You can't have it both ways. and
Also, I see no problems people allowing people to evade taxation "like the rest of us". Why shoot yourself in the foot?! So, you can't see the problem in having the richest perhaps 5%, who own perhaps 95% of all wealth in the US, avoid paying tax, while the rest of us - the 95% who own 5% - pay for the world's most expensive military, public health care (scant though it is), subsidies for farmers and tax breaks for the rich 5% of the population? To me it is a question of which foot to shoot, then. I think I prefer cutting back on the opportunities for cheating all of us; perhaps we would all be a little bit better off that way. Perhaps we could afford REAL public healthcare for everybody, and maybe we could even take care of the poor and the old.
The transistor was first patented in 1925 (look it up in Wikipedia) and the integrated circuit in 1949 - both fundamental for microchips - but we still use radio valves today, and not just for nostaligic reasons. Silicon will probably hang around for a long time to come, I think.
For something else to replace silicon it will have to not only be better, but so much better that it will justify the investment, or it will have to offer other, significant benefits, like being cheaper to produce, using less power or being smaller. Of these, I think speed is probably the least important, at least for common consumers.
Personally, I still haven't reached the point where my 3 year-old machine is too small or slow - not even near. It wouldn't make sense to upgrade, simply. I think most people see it that way, they would probably be more interested in gadgets than in a near-super computer.
To quote from your first post:
The second was the funny and sad story of the fate of songbirds in Beijing. Apparently, Chairman Mao hated them. I would hardly call sparrows "songbirds", not would you, I suspect, but by calling them songbirds, you play on people's ideas about nightingales and reed-warblers to make it seem like Mao Zedong hated something innocent and beautiful, and by extension, everything similar. That's a cheap trick, mate. And to be entirely accurate, he didn't "hate them", he, and his advisers, came to the conclusion that sparrows were problematic pests that should be eradicated. Based on our current understanding of eco-systems that was a bad idea, but at that time it was not that alien. I remember from my childhood (in Denmark) that sparrows were regarded as just as bad as mice or worse for grain production.
Further, in your posting you claim that the Chinese simply tried to scare them off by making a lot of noise, which of course is silly, whereas what they actually did (as explained in the Wikipedia article) was much more effective: they destroyed their nesting places; cruel, perhaps, but not silly.
So you are an East Asia studies scholar, and you seem to suggest that you have been to Japan. Have you ever lived in Beijing or any other place in China? Spoken to ordinary people (as opposed to university students)? I have lived there, I still visit regularly (at least twice a year) and I have friends and family in the country. In my opinion your posting was simply either ill-informed or ill-willed propaganda. Being a scholar, as you say, means that you could have voiced a balanced and thoughtful criticism, but you chose to jeer instead.
Making a secure browser is like making a car that is safe to drive - impossible. Just like driving a car carries some inherent risks because you can't guarantee that other drivers drive safely, you can't make a browser that cannot be used in an way that compromises the security of your system. And just like you have to learn to drive safely, you have to learn to browse safely: don't allow adverts, don't allow Javascript or Flash by default etc. In Firefox at least there are tools that make it easy - eg NoScript which allows you to turn on Javascript temporarily for a single website as and when you need it. It's not really that hard.
If you are going to tell anecdotes, at least try to make them marginally believable. To take them one at a time:
Air pollution - the big cities do have a smog problem; big cities often have, and it is not long ago that most big cities in the West did too - as some still have. Where we in the west for a long time simply denied that it was caused by man, the Chinses at least recognise the problem and say that they intend to solve it. IOW, they have learned from our mistakes to a certain extent, quite contrary to the morale of your stories.
Dust problem in Beijing: Well, what do you expect when a city lies on the edge of one of the world's big deserts: the Gobi? And of course it doesn't make it better that the world's deserts are expanding as a consequence of climate change. As for the series of events you describe, I would have thought anyone could see through them; that is, if they tried. "Banging on pot and pans" should effectively scare birds away forever? It might work in the short term - for a few hours at most. If the "songbirds" have disappeared from Beijing (where is the evidence, by the way?) it must have other causes. As for fighting insect plagues by removing all plants - how does that hang together? China was at the time, and still is, a country that depends heavily on agriculture - are you suggesting they went out and uprooted all plants? Which would necessarily have to include wheat, cabbage etc etc. to have any effect on the insects - as I said, you are talking rubbish. The DDT part sounds half likely - after all that was what we all did at the time. I remember how garden programmes on TV would recommend using loads of the stuff because "it is completely harmless to humans"; yes, thank you very much.
Three Gorges Dam: China has some of the world's best engineers - they knew from the beginning that the dam would be problematic, but in their view the benefits would outweigh the problems. They were wrong, and they seem to realise that now, as would any sensible and responsible person in charge. The big question is of course - what can they do about it now? I think you would agree that nobody would dismiss a multibillion dollar project lightly with an "Oops, sorry folks"; you have to think carefully before proceeding and try to find the best way forward.
And with these feeble stories it is that you try to argue that the Chinese government are a bunch of bumbling idiots whose approach to things is completely out of touch with reality. So how do you explain that they are one of the fastest growing economies in the world? Hardly the work of morons, I'd say. And their attitude to environmental problems is very far removed from what you describe - for one thing, they have a huge tree-planting programme in North China which they hope can help ameliorate the dust problem; not without reason, I might add - this is a proven technique that has been used all over the world.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, and it may be valid to critisize China for many things. But if you blurt out this kind of nonsense, you will not only not be taken serious, you will also harm your side of the argument. This is like the hysterical anti-drugs campaigns we have seen from time to time; if people hear warnings against drugs that are obviously and pathetically wrong, then the young will think "Is that really the best argument against drugs they can come up with? Can't be all that dangerous, then" - and the effect will be quite the opposite of what was intended.
Not quite, I think. If you make an agreement with people and then piss them up and down, then they will be less likely to trust an agreement with you in the future. That is what all this boils down to, at the end of the day; this is the basis, not only for all business transactions, but for all human society. Even most criminals follow this rule. The only people who make agreements and break them casually are psychopaths - that is more than anything else the defining symptom of psychopathy. BTW: Please note that I make this reference to psychopathy in order to illustrate just how fundamental this 'rule of trust' is, I'm not saying that this or that government are psychopaths.
IOW, it is completely irrelevant whether the constitution says this or that, or whether one can "technically" justify not complying with the WTO. When you enter into an agreement, you keep your part of it, even when it is uncomfortable. It was not as if the US joined the WTO not knowing what they were doing, or so one would hope; the US government aren't about to plead incompetent I assume? Just stop messing about and keep your promises.
What! How dare they - this is just what you'd expect from an evil, communist country, blocking a news-service like BBC... Oh, hang on...
Seriously, though, despite all the flak China keeps getting no matter what they do, they keep going forward, slowly, but steadily. I think they actually want to be a free, modern, democratic country. It's just that they know that it has to be done slowly - they only have to look to their neighbor, Russia, to see what happens if you just suddenly let go and try to be all things at once: you get a hugely powerful mafia, hugely powerful companies that operate above the law, common people starving, infrastructure that breaks down. They are doing it the right way, the Chinese.
I can see what he says - we will probably lose some advantages when OOXML fails; or rather, there are some things we won't get as easy access to. So the question is, I think: if we will be no worse off than now, will we have lost anything, really? I don't think we will have less opportunities than we already have, and the future seems to be going our way, as far as I can see. Microsoft are slowly, but sure, it seems, getting their come-uppance, and open source is going to benefit.
I have a hard time feeling much sympathy for Microsoft's predicament, really. They have been the big, bad bully for a long time, and in all that time they had no second thought about squashing anybody who remotely looked like competition; now they are beginning to feel the squeeze, thanks to FOSS, EU and countries who are beginning to realise that they could spend their money better on other things than feeding Microsoft. Maybe, once they have been cut down to size, if they seriously change their ways like IBM, maybe then we can begin to look at them in another light.
And what do they do? I don't see them doing anything they haven't seen the West - most notably the US - do over and over, and get away with it. That doesn't mean that oppression is OK, but in the real world it doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter to most people in the world, as long as they have what they want. I'm sure you can think of something you, yourself, do without caring about what goes on behind the scenes. Do you drink Coca Cola? Does it bother you that the Coca Cola company allegedly runs a factory in India that sucks so much water out of the ground that the local farmers can't get any water?
I think if you step back a little, you'll find that China is doing what most nations would have to do if they were in the same situation; they try to keep things from going ballistic, and they try to not let it spoil the show. But there is only so much one can do against a group of hell-raisers; there are always people in the world who are willing to support a cause without checking what it is all about. Hence the widespread support amongst Americans for the IRA, just to take one example, or for a dubious sect like Falun Gong.
Sometimes you are left no choice but to "oppress" if you want to avoid widespread civil unrest. I think one should look at the wider picture - over the last 30 years China has actually made incredible progress on all fronts: economically, socially and politically. It seems likely that they will continue to do so, if they manage to hold the country together and in peace, and I think it is in the interest of the whole of the rest of the world to help ensure that they succceed. Because if China descends into chaos, it will hit not just SE Asia - including Tibet, Japan, Taiwan, the Koreas, Thailand,... - but all of us. The world simply isn't a bunch of isolated states anymore, we stand or fall together.
I think people in the West need to take off their blinkers; stop uncritically supporting whatever "sounds good", stop letting the ultra-reactionaries and the religious nuts tell us what to think, and make the effort ourselves.
What we see here isn't "The State trying to grab more control" - for one thing this is about international cooperation (ie. not "The State"), and for another, I don't think their primary focus will be on running around like headless chickens after the oh-so-evil music pirates. Some of the big problems with modern, organized crime is are 1) lack of police competence (as you have pointed out), 2) the internet, which makes it very easy for international, organized crime and 3) the fact that national legislations are too often incompatible and/or too difficult to work with.
I can't see a problem with creating an international cooperation to solve these problems. I think this is about actually being able to do the right job, as opposed to running errands for Hollywood.
Has anybody here on/. ever heard of this concept? I am getting hoarse from repeating this, but here we go again: The way forward is through dialog. Hasn't Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine,... taught us anything? No? Nothing at all? You can't climb onto your high, moral horse and try to force somebody to change what they see as "obviously right"; especially not when the somebody in question can so easily point out the glaring hypocrisy evident in your moralising. You can't insult somebody and then expect them to say "Yes, you are right"; it is simply absurd to think that way.
The all too few cases where deep-rooted conflicts have actually been resolved, have been resolved through dialog; both sides have to swallow more and bigger camels than they have any liking for. And when it comes to Tibet, the situation is not much different from the situation in Cuba: America has tried to bully them into submission for decades, spurred on by a small, but loud group of exiles, and it has done nothing to help the Cubans.
If we want to help the Tibetans, we have to work with China in a mature and sensible way. Anything else will most likely be wasted efforts, and it will certainly not help.
It would have to be IBM Basic assembly language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Basic_assembly_language; definitely. This is only halfways a joke - think about it; there is a huge number of programming languages in the world, all of them sort of more or less the same. Learn C, then you have easy access to learning most of the rest. But assembler, any assembler, will teach you how a computer works at a deeper level, which has got to be beneficial. Also, you can then amaze yourself with how small programs can actually be.
And why BAL? Why not? How many people do you know who can actually program a mainframe in any language, let alone assembler? Especially young people? It's a little like learning flint knapping; it went out of style a while back, but it's bloody cool to be able to do it.
Like it or not, you are already know far better than you think you are - that is part of living in a society, having friends and parents, having a job, etc etc. Adding your DNA to the pool isn't as big a step as you make out, and the consequences are not likely to be as grave as you fear.
Let us analyze a couple of things "they" could do with your DNA:
1. The police would be able to compare your DNA with the remains found at a crime scene. If you were a criminal, you would have to be careful not to leave any blood, semen, skin cells or hair behind; but I can't see how knowing your DNA could be used against you by the police, otherwise. It could prove to your advantage by ruling you out as a suspect.
2. One could potentially identify inherited diseases or genes that increase your risk of developing certain diseases, which could be beneficial for your health. The danger here is that employers might use this information as a basis for not hiring you - this would be comparable to discrimitation based on race, gender or age, and that is possibly the greatest danger we face.
Meanwhile, I think we face much graver dangers: our massive waste of resources and unwillingness to face up to our responsibility has not only caused the climate change that is now unfolding, but is also driving one of the great mass extinction events - to put it in perspective, the number of extinctions we are facing has only happened a few times in Earth's history, and while life as such will continue, it is not at all certain that humans and human society will. Personal freedoms, privacy and having the latest & greatest gadgets are important, but hardly relevant if we are choking on our own waste. But that is only my opinion, of course.
... it was the construction of a police state that made the racism, oppression and genocide possible. I know what you mean; but what you are saying here is not quite true. You seem to imply a couple of things that are false:
1. A society where "the state" knows everything about everybody is not a police state - it is simply a society where everything is known about everybody. Three examples would be Denmark, Norway and Sweden, I believe - they are all fairly close to this state of affairs, where everybody's personal information is collected in a central database, but I don't think you could call them police states.
2. A police state doesn't have to lead to racism, oppression or genocide; these crimes exist because there are people who are ruthless as well as racists or fascists. Being in power and having the tools of a police state is of course a situation that such people would see as ideal, and there are many other good reasons for not wanting a police state.
It may seem pedantic to point these things out, but I think it is important to keep our minds clear about things. Oppression, fascism, racism - they all start with appealing to people's fear and not allowing a cool analysis of the facts, so by invoking "police state" as well as "racism, oppression and genocide" in this fashion you are actually serving the purpose of your alleged enemies: the fascists, the "oppresionists".
- amidst all the lame jokes and the general mistrust Americans have to government.
Society, when you get right down to the bare bones of it, is a simple extension of the primitive 'clan' that we know from the other apes, especially the chimpanzees. A group like that is only stable if the members trust each other at some fundamental level. Yes, there will be squabbles and cliques, and they may steal from each other and bully the weakest, but everybody has a fundamental trust in the group, which they don't have in strangers. The same is true about human society - it is built on trust; if this trust is lacking in a society, it will simply fall apart. Perhaps this is happening in America? I don't know, but seeing that America is still one nation I'd say that the fundamental trust is still in place.
Anyway - the question about DNA is one about trust. The government is irrelevant here, governments change all the time, at least every four years; but the people around you don't - the people who will have accecss to your information will be more or less the same. If you trust the society you live in, you shouldn't really mind letting others know your DNA. Having everybody's DNA profile, and indeed all other personal information, in one, central database does offer some objective benefits. It will be a lot easier to identify a person, of course, and it would potentially be possible to identify a number of disease risks etc. On the downside is the fact that not all members of society are worthy of such trust, and they will use this information to exploit people.
I'm am not wise enough to see whether the benefits are great enough to justify the risks; but that is what it all boils down to: trust or no trust.
Firstly, espionage happens - get over it. It may be immoral, but funnily it is not immoral enough to stop anybody from doing it. The Chinese do it, no doubt, and they get away with a lot of things, but then, so do we, whoever 'we' are.
Secondly, I think espionage is less of a national venture these days and more of an international business. The nationality of a spy may matter less - an Iraeli spy, say, might spy on America and sell to whoever bids the most; China, Russia, UK, whatever. Or perhaps even the US. There isn't a lot of pride and glamour in the spying business.
... the organization could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. That's assuming that people would still use it as much. I know I probably wouldn't - or I would only use it if I could block all the adverts.
A lot of these attacks will masquerade as legitimate business agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Better Business Bureau and the SEC Yes, and nobody is going to guess what is happening despite the fact that you and everyone you know suddenly receives at least 10 emails from the 'Inland Revenue' a day. You'd have to be really, seriously stupid to fall for that - it seems ironic that anybody would want to steal intellectual property from people that retarded. Aren't you supposed to at least have an intellect in order to acquire intellectual property?
Should we really limit the kind of articles in Wikipedia? How can we know now what is 'valuable' information and what isn't? When I look through old encyclopedias I see much that might have seemed higly valuable at the time, but which is strangely irrelevant now, information or scientific dead ends, in a way. And conversely, when we look back and try to learn about some aspect of life a hundred years ago, it is often the trivial things that give the most valuable insights; the scraps of newspaper, a love letter, adverts etc.
From that perspective I feel we should include everything and concentrate on the quality and neutrality of the articles instead. For the first time in history this is something that seems within our reach; letting go of this opportunity just to pander to some 'upper class notions' would be doing us all a disservice.
Should scientists date people who believe in astrology? Why not? If they like each other and get along well?
How can this be something of any interest to us - this is not Hello Magazine. It's not our business, telling others who they want to see.
Apart from that - scientists may not have much confidence in the validity of astrology, but however little reason there may be, scientifically, to believe in it, it is not something we are able to definitely prove false. Just like that other far fetched superstition, Christianity.
I don't think most astrologers believe that the planets somehow directly and physically influence what happens here on Earth; they do, however, believe that it is something that can be observed, even if they can't explain why it works, and to tell the truth, there hasn't yet been much serious, rigorous, scientific work on the subject. I can understand that; there are so many other subjects that are much more likely to produce valuable results - but believing in religion doesn't in itself make a person stupid. One has to keep an open mind - there is a story about Niels Bohr: Once, Heisenberg came to visit Bohr in his office in Copenhagen, he noticed that there was a horseshoe hanging over the door, and he asked him: "Surely you don't believe in that sort of nonsense?" - And Bohr answered: "Of course not; but I am told it works even if you don't believe".
When is a person cheating? IMO it must include an intent to deceive; and that makes it very difficult to judge a case like this. What was the assignment - if it was "produce a report about so and so", then it should arguably be irrelevant whether the student did the work himself or went out and bought it; he delivered the goods. But of course this is not really the objective in a school - the objective is that the student should learn by performing the work himself.
That being said, there are some gray areas - I once, in an oral exam, proved a theorem by using an advanced result and then giving the proof for that result instead. Was that brilliant or was it cheating? Most would say that I didn't cheat, but what if the purpose was to demonstrate that I had learned and understood the techniques used in the intended proof? The advanced theorem I used had little bearing on the methods used in the course I was being examined in - I got high marks, but perhaps I was cheating?
Unfortunately it is not entirely as simple as that. Many countries have laws governing the opening hours of shops, and they are often quite complicated; so, rather than changing the law twice a year or making the laws even more complex by writing complex change-over schedules into them, it is easier to simply change the official time of day. To quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time: "Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but... modern heating and cooling usage patterns can cause DST to increase electricity consumption."
Maggie Thatcher was notorious for existing on three to four hours a night. She may have managed on little sleep, and she may even have achieved a lot. But who knows what she lost in the process? Although it may be productive in a certain sense to work without stop, humans need to take time out to do other things. Sleep isn't actually idle time either; not only does the brain seem to require this time to 'reorganize' in, but many good, creative ideas are conceived during sleep.
Taking time out to do 'nothing' can enhance your productivity. If all you are doing is routine tasks - stamping papers or debugging program code - then perhaps you can go on for days on end, I know I have. But it kills your creativity - when I encounter a difficult problem, the best way to solve it, in my experience, is to stop thinking about it, do something else and let the task run in the background. Albert Einstein famously drove himself to desperation trying to find a way to integrate gravity in the relativity theory; when at last he gave up, he suddenly had the solution. IOW, stop trying too hard.
Employers of salaried employees seem to feel quite justified in requiring their employees to work without enough sleep. I'd like to see legislation passed that forbids this. You mean this isn't already forbidden in the US? It certainly is in most of Europe - that, at least, is one good thing the communists (in the labour unions) did for us.
T think calling internet censorship a 'trade barrier' is far-fetched. What would happen is simply that the WTO will spend a huge amount of time, decades even, pinning out what kinds of network trade are to be included under free trade. The problem here is that this is not really about trade, it is about trying to tell another nation how to run its internal affairs, and no sovereign nation will allow that. At the end of the day this is just a silly stunt - I don't think the EU are going to be all that interested in alienating what everybody agrees is going to be the greatest economical superpower.
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The transistor was first patented in 1925 (look it up in Wikipedia) and the integrated circuit in 1949 - both fundamental for microchips - but we still use radio valves today, and not just for nostaligic reasons. Silicon will probably hang around for a long time to come, I think.
For something else to replace silicon it will have to not only be better, but so much better that it will justify the investment, or it will have to offer other, significant benefits, like being cheaper to produce, using less power or being smaller. Of these, I think speed is probably the least important, at least for common consumers.
Personally, I still haven't reached the point where my 3 year-old machine is too small or slow - not even near. It wouldn't make sense to upgrade, simply. I think most people see it that way, they would probably be more interested in gadgets than in a near-super computer.
Further, in your posting you claim that the Chinese simply tried to scare them off by making a lot of noise, which of course is silly, whereas what they actually did (as explained in the Wikipedia article) was much more effective: they destroyed their nesting places; cruel, perhaps, but not silly.
So you are an East Asia studies scholar, and you seem to suggest that you have been to Japan. Have you ever lived in Beijing or any other place in China? Spoken to ordinary people (as opposed to university students)? I have lived there, I still visit regularly (at least twice a year) and I have friends and family in the country. In my opinion your posting was simply either ill-informed or ill-willed propaganda. Being a scholar, as you say, means that you could have voiced a balanced and thoughtful criticism, but you chose to jeer instead.
Making a secure browser is like making a car that is safe to drive - impossible. Just like driving a car carries some inherent risks because you can't guarantee that other drivers drive safely, you can't make a browser that cannot be used in an way that compromises the security of your system. And just like you have to learn to drive safely, you have to learn to browse safely: don't allow adverts, don't allow Javascript or Flash by default etc. In Firefox at least there are tools that make it easy - eg NoScript which allows you to turn on Javascript temporarily for a single website as and when you need it. It's not really that hard.
If you are going to tell anecdotes, at least try to make them marginally believable. To take them one at a time:
Air pollution - the big cities do have a smog problem; big cities often have, and it is not long ago that most big cities in the West did too - as some still have. Where we in the west for a long time simply denied that it was caused by man, the Chinses at least recognise the problem and say that they intend to solve it. IOW, they have learned from our mistakes to a certain extent, quite contrary to the morale of your stories.
Dust problem in Beijing: Well, what do you expect when a city lies on the edge of one of the world's big deserts: the Gobi? And of course it doesn't make it better that the world's deserts are expanding as a consequence of climate change. As for the series of events you describe, I would have thought anyone could see through them; that is, if they tried. "Banging on pot and pans" should effectively scare birds away forever? It might work in the short term - for a few hours at most. If the "songbirds" have disappeared from Beijing (where is the evidence, by the way?) it must have other causes. As for fighting insect plagues by removing all plants - how does that hang together? China was at the time, and still is, a country that depends heavily on agriculture - are you suggesting they went out and uprooted all plants? Which would necessarily have to include wheat, cabbage etc etc. to have any effect on the insects - as I said, you are talking rubbish. The DDT part sounds half likely - after all that was what we all did at the time. I remember how garden programmes on TV would recommend using loads of the stuff because "it is completely harmless to humans"; yes, thank you very much.
Three Gorges Dam: China has some of the world's best engineers - they knew from the beginning that the dam would be problematic, but in their view the benefits would outweigh the problems. They were wrong, and they seem to realise that now, as would any sensible and responsible person in charge. The big question is of course - what can they do about it now? I think you would agree that nobody would dismiss a multibillion dollar project lightly with an "Oops, sorry folks"; you have to think carefully before proceeding and try to find the best way forward.
And with these feeble stories it is that you try to argue that the Chinese government are a bunch of bumbling idiots whose approach to things is completely out of touch with reality. So how do you explain that they are one of the fastest growing economies in the world? Hardly the work of morons, I'd say. And their attitude to environmental problems is very far removed from what you describe - for one thing, they have a huge tree-planting programme in North China which they hope can help ameliorate the dust problem; not without reason, I might add - this is a proven technique that has been used all over the world.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, and it may be valid to critisize China for many things. But if you blurt out this kind of nonsense, you will not only not be taken serious, you will also harm your side of the argument. This is like the hysterical anti-drugs campaigns we have seen from time to time; if people hear warnings against drugs that are obviously and pathetically wrong, then the young will think "Is that really the best argument against drugs they can come up with? Can't be all that dangerous, then" - and the effect will be quite the opposite of what was intended.
Not quite, I think. If you make an agreement with people and then piss them up and down, then they will be less likely to trust an agreement with you in the future. That is what all this boils down to, at the end of the day; this is the basis, not only for all business transactions, but for all human society. Even most criminals follow this rule. The only people who make agreements and break them casually are psychopaths - that is more than anything else the defining symptom of psychopathy. BTW: Please note that I make this reference to psychopathy in order to illustrate just how fundamental this 'rule of trust' is, I'm not saying that this or that government are psychopaths.
IOW, it is completely irrelevant whether the constitution says this or that, or whether one can "technically" justify not complying with the WTO. When you enter into an agreement, you keep your part of it, even when it is uncomfortable. It was not as if the US joined the WTO not knowing what they were doing, or so one would hope; the US government aren't about to plead incompetent I assume? Just stop messing about and keep your promises.
What! How dare they - this is just what you'd expect from an evil, communist country, blocking a news-service like BBC... Oh, hang on...
Seriously, though, despite all the flak China keeps getting no matter what they do, they keep going forward, slowly, but steadily. I think they actually want to be a free, modern, democratic country. It's just that they know that it has to be done slowly - they only have to look to their neighbor, Russia, to see what happens if you just suddenly let go and try to be all things at once: you get a hugely powerful mafia, hugely powerful companies that operate above the law, common people starving, infrastructure that breaks down. They are doing it the right way, the Chinese.
I can see what he says - we will probably lose some advantages when OOXML fails; or rather, there are some things we won't get as easy access to. So the question is, I think: if we will be no worse off than now, will we have lost anything, really? I don't think we will have less opportunities than we already have, and the future seems to be going our way, as far as I can see. Microsoft are slowly, but sure, it seems, getting their come-uppance, and open source is going to benefit.
I have a hard time feeling much sympathy for Microsoft's predicament, really. They have been the big, bad bully for a long time, and in all that time they had no second thought about squashing anybody who remotely looked like competition; now they are beginning to feel the squeeze, thanks to FOSS, EU and countries who are beginning to realise that they could spend their money better on other things than feeding Microsoft. Maybe, once they have been cut down to size, if they seriously change their ways like IBM, maybe then we can begin to look at them in another light.
I think if you step back a little, you'll find that China is doing what most nations would have to do if they were in the same situation; they try to keep things from going ballistic, and they try to not let it spoil the show. But there is only so much one can do against a group of hell-raisers; there are always people in the world who are willing to support a cause without checking what it is all about. Hence the widespread support amongst Americans for the IRA, just to take one example, or for a dubious sect like Falun Gong.
Sometimes you are left no choice but to "oppress" if you want to avoid widespread civil unrest. I think one should look at the wider picture - over the last 30 years China has actually made incredible progress on all fronts: economically, socially and politically. It seems likely that they will continue to do so, if they manage to hold the country together and in peace, and I think it is in the interest of the whole of the rest of the world to help ensure that they succceed. Because if China descends into chaos, it will hit not just SE Asia - including Tibet, Japan, Taiwan, the Koreas, Thailand,
I think people in the West need to take off their blinkers; stop uncritically supporting whatever "sounds good", stop letting the ultra-reactionaries and the religious nuts tell us what to think, and make the effort ourselves.
What we see here isn't "The State trying to grab more control" - for one thing this is about international cooperation (ie. not "The State"), and for another, I don't think their primary focus will be on running around like headless chickens after the oh-so-evil music pirates. Some of the big problems with modern, organized crime is are 1) lack of police competence (as you have pointed out), 2) the internet, which makes it very easy for international, organized crime and 3) the fact that national legislations are too often incompatible and/or too difficult to work with.
I can't see a problem with creating an international cooperation to solve these problems. I think this is about actually being able to do the right job, as opposed to running errands for Hollywood.
Has anybody here on /. ever heard of this concept? I am getting hoarse from repeating this, but here we go again: The way forward is through dialog. Hasn't Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, ... taught us anything? No? Nothing at all? You can't climb onto your high, moral horse and try to force somebody to change what they see as "obviously right"; especially not when the somebody in question can so easily point out the glaring hypocrisy evident in your moralising. You can't insult somebody and then expect them to say "Yes, you are right"; it is simply absurd to think that way.
The all too few cases where deep-rooted conflicts have actually been resolved, have been resolved through dialog; both sides have to swallow more and bigger camels than they have any liking for. And when it comes to Tibet, the situation is not much different from the situation in Cuba: America has tried to bully them into submission for decades, spurred on by a small, but loud group of exiles, and it has done nothing to help the Cubans.
If we want to help the Tibetans, we have to work with China in a mature and sensible way. Anything else will most likely be wasted efforts, and it will certainly not help.
It would have to be IBM Basic assembly language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Basic_assembly_language; definitely. This is only halfways a joke - think about it; there is a huge number of programming languages in the world, all of them sort of more or less the same. Learn C, then you have easy access to learning most of the rest. But assembler, any assembler, will teach you how a computer works at a deeper level, which has got to be beneficial. Also, you can then amaze yourself with how small programs can actually be.
And why BAL? Why not? How many people do you know who can actually program a mainframe in any language, let alone assembler? Especially young people? It's a little like learning flint knapping; it went out of style a while back, but it's bloody cool to be able to do it.
Aren't you overreacting a bit, do you think?
Like it or not, you are already know far better than you think you are - that is part of living in a society, having friends and parents, having a job, etc etc. Adding your DNA to the pool isn't as big a step as you make out, and the consequences are not likely to be as grave as you fear.
Let us analyze a couple of things "they" could do with your DNA:
1. The police would be able to compare your DNA with the remains found at a crime scene. If you were a criminal, you would have to be careful not to leave any blood, semen, skin cells or hair behind; but I can't see how knowing your DNA could be used against you by the police, otherwise. It could prove to your advantage by ruling you out as a suspect.
2. One could potentially identify inherited diseases or genes that increase your risk of developing certain diseases, which could be beneficial for your health. The danger here is that employers might use this information as a basis for not hiring you - this would be comparable to discrimitation based on race, gender or age, and that is possibly the greatest danger we face.
Meanwhile, I think we face much graver dangers: our massive waste of resources and unwillingness to face up to our responsibility has not only caused the climate change that is now unfolding, but is also driving one of the great mass extinction events - to put it in perspective, the number of extinctions we are facing has only happened a few times in Earth's history, and while life as such will continue, it is not at all certain that humans and human society will. Personal freedoms, privacy and having the latest & greatest gadgets are important, but hardly relevant if we are choking on our own waste. But that is only my opinion, of course.
... it was the construction of a police state that made the racism, oppression and genocide possible. I know what you mean; but what you are saying here is not quite true. You seem to imply a couple of things that are false:1. A society where "the state" knows everything about everybody is not a police state - it is simply a society where everything is known about everybody. Three examples would be Denmark, Norway and Sweden, I believe - they are all fairly close to this state of affairs, where everybody's personal information is collected in a central database, but I don't think you could call them police states.
2. A police state doesn't have to lead to racism, oppression or genocide; these crimes exist because there are people who are ruthless as well as racists or fascists. Being in power and having the tools of a police state is of course a situation that such people would see as ideal, and there are many other good reasons for not wanting a police state.
It may seem pedantic to point these things out, but I think it is important to keep our minds clear about things. Oppression, fascism, racism - they all start with appealing to people's fear and not allowing a cool analysis of the facts, so by invoking "police state" as well as "racism, oppression and genocide" in this fashion you are actually serving the purpose of your alleged enemies: the fascists, the "oppresionists".
- amidst all the lame jokes and the general mistrust Americans have to government.
Society, when you get right down to the bare bones of it, is a simple extension of the primitive 'clan' that we know from the other apes, especially the chimpanzees. A group like that is only stable if the members trust each other at some fundamental level. Yes, there will be squabbles and cliques, and they may steal from each other and bully the weakest, but everybody has a fundamental trust in the group, which they don't have in strangers. The same is true about human society - it is built on trust; if this trust is lacking in a society, it will simply fall apart. Perhaps this is happening in America? I don't know, but seeing that America is still one nation I'd say that the fundamental trust is still in place.
Anyway - the question about DNA is one about trust. The government is irrelevant here, governments change all the time, at least every four years; but the people around you don't - the people who will have accecss to your information will be more or less the same. If you trust the society you live in, you shouldn't really mind letting others know your DNA. Having everybody's DNA profile, and indeed all other personal information, in one, central database does offer some objective benefits. It will be a lot easier to identify a person, of course, and it would potentially be possible to identify a number of disease risks etc. On the downside is the fact that not all members of society are worthy of such trust, and they will use this information to exploit people.
I'm am not wise enough to see whether the benefits are great enough to justify the risks; but that is what it all boils down to: trust or no trust.
Firstly, espionage happens - get over it. It may be immoral, but funnily it is not immoral enough to stop anybody from doing it. The Chinese do it, no doubt, and they get away with a lot of things, but then, so do we, whoever 'we' are.
Secondly, I think espionage is less of a national venture these days and more of an international business. The nationality of a spy may matter less - an Iraeli spy, say, might spy on America and sell to whoever bids the most; China, Russia, UK, whatever. Or perhaps even the US. There isn't a lot of pride and glamour in the spying business.
... the organization could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. That's assuming that people would still use it as much. I know I probably wouldn't - or I would only use it if I could block all the adverts.Should we really limit the kind of articles in Wikipedia? How can we know now what is 'valuable' information and what isn't? When I look through old encyclopedias I see much that might have seemed higly valuable at the time, but which is strangely irrelevant now, information or scientific dead ends, in a way. And conversely, when we look back and try to learn about some aspect of life a hundred years ago, it is often the trivial things that give the most valuable insights; the scraps of newspaper, a love letter, adverts etc.
From that perspective I feel we should include everything and concentrate on the quality and neutrality of the articles instead. For the first time in history this is something that seems within our reach; letting go of this opportunity just to pander to some 'upper class notions' would be doing us all a disservice.
How can this be something of any interest to us - this is not Hello Magazine. It's not our business, telling others who they want to see.
Apart from that - scientists may not have much confidence in the validity of astrology, but however little reason there may be, scientifically, to believe in it, it is not something we are able to definitely prove false. Just like that other far fetched superstition, Christianity.
I don't think most astrologers believe that the planets somehow directly and physically influence what happens here on Earth; they do, however, believe that it is something that can be observed, even if they can't explain why it works, and to tell the truth, there hasn't yet been much serious, rigorous, scientific work on the subject. I can understand that; there are so many other subjects that are much more likely to produce valuable results - but believing in religion doesn't in itself make a person stupid. One has to keep an open mind - there is a story about Niels Bohr: Once, Heisenberg came to visit Bohr in his office in Copenhagen, he noticed that there was a horseshoe hanging over the door, and he asked him: "Surely you don't believe in that sort of nonsense?" - And Bohr answered: "Of course not; but I am told it works even if you don't believe".
When is a person cheating? IMO it must include an intent to deceive; and that makes it very difficult to judge a case like this. What was the assignment - if it was "produce a report about so and so", then it should arguably be irrelevant whether the student did the work himself or went out and bought it; he delivered the goods. But of course this is not really the objective in a school - the objective is that the student should learn by performing the work himself.
That being said, there are some gray areas - I once, in an oral exam, proved a theorem by using an advanced result and then giving the proof for that result instead. Was that brilliant or was it cheating? Most would say that I didn't cheat, but what if the purpose was to demonstrate that I had learned and understood the techniques used in the intended proof? The advanced theorem I used had little bearing on the methods used in the course I was being examined in - I got high marks, but perhaps I was cheating?
Unfortunately it is not entirely as simple as that. Many countries have laws governing the opening hours of shops, and they are often quite complicated; so, rather than changing the law twice a year or making the laws even more complex by writing complex change-over schedules into them, it is easier to simply change the official time of day. To quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time: "Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but ... modern heating and cooling usage patterns can cause DST to increase electricity consumption."
Taking time out to do 'nothing' can enhance your productivity. If all you are doing is routine tasks - stamping papers or debugging program code - then perhaps you can go on for days on end, I know I have. But it kills your creativity - when I encounter a difficult problem, the best way to solve it, in my experience, is to stop thinking about it, do something else and let the task run in the background. Albert Einstein famously drove himself to desperation trying to find a way to integrate gravity in the relativity theory; when at last he gave up, he suddenly had the solution. IOW, stop trying too hard.
T think calling internet censorship a 'trade barrier' is far-fetched. What would happen is simply that the WTO will spend a huge amount of time, decades even, pinning out what kinds of network trade are to be included under free trade. The problem here is that this is not really about trade, it is about trying to tell another nation how to run its internal affairs, and no sovereign nation will allow that. At the end of the day this is just a silly stunt - I don't think the EU are going to be all that interested in alienating what everybody agrees is going to be the greatest economical superpower.