I am the UNIX systems administrator in my company - we have a wide range of UNIXes, midframes and mainframes that we develop on, and we of course have problems from time to time. My first source for support is always what is available on the internet, next level is a relevant community.
Only in very special situations will I use the technical support that we pay for, for several reasons; the most important being that a consultant simply isn't in as good a position to solve the problem as I am, having worked with and thought about it for so much longer. In the recent 4 years I have had external support on site 3 or 4 times: once because one RS/6000 had been damaged in a thunderstorm, another time because we needed to upgrade the some firmware on an HP9000 - the latter isn't difficult, but I thought it would be better to let an external company handle it, the reason being that if I screwed up, my company would face the bill, but if an external consultant screws up, it not my company. Sometimes you have to be devious.
'Rather, a computer program is expected to be able to use this information to learn the meaning behind the sting of characters. '
Exactly - and while it seems like a worthwhile mental exercise, I would like to point out that this kind of construction has an immense potential for controlling information and shaping people's opinions. Just imagine advertisers getting their foot in somewhere in this; suddenly the machine's 'understanding' is coloured by commercial or political interests.
No, give me the raw information any time, and I'll do the understanding myself, if you don't mind.
'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'
No doubt inspired by his evil master's stunt when he said 'Mission accomplished', and about as true.
I have rarely seen a more unsavoury character than John Ashcroft - the kind of person that combines powerlust and unlimited ambition with narrowminded intolerance and smallishness. He will not be missed.
But the big - and frightening - question is: who have they been able to find that is worse? I can't imagine the Bush administration replacing this icon of hate-driven hypocrisy with a better (as in more open-minded) person.
Unfortunately this doesn't address what I'm complaining about; I think it is for the vi-style search (where you initiate search with '/')
As for the libnull problem: I could of course edit it out of the build, I suppose; but I don't think it should be there at all. Or at least it should be under an option.
About the comments I have seen along the lines of 'don't you know how to highlight and copy' - of course I do, don't be stupid. That's not the point here. I find it unpleasant to use the mouse - so would anybody who has to do it for hours on end, just because somebody doesn't want to give people the freedom to choose. If it is felt that an option in the options dialog is too much for the average user, it could at least be in the user.js
Unfortunately Firefox 1 also comes with a number of 'improvements' that are rather dubious. The two that I personally dislike are:
1. The 'default plugin' which used to be a dynamic library called something like 'libnullplugin.so' is now statically linked in, which means that you can't just remove it. What it does is nag the you every bloody time you go to a page that wants to display something that requires a plugin; these plugins are used intensively in adverts, which is why I don't have them.
2. There has always been a way to search in the displayed page - go to 'Edit -> Find in This Page' in the menu, or press CtlF. In earlier versions you had to press the 'Find Next' button in the search dialog in order to start the search. In Firefox 1.0 the search happens as you type. Some people like it, apparently, but to me it is incredibly disruptive. There are situations where you definitely don't want this functionality; one such is if you, like me, feel it hard to concentrate on the dialog box when the background moves. Another, rather lengthy example is the following:
Assume that you work with a big text that contains a large number of complicated words, like eg (WARNING: its huge):
http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/mss/volume25/ Or chidaceae_coauthoring.htm
This is a botanical text about orchids in China, and it is full of exotic names. Let's say that you have found 'Hemipilia kwangsiensis', and you want to find other occurrences of 'kwangsiensis'. If you are like me, you press CtlF, type the word (none of this mouse stuff for me if I can avoid it) and press [Return]. Except that the wods you are looking for disappears as soon as you start typing, and now you have the problem of finding the original place in a text of about 900 pages printed. And all that just to be cool. It would definitely have been nice with an option that could turn it off.
Apart from that it is a good browser; definitely better than IE. I can recommend v.0.9
"Eat shit; 50 million flies can't be wrong." - if you get my drift.
Plus, I would say that the kind of people who look at eg. 'reality' tv are the ones that ought to get out there in the big room with the blue ceiling instead of wasting their time and other resources on filter feeding through the silly natterings and intrigues of celebrities whose only distinguishing quality seems to be that they are willing to jerk off on tv.
I mean why would anyone want to own a HDTV not to mention an card to stick into a PC? TV is bad enough at the current low resolution, I certainly don't want to make it worse by seeing it any clearlier.
Seriously, though - I feel I have seen far more than enough crappy TV in my life. Sometimes I watch the news - BBC - and sometimes, say once a month, there is a program that is actually worth your time, that gives you factual information without a load of stupid fade in/out, 'cool' soundtrack and other rubbish. The rest of the time it's quizzes, 'reality' tv, sport and worst of all: garden programs, house makeovers and celebrity chefs, none of whom have anything in the direction of taste or even common sense.
When (if) the day comes when you have to have digital and HDTV, I'll simply go without. And perhaps go to the cinema once every other year, when a film is released that is worth my time.
Somehow I find it hard not to notice that 'Pixars' sounds uncannily like 'Pig's arse' - I don't really feel comfortable just swallowing something that comes out of, er,...
Anyway, let's talk about something else, say, sheep breeding in Mongolia, shall we?
Aren't we simplifying things just a leetle bit here? Yes, monoculture is not good, because it creates the basis for a scenario of total failure, and C in the hands of the more witless sort of programmer can certainly be lethal (although, ANY language in the hands of a stupid programmer is a bad idea. Just look at the host of Visual Basic crap).
However, as far as I can see, by far the largest problem on the internet is the way Microsoft has built powerful programming capabilities into a number of their products, and the way things just happen automatically by default. Perhaps it is getting better, but only slowly. To illustrate: I work in an office where most users have Windows on their desktops, but I use Linux. We have had on average something like 3 or 4 major alerts about email worms per month in the last year, and it has affected everybody else except me. Is this because Windows is a monoculture and programmed in C? Or is it because Microsoft stupidly decided to build in functionality that supports these worms?
The truth is that no matter how many buffer overflows there may be in Linux, BSD etc, we are not likely to ever have problems with email worms - unless some idiot puts the necessary functionality in place.
The thing is - when USA put people on the Moon in the 60s it was something they only just managed, and it nearly went wrong too. Barely managing to put somebody on Mars is simply not good enough if we are to establish ourselves in space.
Lets face reality: we are reasonably good at sending up satelites that skip along atop our athmosphere, but that's about it. How far away is the ISS? A few hundred kilometers? We could drive there in a few hours if there was a road;-)
What we need is a situation where going to the Moon and staying there indefinitely is a simple routine; then we can talk about the Space Age.
?!? You have a startling outlook on things, by the look of it. So, what you;re saying is, 'what the hell, people die, but that's OK, because it's New Technology'? I don't agree, to put it mildly, and I think your attitude is stupid.
Apart from that: It's not true that 'any new technology is dangerous'; some new things may be dangerous. And people don't die when making them better, they die when things aren't good enough. In most cases that kind of accidents can be avoided if those in charge can be bothered to do their job properly and conscientiously.
And to say that we can't let people die in large numbers in the space progra 'for political reasons' says more about you as a person than it does about those in charge of space programs, fortunately. I think you need to take a close look at sorting out your priorities if you think that human life - or any life - is that cheap.
Re:Free Speech in Denmark??
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
And many of us in the US are tired of all the constant complaining. On average, the US is a very good place to live. On average, the policies and actions of the US are a very positive force in for good in the world.
On average? I think, if you look into it seriously, that you will find that people everywhere prefer their own country, on average. People in China love their country, on average, the bushmen in Kalahari love their desert, on average, etc etc. And the Americans are fairly good people, on average - so what? Is 'The American Way On Average' better than anything else in the world? So much better that you have to shove it down people's throats whether they like it or not?
Apart from that, what we have seen from America so far, in particular in recent years, is an aggressive and imperialistic power that has no regard for the lives, let alone the rights, of others.I'm sure I don't have to repeat the many facts about torture, lies in the UN etc etc. This is what is so revolting to most non-Americans: the combination of America's mindless egotism, the blind ignorance of the common Americans and the constant sanctimonious wanking to the sound of religious drivel.
If you guys are tired of hearing criticism you should change your ways. You say you live in a democracy - then choose better leaders.
As if what the public wants had anything to do with it. If this technology is useful, the military will grab it for themselves first and foremost - just look at nuclear submarines - and that is why it won't get anywhere near benefitting scientific or public interests.
Many Americans live under the misconception that they live in a democracy. The truth is that the American form of government is more similar to the Roman republic: 'democracy' where the only ones with a vote were the classes at the very top, and where the only people that could be elected were from those classes.
Oh yes, there's the 'American Dream (TM)': that anybody can work his way up from the bottom to the top, but how often does that happen? (Note: I didn't ask whether it is possible to find an example or two, but how many, in % of the American population). This form of government has always decayed into feudalism over time.
This talk about the 'Holy Grail' always makes me think of Monthy Python. Not just the fun side of it - the point of the film was that it is utterly futile to go chasing after 'The One Secret', and this article illustrates the same fact in biology.
What this boils down to, really, is that life is not just one thing that seperates living organisms from dead matter, but rather the totality of processes and objects that work together to form the biosphere.
I know, this sounds rather like it came from some book by Rudolph Steiner or the like, but I hope it is a little bit better founded. One of the consequences of the above rather vague definition is that there is no clear difference between 'life' and 'non-life'; instead life is a phenomenon that permeates all of the physical world, and perhaps it would make sense to consider the universe as a whole to be 'living'. Organisms are just something that happens at a certain level of complexity.
When you start thinking this way a lot of interesting possibilities present themselves, like eg. could living organisms have developed during the first, very hot phase of our universe's existence - ie. organisms based on 'quark-chemistry'? Etc etc. Processes very similar to evolution can happen in any system, where objects can combine to form more complex objects.
"Is there a tool that we could push out to all the PCs to basically do what anti-virus programs do and block these programs from running and clean them from the computer?"
There's something even better, which will never get these problems in the first place: Linux;-)
'Just because a society is different, don't necessarily mean that its peoples are oppressed (and need 'liberating'). It's a big planet, there's nothing wrong with a little diversity.'
Wow, what a fat lot you know about China and the CCP. I think what you say is mostly bullshit. Morality is actually important to most Chinese, though I suspect that as an American you are not able to recognise it as such; the way you jeer at the notion suggests that you don't really have much idea about what morality is.
Let me explain, then - morality to most people has little to do with religion, since most people in the world aren't very religious. Instead it is all about such things as honesty, reliability and caring about others. I sometimes get the feeling that this is different in America, since Americans so often seem to assume that morality more or less equals religion, particularly Christianity. In my opinion this is one of the most disturbing aspects of American culture. Look at a person like Bush - apparently his thinking has been something like this:
Get baptised or 'born again' or whatever is the cheap and easy way. Now you're a good person - a 'Christian' full of the Holy Ghost. Since you're now God's Child, he will provide for you and give all good things, eg. money. In fact you now have a right to get rich - this is called 'Faith'. The more you demand to get rich, the more Faith you have. And the more Faith, the better your morality, that goes without saying, right?
As I said, I sometimes get the feeling that all you guys have lost the plot when it comes to the basic things like simple, plain morality. It is actually possible to be a non-Christian and higly moral. You can be a hedonist and highly moral, you can be a Muslem or a Communist and highly moral; whether you can be a Christian and highly moral is another question, which I can't answer, since I'm not one.
However, you're right when you say 'Never underestimate the will of the people in stifling themselves'. Most people are not interested in lofty nonsense about 'freedom', they just want a daily life that works without too many problems; and I think that is quite good. And when it comes to pornography I don't think freedom has much to do with it. Porn, for those who want it, is simply either a way to lure money out of fools, or something to stimulate your fantasy when you masturbate. For those of who don't want it, it's simply a load of crap.
BTW, if you want to impress everybody with your command of the Chinese language, perhaps you ought to learn it first. 'Goodbye' (which is what you seem to try to say) is not 'zai zhen', but 'zaijian', at least in pinyin notation.
I've seen a lot of the other comments, which are all along the lines of general - and stupid - derision, asking 'why, oh why'. Yes, India has many problems with poverty etc, but so has USA, Russia and China; in fact Europe are the ones that have the best record on those issues, so perhaps only Europe should ever send things into space, don't you agree?
No I think all these objections are more to do with the fact that India is not America and most Americans hate the fact that others are able to do these things and rely on themselves rather than the scraps the US allow them. There was the same sort of sentiment when the European equivalent of GPS was launched: 'Why, oh why'.
Well I'll tell you why:
1. It's not American - people in the world often prefer to do things independently of America, often because they don't trust the benevolence of America.
2. In the case of India's space program - China and India are rivals in many areas, they are both on the verge to take the place at the top economically in the world. China has put a man in space and annouced plans to put one on the moon, and India feel they have to demonstrate that they can do it too.
Well, I still have my old PC from almost 20 years ago. Admittedly I've had to change a few thing - the harddisk, the monitor, the keyboard, the motherboard, the CPU, the cabinet and a few other things, but apart from that it is still the same old PC...
Sorry, I couldn't be bothered to read the article, so I'll just spew out some prejudiced nonsense.
So, 'every word appears on a screen...' - I assume this means speech recognition software. I remember last I tried that on; it was very good. When I spoke into the microphone it would interpret my words and write them into a document. The problem was, I was sitting in a wicker work chair, and each time I moved a little, it generated a surprisng amount of text, you would be surprised to learn what that chair had on its mind. And it didn't help much either that my wife was speaking loudly with her friend in the next room.
China and the Chinese govenment's attempts at controlling the access to news on the internet are always a very sensitive issue, at least to Americans. So let's try to look at it from another angle. Let's assume that the American government wanted to block people's access to - what would be a likely subject? Websites that are deemed to advocate terrorism?
I'm sure many in the US would be against this on the basis of free speech, but don't you think there might be a large proportion of the population that would support this as part of the imaginary 'War on Terror'? And aren't there many good, or at least good sounding, arguments for this? And if such a measure was taken by the US government, how long would take before those who wanted to circumvent the restrictions, found a way?
So, let's return to China: isn't it possible that a large part of the Chinese actually think of this as good? I'm not saying they do, but isn't it possible? After all, we in the West simply don't have a basis for knowing. And isn't possible that the Chinese feel they have good reasons for doing this?
Finally - what do they actually miss out on? I have travelled to China many times now, lived there, I even own a flat there, and I have of course used the internet many times from China. I have never felt that there were things I wanted to see, but wasn't allowed to.
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right!
I am the UNIX systems administrator in my company - we have a wide range of UNIXes, midframes and mainframes that we develop on, and we of course have problems from time to time. My first source for support is always what is available on the internet, next level is a relevant community.
Only in very special situations will I use the technical support that we pay for, for several reasons; the most important being that a consultant simply isn't in as good a position to solve the problem as I am, having worked with and thought about it for so much longer. In the recent 4 years I have had external support on site 3 or 4 times: once because one RS/6000 had been damaged in a thunderstorm, another time because we needed to upgrade the some firmware on an HP9000 - the latter isn't difficult, but I thought it would be better to let an external company handle it, the reason being that if I screwed up, my company would face the bill, but if an external consultant screws up, it not my company. Sometimes you have to be devious.
Wow, this is radical stuff. Almost as good as Skype, but without the hassle of simply clicking and talking.... ;-)
Isn't it about time we introduce a new technical term:
MS-DoS: The kind of security problems that arise from using Microsoft's products.
'Rather, a computer program is expected to be able to use this information to learn the meaning behind the sting of characters. '
Exactly - and while it seems like a worthwhile mental exercise, I would like to point out that this kind of construction has an immense potential for controlling information and shaping people's opinions. Just imagine advertisers getting their foot in somewhere in this; suddenly the machine's 'understanding' is coloured by commercial or political interests.
No, give me the raw information any time, and I'll do the understanding myself, if you don't mind.
'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'
No doubt inspired by his evil master's stunt when he said 'Mission accomplished', and about as true.
I have rarely seen a more unsavoury character than John Ashcroft - the kind of person that combines powerlust and unlimited ambition with narrowminded intolerance and smallishness. He will not be missed.
But the big - and frightening - question is: who have they been able to find that is worse? I can't imagine the Bush administration replacing this icon of hate-driven hypocrisy with a better (as in more open-minded) person.
Tools->Options->Advanced->Accessabulity
Unfortunately this doesn't address what I'm complaining about; I think it is for the vi-style search (where you initiate search with '/')
As for the libnull problem: I could of course edit it out of the build, I suppose; but I don't think it should be there at all. Or at least it should be under an option.
About the comments I have seen along the lines of 'don't you know how to highlight and copy' - of course I do, don't be stupid. That's not the point here. I find it unpleasant to use the mouse - so would anybody who has to do it for hours on end, just because somebody doesn't want to give people the freedom to choose. If it is felt that an option in the options dialog is too much for the average user, it could at least be in the user.js
Unfortunately Firefox 1 also comes with a number of 'improvements' that are rather dubious. The two that I personally dislike are:
/ Or chidaceae_coauthoring.htm
1. The 'default plugin' which used to be a dynamic library called something like 'libnullplugin.so' is now statically linked in, which means that you can't just remove it. What it does is nag the you every bloody time you go to a page that wants to display something that requires a plugin; these plugins are used intensively in adverts, which is why I don't have them.
2. There has always been a way to search in the displayed page - go to 'Edit -> Find in This Page' in the menu, or press CtlF. In earlier versions you had to press the 'Find Next' button in the search dialog in order to start the search. In Firefox 1.0 the search happens as you type. Some people like it, apparently, but to me it is incredibly disruptive. There are situations where you definitely don't want this functionality; one such is if you, like me, feel it hard to concentrate on the dialog box when the background moves. Another, rather lengthy example is the following:
Assume that you work with a big text that contains a large number of complicated words, like eg (WARNING: its huge):
http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/mss/volume25
This is a botanical text about orchids in China, and it is full of exotic names. Let's say that you have found 'Hemipilia kwangsiensis', and you want to find other occurrences of 'kwangsiensis'. If you are like me, you press CtlF, type the word (none of this mouse stuff for me if I can avoid it) and press [Return]. Except that the wods you are looking for disappears as soon as you start typing, and now you have the problem of finding the original place in a text of about 900 pages printed. And all that just to be cool. It would definitely have been nice with an option that could turn it off.
Apart from that it is a good browser; definitely better than IE. I can recommend v.0.9
"Eat shit; 50 million flies can't be wrong." - if you get my drift.
Plus, I would say that the kind of people who look at eg. 'reality' tv are the ones that ought to get out there in the big room with the blue ceiling instead of wasting their time and other resources on filter feeding through the silly natterings and intrigues of celebrities whose only distinguishing quality seems to be that they are willing to jerk off on tv.
I mean why would anyone want to own a HDTV not to mention an card to stick into a PC? TV is bad enough at the current low resolution, I certainly don't want to make it worse by seeing it any clearlier.
Seriously, though - I feel I have seen far more than enough crappy TV in my life. Sometimes I watch the news - BBC - and sometimes, say once a month, there is a program that is actually worth your time, that gives you factual information without a load of stupid fade in/out, 'cool' soundtrack and other rubbish. The rest of the time it's quizzes, 'reality' tv, sport and worst of all: garden programs, house makeovers and celebrity chefs, none of whom have anything in the direction of taste or even common sense.
When (if) the day comes when you have to have digital and HDTV, I'll simply go without. And perhaps go to the cinema once every other year, when a film is released that is worth my time.
Somehow I find it hard not to notice that 'Pixars' sounds uncannily like 'Pig's arse' - I don't really feel comfortable just swallowing something that comes out of, er, ...
Anyway, let's talk about something else, say, sheep breeding in Mongolia, shall we?
Aren't we simplifying things just a leetle bit here? Yes, monoculture is not good, because it creates the basis for a scenario of total failure, and C in the hands of the more witless sort of programmer can certainly be lethal (although, ANY language in the hands of a stupid programmer is a bad idea. Just look at the host of Visual Basic crap).
However, as far as I can see, by far the largest problem on the internet is the way Microsoft has built powerful programming capabilities into a number of their products, and the way things just happen automatically by default. Perhaps it is getting better, but only slowly. To illustrate: I work in an office where most users have Windows on their desktops, but I use Linux. We have had on average something like 3 or 4 major alerts about email worms per month in the last year, and it has affected everybody else except me. Is this because Windows is a monoculture and programmed in C? Or is it because Microsoft stupidly decided to build in functionality that supports these worms?
The truth is that no matter how many buffer overflows there may be in Linux, BSD etc, we are not likely to ever have problems with email worms - unless some idiot puts the necessary functionality in place.
I made me vomit.
The thing is - when USA put people on the Moon in the 60s it was something they only just managed, and it nearly went wrong too. Barely managing to put somebody on Mars is simply not good enough if we are to establish ourselves in space.
;-)
Lets face reality: we are reasonably good at sending up satelites that skip along atop our athmosphere, but that's about it. How far away is the ISS? A few hundred kilometers? We could drive there in a few hours if there was a road
What we need is a situation where going to the Moon and staying there indefinitely is a simple routine; then we can talk about the Space Age.
?!? You have a startling outlook on things, by the look of it. So, what you;re saying is, 'what the hell, people die, but that's OK, because it's New Technology'? I don't agree, to put it mildly, and I think your attitude is stupid.
Apart from that: It's not true that 'any new technology is dangerous'; some new things may be dangerous. And people don't die when making them better, they die when things aren't good enough. In most cases that kind of accidents can be avoided if those in charge can be bothered to do their job properly and conscientiously.
And to say that we can't let people die in large numbers in the space progra 'for political reasons' says more about you as a person than it does about those in charge of space programs, fortunately. I think you need to take a close look at sorting out your priorities if you think that human life - or any life - is that cheap.
And many of us in the US are tired of all the constant complaining. On average, the US is a very good place to live. On average, the policies and actions of the US are a very positive force in for good in the world.
On average? I think, if you look into it seriously, that you will find that people everywhere prefer their own country, on average. People in China love their country, on average, the bushmen in Kalahari love their desert, on average, etc etc. And the Americans are fairly good people, on average - so what? Is 'The American Way On Average' better than anything else in the world? So much better that you have to shove it down people's throats whether they like it or not?
Apart from that, what we have seen from America so far, in particular in recent years, is an aggressive and imperialistic power that has no regard for the lives, let alone the rights, of others.I'm sure I don't have to repeat the many facts about torture, lies in the UN etc etc. This is what is so revolting to most non-Americans: the combination of America's mindless egotism, the blind ignorance of the common Americans and the constant sanctimonious wanking to the sound of religious drivel.
If you guys are tired of hearing criticism you should change your ways. You say you live in a democracy - then choose better leaders.
As if what the public wants had anything to do with it. If this technology is useful, the military will grab it for themselves first and foremost - just look at nuclear submarines - and that is why it won't get anywhere near benefitting scientific or public interests.
Many Americans live under the misconception that they live in a democracy. The truth is that the American form of government is more similar to the Roman republic: 'democracy' where the only ones with a vote were the classes at the very top, and where the only people that could be elected were from those classes.
Oh yes, there's the 'American Dream (TM)': that anybody can work his way up from the bottom to the top, but how often does that happen? (Note: I didn't ask whether it is possible to find an example or two, but how many, in % of the American population). This form of government has always decayed into feudalism over time.
This talk about the 'Holy Grail' always makes me think of Monthy Python. Not just the fun side of it - the point of the film was that it is utterly futile to go chasing after 'The One Secret', and this article illustrates the same fact in biology.
What this boils down to, really, is that life is not just one thing that seperates living organisms from dead matter, but rather the totality of processes and objects that work together to form the biosphere.
I know, this sounds rather like it came from some book by Rudolph Steiner or the like, but I hope it is a little bit better founded. One of the consequences of the above rather vague definition is that there is no clear difference between 'life' and 'non-life'; instead life is a phenomenon that permeates all of the physical world, and perhaps it would make sense to consider the universe as a whole to be 'living'. Organisms are just something that happens at a certain level of complexity.
When you start thinking this way a lot of interesting possibilities present themselves, like eg. could living organisms have developed during the first, very hot phase of our universe's existence - ie. organisms based on 'quark-chemistry'? Etc etc. Processes very similar to evolution can happen in any system, where objects can combine to form more complex objects.
"Is there a tool that we could push out to all the PCs to basically do what anti-virus programs do and block these programs from running and clean them from the computer?"
;-)
There's something even better, which will never get these problems in the first place: Linux
'Just because a society is different, don't necessarily mean that its peoples are oppressed (and need 'liberating'). It's a big planet, there's nothing wrong with a little diversity.'
Well said, very well said!
Wow, what a fat lot you know about China and the CCP. I think what you say is mostly bullshit. Morality is actually important to most Chinese, though I suspect that as an American you are not able to recognise it as such; the way you jeer at the notion suggests that you don't really have much idea about what morality is.
Let me explain, then - morality to most people has little to do with religion, since most people in the world aren't very religious. Instead it is all about such things as honesty, reliability and caring about others. I sometimes get the feeling that this is different in America, since Americans so often seem to assume that morality more or less equals religion, particularly Christianity. In my opinion this is one of the most disturbing aspects of American culture. Look at a person like Bush - apparently his thinking has been something like this:
Get baptised or 'born again' or whatever is the cheap and easy way. Now you're a good person - a 'Christian' full of the Holy Ghost. Since you're now God's Child, he will provide for you and give all good things, eg. money. In fact you now have a right to get rich - this is called 'Faith'. The more you demand to get rich, the more Faith you have. And the more Faith, the better your morality, that goes without saying, right?
As I said, I sometimes get the feeling that all you guys have lost the plot when it comes to the basic things like simple, plain morality. It is actually possible to be a non-Christian and higly moral. You can be a hedonist and highly moral, you can be a Muslem or a Communist and highly moral; whether you can be a Christian and highly moral is another question, which I can't answer, since I'm not one.
However, you're right when you say 'Never underestimate the will of the people in stifling themselves'. Most people are not interested in lofty nonsense about 'freedom', they just want a daily life that works without too many problems; and I think that is quite good. And when it comes to pornography I don't think freedom has much to do with it. Porn, for those who want it, is simply either a way to lure money out of fools, or something to stimulate your fantasy when you masturbate. For those of who don't want it, it's simply a load of crap.
BTW, if you want to impress everybody with your command of the Chinese language, perhaps you ought to learn it first. 'Goodbye' (which is what you seem to try to say) is not 'zai zhen', but 'zaijian', at least in pinyin notation.
Well done, India, that's what I say.
I've seen a lot of the other comments, which are all along the lines of general - and stupid - derision, asking 'why, oh why'. Yes, India has many problems with poverty etc, but so has USA, Russia and China; in fact Europe are the ones that have the best record on those issues, so perhaps only Europe should ever send things into space, don't you agree?
No I think all these objections are more to do with the fact that India is not America and most Americans hate the fact that others are able to do these things and rely on themselves rather than the scraps the US allow them. There was the same sort of sentiment when the European equivalent of GPS was launched: 'Why, oh why'.
Well I'll tell you why:
1. It's not American - people in the world often prefer to do things independently of America, often because they don't trust the benevolence of America.
2. In the case of India's space program - China and India are rivals in many areas, they are both on the verge to take the place at the top economically in the world. China has put a man in space and annouced plans to put one on the moon, and India feel they have to demonstrate that they can do it too.
Well, I still have my old PC from almost 20 years ago. Admittedly I've had to change a few thing - the harddisk, the monitor, the keyboard, the motherboard, the CPU, the cabinet and a few other things, but apart from that it is still the same old PC...
Sorry, I couldn't be bothered to read the article, so I'll just spew out some prejudiced nonsense.
So, 'every word appears on a screen...' - I assume this means speech recognition software. I remember last I tried that on; it was very good. When I spoke into the microphone it would interpret my words and write them into a document. The problem was, I was sitting in a wicker work chair, and each time I moved a little, it generated a surprisng amount of text, you would be surprised to learn what that chair had on its mind. And it didn't help much either that my wife was speaking loudly with her friend in the next room.
China and the Chinese govenment's attempts at controlling the access to news on the internet are always a very sensitive issue, at least to Americans. So let's try to look at it from another angle. Let's assume that the American government wanted to block people's access to - what would be a likely subject? Websites that are deemed to advocate terrorism?
I'm sure many in the US would be against this on the basis of free speech, but don't you think there might be a large proportion of the population that would support this as part of the imaginary 'War on Terror'? And aren't there many good, or at least good sounding, arguments for this? And if such a measure was taken by the US government, how long would take before those who wanted to circumvent the restrictions, found a way?
So, let's return to China: isn't it possible that a large part of the Chinese actually think of this as good? I'm not saying they do, but isn't it possible? After all, we in the West simply don't have a basis for knowing. And isn't possible that the Chinese feel they have good reasons for doing this?
Finally - what do they actually miss out on? I have travelled to China many times now, lived there, I even own a flat there, and I have of course used the internet many times from China. I have never felt that there were things I wanted to see, but wasn't allowed to.
So what do we do if quantum computers can decrypt anything in almost real-time?
Hmm.., how about thinking about NOT having anything to hide?