I realize that this is not the angle the OP was after, but as far as I can see, the most reliable way to ensure that your programs are legitimate is to use open source software. It is not bulletproof, since there are potential problems related to patents, but I think if the owners of the alleged patents were serious, they would have come out of the woodwork by now. And we shouldn't forget that most SW patents seem to be of a very dubious nature.
While Arthur C. Clarke's geosync satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become commonplace
Arthur Clarke was a clever guy, and geostationary satelites are kind of obvious, really. And one of the main reasons why James Bond tech is now common is that their occurance in the Bond movies was part of a carefully planned marketing strategy.
... still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us -- until now. At $86,000, the Martin Aircraft jetpack costs about as much as a high-end car, achieves a 30-minute flight time, and is fueled by regular gasoline. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence."
I don't think this one is going to get off the ground. Personal flight is the kind of thing you may like to dream about, but I suspect most wouldn't enjoy actually doing it - otherwise the sky would be full of hang-gliders, day and night. On top of that, $86k for 30 minutes of lumbering along uncomfortably under some stinking and noisy contraption hardly seems attractive, unless you want to show off that you are rich enough to not care that you look a right twit. And of course, there is the question of CO2 and responsibility; very soon no one will admire somebody who feels that he can piss the environment up and down - which is just one of the reasons that the Hummer is not being produced any more.
Depends on the BASIC. I use RealBasic at work as an alternative to LabView. It's object oriented, multithreaded and completely "Visual".
Not really; BASIC, as Dijkstra talks about, is not the modern development tool that is barely BASIC any longer. As a programming language regarded, modern 'BASIC' is not really much different from C++ or what can loosely be called "Object Pascal" - it only resembles BASIC because it has kept many of the same keywords.
No, BASIC was and still is, as far as I am concerned, the line-by-line interpreted language that was meant to be a simplified FORTRAN, and as most of the languages from that time, it has a number of features that codify some of the things you can do in assembler (but really shouldn't) - I still shudder at the thought of PERFORM SECT1 THROUGH SECT5 VARYING... - a sort of combination of a FOR loop and a GOSUB the allows overlapping subroutines with no explicit returns.
BASIC allows practices that bad because they can make programs unmaintainable; and the limitations in the language mean that you are more or less forced to code that way. This is of course not because those that designed the language were idiots - it was never meant to be used for serious programming: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - the name says it all; this was only an introduction to things like FORTRAN (for numerical computing) or COBOL (for i/o manipulation).
Am I the only person on the Earth who just writes off hysterical, panty-wetting stuff like this?
Probably not, but it seems to me that you are the one hysterically wetting your pants. A person with a sense of humour would see that this kind of radical statement was meant as a provocative input into a sometimes heated discussion. If one were to interpret your words in a positive spirit, one could say the same; that you are probably just emphasizing a viewpoint by exaggerating.
Do we all have the right to live? Well, of course, and in my opinion it shouldn't be a question of money, really. Most hospital treatments are obscenenly expensive because medical companies are maximizing their profit, not because it really is that expensive to develop the drugs or treatments concerned.
But sometimes we see that this "right to life" becomes a duty to keep living, even when you don't want to; to me, that is the real question.
blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love
A sites that forces me to watch adverts is by definition not one I want to use, let alone "one I love". To me the internet is a tool for finding information, nothing more. It is often very convenient, but I will not tolerate advertising, no more than I want to look at stupid adverts in my paper books. Does that make me strange? Well, I am strange, then.
It is as always a matter of considering all the options available - something that neither politicians not slashdotters seem overly familiar with. And I am not saying that I would like to have a register or registers of offenders of this or that kind; in fact I am not stating any preference.
It is not difficult to see why keeping a register is attractive or imagine who might be most against it. The question is how much of this "for or against" is actually anything but than smoke and mirrors?
On the one hand, would having a register really make our life better and more secure? It seems doubtful, seeing how all these security measures always turn out to be full of holes that the criminals soon find - so it ends up being yet another chain around the legs of ordinary citizens, while doing nothing to protect; pretty much like a talisman or a superstition.
On the other hand, when people are against being registered and supervised, how much difference does it make? If you carry a mobile, then you are already being followed in rather minute detail; if you use a credit or debit card, then your buying habits are already registered, if you have health insurance, then... well, you get the picture. You all seem to accept this as a natural part of life; so what the hell is the whining about? Yeah, a DNA register could be abused, certainly, but it could also be hugely beneficial.
The point I am trying to make here is - start looking at the real facts, not the scaring imagery that some try to paint, or the ever more hollow repetitions of lofty ideals about freedom. You've got that pint of jelly in your skull; start using it for something.
I made my own, more or less home-brewed, networked, serial, multi-console, hmm, can I put any more adjectives on that? Anyway, what I did was very simply, sort of: you take a big pile of USB-to-Serial devices, a suitable number of USB hubs and connect them to your (Linux-) system. The you start up a minicom on each of them inside screen, running in detached mode; you can now connect to the Linux system with ssh or telnet and attach to any of the screen sessions. The Power of Linux, Mwahahahaha!!
I can think of another explanation for why "most scientists in China use Google": if you type some words into the search bar, most browsers will go and search for those words on some search engine - which just happened to default to Google, at least until fairly recently. And if you don't mind, you are not going to change. Another things is - just because they asked a number of scientists which search engine they tend to use, it doesn't mean that they use that one for finding information critical to their research.
It would be a sad state of affairs if scientists were truly hampered in their research by not having access to Google, considering the general quality of the results returned by most search engines. Fortunately, if you are a scientist, the things you work with are more readily available from other, more reliable sources.
Ah, so they were allowed to transmit live during the final, critical phases of the incident? I ask because this is the first time I hear about it; it certainly wasn't reported widely in Europe.
You know, the thing that really makes me distrust your way of telling things is the way you distort things; you are of course not alone in doing this, which only makes it all the more sad. I grew up with that kind of shit, and it still makes me puke - the idiotic, shameless lies over Vietnam, the moronic scare stories about how nearly fatal it was to even think about trying cannabis, the equally mindless admirers of the Soviet Union and so on, and so on.
I know perfectly well what went on in the world, perhaps better than most. But the plain reality is that things are never either black or white, and it is really more about what shade of smutty grey you prefer. So you like to call the Tiananmen incident a massacre; I don't - to my mind a massacre is when you corner a number of people and then do your best to kill them all, indiscriminately. There is no doubt that what happened then was bad and a very grave mistake by the Chinese government, but there is equally no doubt that they were not out to eradicate the whole group of demonstrators. If you want to talk about real massacres, why not choose My Lai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_lai)? Ah, I forget, you are the good guys, of course.
No, if you want to win the respect of people - as opposed to merely getting popular amongst those that agree with you - stick to the facts, objectively and honestly. You have some way to go.
They use slave labour to manufacture our crap (one of my former co-worker's parents were slaves in an iPod factory). They poison our kids with lead, melamine, and cadmium.
How cute. You know, these things come from the kind of businesses that have sprung up because they have adopted a freer market system; IOW, they are the result, not of the allegedly evil, Communist government's actions, but of the enterprising and free capitalists - the so-called good guys, according to the standard, American fairy tale.
But I digress - you are right that this is a disgrace; fortunately the Chinese government are doing what they can to dole out severe punishments. They tend to execute those responsible, and not a moment too soon, IMHO.
That is a quite startling statement if you think about it - it is certainly surpirsing that the Chinese government were not aware that CNN had a live tv transmission going on, that kind of equipment sort of stands out in the landscape. I would be a bit quiet about that, seeing how evil they are...
Seriously; if you want to spread misinformation, you should try to avoid this kind of glaringly obvious lies.
Who can you believe? It is a good question; I'm not sure I can answer it.
I am not surprised that people get confused by the news; most people are only watching from the sidelines and we are perhaps getting to much information nowadays. It's like politics (and sausage-making, if one is to believe Bismarck) - you may enjoy the end result, but it is better not to watch how it is made.
Many people expect that science sort of progresses in a noble and dignified manner, but the truth is that scientific discovery often is the end result of a protracted, global fight over words. It has to be that way - these are people with huge talents and quite often egos to match.
What saves the day is the scientific process itself: You make your theories freely accessible to a forum of your peers, and they try their damndest to take them apart. The result is that once your theory has survived that procedure, it will take someone with a huge amount of insight and a very sharp mind indeed to kill it.
And that is why you should pay more attention to the claims of climate scientists than to the claims made by the skeptics. Whichever arguments the disbelievers come up with, you can be reasonably sure that they have already been tried out many times by the scientists themselves.
So, the IPCC got something wrong? It doesn't matter, really - it is not as if what they say is the only argument in favour of climate change caused by humans. The only reason we hear a lot about this now is that there are powerful, economic interests that don't want us to make the necessary changes, and who don't care about those who are going to be hit worst. We have seen this over and over: the tobacco companies that paid for "research" that found no connection between smoking and cancer; the religious fringe that pays for research into discrediting evolution - and so on.
If you want to find a conspiracy to do with climate change research, look no longer than to the very, very big and powerful energy production sector, who stand to lose money if we change the way we produce energy.
Either way, I didn't say it makes sense to ignore the majority of climatologists who express concern. It doesn't. But it does make sense to ask critical questions about the methods they're using to make such dramatic predictions, especially when those predictions have policy consequences that extend far outside their own field.
I agree - asking critical questions is not only legitimate, but necessary for science to be science at all; however, there is a big difference between being an honest critic, that simply wants to reach a better, more objective understanding, and the complete lack of honesty and integrity that seems to be driving the majority of socalled climate skeptics.
And it is true that science should only be about science, but since scientists are people, they have every right to take part in the debate, just like everybody else - "Freedom of Speech", you know. And since they have a proven track-record of knowing what they are talking about, their words do rightly come with more weight.
But what kind of idiotic law is that? Do they expect that "subversive elements" will now come out in the open and get registered? Isn't that a bit like asking people on the plane whether they are terrorists?
No, seriously. Trust starts with yourself; if you don't trust yourself, you can't trust others.
The other side is of course whether others are trustworthy; experience will tell you. But in the beginning it is necessary to decide that you will try it out.
So can we trust Chinese computers? I can; I don't know if you can - it depends on your own choices. If you meet other people with suspicion, you will always find your suspicion is confirmed; because you will keep prying until you find something to hang it on, and in the process you will turn people against you, who might otherwise have become your best friends.
Sorry, but I couldn't resist asking. I'm just curious why you're an apologist for their government. Do you work for a large corporation with foreign interests? Are you a poly-sci major at an "interesting" college?
Why do I defend the Chinese government? Well, I tend to side with the ones that are treated unfairly; on slashdot it often means China. On other occasions it has meant America, Iran and even Microsoft.
Believe it or not, but fairness and objectivity are things that matter a lot to me. And trying to see both sides to every problem. How else can you reach the truth?
I don't dislike the Chinese Government because they are Communist, I dislike the Chinese Government because they do not care about their people. They only care about the power they exert over the largest country on Earth. They're paranoid of opposing points of view. They have embraced censorship and propaganda as vital to their continuing governance. They imprison peaceful political dissidents. They've committed mass murder, more than once.
You don't see something wrong with this? You seriously can't imagine how these types of people will abuse a root cert?
Your sweeping statements demonstrate what I mean by bigotry - to take them one by one:
They only care about the power they exert
Do you somehow possess special insight into the inner workings of their minds? Do you even know who "they" are? I don't think so - very few real persons are completely void of positive traits, and the majority of politicians genuinely care about the people. Even American politicians do, although I am given to understand that they are particularly obnoxious. But politics is "the art of the possible", and compromises rarely make everybody happy.
They're paranoid of opposing points of view
Really? It is my impression that they are openminded and willing to listen to contructive criticism; but they are not willing to waste time on fools, and they can't afford to be lenient towards troublemakers. When activists cover behind labels like religion or democracy, do we really know what they stand for? I mean, aren't al Qaeda "religious activists", just to pick an extreme example?
They have embraced censorship and propaganda as vital to their continuing governance
I doubt it - not that I deny they use them, but if those things were all that vital, they would have done a much better job of it. As far as I can see, the internet filters are there because most Chinese want them; parents don't want their children to get caught up in what they see as Western filth in a medium they don't understand.
And the propaganda part - are they any worse than other governments? Much of what you call propaganda, the Chinese probably think of as obvious expressions of their cultural mindset; they aren't Americans, you know.
They imprison peaceful political dissidents
I am not entirely sure about that - all I know is that western media have declared them to be "peaceful dissidents"; but I don't know enough about the sources of information to be certain that I can trust them. Trust is something you earn, it can't simply be assumed a priori.
They've committed mass murder, more than once
Only in the same sense that the American government have massacred thousands of native Americans, not to mentions unknown numbers of Vietnamese etc etc. Of course, we both know that you can't blame Obama or even George Bush for those things; but then, why shold we blame the current Chinese government for what happened during the Cultural Revolution?
No, I stand by my words: you speak from a basis of bigotry, even if you aren't aware of it.
The question is, should it be removed for the safety of others?
This is nothing more than simple bigotry. You want them removed, not because they are more likely to abuse their position, but because they are Chinese or "Communists" or whatever. Why should I trust CNNIC less than, eg Microsoft Internet Authority, Deutsche Telekom or Sociedad Cameral de Certificacion Digital, just to mention three at random?
The whole point of root certs is trust
No, the point is convenience. It is ultimately your own responsibility who you choose to trust, which is why you can edit the list of authorities your browser trusts.
That is because what they are (or should be) talking about is not hardness, but mechanical strength. Black diamonds are not harder, but because they consist of microscopic crystals, they don't have the convenient break lines of monocrystals, and therefore are more difficult to process. See:
I don't how people came to believe in this superstition: That anonymity is a basic, human right of fundamental importance to democracy. You have a right to cast your vote secretly, but that is about all, and that is all that is needed.
There are many good reasons why all political activity should be above board. Otherwise, how can we guard our society against things like powerful money interests posing as the views of "concerned citizens"? Or how about this one: A hostile, foreign nation spreading propaganda?
Apart from that, freedom of speech means that you have the right to the protection of the law, when you express your opinions. If you wan't anonymity, it must be because you don't believe that you are protected by that guarantee.
Some would argue that the proper language of any country is the language spoken by the people there. And the correct form of writing is the form that people choose, whether that is by means of exotic spelling, ideographs or petroglyhs.
Now, for a refreshingly different form of English (-ish), see:
"There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."
I think most people can sympathize with the view that we have at least a moral duty to do something when we see one of our fellow beings is in need; whether passing yet another law is the best way is debatable, but IMO if you simply stand around to enjoy the entertainment, you are guilty.
"Guilt by association" BTW, means that you are considered guilty as the consequence of a false association (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_by_association); it doesn't apply in this case, where the offence is not that you are in the neighborhood, but that you do nothing to help, not even the bare minimum of reporting it.
Those things aside - I really have no sympathy with the attitude, that people won't accept anything but the complete and final solution to problems. Here we have identified an obvious problem: Criminals can act with impunity because nobody cares enough to do anything. Passing a law that criminalizes those that fail to help, is clearly not the best way - but it is at least an attempt at addressing the problem.
The sad truth is that you can hardly ever solve a problem with one, bold strike; it has to be a step-by-step process with a lot of trial error on the way. But doing something, anything, is a lot better than just standing in the corner, sulking. But to turn things around: Why don't you tell us all how you would solve the problem? Taking into account, of course, that your only tools are the power to legislate and to allocate limited funds to social projects.
So one cannot grasp the idea of "good ethics", yet one have no problems determining what evil is, is what you say?
Indeed.
It isn't necessarily as self-contradictory as it seems; what is called "ethics" is usually a good deal more fine-grained than the basic "good/evil". Apart from that, the statement "evil is evil..." is obviously used as a nice-sounding catch-phrase, something most will regocnize, I hope.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that this is not the angle the OP was after, but as far as I can see, the most reliable way to ensure that your programs are legitimate is to use open source software. It is not bulletproof, since there are potential problems related to patents, but I think if the owners of the alleged patents were serious, they would have come out of the woodwork by now. And we shouldn't forget that most SW patents seem to be of a very dubious nature.
While Arthur C. Clarke's geosync satellites have taken to space, and James Bond's futuristic mobile technology has become commonplace
Arthur Clarke was a clever guy, and geostationary satelites are kind of obvious, really. And one of the main reasons why James Bond tech is now common is that their occurance in the Bond movies was part of a carefully planned marketing strategy.
... still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us -- until now. At $86,000, the Martin Aircraft jetpack costs about as much as a high-end car, achieves a 30-minute flight time, and is fueled by regular gasoline. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence."
I don't think this one is going to get off the ground. Personal flight is the kind of thing you may like to dream about, but I suspect most wouldn't enjoy actually doing it - otherwise the sky would be full of hang-gliders, day and night. On top of that, $86k for 30 minutes of lumbering along uncomfortably under some stinking and noisy contraption hardly seems attractive, unless you want to show off that you are rich enough to not care that you look a right twit. And of course, there is the question of CO2 and responsibility; very soon no one will admire somebody who feels that he can piss the environment up and down - which is just one of the reasons that the Hummer is not being produced any more.
Depends on the BASIC. I use RealBasic at work as an alternative to LabView. It's object oriented, multithreaded and completely "Visual".
Not really; BASIC, as Dijkstra talks about, is not the modern development tool that is barely BASIC any longer. As a programming language regarded, modern 'BASIC' is not really much different from C++ or what can loosely be called "Object Pascal" - it only resembles BASIC because it has kept many of the same keywords.
No, BASIC was and still is, as far as I am concerned, the line-by-line interpreted language that was meant to be a simplified FORTRAN, and as most of the languages from that time, it has a number of features that codify some of the things you can do in assembler (but really shouldn't) - I still shudder at the thought of PERFORM SECT1 THROUGH SECT5 VARYING ... - a sort of combination of a FOR loop and a GOSUB the allows overlapping subroutines with no explicit returns.
BASIC allows practices that bad because they can make programs unmaintainable; and the limitations in the language mean that you are more or less forced to code that way. This is of course not because those that designed the language were idiots - it was never meant to be used for serious programming: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - the name says it all; this was only an introduction to things like FORTRAN (for numerical computing) or COBOL (for i/o manipulation).
Am I the only person on the Earth who just writes off hysterical, panty-wetting stuff like this?
Probably not, but it seems to me that you are the one hysterically wetting your pants. A person with a sense of humour would see that this kind of radical statement was meant as a provocative input into a sometimes heated discussion. If one were to interpret your words in a positive spirit, one could say the same; that you are probably just emphasizing a viewpoint by exaggerating.
Do we all have the right to live? Well, of course, and in my opinion it shouldn't be a question of money, really. Most hospital treatments are obscenenly expensive because medical companies are maximizing their profit, not because it really is that expensive to develop the drugs or treatments concerned.
But sometimes we see that this "right to life" becomes a duty to keep living, even when you don't want to; to me, that is the real question.
blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love
A sites that forces me to watch adverts is by definition not one I want to use, let alone "one I love". To me the internet is a tool for finding information, nothing more. It is often very convenient, but I will not tolerate advertising, no more than I want to look at stupid adverts in my paper books. Does that make me strange? Well, I am strange, then.
It is as always a matter of considering all the options available - something that neither politicians not slashdotters seem overly familiar with. And I am not saying that I would like to have a register or registers of offenders of this or that kind; in fact I am not stating any preference.
It is not difficult to see why keeping a register is attractive or imagine who might be most against it. The question is how much of this "for or against" is actually anything but than smoke and mirrors?
On the one hand, would having a register really make our life better and more secure? It seems doubtful, seeing how all these security measures always turn out to be full of holes that the criminals soon find - so it ends up being yet another chain around the legs of ordinary citizens, while doing nothing to protect; pretty much like a talisman or a superstition.
On the other hand, when people are against being registered and supervised, how much difference does it make? If you carry a mobile, then you are already being followed in rather minute detail; if you use a credit or debit card, then your buying habits are already registered, if you have health insurance, then... well, you get the picture. You all seem to accept this as a natural part of life; so what the hell is the whining about? Yeah, a DNA register could be abused, certainly, but it could also be hugely beneficial.
The point I am trying to make here is - start looking at the real facts, not the scaring imagery that some try to paint, or the ever more hollow repetitions of lofty ideals about freedom. You've got that pint of jelly in your skull; start using it for something.
I made my own, more or less home-brewed, networked, serial, multi-console, hmm, can I put any more adjectives on that? Anyway, what I did was very simply, sort of: you take a big pile of USB-to-Serial devices, a suitable number of USB hubs and connect them to your (Linux-) system. The you start up a minicom on each of them inside screen, running in detached mode; you can now connect to the Linux system with ssh or telnet and attach to any of the screen sessions. The Power of Linux, Mwahahahaha!!
I can think of another explanation for why "most scientists in China use Google": if you type some words into the search bar, most browsers will go and search for those words on some search engine - which just happened to default to Google, at least until fairly recently. And if you don't mind, you are not going to change. Another things is - just because they asked a number of scientists which search engine they tend to use, it doesn't mean that they use that one for finding information critical to their research.
It would be a sad state of affairs if scientists were truly hampered in their research by not having access to Google, considering the general quality of the results returned by most search engines. Fortunately, if you are a scientist, the things you work with are more readily available from other, more reliable sources.
Ah, so they were allowed to transmit live during the final, critical phases of the incident? I ask because this is the first time I hear about it; it certainly wasn't reported widely in Europe.
You know, the thing that really makes me distrust your way of telling things is the way you distort things; you are of course not alone in doing this, which only makes it all the more sad. I grew up with that kind of shit, and it still makes me puke - the idiotic, shameless lies over Vietnam, the moronic scare stories about how nearly fatal it was to even think about trying cannabis, the equally mindless admirers of the Soviet Union and so on, and so on.
I know perfectly well what went on in the world, perhaps better than most. But the plain reality is that things are never either black or white, and it is really more about what shade of smutty grey you prefer. So you like to call the Tiananmen incident a massacre; I don't - to my mind a massacre is when you corner a number of people and then do your best to kill them all, indiscriminately. There is no doubt that what happened then was bad and a very grave mistake by the Chinese government, but there is equally no doubt that they were not out to eradicate the whole group of demonstrators. If you want to talk about real massacres, why not choose My Lai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_lai)? Ah, I forget, you are the good guys, of course.
No, if you want to win the respect of people - as opposed to merely getting popular amongst those that agree with you - stick to the facts, objectively and honestly. You have some way to go.
Neither - I am old enough to remember how to think independently and ask critical, prying questions that go against the common view.
They use slave labour to manufacture our crap (one of my former co-worker's parents were slaves in an iPod factory). They poison our kids with lead, melamine, and cadmium.
How cute. You know, these things come from the kind of businesses that have sprung up because they have adopted a freer market system; IOW, they are the result, not of the allegedly evil, Communist government's actions, but of the enterprising and free capitalists - the so-called good guys, according to the standard, American fairy tale.
But I digress - you are right that this is a disgrace; fortunately the Chinese government are doing what they can to dole out severe punishments. They tend to execute those responsible, and not a moment too soon, IMHO.
As someone who saw Tiananmen live on CNN,
That is a quite startling statement if you think about it - it is certainly surpirsing that the Chinese government were not aware that CNN had a live tv transmission going on, that kind of equipment sort of stands out in the landscape. I would be a bit quiet about that, seeing how evil they are ...
Seriously; if you want to spread misinformation, you should try to avoid this kind of glaringly obvious lies.
Who can you believe? It is a good question; I'm not sure I can answer it.
I am not surprised that people get confused by the news; most people are only watching from the sidelines and we are perhaps getting to much information nowadays. It's like politics (and sausage-making, if one is to believe Bismarck) - you may enjoy the end result, but it is better not to watch how it is made.
Many people expect that science sort of progresses in a noble and dignified manner, but the truth is that scientific discovery often is the end result of a protracted, global fight over words. It has to be that way - these are people with huge talents and quite often egos to match.
What saves the day is the scientific process itself: You make your theories freely accessible to a forum of your peers, and they try their damndest to take them apart. The result is that once your theory has survived that procedure, it will take someone with a huge amount of insight and a very sharp mind indeed to kill it.
And that is why you should pay more attention to the claims of climate scientists than to the claims made by the skeptics. Whichever arguments the disbelievers come up with, you can be reasonably sure that they have already been tried out many times by the scientists themselves.
So, the IPCC got something wrong? It doesn't matter, really - it is not as if what they say is the only argument in favour of climate change caused by humans. The only reason we hear a lot about this now is that there are powerful, economic interests that don't want us to make the necessary changes, and who don't care about those who are going to be hit worst. We have seen this over and over: the tobacco companies that paid for "research" that found no connection between smoking and cancer; the religious fringe that pays for research into discrediting evolution - and so on.
If you want to find a conspiracy to do with climate change research, look no longer than to the very, very big and powerful energy production sector, who stand to lose money if we change the way we produce energy.
Either way, I didn't say it makes sense to ignore the majority of climatologists who express concern. It doesn't. But it does make sense to ask critical questions about the methods they're using to make such dramatic predictions, especially when those predictions have policy consequences that extend far outside their own field.
I agree - asking critical questions is not only legitimate, but necessary for science to be science at all; however, there is a big difference between being an honest critic, that simply wants to reach a better, more objective understanding, and the complete lack of honesty and integrity that seems to be driving the majority of socalled climate skeptics.
And it is true that science should only be about science, but since scientists are people, they have every right to take part in the debate, just like everybody else - "Freedom of Speech", you know. And since they have a proven track-record of knowing what they are talking about, their words do rightly come with more weight.
No, we already know that, don't we?
But what kind of idiotic law is that? Do they expect that "subversive elements" will now come out in the open and get registered? Isn't that a bit like asking people on the plane whether they are terrorists?
No, seriously. Trust starts with yourself; if you don't trust yourself, you can't trust others.
The other side is of course whether others are trustworthy; experience will tell you. But in the beginning it is necessary to decide that you will try it out.
So can we trust Chinese computers? I can; I don't know if you can - it depends on your own choices. If you meet other people with suspicion, you will always find your suspicion is confirmed; because you will keep prying until you find something to hang it on, and in the process you will turn people against you, who might otherwise have become your best friends.
Somewhere on the way this story changed from telling this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18463-draw-the-neuroscience-behind-hollywood-shootouts.html
to saying the opposite. Perhaps people didn't read it closely enough?
Are you a Chinese agent?
:-)
Sorry, but I couldn't resist asking. I'm just curious why you're an apologist for their government. Do you work for a large corporation with foreign interests? Are you a poly-sci major at an "interesting" college?
Why do I defend the Chinese government? Well, I tend to side with the ones that are treated unfairly; on slashdot it often means China. On other occasions it has meant America, Iran and even Microsoft.
Believe it or not, but fairness and objectivity are things that matter a lot to me. And trying to see both sides to every problem. How else can you reach the truth?
I don't dislike the Chinese Government because they are Communist, I dislike the Chinese Government because they do not care about their people. They only care about the power they exert over the largest country on Earth. They're paranoid of opposing points of view. They have embraced censorship and propaganda as vital to their continuing governance. They imprison peaceful political dissidents. They've committed mass murder, more than once.
You don't see something wrong with this? You seriously can't imagine how these types of people will abuse a root cert?
Your sweeping statements demonstrate what I mean by bigotry - to take them one by one:
They only care about the power they exert
Do you somehow possess special insight into the inner workings of their minds? Do you even know who "they" are? I don't think so - very few real persons are completely void of positive traits, and the majority of politicians genuinely care about the people. Even American politicians do, although I am given to understand that they are particularly obnoxious. But politics is "the art of the possible", and compromises rarely make everybody happy.
They're paranoid of opposing points of view
Really? It is my impression that they are openminded and willing to listen to contructive criticism; but they are not willing to waste time on fools, and they can't afford to be lenient towards troublemakers. When activists cover behind labels like religion or democracy, do we really know what they stand for? I mean, aren't al Qaeda "religious activists", just to pick an extreme example?
They have embraced censorship and propaganda as vital to their continuing governance
I doubt it - not that I deny they use them, but if those things were all that vital, they would have done a much better job of it. As far as I can see, the internet filters are there because most Chinese want them; parents don't want their children to get caught up in what they see as Western filth in a medium they don't understand.
And the propaganda part - are they any worse than other governments? Much of what you call propaganda, the Chinese probably think of as obvious expressions of their cultural mindset; they aren't Americans, you know.
They imprison peaceful political dissidents
I am not entirely sure about that - all I know is that western media have declared them to be "peaceful dissidents"; but I don't know enough about the sources of information to be certain that I can trust them. Trust is something you earn, it can't simply be assumed a priori.
They've committed mass murder, more than once
Only in the same sense that the American government have massacred thousands of native Americans, not to mentions unknown numbers of Vietnamese etc etc. Of course, we both know that you can't blame Obama or even George Bush for those things; but then, why shold we blame the current Chinese government for what happened during the Cultural Revolution?
No, I stand by my words: you speak from a basis of bigotry, even if you aren't aware of it.
The question is, should it be removed for the safety of others?
This is nothing more than simple bigotry. You want them removed, not because they are more likely to abuse their position, but because they are Chinese or "Communists" or whatever. Why should I trust CNNIC less than, eg Microsoft Internet Authority, Deutsche Telekom or Sociedad Cameral de Certificacion Digital, just to mention three at random?
The whole point of root certs is trust
No, the point is convenience. It is ultimately your own responsibility who you choose to trust, which is why you can edit the list of authorities your browser trusts.
... not harder than natural diamonds.
That is because what they are (or should be) talking about is not hardness, but mechanical strength. Black diamonds are not harder, but because they consist of microscopic crystals, they don't have the convenient break lines of monocrystals, and therefore are more difficult to process. See:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0612-mystery_diamonds.htm
I don't how people came to believe in this superstition: That anonymity is a basic, human right of fundamental importance to democracy. You have a right to cast your vote secretly, but that is about all, and that is all that is needed.
There are many good reasons why all political activity should be above board. Otherwise, how can we guard our society against things like powerful money interests posing as the views of "concerned citizens"? Or how about this one: A hostile, foreign nation spreading propaganda?
Apart from that, freedom of speech means that you have the right to the protection of the law, when you express your opinions. If you wan't anonymity, it must be because you don't believe that you are protected by that guarantee.
Some would argue that the proper language of any country is the language spoken by the people there. And the correct form of writing is the form that people choose, whether that is by means of exotic spelling, ideographs or petroglyhs.
Now, for a refreshingly different form of English (-ish), see:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/tokpisin/
"There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."
I think most people can sympathize with the view that we have at least a moral duty to do something when we see one of our fellow beings is in need; whether passing yet another law is the best way is debatable, but IMO if you simply stand around to enjoy the entertainment, you are guilty.
"Guilt by association" BTW, means that you are considered guilty as the consequence of a false association (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_by_association); it doesn't apply in this case, where the offence is not that you are in the neighborhood, but that you do nothing to help, not even the bare minimum of reporting it.
Those things aside - I really have no sympathy with the attitude, that people won't accept anything but the complete and final solution to problems. Here we have identified an obvious problem: Criminals can act with impunity because nobody cares enough to do anything. Passing a law that criminalizes those that fail to help, is clearly not the best way - but it is at least an attempt at addressing the problem.
The sad truth is that you can hardly ever solve a problem with one, bold strike; it has to be a step-by-step process with a lot of trial error on the way. But doing something, anything, is a lot better than just standing in the corner, sulking. But to turn things around: Why don't you tell us all how you would solve the problem? Taking into account, of course, that your only tools are the power to legislate and to allocate limited funds to social projects.
So one cannot grasp the idea of "good ethics", yet one have no problems determining what evil is, is what you say?
Indeed.
It isn't necessarily as self-contradictory as it seems; what is called "ethics" is usually a good deal more fine-grained than the basic "good/evil". Apart from that, the statement "evil is evil ..." is obviously used as a nice-sounding catch-phrase, something most will regocnize, I hope.