be better spent elsewhere. That should comfort those who are worried about this project - it doesn't have much chance of getting off the ground. Of course, it shouldn't take a competent database developer many months to make this work; perhaps they should have chosen to develop it as open source?
Seriously though these kinds of analysis of political leaning toward behavior seem as silly as the easily startled tend to be more conservative.
Sille as it may seem when presented like this, it is not as stupid as that. In recent years there has been a lot of research into how mental processes relate to brain physiology, body chemistry etc, and in that context it isn't unreasonable to hypothesize about why people lean one way or another, politically.
Also, please note that this a statistical result - there is a apparent correlation between political leaning and the way you keep order. This can be seen as just a special case of the idea that the way you live your life influences your political opinion - IOW nothing surprising there.
What they don't say is that "if you are messy, you are always liberal".
How much of this do you folks in the Slashdot community out there really buy into?
Oh, every word, certainly. This is about critical thinking - it doesn't mean that you have to reject everything with scorn, out of hand, it just means that you don't accept things without first thinking about how they add up. It is surprising how often critical thinking leads you to accept and understand what others tell you.
From the beginning of the enlightenment up till about the middle of the twentieth century there was plenty of role models and they got lots publicity: just take at random Einstein and Bohr, but also Gauss, Riemann and a long list of others. In the west it ended with the Moon landings, more or less, not least because that was never meant to be more than a publicity stunt, really.
Another contributing cause is that while people like Einstein and Bohr produced some breathtaking results that reverberated through the common media so everybody heard about them, scientists are not seen as producing similarly impressive reults. In many ways we haven't really done much more than filling in the gaps and checking predictions since then. And the next big step forward seems ever more elusive - it isn't for lack of talent or effort that we still don't have a definitive unified theory in physics.
A third factor is possibly that science fiction has pumped up people's expectations with ideas of faster-than-light travel, worm-holes and aliens that look surprisingly like dressed-up humans everywhere you go. Only a century ago science-fiction's wildest imaginations were life on Mars and time-travel, and science was able to blow our minds with discoveries far more exciting than that, but science now-a-days tells us that we are unlikely to be able to travel faster than light and that alien civilizations don't seem to be thick on the ground - it is simply a disappointment to many young people.
And of course we don't admire the power of the mind any more. Where there once was Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, we now have Rambo, Batman and very occasionally somebody with an impressively huge computer, but even then it is the computer we admire, not the guy who invented it.
So, that is why we are beginning to lag behind in science; and to add insult to injury, the Chinese are storming forward and are becoming the leaders, not least in mathematics. But what can we do? When we have to actually fight against the mind-numbing idiocy of such things as Intelligent Design, what hope is there of attracting young people to a line of study that requires you to ask critical questions every step of the way? And for a disappointingly low salary too.
First of all - I'm not really in a position to jude whether more or less surveillance is a good thing; I can say it doesn't worry me a lot, just like the terrorist threat and other organised crime dont worry me too much. After all, in my daily life I don't feel that any of those things are in my way. The worst I have experienced is having to take off my shoes at Heathrow when I went through security, and I think that must have been worse for those around me. Frankly, I am surprised that they were willing to risk it.
It is so easy to act like a lemming and follow the crowd over the cliff's edge when somebody starts hollering about surveillance, because it evokes associations about cameras in your bed- and batrooms and people in dark suits following you around discreetly everywhere. This is of course not real - no government has that many resources, certainly not in the current economic climate. So take a small step back, take a deep breath and think critically about things. I am not going to argue for one position or another, but we should learn to be critical about what others want us to believe; it is not only the government that is out to use you, you know.
And while you are thinking, why not give some thought to how you would address the very real problems of international crime in the modern world? Thinking about those things and making up your mind is part of what some call your democratic duty; if you like living in a democracy, you should do your part and take it serious. otherwise you are no better than the ultra-Christian nutters that automatically agrees with anybody who hates gays, is against free abortion and quotes the Bible.
But back to the problems this sort of legislation is actually trying to address, however clumsily: Modern communication, and especially the internet makes it very easy to organise criminal activity of any kind, not just terrorism, but also drug crimes, economic crimes, people smuggling etc etc. How would you, working in the real world, solve these problems? Calling in Rambo or Superman is not going to work.
I think one of the problems here is that IPv6 hasn't really presented a conving case yet. I have, like most, only taken a very limited interest in the issue and all I can remember is that with IPv6 we can have networking in all our home appliances right down to the RFID tags on our cornflakes packages. So it seems rather like something that isn't seriously needed.
I am very open to the idea that it may be an absolutely fabulous idea, but then what are the real benefits - how can we justify spending the money and time it will inevitably cost? It seems reasonable to me to assume that those in charge have made a cost/benefit analysis and found that it isn't worth it; you tend to do that before spending large amounts of money.
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What a lot of bizarre, whining comments I see on this list and elsewhere. This is democracy - sometimes your party wins, sometimes not; but you are expected to accept it with good grace and make the best of it. At least you can't say that this was not won fair and square. Well, I suppose those on the losing side are entitled to feel a bit sore - I'm sure you will get over it.
Let us look a bit on what has happened here: For one thing, Obama and his team have organized a brilliant and effective campaign; that shows he has determination, organisation skills and leadership. So, he is actually qualified for the job. Another thing we have seen is that he raised a staggering amount of campaign money, much of it in the form of small individual contributions - to me that says that a lot of ordinary people really wanted what he has to offer, not just rich corporations. All in all, this really is the people of America that has spoken, loudly and clearly. And what is he actually suggesting? As I hear it, he talks about solving problems by talking to people rather than ripping out the biggest gun you've got and start blasting away; he talks about being responsible in money matters and about not giving taxpayers money to those least in need: rich people. What is wrong with that?
But I don't think that is the most important thing that has happened, really. What has really happened is that people have thrown off the fear and insecurity that the NeoCons and the religious right have used to keep them down. Yes, it is hugely important that he is the first non-white president, but the really important thing is that people have chosen not to cower in fear any longer, but instead stand up and face it. And I think it is also remarkable that they have chosen what looks like an entirely unknown new direction - that is how much they didn't like the old ways.
How about names that are ambiguous, like "Randy"? Which I understand is a male name in the US, but means "sexually aroused" in UK - should the icon depend on which part of the world you live in? And if so, what should the UK avatar be like?
You know, I don't really disagree with you. A child growing up in a healthy, loving family isn't usually harmed by physical punishment; although arguably in such a family there will rarely be the need for such measures. If physical discipline is used on a regular basis, it is likely to be a symptom of more fundamental problems in the family - humans, like most comparable mammals, have deep instincts for protecting our young, and it takes a lot to break through those instincts.
Used to work that way, unfortuantly, you get some crazy things today. For example, just getting hauled in front of a judge is a great expense - legal fees for the lawyer, time out of work, etc...
But then the problem is in the way your legal system works; if justice depends on your income, it isn't justice. Aren't we supposed to be equal to the law?
Define "gun".
I'm sure you know what a gun is better than I. As you can guess, I can't see that there is any legal need for a civilian to own military-grade weapons; correct me if I am wrong, but I think we in Europe still are behind the US as far as violent crime goes, unless you put on the special argue-in-favour-of-weapons glasses. I think you can see this expressed in how safe people feel - in many European countries families with young children are not worried about letting them run outside without supervision or placing their prams - with their babies inside - on the pavement oustide a shop. This is certainly true in Scandinavia, but I remember one horror story some years ago, about a Danish couple on holiday in New York, who went to a restaurant; they left the baby just outside the window and went to sit on the inside so they could see the pram while enjoying a cup of coffee. They almost lost their child - not to criminals, though, unless you see your police as criminals. Clearly Americans feel far less safe in their own environment than the Danes; and the only explanations I can see all have the easy access to all kinds of weapons as a significant factor. I mean, it isn't because Danish people are better and more law-abiding than Americans - we are just people.
But maybe you can explain why the average American has an overpowering need to own heavy artillery? I don't think the civil militia argument holds any more, since America now has a well-educated and well-regulated police. You don't need a machine gun for hunting, not if you are a sportsman. I don't buy that you need it for personal protection - if you pull out a gun against an armed robber, one of you is likely to get hurt, and the robber is more desperate so he will hesitate less. The sensible thing is to give him what he wants and claim it on the insurance.
"we have the right to respond to deadly force with deadly force"
Well, I believe that is the case everywhere. If you are threatened on your life, you can legally use deadly force to defend yourself. Of course, in most of Europe you can't put up a sign on your lawn saying "Armed response" and then shoot down anybody you deem to be trespassing; there has to be an actual danger to your life. And we do have gun rights, they are just not as easily obtained.
I think the main reason why guns are so important in America is that you have a huge and politically powerful arms industry. Any regulation will endanger their profit margins; and that points to a much more fundamental problem in the States: your political system is only democratic in a very limited way. You are allowed to - sorry, you have the right to - vote for certain politicians, but as I hear again and again, politicians don't hold the real power in America - that belongs to big interest groups, like the gun lobby, oil lobby etc as well as the religious fringes, none of which are democratically elected or accountable to the public.
People cannot yell, spank, or otherwise discipline their children in public places because some do gooder will freak out and claim its abuse.
Perhaps, but I doubt that this is what is intended. The problem is, however, that while it is relatively easy to decide objectively whether a parent has smacked their child, it was incredibly difficult to convict even somebody who regularly beat up the kids, if they can say "I have a right to discipline my children". I suppose the idea was that it would be easier to get to a fair verdict if the starting point is that any corporeal punishment is illegal. Ideally, if a parent has smacked their child because, say, they had a tantrum in a dangerous situation, the judge should say "Well, this is illegal, but in the circumstances, permissible". I don't know if it works that way.
There is no doubt that the government doesn't handle these things very well - on the other hand, public servants are not paid very well and the whole area of public care is massively underfunded. So you get what you pay for, I think.
Compared with socialist-leaning political types we see in Europe, ...
You have some curious notions, I think. A bit like saying that the Archbishop of Canterbury leans towards Satanism because he is not as far to the extreme right as the average American Creationist. And the funny things is, quite a lot of Americans I know seem to agree with a lot of Socialist ideas, as long as it isn't called Socialism. As far as I can see, you Americans are distributed politically exactly like people in Europe, only you call it something different, because you have grown up fearing the words "socialism" and "communism".
I don't think European scepticism about McCain has as much to do with him as with Sarah Palin; she may have put the "hot in hot", as I heard recently, but she's also put the "alas" into "Alaska". You are probably right - it doesn't matter much whether it is one or the other; except for the threat of Palin getting into power. Because to a great extent, the situation in the world is going to dictate which decisions the next president will make, if he has any common sense. McCain has, Obama has, Biden has, but I am not sure what Sarah Palin has.
I don't know what it is with you guys about "small government"; I mean, you do want public roads, education for all as well as judicial system, police and military, don't you? I doubt that many would prefer all those things to be privatised. And you cling to your guns like a drug addict to his next fix; it isn't even as if people who wanted to own a gun wouldn't be able to. I mean, if I want to own a gun in UK, I can do so legally; it is just not something you can buy in the local car boot sale.
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die. There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be.
The idiocy of this statement is beyond belief. Oh yes, it is very natural that species die out, just like it is natural for people to die when they get a nuclear missile in the head. That doesn't exonerate us from being the main if not the only cause for the current mass extinction. Amphibians have been around far longer than both mammals and reptiles - they have lived through several mass extinctions already, so they are clearly able to adapt. Which means that when they can't in the present situation, there may be cause for concern.
And your idea that historical events can be more significant than climate change and the collapse of the ecosystem reveals a staggering lack of insight. Do you think that humanity isn't part of nature, somehow? That we can breathe without air and eat without food? Ecosystems are intimately connected, and when crucial parts disappear, they collapse. And then we lose out too.
The sad truth is that we humans throughout our existence have have had a major, negative impact on nature. Just compare the diversity of species in areas where no humans live, with what we find in cultivated fields. Or look at what happend in the fall-out zone around Chernobyl: People evacuated, and suddenly the bio-diversity shoots up dramatically; there's even wild boars there now - and that is in an area with high levels of radioactive pollution.
To sum it up: we are fishing the seas dry, we are shaving the rainforests away, we pollute and waste resources like there is no tomorrow - and I suppose there isn't likely to be one either, the way we go about things - and one day we won't be able to do it any more; I wonder how muc comfort people like you will find in your words about "adapt or die". Right now there is enough food to feed everybody, but that depends on being able to maintain the current levels of fishing, and the current intensity of agriculture - which in turn depends on massive amountds of synthetic fertiliser, insecticides, growth regulators, herbicides etc. Which in turn depends on our access to cheap energy.
We can choose one of the following: we can continue as usual, steadily increasing our numbers and our use of resources. When they run out, we will probably be living in a world where there are little other than our unsustainable, energy intensive agriculture; few fish in the seas, few animals on land, no natural forests etc. But lots of people, who are now facing starvation. Or we can change our ways, preserve nature, stop wasting resources on stupid crap, reverse population growth etc; and maybe we won't end up in quite as grim a situation.
Welcome to the newest in FUD technology! Which just happens to be the same as the old version, but stated more emphatically - again, again, again, ... [echoes fading into to the background] - This time from samzenpus; well, who would have thought it?
As others have noted, if you were to actually go to China and try the internet, you would find that it works pretty much the same as elsewhere. And just as elsewhere you will sometimes have trouble with your connection - last I was in Beijing (~1 month ago) I found that I couldn't connect to Wikipedia. So I waited half an hour and could. The same thing can happen in UK; and my daughter, in Denmark, can't connect to RyanAir for some reason - don't ask why I don't know and I don't care. But I don't automatically assume that this is because the government is trying to block anything.
But they do have censorship - not unlike what several ISPs in the West do, I hear. Not many years ago certain ISPs wouldn't let you access certain websites because they had naughty words on them; one of the funnier ones was a BBS for birdwatchers, where they used filthy language such "A magnificent cock robin" and "the lovely tits outside my window". In China, we are told, you are not allowed to discuss "democracy" or "Tibet"; it may even be true. I can certainly see their point - one thing is that words like "democracy" and "freedom" come cheap, but is American style democracy and/or freedom the only or even the best there is? Perhaps they just want to figure out the right way for themselves; I would think that is their right.
And the same goes for religion - if they just open the doors, they know very well that the country will be flooded with America peddlers trying to push their McJesus, the fast-food version of Christian faith. As far as I can see, the world would be a better place if there were less mind-benders around. Apart from that, I don't think the Chinese people will tolerate being flooded with foreign religions any more than we in West generally do; if we care about the freedom of the Chinese people, shouldn't we respect their freedom to say no?
Then, of course, there is the security aspect of the thing - I think all Americans can understand that one, considering that muslims and anybody who looks vaguely Middle-Eastern is automatically considered suspect by a major section of Americans. Having a large percentage of your population influenced by American fundamentalist Christians, who openly declare that they are enemies of the Chinese state, is not something they see as attractive, I imagine.
No, I'm not going to put down Minefield, which I haven't tried yet, but I have been worried for a long while what is happening in the world of browsers. Well, I say browsers, but I mean Firefox, the only one I have used regularly for many years. There was a point a couple of years ago when Firefox seemed to change from being the free browser for the people and began to become a way to introduce Google into everything we do on the Web. I really resent that, it takes away some of my freedom to choose, but even more, it pushes a product that I haven't asked for; if I want to use Google, I will go to their website.
What I'm talking about is the fact that if you type something in the address field, it gets sent off to Google as a search entry; that may be OK if that is what you expected and wanted - in my opinion it isn't OK if you simply mistyped an address. I'm not interested in "Buy the cheapest http//oracle.com at eBay", to be perfectly honest - I just want an error message.
And when start looking around in Firefox there are several of these tie-ins that they seem to try to sneak under your radar; like the exception lists that come as default: "Block popups (except from Google, etc ...)" and others like it. It it the kind of things that make me feel that they are being dishonest and that is not a nice feeling. They didn't have to sneak around like they were ashamed of themselves - a lot of people think it is a great thing that access to Google is built in from the start - they could have said up front that this is a vehicle to promote Google without losing anything, but they chose not to; and for that I don't trust them like I used to.
OK, it is a small complaint and hardly has any bearing on the subject; so to try to save that a little bit - does Minefield display the same tendencies? And can you use Firefox's extensions with it?
My favorite hoax is "Dianetics" by L. Ron Hubbard.
Can you really glean no meaning from that?
Well, trust a guy called "lazynomer" to not read or understand what I wrote and then go on to rebuke me for not understanding; ironic, really. As I pointed out, the dictionary offers the interpretation that you suggest; I just can't see how that meaning fits in with other, more natural meanings. I also tried to lighten the tone of my posting by joking about it - I suppose my error was that I used something akin to sarcasm without surrounding it with "[sracasm] ... [/sarcasm]". My fault entirely (whoops, there I go again; I just don't learn)
And now for some political and technological dynamite! No, sorry actually - just a rather trivial question about language, and not even a programming one.
...the calibration images were 'nominal'
Just out of curiosity - what is this about the word 'nominal'? According to the Wiktionary, 'nominal' has a number of meanings, including: "Of, resembling, relating to, or consisting of a name or names" and "Insignificantly small; trifling", both of which make sense, considering that it comes from 'nomen' (='name'). It also means "According to plan or design" and that doesn't seem to make any sense. Is this a mispronunciation that has become mainstream, along the same lines as 'nucular', which actually means "Of or related to a nucule -- a section of a compound (usually hard) fruit"?
It's not a difficult language, only very clunky. I learned it by first lying to get a job, then writing programs with the manual beside me; and that was the IBM mainframe COBOL manual, not the easiest read in the world. Here is a link to where you can supposedly get a free COBOL compiler for Linux:
http://www.open-cobol.org/
And Wikipedia has a link to the following tutorial:
http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/default.htm
Apparently the object oriented pendant to C++ would have to be called "ADD 1 TO COBOL".
What he actually said was that he has discovered flaws in the ideology that he followed, which is a much more fundamental thing. This is from BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7687101.stm):
... the former bank boss said he had made a "partially" wrong decision in thinking that relying on banks to use their self-interest would be enough to protect shareholders and their equity.
In other words, the assumption underlying the idea that unregulated market will end up making the best decisions, is wrong, at least "partially".
It seems like a paradox to me that we have heard endlessly from the so-called climate sceptics that we don't know enough about the climate, the atmosphere or anything else to say anything about global warming; but on the other hand, we are all too willing to throw ourselves, arms and legs flailing, into trying to modify the global environment to cool the planet down. After all we know even less about what will happen if we try to do any of that, than we do about modeling the planet's climate as it is now.
No matter what effect modifications of this sort might have on our climate, the very first thing we must do is to stop burning fossil fuels. Otherwise we are just going to paint ourselves into a corner, where we start cooling the planet down, but never get around to stopping the CO2 emissions. CO2 doesn't just warm the planet up, it has a large number of other harmful effects, acidification of the oceans just being one example. If we live in a filthy house, we can cover the bad smell with perfume for a while - but if we don't clean up and stop throwing waste on the floor, the house will end up being unihabitable, even if it doesn't smell too bad.
The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor
Nor are they going to want to pay for software they have been used to download for free. This sounds more like the wishful thinking of somebody who really wants open source and free software to go away.
If you have been travelling the world, you will probably have noticed that the poorer the country, the more generous the people. Which makes sense, I think - when you have little, you can understand the plight of others, but when you have much more than you need, you have probably never felt hardship and tend to think that poor people are just lazy.
And when you think about, didn't OSS start out exactly because there were clever, but poor people, who couldn't afford to buy expensive software? That alone should tell us that open source will become more prevalent in times of hardship.
I can't see what is so surprising here. Basically when you do research, you are groping in darkness - after all, it wouldn't really be worth doing if the results were already known, would it? Approaching a new problem is a bit like looking at the notorious elephant through a keyhole; different people will have different guesses as to what it is and most will be wrong, until at some point enough observations are made and you can construct a more complete picture.
When you publish scientific articles you don't claim that "THIS IS THE TRUTH" - you are merely putting forward your opinion and then somebody else comes along and says "No, because ...". And even the articles with the "wrong" results are valuable, because they tell us that this particular interpretation is not the right one. It can take a lot of false turns before you find the right way through a maze, and in fact it tells us something about the generally high quality of research that we are not seeing about 90% wrong results.
The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns
Hedge fund investor? In other words someone who makes money without actually producing anything, to put it bluntly? And this guy has suddenly seen the light and knows how to solve all the problems in the world? He's right about one thing, though - the current form of government in the US is not working optimally.
The idea he is proposing is far from new - it seems to be the standard "solution" whenever it gets a bit tough, and it always ends with a bunch of idiots in an ivory tower - IOW, aristocrats. Nope, democracy is still the way forward, despite all its inefficiency and shortcomings. Government in general shouldn't be efficient - it should be accountable and it should plan far ahead. The inefficiency is part of the "checks and stops", it forces those in government to think before they act. If the goverment was efficient, we would soon have a wild-eyed George Bush, foaming around the mouth, hurling the country into stupid wars. Haven't we had enough of kings and aristocrats?
What we really need is to make a few, clever adjustments to things. More accountability, more openness, for starters, as well as a considerable tightening of the rules for how much private money and religion may influence politics. One of the biggest problems for American democracy is that the country is in effect being ruled by a very small minority of either the hyper rich or fringe groups that have influence because they are loud. I don't know - make it illegal (ie, a crime) to receive more than the typical membership fee from any private entity, make it illegal for companies, churches and the like to pay for political adverts of any sort during an election campaign. Give each candidate the same amount of airtime, make it a capital offence to be a professional lobbyist; whatever it takes to keep out undue influence on the processes of democracy.
A democracy worth its name should represent the will of the people, and I think it is worth protecting. Even if it means limiting the general laissez-faire version of "freedom of speech" on certain occasions.
I would start with Article 12 from this... http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
i.e. "Article 12 : No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
Please note the little word "arbitrary". Is it arbitrary when it happens systematically? Such philosophical questions aside, what this article really says is that these must not occur except as allowed by law. This is just like when the polica can't arrest you on a whim, "just because" - that would be "arbitrary" - but they can still arrest you if they suspect you of committing a crime, because there is a law that says so.
In the same way, if the legislators decide to make a law that decides which web-sites you are allowed to visit, it is no longer arbitrary, and the only way to get around it, as far as I can see, is by either proving that it is unconstitutional or by getting somebody elected that are willing to repeal this law.
...is actually pointless (that is, of no commercial value)...
It's an interesting definition of "pointless" he's got there; symptomatic of the ultra-capitalistic mindset that has just been demonstrated to be far from optimal by the current financial crisis. Look at it this way: He is saying that the only thing that matters in the world is whether you can make a profit. This is the ideological basis for such things a the lack of regulations that have brought us the crisis; it is also the reason why making a fast profit has been giving priority over long-term financial stability in so many companies, banks not least.
Apart from that - basic research is not pointless, even if there are no short-term profits to be made. Basic research is necessary because we are not able to tell what we are going to need to know in the future - take the early research into quantum mechanics. It was basic research, utterly pointless according to this definition, but we wouldn't have semiconductors today, and thus no PCs nor the endless numbers of electronic gadgets we have now, were it not for that "pointless" research.
It really is time to stop dreaming about "the market" as something magical that will sort everything out for us without requiring us to think and take responsibility.
How is this different from what is already in place? Phone companies and ISPs already keep logs and records of these things; how else would the phone company be able to send you a itemised bill? Tne new thing is that they want to collect it in one, central database for convenience.
Nobody in their right mind would imagine that any government authority would be able to listen to all phone conversations happening in the UK or read all emails being sent - let alone analyse them and understand them. And that's just the meaningful emails - add SPAM to that; it just can't be done. So where is actually the big, bad surveillance? As far as I can see, the reason why they want this is because it takes too long to go and retrieve the records from individual ISPs and phone companies - it was a lot easier when there was only one phone company. Speed is of the essence in dealing with crime, especially since they can't get through with extending the period the police can retain terror suspects, and having it all in one database will make it a lot faster to find out who communicated with your suspect when and where.
So, is it worth making a big fuss about? Not to my mind. What does worry me is that this is yet another big project that a public authority will let EDS handle. That combination has in the past led to too many failures and I think they are going to waste a lot of money at a time when it would be better spent elsewhere. That should comfort those who are worried about this project - it doesn't have much chance of getting off the ground. Of course, it shouldn't take a competent database developer many months to make this work; perhaps they should have chosen to develop it as open source?
Seriously though these kinds of analysis of political leaning toward behavior seem as silly as the easily startled tend to be more conservative.
Sille as it may seem when presented like this, it is not as stupid as that. In recent years there has been a lot of research into how mental processes relate to brain physiology, body chemistry etc, and in that context it isn't unreasonable to hypothesize about why people lean one way or another, politically.
Also, please note that this a statistical result - there is a apparent correlation between political leaning and the way you keep order. This can be seen as just a special case of the idea that the way you live your life influences your political opinion - IOW nothing surprising there.
What they don't say is that "if you are messy, you are always liberal".
How much of this do you folks in the Slashdot community out there really buy into?
Oh, every word, certainly. This is about critical thinking - it doesn't mean that you have to reject everything with scorn, out of hand, it just means that you don't accept things without first thinking about how they add up. It is surprising how often critical thinking leads you to accept and understand what others tell you.
From the beginning of the enlightenment up till about the middle of the twentieth century there was plenty of role models and they got lots publicity: just take at random Einstein and Bohr, but also Gauss, Riemann and a long list of others. In the west it ended with the Moon landings, more or less, not least because that was never meant to be more than a publicity stunt, really.
Another contributing cause is that while people like Einstein and Bohr produced some breathtaking results that reverberated through the common media so everybody heard about them, scientists are not seen as producing similarly impressive reults. In many ways we haven't really done much more than filling in the gaps and checking predictions since then. And the next big step forward seems ever more elusive - it isn't for lack of talent or effort that we still don't have a definitive unified theory in physics.
A third factor is possibly that science fiction has pumped up people's expectations with ideas of faster-than-light travel, worm-holes and aliens that look surprisingly like dressed-up humans everywhere you go. Only a century ago science-fiction's wildest imaginations were life on Mars and time-travel, and science was able to blow our minds with discoveries far more exciting than that, but science now-a-days tells us that we are unlikely to be able to travel faster than light and that alien civilizations don't seem to be thick on the ground - it is simply a disappointment to many young people.
And of course we don't admire the power of the mind any more. Where there once was Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, we now have Rambo, Batman and very occasionally somebody with an impressively huge computer, but even then it is the computer we admire, not the guy who invented it.
So, that is why we are beginning to lag behind in science; and to add insult to injury, the Chinese are storming forward and are becoming the leaders, not least in mathematics. But what can we do? When we have to actually fight against the mind-numbing idiocy of such things as Intelligent Design, what hope is there of attracting young people to a line of study that requires you to ask critical questions every step of the way? And for a disappointingly low salary too.
First of all - I'm not really in a position to jude whether more or less surveillance is a good thing; I can say it doesn't worry me a lot, just like the terrorist threat and other organised crime dont worry me too much. After all, in my daily life I don't feel that any of those things are in my way. The worst I have experienced is having to take off my shoes at Heathrow when I went through security, and I think that must have been worse for those around me. Frankly, I am surprised that they were willing to risk it.
It is so easy to act like a lemming and follow the crowd over the cliff's edge when somebody starts hollering about surveillance, because it evokes associations about cameras in your bed- and batrooms and people in dark suits following you around discreetly everywhere. This is of course not real - no government has that many resources, certainly not in the current economic climate. So take a small step back, take a deep breath and think critically about things. I am not going to argue for one position or another, but we should learn to be critical about what others want us to believe; it is not only the government that is out to use you, you know.
And while you are thinking, why not give some thought to how you would address the very real problems of international crime in the modern world? Thinking about those things and making up your mind is part of what some call your democratic duty; if you like living in a democracy, you should do your part and take it serious. otherwise you are no better than the ultra-Christian nutters that automatically agrees with anybody who hates gays, is against free abortion and quotes the Bible.
But back to the problems this sort of legislation is actually trying to address, however clumsily: Modern communication, and especially the internet makes it very easy to organise criminal activity of any kind, not just terrorism, but also drug crimes, economic crimes, people smuggling etc etc. How would you, working in the real world, solve these problems? Calling in Rambo or Superman is not going to work.
I think one of the problems here is that IPv6 hasn't really presented a conving case yet. I have, like most, only taken a very limited interest in the issue and all I can remember is that with IPv6 we can have networking in all our home appliances right down to the RFID tags on our cornflakes packages. So it seems rather like something that isn't seriously needed.
I am very open to the idea that it may be an absolutely fabulous idea, but then what are the real benefits - how can we justify spending the money and time it will inevitably cost? It seems reasonable to me to assume that those in charge have made a cost/benefit analysis and found that it isn't worth it; you tend to do that before spending large amounts of money.