So, in the last year there has been even more talk and research into this - and as always the reactionaries on both sides have been screaming their heads off about anything but the real issue: the fact that violence is endemic in America even today, and in fact seems to be on the increase when it comes to the more extreme forms.
Is it games? Or movies? Or weapons? Or social injustice? Or a combination? The argument you hear all the time is that "it isn't guns that kill people, it's people using the guns" - this seems to function as a cover-all that precludes any further thoughts about the issue, and which is used not just about weapons, but against the idea that violent games or movies cause violence, or that social inequality causes crime. It is, in fact used much like that other old saw "there is no conclusive proof", which has been used as an excuse for not doing anything about pollution, climate change, the tobacco industry etc.
I don't think anybody in their right mind suggests that violent games are the only cause, or even the main cause for violence; but there is now good reason to suspect that is a contributing factor, just like violent movies, easy acces to weapons and the deep social divides in US society. This is what the scientists are saying, they are not saying what should be done about it - that is not their job, their job is to find facts and publish their findings.
I personally think the main reason for the very high levels of violence in the US is a combination of several cultural elements:
- the tendency to polarize anything. Politicans are seen as either saints or demons, and nobody is willing to even try to reach across any divide, because you are either 'for or against us'. This tends to justify treating those outside your own group as not worthy of consideration.
- the extreme dominance of capitalism. This may be good for the economy, at least for a while, but it means that your own material success becomes the number one priority; it is a worship of selfishness, if you will. Poor people are seen as nothing more than useless rabble that are too lazy and stupid to break out of their poverty. And of course, poor people tend to see the rest of society as enemies.
- violent games and movies contribute to a culture where violence is seen as somehow cool and attractive. So does the very high status the Military holds in America - the army is in many ways nothing but a concentrated, ritualized culture of unthinking violence, and many if not most young men grow up to think that you have to be a soldier to be a real man. So, to the American mind violence is perhaps seen as more acceptable than in other Western cultures.
- the easy acces to guns and the near-worhip of guns is certainly contributing to violence. A gun represents the ultimate in violent capability, and with many seeing violence as cool it is not surprising that they will get a gun and use it. After all, if you pull out a gun, but don't intend to use it, your opponent may grab it and use against you, so if you carry a gun, you have already subscribed to the paradigm "kill or get killed".
So how do we get out of this evil spiral, where violence begets ever more violence? Well, restricting violent games won't make much difference - even an outright ban wouldn't do much. What we need is a general change of hearts and minds, so that violence is no longer seen as attractive or necessary to solve problems, and a change in the political landscape so society can develop towards more equality, not less. I don't know if this is possible, but if it isn't, America will become ever more divided, violent and fearful, until people lock themselves in their homes, never look their neighbors in the eye, and everybody wants a police state, that is 'tough on crime' (and people in general). I hope we will find a way. I really hope we do.
Not so. In fact, in most of the higher mathematics it is the proofs that are mportant, sometimes more so than the actual theorems. A theorem sums up some important conclusion, but the proof demonstrates the methods used to reach the conclusion. If you want to be able to reach other conclusions on your own, you have to master the methods. Take some of the theorems about continuity of real functions - if that is all you know, how are you going to prove that some new function is continuous, if it is not covered by the theorems? You have to know how to use the epsilon/delta argument.
So, yeah, let's instead believe bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales where surely the biggest advantage was being sexy
Hmm, something seems to have touched a nerve there. So, you don't like the thought about being nice as a selective force? No problem.
Your reasoning isn't entirely wrong; but then again it isn't entirely true either. You seem to want to make evolution something that only favours violence and selfishness, which is a rather one-sided view of the world. I haven't read this particular article, but I am familiar with this topic - it isn't as if this is an entirely new idea.
What is evolution really, when you think about it? One component is the fact that in each generation of organisms, some will survive and have descendants and some won't. It is worth remembering that you don't have to be particularly 'fit' in any way in order to produce desendants, you may just be lucky. The thing about 'fitness' only comes in when you look at it statistically - over time, and over a large population, it makes sense to say that the ones that kept surviving and reproducing had traits that made them more 'fit for survival'. This also means is that at any given point in time there is likely to be a proportion of traits in the population that are not advantageous, just to make that point clear.
Another factor that is worth keeping in mind is that the environment is not something seperate from the population. In the case of human evolution this becomes especially important as our numbers grow; it is not surprising to see that genes that influence our social abilities seem to have evolved rapidly since we began to live in larger communities than the typical family groups we see with other primates. Another area where our sheer force in numbers has been important is in diseases; the more people and the close they live together, the more they will contaminate their environment and the more they will pass on infections etc, so we are under a large pressure when it comes to evolving resistence against infections.
The examples you mention, on the other hand, don't seem to make too much sense. Humans are apes; our great advantage has been adaptability; our teeth and gut are general purpose, we are able to both walk and climb, and we have learned to work together - and it is that cooperative ability that has been our greatest asset, and it is probably also the single greatest factor contributing to the evolution of our intelligence. It has also made us the most efficient hunters on the planet - quite well done for a species that is not a predator.
As for what you call 'bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales' - I assume you mean the idea that things like beauty and altruism play a role in evolution. Well, I'm sorry to upset your view on the world, but they do. Altruism is still one of the things we don't entirely understand from an evolutionary point of view, but we can see it happen, even amongst chimpanzees; ie. it is a FACT. Beauty, on the other hand is not difficult to understand - beautiful people are people who look healthy (ie. likelier to produce good offspring), whose facial expressions are mostly kind (probably better at bringing up succesful offspring) etc etc. Our ide of beauty is a result of evolution and therefore important in evolution. The same goes for our morals - our moral rules are the ones that have been valuable for our survival as species.
You refer to some historical facts or factoids about the Romans etc. However, our written history doesn't stretch much more than about 5000 years, and large scale evolution doesn't happen quite as fast as that, which tends to invalidate your arguments. You may not like the idea that physical beauty is important, so you try paint an ugly picture of mankind; yes, even an ugly man or woman can have sex and thus offspring, but looks are after all only one factor in this - an ugly person may have other traits that make him/her very attractive, such as a caring personality, or high social intelligence. But physical beauty is an important factor f
Anybody who knows me, knows that I am usually the first to criticise the US government. But I think people should take the time and make the effort to distinguish between 'Government' as an institution and the bunch of idiots that somehow seems to be the only kind of people that make it into government in the US. It seems very much to be part of American culture today to be anti-government; if one were thus inclined, one could make up a conspiracy theory about that: 'They' (this most notorious group of evil people) make sure that only idiots get into government in order to discredit the institution as a whole, so that they can minimize the influence of government on society.
However, there is such a thing as a good government - one that takes care of the whole of the people rather than just business interests.
Did anybody really think that these export restrictions have any effect in these cases? All they mean is that certain American companies can't knowingly sell to certain countries; but how should that stop Iran, Myanmar, North Korea,... from getting AMD chips, really? They aren't exactly huge, and anybody could in principle buy a suitcase full of them in Europe or America, fly to somewhere that is not banned and where they don't control your luggage all that well, at least not for computer parts, and then on to Iran. In fact, you wouldn't take too big a risk if you flew from London, in my experience - not that I have been to Iran, but they don't really check people's luggage other than to ensure that you don't carry weapons or bombs. It is the job of the customs officers at the other end to make sure you don't smuggle illegal things in. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranians would be quite lenient if you tried to bring a load of 'illegal' computer parts into the country.
This is a bit like the ridiculous declarations you have to click on when you download 'restricted' SW from American companies; if you are a terorist or live in one of the banned countries, why would you restrain yourself from lying? Most people in the west wouldn't think twice about it anyway.
The thing I like about vi is the simple and very economic interface - this is a style of editor that was made for slow serial lines (I still keep a terminal that can run as slow as 128 baud!). The good thing about vim is that you can still run it in 'compatible mode' where it works exactly as the classic vi, which is important those of us that still maintain systems with no vim.
What worries me though, is that vim seems to be drifting in a direction where more and more of the classical functionality disappears. Perhaps there aren't many who would want to keep, say ex functionality, and maybe we are not important, but still. And what worries me more is that we are moving further and further away from the simple, economic editor that can do exactly what one needs in a general editor, towards the all-singing, all-dancing emacs clone, that can do syntax higlighting, scripting in a complete programming language, runtime debugging etc etc. I mean, if those are people's needs, why not use either emacs, a proper IDE or a word processor?
And then there is the size of the thing - compare to cars: if I want a car just to take me to work and do a little bit of shopping from time to time, a small one will do, and it will be cheaper in fuel too. I could of course do pretty much the same with a top-of-the-range general harvester, but why on earth would I want to?
This is unfortunately what is bound to happen when you allow privately owned monopolies, and a weighty argument in favour of nationalisation. There are certain things that are simply too important to leave them to free market forces - health care, power generation, water supply, roads, telephone lines and now internet access. These are areas where small to middle sized companies would never really be able to compete, which leads to monopolies - which in the end will lead to abuse. Call it 'communism' if you like, but to me the important thing is not the ideology, it's whatever gives me and everybody else the best options. In the case of internet connection, if the state supplied the physical lines, we could make sure through legislation that all service providers had a level playing field and that there was real competition.
Right now it is only adverts that get filtered; well, probably. Later, who knows? The thing about private companies is that they are controlled by people who are not held accountable by a democratic process, so they are free to impress whichever political and/or religious viewpoints they want on the practises of their business - they don't have to stick to what maximises their profits, especially if they have no real competition, as in the situation where people don't have access to another ISP.
This has always been the thing we have criticised about the Soviet Union, that people were not allowed access to unfiltered, uncensored news; and that was the main reason why the leaders could hold on to power for so long. The same can easily happen in the US or enywhere else, if all the news channels are owned by huge companies that all agree on what you are not allowed to hear about, and all ISPs filter out the same subjects.
I have always thought that was more or less inevitable. If we make a couple of bold and sweeping generalisations, we can say that:
1. The market is finite. 2. MS has expanded to the max extent. 3. Linux is growing.
The inevitable conclusion is that if anything else than MS grows, MS must shrink. If this continues long enough, there will come a tipping point. The thing is, the bigger Linux is in the marketplace, the easier will it be to persuade new users to join (up to a point, of course; if Linux ends up being 99% or so, there won't be many new users to recruit).
It doesn't really matter that many or most OSS project are sponsored by companies; even if they all suddenly lost their sponsors, there would still be a number of people who would continue, simply because they can and they like to do it. Think of Stallman or Linus - nobody paid them in the beginning, but GNU Linux is now the de facto standard for UNIX. Linux will keep growing as long as it is free and fun to program. Windows, on the other hand, is not free and is long ago ceased to be any fun programming for it.
I wouldn't say I feel proud - I feel confident. I think after a while (OK, several years, then) you find a style of programming that is 'right' in that it works for you. It's like anything else in life; when you start on doing something new, you will probably not do the best of jobs, but after some time it will be routine.
The trick, of course, is to get into the right routine so it doesn't become simply bad habits. I find these rules help:
1. Take the time to write your code well. 2. Be willing to rewrite bad code. 3. Maintainability is usually more important than speed. 4. Don't let managers bully you.
Point 1 and 4 are probably more important than you would think. It is no use writing code quickly, if you end up spending ages debugging and maintaining it. Managers of all kinds are often one of the biggest reasons why programmers produce bad code - they often don't know much about actually producing code, and if they don't know much about leadership either, they think that you will work harder and better if you are kept under pressure; but all that achieves is to make people not take the time needed.
It's true, there are many starving people in the world, which we could and should do something to help. However, it is possible to be desperately poor without actually starving; it is fully possible to grow up in a place where you have no future, no hope, nothing. Those people also need our help, and helping poor people with education may give them at least the chance to improve their lives. You can die from starvation, but is it worth living if life is nothing but empty desperation? It is in our own interest too, helping poor people not only to survive, but also to improve their lives and enable them to stand on their own. When people feel they have nothing to live for, they are much more willing to die as martyrs.
It has been very fashionable in recent years to pretend that we in the West are so high and mighty with our impeccable moral, freedom and democracy. And maybe we ARE better than the Chinese or whoever we are morally outraged over this week; but if so, then starting up the usual howling concert is not going to make things better for anybody, neither them nor us. If we want people to listen to criticism, we first have to be their friends in some sense - if we are enemies, they will just stick the finger up at whatever we say - I mean, wouldn't you? Friends can work things out, enemies can only fight.
It really is as simple as that; so if we want to see other nations change and approach our way of living, then we have to change ourselves too. We have to be willing to accept that not everything is the way we want it to be, in the hope that it may be so in the future. We have to accept that maybe we are in the wrong in some areas, and that we have to change a bit too; we have to meet somewhere in the middle.
So, when it comes to China (or Myanmar, Thailand or all the others), is it really right to ban American companies from trading there? Which is what it would mean if they are not allowed to follow the local laws for ideological reasons. Such a ban would be a rather hostile thing - and all we will get for it will be a 'Good Riddance', and then the Chinese companies will grow and take over the whole of the Chinese market for themselves, thus closing that channel of cultural influence. Is this what we should do? I don't think so.
I think we should grumble a bit and let it pass - China is actually becoming more open, and somewhere along the way it is likely that they will develope their own form of democracy. If we look back at our own history we can see that we didn't come into democracy overnight, it was something that emerged as the result of changes in our culture, and perhaps the Chinese people isn't there yet. Iraq should tell us that trying to force the issue is not going to work.
The seed vault is not primarily about preserving species of wheat or whatever it is people have been imagining on/. - it is about saving as many as possible of all the wild plant species we are busy driving to extinction through logging, global warming, mindless, industrial agriculture etc. It is part of a multi layered strategy: preserve habitats, preserve growing specimens in botanical gardens, preserve seeds in seed banks.
A pessimistic, but very realistic view indicates that we will have killed off most rainforests etc within this century; that leaves botanical gardens and the seed banks. When the botanical gardens aren't viable any more, perhaps we have one more chance in the seed banks. If we save enough seeds, perhaps we can re-establish viable ecologies where they have been lost, or in new, better suited places, since the climate changes are likely to change some habitats too much.
What people should realize is that this is not about safeguarding against starvation - it's for after, when a large part of the world's population has died. It is also worth thinking about that this project isn't a panicky rush to build a shelter a-la the cold-war nuclear bunkers. This has been contemplated and implemented by level-headed scientists.
I can see people on/. are already busy cursing lorry drivers in general - a sentiment I fully understand and agree with - but that is not the real problem here. Tele Atlas have not provided a system that is appropriate for its use; and their attitude is less than accomodating. If I sell an instruction manual for something and my instructions cause people to lose money, am I not responsible for that loss? I should think so; and Tele Atlas' instruction is causing loss of life.
One may argue that the lorry drivers should drive competently etc, but they would probably not have been in this place if they had used a proper paper map and had been forced to seek out their route before they left home, so I think the company are at least part responsible and should be made to pay as well as upgrade their data as a priority.
One of the downsides of aloowing people to anonymously address the public is that the author cannot be held accountable. And accountability is a cornerstone of any society. Another cornerstone is trust - members of society have to trust the laws of that society, otherwise the whole system breaks down and we end up with nothing but the right of the strongest. Of course, if you are strong, you may not mind, but most of us are not. And I suspect if you feel the need to hide behind anonymity, then you are not strong.
In a free society, where the law guarantees your freedom of speech, the only consequences you should need to fear is that other people may give you an earful for saying what they don't like; but that is part of the price for have both society and freedom. It's a compromise and thus not perfect.
Perhaps it would be almost bearable, all these restrictions and prying and groping, if it was clear that it actually worked, but all I can see is that it never has and never will - it simply can't. It's like stemming the tide with legislation alone - it's an exercise in futility.
They are trying to apply a bad solution to something that isn't the real problem. First of all, if somebody, especially a desperado who is willing to kill himself in an act of terrorism, wants to get into the US, s/he will - there are uncounted holes in the American border and people have always and will always just walk in. The border control is not going to catch them - or not all of them.
And then, of course, terrorism is only a symptom of the real, underlying problem of a few countries being obscenely rich and most of the rest being poor or desperately poor.
You sound almost as if you are defending the corruptness of the system; or at least saying 'Well, that's just the way it is'.
I don't agree with that - if the system doesn't work, it has to be changed. And it clearly doesn't work, because:
- as this government has demonstrated again and again, they can get away with just about any crime. This one is just one of the small ones - how about the war in Iraq and all the others? Ie: they are not accountable.
- the government's policy is determined, not by the people elected and according to what they stand for, but by big business: the energy industry, the big telecoms, the religious extremists, the military. The interests of the people do not enter the equation at any point. Ie: they do not govern for the people.
- the elections are simply an elaborate fraud. The people are not given sufficient relevant information about the political views of the candidates, for one thing - instead they are fed a mixture of soap opera and reality tv where such momentous subjects dominate as eg. the scandalous story that 'X once smoked dope'. And apart from that, the only real candidates are all in the pockets of those who own the real power: Big Money, so it doesn't matter who the hell you elect.
Is that democracy? Of course not; Americans have not known democracy for generations. In a real democracy the government
- is independent of special interest - they serve the whole of the people.
- accountable under the law
- elected from candidates that stand only on their own merits, not on the buying power of their secret backers
Did you know that in several if not most countries in Europe, each party is only allowed the same amount of tv time as the other parties during an election? That members of governmet are often held MORE responsible than ordinary people rather than less? Think of the British ministers who've had to go for having an affair, something that would hardly have raised an eyebrow, had they not been in government. The Europeans may all be 'bloody commies' for all I know, but they have a better democracy.
Actually, you're wrong - or you are right in saying that it is OK in this case, but not because 'it happens all the time'; the author had placed it in the public domain, and that's why it is OK.
And to be quite frank - I think I am glad I don't have many employees with your attitude. ScuttleMonkey asked a very valid question, and he shows a responsible and thoughtful attitude, which are qualities any employer should value; you, on the other hand, seem all too willing to take what is not yours and jump the fence where it is lowest. How could anybody trust you with a task that is important to a company?
How about for once trying to approach this subject in a more mature way? It is so easy and so common to simply misinterpret something you don't like in way that makes sound like it is obviously crap, so you can just dismiss it, but that doesn't do justice to the subject, the people who have don'e actual, serious research into it, or to yourself and your own intelligence. Listening and understanding is not going to hurt, really.
This research is not saying that this or that individual will necessarily be more violent after having played a video game; but it says that there is a measurable effect on average. The article doesn't detail what research method was used, but it could be something like comparing a group of people, who play violent games with a group who don't. And of course, one might question whether the interpretation of the results is correct; but jeering stupidly is not the way, I think.
I think the reasoning behind is quite sensible: You can train your responses to situations in a simulator - this is used in many places, not least the military. So in a violent game you learn to respond with violence to certain situations; also, when you do something often enough, it becomes routine, and you feel less emotional impact from what you do. Wouldn't it be reasonable to suspect that playing violent video games might harden people against the consequences of violences to others? To most this will not be an issue, but there is a frighteningly large proportion of the normal population whose grasp on reality is not very strong - they are not very far away from a mild form of actual psychosis, one might say, and those people will be less able to distinguish between what happens in a game and what happens in reality. I don't know actual numbers, but there are more than most think. On that backkground, isn't it reasonable to research the subject of violence in the media question whether we, as a society, would not be better off there was less of it?
They have certainly failed miserably with this project; but I think it is worth noting that they are not the only ones. We just don't hear about the way private companies fail because their management is a bunch of narrowminded wankers, not until they go bankrupt at least.
The BBC isn't a private company, but a public service. Their income comes mainly from the license fee - this is a good thing, really, because it enables them to broadcast programs that are not necessarily commercially viable, like educational programmes. The real problem with BBC is not that they have mismanaged a SW project in a world where almost big SW project is ever handled optimally; the real problem is that they have for far too many years tried to compete with the commercial channels, so that now mainly send the same crappy soaps and reality shows as everybody else. They are, as a public service channel, in a unique position that would have allowed them to experiment and be innovative, but the leadership lacked vision and courage - and that is the real shame.
Were the Starwars movies really that bad? I think they were bad in so many respects, from the very beginning: the dubious understanding of science, the strange coincidence that all these aliens in a galaxy far, far away looked exactly like humans with the occasional funny hairdress, the utterly uncool wookies, the jedis with their supposedly deep wisdom who still educated their apprentice jedis like a caricature of the archetypical 'Zen master/student' relationship; isn't it likely that if a hugely gifted boy like Anakin had been treated with care and understanding, he might have had the strength to resist the rather naff temptations of Mr. Palpatine, Esq.? In this context things like midichlorians and Ewoks are simply natural and quite cute.
I think it is simply being seen from the wrong perspective - Starwars was never more than an entertaining, exciting story, and as such brilliant. I remember when I saw them in the beginning I felt hugely disappointed, but now I really enjoy them for what they are. They are just not 'deep' or insightful, that's all.
There is something about the way the DRM clique go about things that makes me think it isn't so much a question about money as one about not being able to tolerate that there are people in the world that listen to music and enjoy themselves. I mean, if it was only about money they would have dropped DRM and all the other draconian efforts that will, in the long run only alienate their customers.
If a life form originated here on Earth, it isn't alien in any sense of the word - if life started up several times the different forms are all native, but may be called 'polyphyletic'.
And, on the other hand, how long does one have to stick around to no longer be alien? Are those currently called 'Americans' still aliens? If life came to Earth from outer space 4 billon years ago, shouldn't it qualify as 'native' by now, after having been shaped by the local environment for so long?
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So, in the last year there has been even more talk and research into this - and as always the reactionaries on both sides have been screaming their heads off about anything but the real issue: the fact that violence is endemic in America even today, and in fact seems to be on the increase when it comes to the more extreme forms.
Is it games? Or movies? Or weapons? Or social injustice? Or a combination? The argument you hear all the time is that "it isn't guns that kill people, it's people using the guns" - this seems to function as a cover-all that precludes any further thoughts about the issue, and which is used not just about weapons, but against the idea that violent games or movies cause violence, or that social inequality causes crime. It is, in fact used much like that other old saw "there is no conclusive proof", which has been used as an excuse for not doing anything about pollution, climate change, the tobacco industry etc.
I don't think anybody in their right mind suggests that violent games are the only cause, or even the main cause for violence; but there is now good reason to suspect that is a contributing factor, just like violent movies, easy acces to weapons and the deep social divides in US society. This is what the scientists are saying, they are not saying what should be done about it - that is not their job, their job is to find facts and publish their findings.
I personally think the main reason for the very high levels of violence in the US is a combination of several cultural elements:
- the tendency to polarize anything. Politicans are seen as either saints or demons, and nobody is willing to even try to reach across any divide, because you are either 'for or against us'. This tends to justify treating those outside your own group as not worthy of consideration.
- the extreme dominance of capitalism. This may be good for the economy, at least for a while, but it means that your own material success becomes the number one priority; it is a worship of selfishness, if you will. Poor people are seen as nothing more than useless rabble that are too lazy and stupid to break out of their poverty. And of course, poor people tend to see the rest of society as enemies.
- violent games and movies contribute to a culture where violence is seen as somehow cool and attractive. So does the very high status the Military holds in America - the army is in many ways nothing but a concentrated, ritualized culture of unthinking violence, and many if not most young men grow up to think that you have to be a soldier to be a real man. So, to the American mind violence is perhaps seen as more acceptable than in other Western cultures.
- the easy acces to guns and the near-worhip of guns is certainly contributing to violence. A gun represents the ultimate in violent capability, and with many seeing violence as cool it is not surprising that they will get a gun and use it. After all, if you pull out a gun, but don't intend to use it, your opponent may grab it and use against you, so if you carry a gun, you have already subscribed to the paradigm "kill or get killed".
So how do we get out of this evil spiral, where violence begets ever more violence? Well, restricting violent games won't make much difference - even an outright ban wouldn't do much. What we need is a general change of hearts and minds, so that violence is no longer seen as attractive or necessary to solve problems, and a change in the political landscape so society can develop towards more equality, not less. I don't know if this is possible, but if it isn't, America will become ever more divided, violent and fearful, until people lock themselves in their homes, never look their neighbors in the eye, and everybody wants a police state, that is 'tough on crime' (and people in general). I hope we will find a way. I really hope we do.
proofs alone don't really "teach" mathematics
Not so. In fact, in most of the higher mathematics it is the proofs that are mportant, sometimes more so than the actual theorems. A theorem sums up some important conclusion, but the proof demonstrates the methods used to reach the conclusion. If you want to be able to reach other conclusions on your own, you have to master the methods. Take some of the theorems about continuity of real functions - if that is all you know, how are you going to prove that some new function is continuous, if it is not covered by the theorems? You have to know how to use the epsilon/delta argument.
So, yeah, let's instead believe bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales where surely the biggest advantage was being sexy
Hmm, something seems to have touched a nerve there. So, you don't like the thought about being nice as a selective force? No problem.
Your reasoning isn't entirely wrong; but then again it isn't entirely true either. You seem to want to make evolution something that only favours violence and selfishness, which is a rather one-sided view of the world. I haven't read this particular article, but I am familiar with this topic - it isn't as if this is an entirely new idea.
What is evolution really, when you think about it? One component is the fact that in each generation of organisms, some will survive and have descendants and some won't. It is worth remembering that you don't have to be particularly 'fit' in any way in order to produce desendants, you may just be lucky. The thing about 'fitness' only comes in when you look at it statistically - over time, and over a large population, it makes sense to say that the ones that kept surviving and reproducing had traits that made them more 'fit for survival'. This also means is that at any given point in time there is likely to be a proportion of traits in the population that are not advantageous, just to make that point clear.
Another factor that is worth keeping in mind is that the environment is not something seperate from the population. In the case of human evolution this becomes especially important as our numbers grow; it is not surprising to see that genes that influence our social abilities seem to have evolved rapidly since we began to live in larger communities than the typical family groups we see with other primates. Another area where our sheer force in numbers has been important is in diseases; the more people and the close they live together, the more they will contaminate their environment and the more they will pass on infections etc, so we are under a large pressure when it comes to evolving resistence against infections.
The examples you mention, on the other hand, don't seem to make too much sense. Humans are apes; our great advantage has been adaptability; our teeth and gut are general purpose, we are able to both walk and climb, and we have learned to work together - and it is that cooperative ability that has been our greatest asset, and it is probably also the single greatest factor contributing to the evolution of our intelligence. It has also made us the most efficient hunters on the planet - quite well done for a species that is not a predator.
As for what you call 'bogus shiny-happy fairy-tales' - I assume you mean the idea that things like beauty and altruism play a role in evolution. Well, I'm sorry to upset your view on the world, but they do. Altruism is still one of the things we don't entirely understand from an evolutionary point of view, but we can see it happen, even amongst chimpanzees; ie. it is a FACT. Beauty, on the other hand is not difficult to understand - beautiful people are people who look healthy (ie. likelier to produce good offspring), whose facial expressions are mostly kind (probably better at bringing up succesful offspring) etc etc. Our ide of beauty is a result of evolution and therefore important in evolution. The same goes for our morals - our moral rules are the ones that have been valuable for our survival as species.
You refer to some historical facts or factoids about the Romans etc. However, our written history doesn't stretch much more than about 5000 years, and large scale evolution doesn't happen quite as fast as that, which tends to invalidate your arguments. You may not like the idea that physical beauty is important, so you try paint an ugly picture of mankind; yes, even an ugly man or woman can have sex and thus offspring, but looks are after all only one factor in this - an ugly person may have other traits that make him/her very attractive, such as a caring personality, or high social intelligence. But physical beauty is an important factor f
Anybody who knows me, knows that I am usually the first to criticise the US government. But I think people should take the time and make the effort to distinguish between 'Government' as an institution and the bunch of idiots that somehow seems to be the only kind of people that make it into government in the US. It seems very much to be part of American culture today to be anti-government; if one were thus inclined, one could make up a conspiracy theory about that: 'They' (this most notorious group of evil people) make sure that only idiots get into government in order to discredit the institution as a whole, so that they can minimize the influence of government on society.
However, there is such a thing as a good government - one that takes care of the whole of the people rather than just business interests.
Did anybody really think that these export restrictions have any effect in these cases? All they mean is that certain American companies can't knowingly sell to certain countries; but how should that stop Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, ... from getting AMD chips, really? They aren't exactly huge, and anybody could in principle buy a suitcase full of them in Europe or America, fly to somewhere that is not banned and where they don't control your luggage all that well, at least not for computer parts, and then on to Iran. In fact, you wouldn't take too big a risk if you flew from London, in my experience - not that I have been to Iran, but they don't really check people's luggage other than to ensure that you don't carry weapons or bombs. It is the job of the customs officers at the other end to make sure you don't smuggle illegal things in. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranians would be quite lenient if you tried to bring a load of 'illegal' computer parts into the country.
This is a bit like the ridiculous declarations you have to click on when you download 'restricted' SW from American companies; if you are a terorist or live in one of the banned countries, why would you restrain yourself from lying? Most people in the west wouldn't think twice about it anyway.
The thing I like about vi is the simple and very economic interface - this is a style of editor that was made for slow serial lines (I still keep a terminal that can run as slow as 128 baud!). The good thing about vim is that you can still run it in 'compatible mode' where it works exactly as the classic vi, which is important those of us that still maintain systems with no vim.
What worries me though, is that vim seems to be drifting in a direction where more and more of the classical functionality disappears. Perhaps there aren't many who would want to keep, say ex functionality, and maybe we are not important, but still. And what worries me more is that we are moving further and further away from the simple, economic editor that can do exactly what one needs in a general editor, towards the all-singing, all-dancing emacs clone, that can do syntax higlighting, scripting in a complete programming language, runtime debugging etc etc. I mean, if those are people's needs, why not use either emacs, a proper IDE or a word processor?
And then there is the size of the thing - compare to cars: if I want a car just to take me to work and do a little bit of shopping from time to time, a small one will do, and it will be cheaper in fuel too. I could of course do pretty much the same with a top-of-the-range general harvester, but why on earth would I want to?
This is unfortunately what is bound to happen when you allow privately owned monopolies, and a weighty argument in favour of nationalisation. There are certain things that are simply too important to leave them to free market forces - health care, power generation, water supply, roads, telephone lines and now internet access. These are areas where small to middle sized companies would never really be able to compete, which leads to monopolies - which in the end will lead to abuse. Call it 'communism' if you like, but to me the important thing is not the ideology, it's whatever gives me and everybody else the best options. In the case of internet connection, if the state supplied the physical lines, we could make sure through legislation that all service providers had a level playing field and that there was real competition.
Right now it is only adverts that get filtered; well, probably. Later, who knows? The thing about private companies is that they are controlled by people who are not held accountable by a democratic process, so they are free to impress whichever political and/or religious viewpoints they want on the practises of their business - they don't have to stick to what maximises their profits, especially if they have no real competition, as in the situation where people don't have access to another ISP.
This has always been the thing we have criticised about the Soviet Union, that people were not allowed access to unfiltered, uncensored news; and that was the main reason why the leaders could hold on to power for so long. The same can easily happen in the US or enywhere else, if all the news channels are owned by huge companies that all agree on what you are not allowed to hear about, and all ISPs filter out the same subjects.
I have always thought that was more or less inevitable. If we make a couple of bold and sweeping generalisations, we can say that:
1. The market is finite.
2. MS has expanded to the max extent.
3. Linux is growing.
The inevitable conclusion is that if anything else than MS grows, MS must shrink. If this continues long enough, there will come a tipping point. The thing is, the bigger Linux is in the marketplace, the easier will it be to persuade new users to join (up to a point, of course; if Linux ends up being 99% or so, there won't be many new users to recruit).
It doesn't really matter that many or most OSS project are sponsored by companies; even if they all suddenly lost their sponsors, there would still be a number of people who would continue, simply because they can and they like to do it. Think of Stallman or Linus - nobody paid them in the beginning, but GNU Linux is now the de facto standard for UNIX. Linux will keep growing as long as it is free and fun to program. Windows, on the other hand, is not free and is long ago ceased to be any fun programming for it.
I wouldn't say I feel proud - I feel confident. I think after a while (OK, several years, then) you find a style of programming that is 'right' in that it works for you. It's like anything else in life; when you start on doing something new, you will probably not do the best of jobs, but after some time it will be routine.
The trick, of course, is to get into the right routine so it doesn't become simply bad habits. I find these rules help:
1. Take the time to write your code well.
2. Be willing to rewrite bad code.
3. Maintainability is usually more important than speed.
4. Don't let managers bully you.
Point 1 and 4 are probably more important than you would think. It is no use writing code quickly, if you end up spending ages debugging and maintaining it. Managers of all kinds are often one of the biggest reasons why programmers produce bad code - they often don't know much about actually producing code, and if they don't know much about leadership either, they think that you will work harder and better if you are kept under pressure; but all that achieves is to make people not take the time needed.
Whoever did production design on that thing deserves an Oscar.
Or a wedgie.
It's true, there are many starving people in the world, which we could and should do something to help. However, it is possible to be desperately poor without actually starving; it is fully possible to grow up in a place where you have no future, no hope, nothing. Those people also need our help, and helping poor people with education may give them at least the chance to improve their lives. You can die from starvation, but is it worth living if life is nothing but empty desperation? It is in our own interest too, helping poor people not only to survive, but also to improve their lives and enable them to stand on their own. When people feel they have nothing to live for, they are much more willing to die as martyrs.
It has been very fashionable in recent years to pretend that we in the West are so high and mighty with our impeccable moral, freedom and democracy. And maybe we ARE better than the Chinese or whoever we are morally outraged over this week; but if so, then starting up the usual howling concert is not going to make things better for anybody, neither them nor us. If we want people to listen to criticism, we first have to be their friends in some sense - if we are enemies, they will just stick the finger up at whatever we say - I mean, wouldn't you? Friends can work things out, enemies can only fight.
It really is as simple as that; so if we want to see other nations change and approach our way of living, then we have to change ourselves too. We have to be willing to accept that not everything is the way we want it to be, in the hope that it may be so in the future. We have to accept that maybe we are in the wrong in some areas, and that we have to change a bit too; we have to meet somewhere in the middle.
So, when it comes to China (or Myanmar, Thailand or all the others), is it really right to ban American companies from trading there? Which is what it would mean if they are not allowed to follow the local laws for ideological reasons. Such a ban would be a rather hostile thing - and all we will get for it will be a 'Good Riddance', and then the Chinese companies will grow and take over the whole of the Chinese market for themselves, thus closing that channel of cultural influence. Is this what we should do? I don't think so.
I think we should grumble a bit and let it pass - China is actually becoming more open, and somewhere along the way it is likely that they will develope their own form of democracy. If we look back at our own history we can see that we didn't come into democracy overnight, it was something that emerged as the result of changes in our culture, and perhaps the Chinese people isn't there yet. Iraq should tell us that trying to force the issue is not going to work.
The seed vault is not primarily about preserving species of wheat or whatever it is people have been imagining on /. - it is about saving as many as possible of all the wild plant species we are busy driving to extinction through logging, global warming, mindless, industrial agriculture etc. It is part of a multi layered strategy: preserve habitats, preserve growing specimens in botanical gardens, preserve seeds in seed banks.
A pessimistic, but very realistic view indicates that we will have killed off most rainforests etc within this century; that leaves botanical gardens and the seed banks. When the botanical gardens aren't viable any more, perhaps we have one more chance in the seed banks. If we save enough seeds, perhaps we can re-establish viable ecologies where they have been lost, or in new, better suited places, since the climate changes are likely to change some habitats too much.
What people should realize is that this is not about safeguarding against starvation - it's for after, when a large part of the world's population has died. It is also worth thinking about that this project isn't a panicky rush to build a shelter a-la the cold-war nuclear bunkers. This has been contemplated and implemented by level-headed scientists.
I can see people on /. are already busy cursing lorry drivers in general - a sentiment I fully understand and agree with - but that is not the real problem here. Tele Atlas have not provided a system that is appropriate for its use; and their attitude is less than accomodating. If I sell an instruction manual for something and my instructions cause people to lose money, am I not responsible for that loss? I should think so; and Tele Atlas' instruction is causing loss of life.
One may argue that the lorry drivers should drive competently etc, but they would probably not have been in this place if they had used a proper paper map and had been forced to seek out their route before they left home, so I think the company are at least part responsible and should be made to pay as well as upgrade their data as a priority.
One of the downsides of aloowing people to anonymously address the public is that the author cannot be held accountable. And accountability is a cornerstone of any society. Another cornerstone is trust - members of society have to trust the laws of that society, otherwise the whole system breaks down and we end up with nothing but the right of the strongest. Of course, if you are strong, you may not mind, but most of us are not. And I suspect if you feel the need to hide behind anonymity, then you are not strong.
In a free society, where the law guarantees your freedom of speech, the only consequences you should need to fear is that other people may give you an earful for saying what they don't like; but that is part of the price for have both society and freedom. It's a compromise and thus not perfect.
Perhaps it would be almost bearable, all these restrictions and prying and groping, if it was clear that it actually worked, but all I can see is that it never has and never will - it simply can't. It's like stemming the tide with legislation alone - it's an exercise in futility.
They are trying to apply a bad solution to something that isn't the real problem. First of all, if somebody, especially a desperado who is willing to kill himself in an act of terrorism, wants to get into the US, s/he will - there are uncounted holes in the American border and people have always and will always just walk in. The border control is not going to catch them - or not all of them.
And then, of course, terrorism is only a symptom of the real, underlying problem of a few countries being obscenely rich and most of the rest being poor or desperately poor.
You sound almost as if you are defending the corruptness of the system; or at least saying 'Well, that's just the way it is'.
I don't agree with that - if the system doesn't work, it has to be changed. And it clearly doesn't work, because:
- as this government has demonstrated again and again, they can get away with just about any crime. This one is just one of the small ones - how about the war in Iraq and all the others? Ie: they are not accountable.
- the government's policy is determined, not by the people elected and according to what they stand for, but by big business: the energy industry, the big telecoms, the religious extremists, the military. The interests of the people do not enter the equation at any point. Ie: they do not govern for the people.
- the elections are simply an elaborate fraud. The people are not given sufficient relevant information about the political views of the candidates, for one thing - instead they are fed a mixture of soap opera and reality tv where such momentous subjects dominate as eg. the scandalous story that 'X once smoked dope'. And apart from that, the only real candidates are all in the pockets of those who own the real power: Big Money, so it doesn't matter who the hell you elect.
Is that democracy? Of course not; Americans have not known democracy for generations. In a real democracy the government
- is independent of special interest - they serve the whole of the people.
- accountable under the law
- elected from candidates that stand only on their own merits, not on the buying power of their secret backers
Did you know that in several if not most countries in Europe, each party is only allowed the same amount of tv time as the other parties during an election? That members of governmet are often held MORE responsible than ordinary people rather than less? Think of the British ministers who've had to go for having an affair, something that would hardly have raised an eyebrow, had they not been in government. The Europeans may all be 'bloody commies' for all I know, but they have a better democracy.
Actually, you're wrong - or you are right in saying that it is OK in this case, but not because 'it happens all the time'; the author had placed it in the public domain, and that's why it is OK.
And to be quite frank - I think I am glad I don't have many employees with your attitude. ScuttleMonkey asked a very valid question, and he shows a responsible and thoughtful attitude, which are qualities any employer should value; you, on the other hand, seem all too willing to take what is not yours and jump the fence where it is lowest. How could anybody trust you with a task that is important to a company?
How about for once trying to approach this subject in a more mature way? It is so easy and so common to simply misinterpret something you don't like in way that makes sound like it is obviously crap, so you can just dismiss it, but that doesn't do justice to the subject, the people who have don'e actual, serious research into it, or to yourself and your own intelligence. Listening and understanding is not going to hurt, really.
This research is not saying that this or that individual will necessarily be more violent after having played a video game; but it says that there is a measurable effect on average. The article doesn't detail what research method was used, but it could be something like comparing a group of people, who play violent games with a group who don't. And of course, one might question whether the interpretation of the results is correct; but jeering stupidly is not the way, I think.
I think the reasoning behind is quite sensible: You can train your responses to situations in a simulator - this is used in many places, not least the military. So in a violent game you learn to respond with violence to certain situations; also, when you do something often enough, it becomes routine, and you feel less emotional impact from what you do. Wouldn't it be reasonable to suspect that playing violent video games might harden people against the consequences of violences to others? To most this will not be an issue, but there is a frighteningly large proportion of the normal population whose grasp on reality is not very strong - they are not very far away from a mild form of actual psychosis, one might say, and those people will be less able to distinguish between what happens in a game and what happens in reality. I don't know actual numbers, but there are more than most think. On that backkground, isn't it reasonable to research the subject of violence in the media question whether we, as a society, would not be better off there was less of it?
- is going to be called 'Gulag', I suppose.
Russia's New Cosmodome
Wow, that sounds like some huge condom. They are not lacking in self-confidence, are they?
They have certainly failed miserably with this project; but I think it is worth noting that they are not the only ones. We just don't hear about the way private companies fail because their management is a bunch of narrowminded wankers, not until they go bankrupt at least.
The BBC isn't a private company, but a public service. Their income comes mainly from the license fee - this is a good thing, really, because it enables them to broadcast programs that are not necessarily commercially viable, like educational programmes. The real problem with BBC is not that they have mismanaged a SW project in a world where almost big SW project is ever handled optimally; the real problem is that they have for far too many years tried to compete with the commercial channels, so that now mainly send the same crappy soaps and reality shows as everybody else. They are, as a public service channel, in a unique position that would have allowed them to experiment and be innovative, but the leadership lacked vision and courage - and that is the real shame.
Were the Starwars movies really that bad? I think they were bad in so many respects, from the very beginning: the dubious understanding of science, the strange coincidence that all these aliens in a galaxy far, far away looked exactly like humans with the occasional funny hairdress, the utterly uncool wookies, the jedis with their supposedly deep wisdom who still educated their apprentice jedis like a caricature of the archetypical 'Zen master/student' relationship; isn't it likely that if a hugely gifted boy like Anakin had been treated with care and understanding, he might have had the strength to resist the rather naff temptations of Mr. Palpatine, Esq.? In this context things like midichlorians and Ewoks are simply natural and quite cute.
I think it is simply being seen from the wrong perspective - Starwars was never more than an entertaining, exciting story, and as such brilliant. I remember when I saw them in the beginning I felt hugely disappointed, but now I really enjoy them for what they are. They are just not 'deep' or insightful, that's all.
There is something about the way the DRM clique go about things that makes me think it isn't so much a question about money as one about not being able to tolerate that there are people in the world that listen to music and enjoy themselves. I mean, if it was only about money they would have dropped DRM and all the other draconian efforts that will, in the long run only alienate their customers.
If a life form originated here on Earth, it isn't alien in any sense of the word - if life started up several times the different forms are all native, but may be called 'polyphyletic'.
And, on the other hand, how long does one have to stick around to no longer be alien? Are those currently called 'Americans' still aliens? If life came to Earth from outer space 4 billon years ago, shouldn't it qualify as 'native' by now, after having been shaped by the local environment for so long?