Supermans not much of a hero, if you ask me. Superman spends his time helping a few privileged white folk with their relatively petty problems, while simply ignoring the cries of millions of people in 3rd world countries with much bigger problems (war/starvation/famine etc). He could be helping so many people, but he chooses not to. Such role models our kids don't need...
Of course I like it =) No secret there. I'm perfectly aware of it, but I wasn't complaining:) Sex/sexuality are normal, natural aspects of human behaviour, I think it would be unnatural to try separate it from our media and to try compartmentalize it into things like "adult sections". "Sanitized, this side. Sex, that side". Why separate it as if it were some unnatural, seedy thing? In real life its just a natural and integrated part of our complex relations. Our brains don't have a discrete, binary "sex-mode" and "non-sex-mode".
I find it a little odd that people hold different standards for different media. People are generally OK with, say, the obviously semi-porno nature of music videos, and some movies, like say Blue Crush, as well as a lot of advertising. But in other situations people dismiss basically the same thing as tacky and cheap, e.g. computer games or biker magazines. All of them are very obviously flaunting sexuality if you think about it, but I think the fine line between them lies with the degree to which the creators try to pretend that they're being classy and not trashy. I guess thats the thing, there is a rather thin line between classy-sexy, and trashy.
The reason I say peoples reaction to it in computer games is immature/prudish is because, if you look at say, tits in European magazines - guys don't pick up those magazines and say "oh wow, tits, OMW, uhm, should this be here?". They pick it up and look at it without that internal reaction, in other words, they are comfortable with their sexuality. Where-as those that pick up a computer game which has, say, a female character with big breasts and say, "oh wow, tits, OMW, should this be here?" are not comfortable with this display of sexuality (typically either kids or prudish people). But on the other hand, those same people might watch an overtly sexy music video without batting an eyelid, strange.
"Pandering to sex drives" is a dominant theme in everything in western culture. Its perhaps done in a slightly 'classier' fashion than the game industry in most other cases, but only marginally so, and in fact the more I think about it, not at all. Just look around. Look at a typical magazine section in a store. Almost all of the womens' magazines (e.g. Cosmo, Femina etc) feature sexy, photoshopped women wearing almost nothing. And so do almost all of the (adult) mens magazines (FHM, GQ) etc. So do the magazines for teenage girls. So do the magazines for bikers. So do the porn mags (of course). So do the photography magazines. So do the frikkin comics! Look at television and movies - most of the shows are full of sexy women, and many of the shows don't even try to pretend that they're not just displaying sexy women to attract viewers. Yes, go into a video store and really take a look, you will find that MANY of the non-adult shows are flaunting beautiful women (and NOT just the obvious movies like Blue Crush). Look at the music industry, almost all our female stars are damn sexy. Look at their music videos, they all have to dance around wearing practically nothing, grabbing and touching their breasts and genitals and writhing sexily. Even trade shows in other industries (e.g. mining/defence) have their "booth babes" - some shows may do it slightly classier than others, but a booth babe is a booth babe. No matter how classy she is dressed, you know she is only there for one reason (and its not for her knowledge about the mining or defence industries).
Everybody does this, EVERYWHERE in society, and nobody sees it as out of the ordinary, having long discussions about it on sites like/. In fact, the field of computer games stands out as being quite singular in the fact that people do see it as something unusual (and in some cases see it "as a problem", like this website).
People still seem somehow awed by the idea of sexy women in computer games. Get over it, the whole of western culture is fascinated by boobies. To make a fuss over the fact that this would apply to computer games too just seems prudish (and thus a bit immature) to me. Think about this, does society consider mags like GQ "immature"? No? Then why are tits in computer games considered "immature"?
How would you ever know whether he was really reformed, or whether you were just another victim of his 'social engineering'?
Same way you know whether ANYONE ELSE you've hired for company security can be trusted: you don't. Its impossible to know, no matter how squeaky clean someones record is. The only thing you can do is wait a while, and if no corporate information seems to be leaking, they you might have found someone who can be trusted. But you never know. The majority of security breaches are inside jobs. Statistically, any large enough company is very likely to have "thieves in their midst".
Indeed. If some organization could get 1/10th of the income Microsoft gets for MS Office, I'm sure they could develop an Office suite that kicks MS Office's butt, and still have a few billion $ left over for, I don't know, a couple Ferraris and Porsches for every member of the development team. The amount of money companies all over the world collectively pour into MS is ridiculous.
If there are infinitely many universes, then there must also be universes that play out the possibility that NOBODY enters their universe from a parallel universe. We're probably just in one of those universes.
I remember it like this also, and its one of the things I found somewhat puzzling/intriguing about just how irrational investor behaviour can be. I remember during the boom that people were saying over and over and over, for at least a year before the collapse began, that "it wasn't going to last", that "stocks were horribly overvalued", that "it was all going to collapse, and soon", that "these P/E ratios are so ridiculously high that this cannot sustain itself much longer" etc. Seriously, you had to have your head buried in the sand to not hear the warning cries everywhere. What I find so intriguing is that even though everyone knew it was going to collapse, they just continued onwards anyway, like lemmings throwing themselves over a cliff, unable to control their own impulses.
Very true:) There seem to be no limits in life as to what men will turn into a silly 'dick-size' contest. Men turn practically anything and everything into a contest, no matter how pointless and trivial something is (or for that matter, no matter how lofty and meaningful something is). I think its one of humankinds more useful traits, competition 'gets the blood going' (figuratively I mean) and spurs us on to be better and to make better things.
This confirms what intelligent people have been saying for years
You seem to imply that other advertisers never realised this point. Of course they did, its just harder for them to do so than a search engine. I used to be a CJ affiliate, and this is one of the things they stressed over and over again - make your ads relevant to your visitors. The same in the Amazon associates program, they stress the same point. If you visit a website such as slashdot.org, they cannot possibly know what you are interested in in order to target their ads (they try to guess, e.g. make it tech-oriented on slashdot). A search engine is a little different, since you are specifically searching for some keywords and presumably have some interest in those keywords. Some of the affiliates use tracking to try and determine your interests from the websites you visit, but this is also not nearly as pointed as using your search keywords.
I have this vague recollection that some search engines before Google did try to target banner ads based on the keywords that were searched for, but that they weren't terribly good at it. Can anyone else remember?
I think one of the search engines also tried to target ads based on your (estimated) geographical location.
Why do companies 'need' to be big anyway? The main point of a company is to turn a profit and to avoid dying.
IMO technology development companies/teams are far better off with a smaller group of highly talented and intelligent (and flexible!) people, than a large team of mediocre talents. That is, I think that a "smaller, smarter, nimbler" development team is actually a critical asset in IT. I think growth just for the sake of growth can be the downfall of a decent IT company. People are too focussed (sp?) on size as a measure of a company.
Crap.. obligatory POST?!? I meant, "Obligatory post^H^H^H^HQuote". Dammit, almost did it again. I would like to claim that this will cause me to "use the preview next time", but I know it won't.
Although you didn't attribute the source, the fact that you titled the post "Obligatory post" made it completely obvious (to anyone with > 2 brain cells) that you weren't trying to pass it off as your own.
Motivation for 2, google for "PNAC". Note that there are strong ties between PNAC and the members of the Bush administration. If they are serious about carrying out their plans, they will quite likely need to be able to quell the inevitable protests within the US.
I agree with you that they are very likely to cover something like this up, I just don't think the primary reason is pride, I think it has more to do with protecting their economy (which indirectly of course reflects on their image/pride, so the motivations are probably connected anyway.). The Chinese government is of course a whole bunch of people, and I'm sure that many of them have more than one reason why they may want to or not want to cover this up. And people are people; so likewise, I'm sure there are those WITHIN their government who are arguing to rather be as open as possible about SARS in order to save lives. Things are never quite so 'black and white' as USians tend to paint them. This is what I mean about having a 'balanced view'. Chinese people are not single-minded stereotypical homogenous caricatures like those in American TV shows. They are people.
The US had institutionalised segregation (separatism) up until the 1950's, and IIRC the last of the so-called "Jim Crow" laws was finally dropped only in the 1960s. I'm not sure when blacks were first allowed to vote in the US though. I seem to remember they had some system where a black persons vote counted as half or two-thirds of a person. Before segregation they had slavery, I think that was until about 150 years ago. Slavery was harsh; it is believed that approx 12 million black people died during the transit from Africa due to the harsh conditions they were kept in on the ships. But US segregation was never as harsh as SAn apartheid.
Symptomatic, I'd say, of the oh-what-will-the-outside-world-think-about-us mentality that most governments in Asia, including India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia to name a few, share. All these governments have, on earlier ocassions, done similar subterfuge, although not necessarily with respect to information on SARS.
Honestly, with all due respect, grow up. Not everything is a commie cover-up by a totalitarian regime bent on maintaining an inflated image of control and prosperity for purely ideological reasons. The reason that China is underreporting this is largely pragmatic: the worldwide paranoia resulting from the media spread this will potentially cripple their economy (and in fact has already slashed both tourism and business in the Hong Kong area by over 50%.
Around here you'd think that every time a member of the Chinese government got up to piss that it was more evidence of government cover-ups and oppression of their people. You can't even mention China on/. without the knee-jerk "China spam blah blah" and "China 1984-style government blah blah" crap flooding the place.
Sheesh.. some days.. you people live in a vacuum, you really need to get out more. I'm not saying there isn't corruption and coverups in those governments, but really, its as if you people think everything outside the US is 1984. Yeah yeah, -1 flamebait me, its not going to make you any less ignorant anyway. Go actually learn something about the countries you criticize, go actually get a balanced perspective. Half these people here don't even know the difference between Taiwan and China, or that "Africa" is not a country, but that sure doesn't stop them from posting lengthy diatribes detailing what they believe the problems with those places are and how to solve them.
Sorry, this rant isn't really aimed at you anymore, Cydonian. Just a more general nit I feel like picking.
If women in the US couldn't vote 100 years ago, could it still have been considered a democracy? (I know for one that South Africa was definitely not considered a democracy until the black people were finally able to vote in 1994.)
What a load of bunk. To put SARS in some perspective, go google for "Spanish flu 1918". This flu epidemic killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide in the space of about a year. (Much of that incidentally could have been prevented had it not been for severe under-reporting/over-optimism of the threat in the USA by US authorities). Surprise, a free society can also do stuff under-reporting and denials. (Uh, "duh").
SARS does of course have the potential to be the next "Spanish flu". I for one hope that they manage to contain and destroy it before it "gets out" on that level, because once it 'gets out', the threat becomes too large to effectively contain.
Another aspect of the modern era is globalization and international mobility.
This is one point in the argument that SARS may "hit big". But a point working against SARS is that today's society is also far more paranoid than that in 1918. A few dozen people die, and suddenly travel to the region, and business in the region, is down by more than 50%.
Interestingly, a side note; if in these sorts of cases it turns out that "only the paranoid survive" (i.e. that people who are genetically inclined to be more paranoid about such things have a higher survival rate), Darwinism would predict that future generations of humans become increasingly paranoid.
In general, I believe that it is a myth that we had some super-democratic past
Essentially, yes, you are correct. The USA can only have begun being considered a free country after the last of the Jim Crow laws was dropped, which was, IIRC, in the late 50s or early 60s. And 100 years ago women did not even have the vote in the US - so certainly not a democracy then. The USA is thus a relatively new democracy, less than 100 years. And in the 50s you of course had the whole McCarthyism thing, which wasn't pleasant, but after that the USA improved again in terms of freedom/democracy.
Anyway, its difficult to say right now where the US is headed, the timespans we're looking at are too short here. While the last 10 years has definitely seen a trend towards fewer freedoms, the optimists would hold that the 'checks and balances' will kick in eventually (presumably after the war(s?) is(are?) over) and that the trend will reverse again. The question is not so much "where will the US be in 5 years" (since the US will very likely have fewer freedoms than now in 5 years time), but rather, "where will the US be in 50 years". In other words, in a few decades time, will counter-trends to the current trends have kicked in.
Hmm.. yes, thanks, will try that. Didn't think of that. I do regularly wipe my cookies though. Will check what options Moz has for keeping specific cookies.
ANYWAY, I fail to see why legacy is such a bad thing. Just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it needs to go away.
Something to think about; somewhere in the millions of transistors on the GPU of a NVIDIA GeForce 4 Titanium 4600 (or the latest ATI card for that matter) is a piece of hardware dedicated to supporting.... CGA! (2 and 4 colour low-resolution screen modes). In one or another, you pay NVIDIA for putting that in there when you buy one of their cards. And on the newest Pentium 4 CPU from Intel is a large amount of (hopefully) unused 16-bit code: the whole instruction set, 16-bit registers, (640K) segmented memory mode, memory mapped IO of page A000 to the video card, 16-bit interrupts (not to mention "virtual x86" support)... all of that cool totally useless stuff, you pay Intel for it, one way or another, when you buy a CPU from them. Even cool stuff like system interrupts for activating the "ROM-BASIC" that all computers were supposed to have! Woohoo! (Int 19, wasn't that?) Chances are, the BIOS on the board also contains code for all sorts of legacy devices (5.25" drives? ISA devices?), and the IDE controller contains code for old versions for hard disks that you are never going to plug into your PC. These things aren't bottlenecks per se, but we do all pay for them. In the grand scheme of things I doubt they add more a percent or so to the cost of a PC, but when I think about things like ROM-BASIC interrupts and CGA mode code lurking around inside my Pentium 4, GeForce4 system, something feels a little "off" to me. That stuff was obsolete already 11 or 12 years ago when I got into computers, and I guess I wouldn't have expected to still be finding that stuff on systems in 2003. These are not things that are still useful to anything but a negligible percentage of people; I think its time for a cleaner "from-the-ground-up" re-design.
I "googled" and "yahoo'ed" for "african languages", and the search results seemed to be the same for both (at least for the first 10 or so, didn't check further than that). Guess they've figured out a very similar algorithm, or else they've just licensed google's search technology (ha ha). Oh wait, at the bottom of the Yahoo page: "Search Technology provided by Google"! Haha, Yahoo search is just google search.
Yahoo puts 20 results on the page by default, which IMO is nicer than the default 10 at a time from google, but the Yahoo results page looks ugly and messy and confusing to the eye, just a mess of links.
These are the typical "classic" definitions of life, but I'm not much of a believer in them, I think they are a little arbitrary, and were mostly chosen historically from the much simpler view of "life" that earlier biologists had. These seem way to specific to the general case on Earth, but even on Earth I'm sure you would find examples of things that are "alive" but don't qualify by this definition. I don't see why something has to be strictly self-reproducing to be considered alive. Whether or not *I* am alive has nothing to do with whether or not I produce offspring, in my opinion. Under this definition, even a human being who is sterile for any reason (e.g. accident/disease/disorder) can no longer strictly be considered "alive", because he/she is no longer self-reproducing in any sense. Also, I don't see any difference between humans getting their energy from a piece of machinery inside themselves that extracts energy chemically from organic matter ('from the environment'), and a robot that gets energy from a piece of machinery inside itself that extracts energy from an electrical socket, or perhaps even from solar power (which plants and reptiles use too, incidentally). A human on a life support machine doesn't break down food to get energy, its inserted right into the bloodstream by other people. Is a human on a life-support machine "alive"? Of course! Also, why do I need to "grow and develop" to be considered alive? If I discovered a pill that gave me immortality by halting my growth, I would definitely still consider myself alive.
Generally, these definitions are based on a number of concepts which are actually completely abstract when you consider the fundamental building blocks of life (i.e. fundamental particles), and unfortunately for us these fundamental building blocks are precisely the same as the ones used for everything else in the Universe which we regard as "non-living". A stomach or heart or brain or human or dolphin or amoeba is just one particular arrangement of these particles. What makes those things "dolphins" or "stomachs" is our own perceptions of these abstract ideas; the Universe doesn't somehow label each atom in a dolphin as a "dolphin atom" for our convenience.
Anyway, to get to the point, as you say, I think that the only real question that matters is whether or not something is 'sentient'. And unfortunately this is not something we know how to measure, so we may never know if and when our robot creations become sentient. We keep adding more and more of the features which seem to contribute to our sentience (senses, sight, hearing etc) and yet we still consider these things just machines, and we'll keep improving them until they are equivalent or better than us, even possibly in intelligence, and we'll still consider them "just machines", because they won't be accompanied by the mysticism we hold for ourselves. (Which we *rightfully* hold for ourselves, given the existence of our own "awareness" which defines our sentience - we know it exists because we wouldn't be "aware of it" if it didn't). For all we know, the HOAP robot is already sentient on some simple level.
Oh for fcks sake, thats not what I meant. I said, I think its great that she has hope and what she wants to do. What is naive is her level of knowledge and insight into the problems she wants to solve, but as I said, if she wants to do this, she will learn the necessary reality in order to go about attaining her goals. Can't people frikkin read anymore, you have to re-explain your comments in painstaking detail to ppl who don't have the necessary reading skills to follow a simple piece of writing.
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Supermans not much of a hero, if you ask me. Superman spends his time helping a few privileged white folk with their relatively petty problems, while simply ignoring the cries of millions of people in 3rd world countries with much bigger problems (war/starvation/famine etc). He could be helping so many people, but he chooses not to. Such role models our kids don't need...
Of course I like it =) No secret there. I'm perfectly aware of it, but I wasn't complaining :) Sex/sexuality are normal, natural aspects of human behaviour, I think it would be unnatural to try separate it from our media and to try compartmentalize it into things like "adult sections". "Sanitized, this side. Sex, that side". Why separate it as if it were some unnatural, seedy thing? In real life its just a natural and integrated part of our complex relations. Our brains don't have a discrete, binary "sex-mode" and "non-sex-mode".
I find it a little odd that people hold different standards for different media. People are generally OK with, say, the obviously semi-porno nature of music videos, and some movies, like say Blue Crush, as well as a lot of advertising. But in other situations people dismiss basically the same thing as tacky and cheap, e.g. computer games or biker magazines. All of them are very obviously flaunting sexuality if you think about it, but I think the fine line between them lies with the degree to which the creators try to pretend that they're being classy and not trashy. I guess thats the thing, there is a rather thin line between classy-sexy, and trashy.
The reason I say peoples reaction to it in computer games is immature/prudish is because, if you look at say, tits in European magazines - guys don't pick up those magazines and say "oh wow, tits, OMW, uhm, should this be here?". They pick it up and look at it without that internal reaction, in other words, they are comfortable with their sexuality. Where-as those that pick up a computer game which has, say, a female character with big breasts and say, "oh wow, tits, OMW, should this be here?" are not comfortable with this display of sexuality (typically either kids or prudish people). But on the other hand, those same people might watch an overtly sexy music video without batting an eyelid, strange.
"Pandering to sex drives" is a dominant theme in everything in western culture. Its perhaps done in a slightly 'classier' fashion than the game industry in most other cases, but only marginally so, and in fact the more I think about it, not at all. Just look around. Look at a typical magazine section in a store. Almost all of the womens' magazines (e.g. Cosmo, Femina etc) feature sexy, photoshopped women wearing almost nothing. And so do almost all of the (adult) mens magazines (FHM, GQ) etc. So do the magazines for teenage girls. So do the magazines for bikers. So do the porn mags (of course). So do the photography magazines. So do the frikkin comics! Look at television and movies - most of the shows are full of sexy women, and many of the shows don't even try to pretend that they're not just displaying sexy women to attract viewers. Yes, go into a video store and really take a look, you will find that MANY of the non-adult shows are flaunting beautiful women (and NOT just the obvious movies like Blue Crush). Look at the music industry, almost all our female stars are damn sexy. Look at their music videos, they all have to dance around wearing practically nothing, grabbing and touching their breasts and genitals and writhing sexily. Even trade shows in other industries (e.g. mining/defence) have their "booth babes" - some shows may do it slightly classier than others, but a booth babe is a booth babe. No matter how classy she is dressed, you know she is only there for one reason (and its not for her knowledge about the mining or defence industries).
Everybody does this, EVERYWHERE in society, and nobody sees it as out of the ordinary, having long discussions about it on sites like /. In fact, the field of computer games stands out as being quite singular in the fact that people do see it as something unusual (and in some cases see it "as a problem", like this website).
People still seem somehow awed by the idea of sexy women in computer games. Get over it, the whole of western culture is fascinated by boobies. To make a fuss over the fact that this would apply to computer games too just seems prudish (and thus a bit immature) to me. Think about this, does society consider mags like GQ "immature"? No? Then why are tits in computer games considered "immature"?
How would you ever know whether he was really reformed, or whether you were just another victim of his 'social engineering'?
Same way you know whether ANYONE ELSE you've hired for company security can be trusted: you don't. Its impossible to know, no matter how squeaky clean someones record is. The only thing you can do is wait a while, and if no corporate information seems to be leaking, they you might have found someone who can be trusted. But you never know. The majority of security breaches are inside jobs. Statistically, any large enough company is very likely to have "thieves in their midst".
Indeed. If some organization could get 1/10th of the income Microsoft gets for MS Office, I'm sure they could develop an Office suite that kicks MS Office's butt, and still have a few billion $ left over for, I don't know, a couple Ferraris and Porsches for every member of the development team. The amount of money companies all over the world collectively pour into MS is ridiculous.
If there are infinitely many universes, then there must also be universes that play out the possibility that NOBODY enters their universe from a parallel universe. We're probably just in one of those universes.
I remember it like this also, and its one of the things I found somewhat puzzling/intriguing about just how irrational investor behaviour can be. I remember during the boom that people were saying over and over and over, for at least a year before the collapse began, that "it wasn't going to last", that "stocks were horribly overvalued", that "it was all going to collapse, and soon", that "these P/E ratios are so ridiculously high that this cannot sustain itself much longer" etc. Seriously, you had to have your head buried in the sand to not hear the warning cries everywhere. What I find so intriguing is that even though everyone knew it was going to collapse, they just continued onwards anyway, like lemmings throwing themselves over a cliff, unable to control their own impulses.
Very true :) There seem to be no limits in life as to what men will turn into a silly 'dick-size' contest. Men turn practically anything and everything into a contest, no matter how pointless and trivial something is (or for that matter, no matter how lofty and meaningful something is). I think its one of humankinds more useful traits, competition 'gets the blood going' (figuratively I mean) and spurs us on to be better and to make better things.
This confirms what intelligent people have been saying for years
You seem to imply that other advertisers never realised this point. Of course they did, its just harder for them to do so than a search engine. I used to be a CJ affiliate, and this is one of the things they stressed over and over again - make your ads relevant to your visitors. The same in the Amazon associates program, they stress the same point. If you visit a website such as slashdot.org, they cannot possibly know what you are interested in in order to target their ads (they try to guess, e.g. make it tech-oriented on slashdot). A search engine is a little different, since you are specifically searching for some keywords and presumably have some interest in those keywords. Some of the affiliates use tracking to try and determine your interests from the websites you visit, but this is also not nearly as pointed as using your search keywords.
I have this vague recollection that some search engines before Google did try to target banner ads based on the keywords that were searched for, but that they weren't terribly good at it. Can anyone else remember?
I think one of the search engines also tried to target ads based on your (estimated) geographical location.
Why do companies 'need' to be big anyway? The main point of a company is to turn a profit and to avoid dying.
IMO technology development companies/teams are far better off with a smaller group of highly talented and intelligent (and flexible!) people, than a large team of mediocre talents. That is, I think that a "smaller, smarter, nimbler" development team is actually a critical asset in IT. I think growth just for the sake of growth can be the downfall of a decent IT company. People are too focussed (sp?) on size as a measure of a company.
Crap.. obligatory POST?!? I meant, "Obligatory post^H^H^H^HQuote". Dammit, almost did it again. I would like to claim that this will cause me to "use the preview next time", but I know it won't.
Although you didn't attribute the source, the fact that you titled the post "Obligatory post" made it completely obvious (to anyone with > 2 brain cells) that you weren't trying to pass it off as your own.
Motivation for 2, google for "PNAC". Note that there are strong ties between PNAC and the members of the Bush administration. If they are serious about carrying out their plans, they will quite likely need to be able to quell the inevitable protests within the US.
I agree with you that they are very likely to cover something like this up, I just don't think the primary reason is pride, I think it has more to do with protecting their economy (which indirectly of course reflects on their image/pride, so the motivations are probably connected anyway.). The Chinese government is of course a whole bunch of people, and I'm sure that many of them have more than one reason why they may want to or not want to cover this up. And people are people; so likewise, I'm sure there are those WITHIN their government who are arguing to rather be as open as possible about SARS in order to save lives. Things are never quite so 'black and white' as USians tend to paint them. This is what I mean about having a 'balanced view'. Chinese people are not single-minded stereotypical homogenous caricatures like those in American TV shows. They are people.
The US had institutionalised segregation (separatism) up until the 1950's, and IIRC the last of the so-called "Jim Crow" laws was finally dropped only in the 1960s. I'm not sure when blacks were first allowed to vote in the US though. I seem to remember they had some system where a black persons vote counted as half or two-thirds of a person. Before segregation they had slavery, I think that was until about 150 years ago. Slavery was harsh; it is believed that approx 12 million black people died during the transit from Africa due to the harsh conditions they were kept in on the ships. But US segregation was never as harsh as SAn apartheid.
Symptomatic, I'd say, of the oh-what-will-the-outside-world-think-about-us mentality that most governments in Asia, including India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia to name a few, share. All these governments have, on earlier ocassions, done similar subterfuge, although not necessarily with respect to information on SARS.
Honestly, with all due respect, grow up. Not everything is a commie cover-up by a totalitarian regime bent on maintaining an inflated image of control and prosperity for purely ideological reasons. The reason that China is underreporting this is largely pragmatic: the worldwide paranoia resulting from the media spread this will potentially cripple their economy (and in fact has already slashed both tourism and business in the Hong Kong area by over 50%.
Around here you'd think that every time a member of the Chinese government got up to piss that it was more evidence of government cover-ups and oppression of their people. You can't even mention China on /. without the knee-jerk "China spam blah blah" and "China 1984-style government blah blah" crap flooding the place.
Sheesh .. some days .. you people live in a vacuum, you really need to get out more. I'm not saying there isn't corruption and coverups in those governments, but really, its as if you people think everything outside the US is 1984. Yeah yeah, -1 flamebait me, its not going to make you any less ignorant anyway. Go actually learn something about the countries you criticize, go actually get a balanced perspective. Half these people here don't even know the difference between Taiwan and China, or that "Africa" is not a country, but that sure doesn't stop them from posting lengthy diatribes detailing what they believe the problems with those places are and how to solve them.
Sorry, this rant isn't really aimed at you anymore, Cydonian. Just a more general nit I feel like picking.
If women in the US couldn't vote 100 years ago, could it still have been considered a democracy? (I know for one that South Africa was definitely not considered a democracy until the black people were finally able to vote in 1994.)
What a load of bunk. To put SARS in some perspective, go google for "Spanish flu 1918". This flu epidemic killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide in the space of about a year. (Much of that incidentally could have been prevented had it not been for severe under-reporting/over-optimism of the threat in the USA by US authorities). Surprise, a free society can also do stuff under-reporting and denials. (Uh, "duh").
SARS does of course have the potential to be the next "Spanish flu". I for one hope that they manage to contain and destroy it before it "gets out" on that level, because once it 'gets out', the threat becomes too large to effectively contain.
Another aspect of the modern era is globalization and international mobility.
This is one point in the argument that SARS may "hit big". But a point working against SARS is that today's society is also far more paranoid than that in 1918. A few dozen people die, and suddenly travel to the region, and business in the region, is down by more than 50%.
Interestingly, a side note; if in these sorts of cases it turns out that "only the paranoid survive" (i.e. that people who are genetically inclined to be more paranoid about such things have a higher survival rate), Darwinism would predict that future generations of humans become increasingly paranoid.
In general, I believe that it is a myth that we had some super-democratic past
Essentially, yes, you are correct. The USA can only have begun being considered a free country after the last of the Jim Crow laws was dropped, which was, IIRC, in the late 50s or early 60s. And 100 years ago women did not even have the vote in the US - so certainly not a democracy then. The USA is thus a relatively new democracy, less than 100 years. And in the 50s you of course had the whole McCarthyism thing, which wasn't pleasant, but after that the USA improved again in terms of freedom/democracy.
Anyway, its difficult to say right now where the US is headed, the timespans we're looking at are too short here. While the last 10 years has definitely seen a trend towards fewer freedoms, the optimists would hold that the 'checks and balances' will kick in eventually (presumably after the war(s?) is(are?) over) and that the trend will reverse again. The question is not so much "where will the US be in 5 years" (since the US will very likely have fewer freedoms than now in 5 years time), but rather, "where will the US be in 50 years". In other words, in a few decades time, will counter-trends to the current trends have kicked in.
Hmm .. yes, thanks, will try that. Didn't think of that. I do regularly wipe my cookies though. Will check what options Moz has for keeping specific cookies.
ANYWAY, I fail to see why legacy is such a bad thing. Just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it needs to go away.
Something to think about; somewhere in the millions of transistors on the GPU of a NVIDIA GeForce 4 Titanium 4600 (or the latest ATI card for that matter) is a piece of hardware dedicated to supporting .... CGA! (2 and 4 colour low-resolution screen modes). In one or another, you pay NVIDIA for putting that in there when you buy one of their cards. And on the newest Pentium 4 CPU from Intel is a large amount of (hopefully) unused 16-bit code: the whole instruction set, 16-bit registers, (640K) segmented memory mode, memory mapped IO of page A000 to the video card, 16-bit interrupts (not to mention "virtual x86" support) ... all of that cool totally useless stuff, you pay Intel for it, one way or another, when you buy a CPU from them. Even cool stuff like system interrupts for activating the "ROM-BASIC" that all computers were supposed to have! Woohoo! (Int 19, wasn't that?) Chances are, the BIOS on the board also contains code for all sorts of legacy devices (5.25" drives? ISA devices?), and the IDE controller contains code for old versions for hard disks that you are never going to plug into your PC. These things aren't bottlenecks per se, but we do all pay for them. In the grand scheme of things I doubt they add more a percent or so to the cost of a PC, but when I think about things like ROM-BASIC interrupts and CGA mode code lurking around inside my Pentium 4, GeForce4 system, something feels a little "off" to me. That stuff was obsolete already 11 or 12 years ago when I got into computers, and I guess I wouldn't have expected to still be finding that stuff on systems in 2003. These are not things that are still useful to anything but a negligible percentage of people; I think its time for a cleaner "from-the-ground-up" re-design.
I "googled" and "yahoo'ed" for "african languages", and the search results seemed to be the same for both (at least for the first 10 or so, didn't check further than that). Guess they've figured out a very similar algorithm, or else they've just licensed google's search technology (ha ha). Oh wait, at the bottom of the Yahoo page: "Search Technology provided by Google"! Haha, Yahoo search is just google search.
Yahoo puts 20 results on the page by default, which IMO is nicer than the default 10 at a time from google, but the Yahoo results page looks ugly and messy and confusing to the eye, just a mess of links.
These are the typical "classic" definitions of life, but I'm not much of a believer in them, I think they are a little arbitrary, and were mostly chosen historically from the much simpler view of "life" that earlier biologists had. These seem way to specific to the general case on Earth, but even on Earth I'm sure you would find examples of things that are "alive" but don't qualify by this definition. I don't see why something has to be strictly self-reproducing to be considered alive. Whether or not *I* am alive has nothing to do with whether or not I produce offspring, in my opinion. Under this definition, even a human being who is sterile for any reason (e.g. accident/disease/disorder) can no longer strictly be considered "alive", because he/she is no longer self-reproducing in any sense. Also, I don't see any difference between humans getting their energy from a piece of machinery inside themselves that extracts energy chemically from organic matter ('from the environment'), and a robot that gets energy from a piece of machinery inside itself that extracts energy from an electrical socket, or perhaps even from solar power (which plants and reptiles use too, incidentally). A human on a life support machine doesn't break down food to get energy, its inserted right into the bloodstream by other people. Is a human on a life-support machine "alive"? Of course! Also, why do I need to "grow and develop" to be considered alive? If I discovered a pill that gave me immortality by halting my growth, I would definitely still consider myself alive.
Generally, these definitions are based on a number of concepts which are actually completely abstract when you consider the fundamental building blocks of life (i.e. fundamental particles), and unfortunately for us these fundamental building blocks are precisely the same as the ones used for everything else in the Universe which we regard as "non-living". A stomach or heart or brain or human or dolphin or amoeba is just one particular arrangement of these particles. What makes those things "dolphins" or "stomachs" is our own perceptions of these abstract ideas; the Universe doesn't somehow label each atom in a dolphin as a "dolphin atom" for our convenience.
Anyway, to get to the point, as you say, I think that the only real question that matters is whether or not something is 'sentient'. And unfortunately this is not something we know how to measure, so we may never know if and when our robot creations become sentient. We keep adding more and more of the features which seem to contribute to our sentience (senses, sight, hearing etc) and yet we still consider these things just machines, and we'll keep improving them until they are equivalent or better than us, even possibly in intelligence, and we'll still consider them "just machines", because they won't be accompanied by the mysticism we hold for ourselves. (Which we *rightfully* hold for ourselves, given the existence of our own "awareness" which defines our sentience - we know it exists because we wouldn't be "aware of it" if it didn't). For all we know, the HOAP robot is already sentient on some simple level.
Oh for fcks sake, thats not what I meant. I said, I think its great that she has hope and what she wants to do. What is naive is her level of knowledge and insight into the problems she wants to solve, but as I said, if she wants to do this, she will learn the necessary reality in order to go about attaining her goals. Can't people frikkin read anymore, you have to re-explain your comments in painstaking detail to ppl who don't have the necessary reading skills to follow a simple piece of writing.