The point is that if Google tries to offer service to the PRC without this censorship, they get banned too.
Those are the breaks. Sometimes when you do the right thing, there are less than optimal results. That is why people (like Google) do the wrong thing so frequently--it pays off in many cases.
So would it be better to give the Chinese a free service that everyone knows is flawed (the Chinese know about censorship, they aren't stupid), or would you rather have Google not provide any of their free service to China? That's really the only two options Google has.
It would be better imho to take the moral high ground and not provide a censored service. Perhaps there would even be enough public outrage in China that it would effect some positive change, but that isn't relevant to whether it's right or wrong, because we don't know how the Chinese people would react. All we have control over is our own actions.
I know the Chinese people aren't stupid, but perhaps you underestimate the power of censorship to shape one's worldview. Do you believe that most Chinese have an accurate knowledge of world events? I personally do not believe so, and I believe this on the feedback of people I know who have lived in China.
Evil or no, China's laws are the way they are, and Google isn't going to change them. If Google refuses to write in a little bit of code that snips out X,Y, and Z, they have no other choice than to deny 1.3 billion people a free, useful service.
No, the PRC is the only party that can deny 1.3 billion people a free, useful service, and they do it daily in myriad ways. I'm just saying Google shouldn't help them.
As for the al-qaeda analogy, it's deeply flawed.
I'm pretty sure al-qaeda isn't a 50-odd year old sovereign nation with very firm and intractible laws about internet access.
I agree, and it's totally irrelevant. The whole analogy is getting at the issue of whether you cooperate with evil because it's the easiest thing to do. The point stands. I don't believe Google should, in either case.
If Afghanis want to hook up to Google they can without any censorship, but they have to worry about al-qaeda coming and killing them.
Okay, I'm not sure how that relates to anything, but I agree.
A better analogy would be Saudi Arabia, but they, like the PRC, have firm control on all their internet lines, so Google is still stuck with the censored-search-or-no-search problem.
It's a different analogy, making a different point, and I agree that they have the same problem, though I would phrase it as "help perpetuate misinformation, deception, and oppression, or take the highground".
I'm sure the red-blooded Americans over at Google aren't too thrilled about it either, but their only other option is to not provide any service at all. Which really doesn't help anybody.
I'd argue that helping an oppressive regime deceive and maintain control over its people is not helping anybody either, but it is the also the wrong thing to do.
This whole "giving comfort to the enemy" thing you're getting at is entirely beside the point. By refusing to obey the laws of the PRC, a sovereign nation, Google can only get themselves banned, hurting 20 million internet users without doing any damage to the tyrannical and corrupt government you rage against.
Okay, so you're saying we should just help the tyrannical and corrupt government instead. Yes, they will be banned. That is the choice of the PRC government. Your argument is structurally analogous to saying "well, if I don't sell the kid the gun, somebody else will, so what's the difference?" The difference, in both cases, is that you do the right thing or the wrong thing, even if your doing the right thing cannot have the positive effect you wish (the kid not shooting somebody, or the PRC having open access to information and no big brother).
No. I, for one, will criticize Google for putting "provide a censored service that helps the in-power PRC government continue their Orwellian rein because it makes us more money" above "do the right thing and realize that you can make lots of money without aiding and abetting evil". Choosing the former shows that 'Do no evil!' is just marketing bullshit to be disregarded when it affects the bottom-line.
Note: by 'evil', I mean evil in the sense that Google means it, not capital E evil in a religious sense. And under this definition, I think China's censorship and Google's cooperation with that censorship are evil.
No, they're not remotely the same in terms of culpability or degree of evil, but if you were teaching your child about right and wrong, and you had just explained Chinese history of the last 50 years, highlighting things like the cultural revolution, the starving millions during the 'great leap forward' (all the while maintaining that all is great in the motherland and belt-buckle production is up 300% over last year), Tiananmen square, the silent executions for thought-crime, are you then going to say that it's okay to make as much money as possible by helping them continue with the policies that allow them to continue their oppressive rein? I think most of us would think there is something wrong with that attitude, and that maximizing profit *AT ALL COST* is a dirty thing.
Anyway, if "standing tall" is such a bad, American thing, should Google offer customized results for every oppressive regime in the world (perhaps if al-qaeda paid them enough they could get custom results too?), or only the ones that can pay us massive amounts of money?
Better still in firefox: highlight the link, then right-click and select "view selection source". It will just show the source for what you've highlighted, so you don't have to search through a massive document.
It's irrelevant to the question of what they do today, but not to what they will do tomorrow. If you prefer to just say "I can't predict the future, so I won't think about, and will only look at what they do today", then fine, I hope that attitude works out for you. I personally, though, think it's better to think about the future and the implications and possible abuses of a company having 38 years of browsing data on an individual, before it's too late.
What you can be absolutely certain of is that if at some point they determine that the long-term financial impact of exploiting the extremely detailed profile information they will are accumulated that information for more targeted ads is positive, then they will do whatever possible to maximize their profit.
Two years ago, people would not have thought that google would capitulate to the demands of the Chinese government in order that the government could more effectively censor its citizens' web browsing. But they did.
On the same day that China blocked access to Google, it also flipped the switch on AltaVista. AltaVista issued a defiant statement to the media and went on to list several ways to access the site. Months later, AltaVista is still blocked. Brin figures that by meeting China halfway, Google remained available - and useful - to visitors and also preserved its advertising revenue there. "You have to look at the total value picture," he says.
'The total value picture' is a bs euphemism for compromising your morals for money. They have crossed the line.
Do you really not think that they could charge a lot higher rates for posting an ad to a user search for 'cheap laptops' (nothing else known) than they could for the same search performed by somebody known to be a hardware purchaser of a large corporation (with probability of, say, 50%)?? Or that advertisers wouldn't pay more to put a 'porn here' link in front of somebody who is known to have visited 20000 porn sites over the last 17 years?
Please, of course it is valuable information to them, and of course advertisers will pay more money for being able to deliver ads to a more specific demographic.
Even better, you could set the gmail cookies in firefox to always expire at the end of the session.
As for '.google.com' cookies for searching (so that it remembers your prefs), you can delete the cookie, and tell firefox not to allow it to be set again, then bookmark something like the following in firefox (http://www.google.com/search?as_q=%s&num=100&hl=e n&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq =&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_n hi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=of f), and then under the bookmark manager, assign the keyword 'g' under the properties. Then, you can just type 'g tin foil hat' in the location bar, and it will search google using your preferences and without a cookie.
Nobody but poor third-grade grammar teachers think that not ending a sentence with a preposition is correct or desirable in all or even most cases. It is not a rule. It is a quasi-convention of poor writers with little (i.e. dangerous) knowledge.
As another poster noted, Churchhill said it best in reply to a foolish editor who 'corrected' his English: This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
Oh, thanks for the explanation. I understand now. I generally use 'average' with most people, if I think they might not know the different between mean, median, and mode--and that is most people--but I have one in mind myself when I say 'average.' I guess on slashdot though that it doesn't make sense to think that most people don't know the different between arithmetic mean and median, so there is no reason at all to use the generic, ambiguous 'considered harmful' superclass term.
Just goes to show that it isn't always best to refer to something by its interface!
Maybe he said sine? Shorthand for, what's your favorite sine-computing continuous fraction that can be parallelized on a beowolf cluster of slashbot brains in a vat--and also be redundantly, steganographically stored in said distributed 16-year old brains in vats--and before I come on to you anymore, would you like to soviet rush me?
Nice logic. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if this one guy wastes time on Slashdot, it's okay to waste money on frivolous activities when there are tons of really noble uses of money.
Your argument, I guess, is that if somebody wastes something, then all waste is justified. I don't find this very compelling, but then what do I know?
Or maybe you mean that because this guy wastes time on slashdot, he shouldn't complain about any other frivolous activities in the world? I totally agree, anybody who has ever done anything wrong should not be allowed to talk about other wrongs in the world. That damn Gandhi should have just shut up about oppression in South Africa, or colonialism in India, because I'm sure he did something wrong in his life, if not as colossolly wrong as wasting time on slashdot.
Silicon-based computers excel at logic. Carbon-based computors excel at pattern-recognition and that whole sphere of massively parallel modes of thinking that one might call intuition.
The best carbon chess players are still about equal with the best silicon chess players, and they sure as hell are not doing that with silicon-type logic (evaluating billions of nodes in a search tree). That implies to me that there's a hell of a lot of intuition, for want of a better word, in chess.
Every you need to know about EJBs is in this book.
And yes, Spring is an incredibly powerful, flexible, and *simple* framework to use. I don't know that I've ever used the terms elegant or beautiful for software remotely related to J2EE, but Spring is amazing.
And no, I'm not involved in the project. Just a happy user.
Yes, dispatch-conf in combination with RCS is great. You can use it to manage config updates for whatever config files you want. You just need to put anything other than/etc in the CONFIG_PROTECT variable. Another great thing about dispatch-conf is that it can be easily configured to auto-update the configuration files if only CVS headers are different, or there are no differences but whitespace and comments. Definitely a big quantum leap above etc-update.
The even more interesting thing about Rico is that when they quizzed him again a month later, he still fetched the new toy in response to the new name, though he had only been tested the one time a month before. That is pretty impressive!
No. Alan Turing did not commit suicide because he was homosexual. He committed suicide because he was forced to take hormones to such an extent that it wreaked havoc on his mind and body and made his life a living hell.
Relgious-based intolerance was the root cause, not homosexuality. There is no problem with homosexuality if you live in a tolerant society, just as there are no problems with being black or a woman if you live in an enlightened society--not that we do, but you get the point.
And by the way, if you think it's on-topic just because it's sort-of, half-way, in part related to the real cause, do you also think it is on-topic for me to point out that G. Dubya Bush was an alcoholic coke fiend who has the IQ of a two-by-four every time there is an article about him anywhere?
Homosexuality didn't cause Turing's death any more than Bush's drug addictions caused him to be perhaps the stupidest elected official of modern times.
So you're saying that if wore a faux human skin outfit that looked exactly like i had skinned somebody alive to create it, I would be celebrating the beauty of humans?
Why doesn't it fall under the first rule also? It doesn't look like a number, so operators that operate on numbers should not be able to be used with "hello world 3". The programmer asked for addition on a string, which doesn't make sense because addition is an operation on numbers. What if I try to use + to do addition on a hashtable and an ordered list? Perhaps Perl will permit this too, and gives some very strange result, but surely this is not a good practice to follow in general, though perhaps that's why people say Perl is needlessly complex and a 'write only' language?
Perl doesn't like to second guess the programmer.
Hmmm, I'm not sure this is such a good general principle. Ditto for the link you referenced. Don't programmers sometimes (in many cases, often) ask for stupid things and make mistakes? Woudn't it be nice if the compiler or interpreter informed the programmer of this? Basing a language on the notion that people are infallible seems a bit iffy to me. A better guiding assumption might be that people are fallible and the compiler/interpreter should be on the lookout for mistakes.
It's economically more efficient to have differential pricing so that you can suck as much as possible out of the people who are willing to pay the most, then suck as much as possible out of the people who are willing to pay less, and so forth. It's cheaper to create and maintain only one codebase, but if the product were the same, nobody would pay more than the minimum. Thus, differential pricing by artificial limiters!, since corporations will always do what is cheapest and maximizes profitability. See this article by Hal Varian for more information.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are the breaks. Sometimes when you do the right thing, there are less than optimal results. That is why people (like Google) do the wrong thing so frequently--it pays off in many cases.
So would it be better to give the Chinese a free service that everyone knows is flawed (the Chinese know about censorship, they aren't stupid), or would you rather have Google not provide any of their free service to China? That's really the only two options Google has.
It would be better imho to take the moral high ground and not provide a censored service. Perhaps there would even be enough public outrage in China that it would effect some positive change, but that isn't relevant to whether it's right or wrong, because we don't know how the Chinese people would react. All we have control over is our own actions.
I know the Chinese people aren't stupid, but perhaps you underestimate the power of censorship to shape one's worldview. Do you believe that most Chinese have an accurate knowledge of world events? I personally do not believe so, and I believe this on the feedback of people I know who have lived in China.
Evil or no, China's laws are the way they are, and Google isn't going to change them. If Google refuses to write in a little bit of code that snips out X,Y, and Z, they have no other choice than to deny 1.3 billion people a free, useful service.
No, the PRC is the only party that can deny 1.3 billion people a free, useful service, and they do it daily in myriad ways. I'm just saying Google shouldn't help them.
As for the al-qaeda analogy, it's deeply flawed.
I'm pretty sure al-qaeda isn't a 50-odd year old sovereign nation with very firm and intractible laws about internet access.
I agree, and it's totally irrelevant. The whole analogy is getting at the issue of whether you cooperate with evil because it's the easiest thing to do. The point stands. I don't believe Google should, in either case.
If Afghanis want to hook up to Google they can without any censorship, but they have to worry about al-qaeda coming and killing them.
Okay, I'm not sure how that relates to anything, but I agree.
A better analogy would be Saudi Arabia, but they, like the PRC, have firm control on all their internet lines, so Google is still stuck with the censored-search-or-no-search problem.
It's a different analogy, making a different point, and I agree that they have the same problem, though I would phrase it as "help perpetuate misinformation, deception, and oppression, or take the highground".
I'm sure the red-blooded Americans over at Google aren't too thrilled about it either, but their only other option is to not provide any service at all. Which really doesn't help anybody.
I'd argue that helping an oppressive regime deceive and maintain control over its people is not helping anybody either, but it is the also the wrong thing to do.
This whole "giving comfort to the enemy" thing you're getting at is entirely beside the point. By refusing to obey the laws of the PRC, a sovereign nation, Google can only get themselves banned, hurting 20 million internet users without doing any damage to the tyrannical and corrupt government you rage against.
Okay, so you're saying we should just help the tyrannical and corrupt government instead. Yes, they will be banned. That is the choice of the PRC government. Your argument is structurally analogous to saying "well, if I don't sell the kid the gun, somebody else will, so what's the difference?" The difference, in both cases, is that you do the right thing or the wrong thing, even if your doing the right thing cannot have the positive effect you wish (the kid not shooting somebody, or the PRC having open access to information and no big brother).
By "do no evil" Google didn't mean "fla
Note: by 'evil', I mean evil in the sense that Google means it, not capital E evil in a religious sense. And under this definition, I think China's censorship and Google's cooperation with that censorship are evil.
No, they're not remotely the same in terms of culpability or degree of evil, but if you were teaching your child about right and wrong, and you had just explained Chinese history of the last 50 years, highlighting things like the cultural revolution, the starving millions during the 'great leap forward' (all the while maintaining that all is great in the motherland and belt-buckle production is up 300% over last year), Tiananmen square, the silent executions for thought-crime, are you then going to say that it's okay to make as much money as possible by helping them continue with the policies that allow them to continue their oppressive rein? I think most of us would think there is something wrong with that attitude, and that maximizing profit *AT ALL COST* is a dirty thing.
Anyway, if "standing tall" is such a bad, American thing, should Google offer customized results for every oppressive regime in the world (perhaps if al-qaeda paid them enough they could get custom results too?), or only the ones that can pay us massive amounts of money?
Better still in firefox: highlight the link, then right-click and select "view selection source". It will just show the source for what you've highlighted, so you don't have to search through a massive document.
It's irrelevant to the question of what they do today, but not to what they will do tomorrow. If you prefer to just say "I can't predict the future, so I won't think about, and will only look at what they do today", then fine, I hope that attitude works out for you. I personally, though, think it's better to think about the future and the implications and possible abuses of a company having 38 years of browsing data on an individual, before it's too late.
What you can be absolutely certain of is that if at some point they determine that the long-term financial impact of exploiting the extremely detailed profile information they will are accumulated that information for more targeted ads is positive, then they will do whatever possible to maximize their profit.
Two years ago, people would not have thought that google would capitulate to the demands of the Chinese government in order that the government could more effectively censor its citizens' web browsing. But they did.
Quote from Wired 11.01: Google vs. Evil:
'The total value picture' is a bs euphemism for compromising your morals for money. They have crossed the line.
Please, of course it is valuable information to them, and of course advertisers will pay more money for being able to deliver ads to a more specific demographic.
As for '.google.com' cookies for searching (so that it remembers your prefs), you can delete the cookie, and tell firefox not to allow it to be set again, then bookmark something like the following in firefox (http://www.google.com/search?as_q=%s&num=100&hl=e n&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq =&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_n hi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=of f), and then under the bookmark manager, assign the keyword 'g' under the properties. Then, you can just type 'g tin foil hat' in the location bar, and it will search google using your preferences and without a cookie.
As another poster noted, Churchhill said it best in reply to a foolish editor who 'corrected' his English: This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
Just goes to show that it isn't always best to refer to something by its interface!
Is that wrong?
Maybe he said sine? Shorthand for, what's your favorite sine-computing continuous fraction that can be parallelized on a beowolf cluster of slashbot brains in a vat--and also be redundantly, steganographically stored in said distributed 16-year old brains in vats--and before I come on to you anymore, would you like to soviet rush me?
Your argument, I guess, is that if somebody wastes something, then all waste is justified. I don't find this very compelling, but then what do I know?
Or maybe you mean that because this guy wastes time on slashdot, he shouldn't complain about any other frivolous activities in the world? I totally agree, anybody who has ever done anything wrong should not be allowed to talk about other wrongs in the world. That damn Gandhi should have just shut up about oppression in South Africa, or colonialism in India, because I'm sure he did something wrong in his life, if not as colossolly wrong as wasting time on slashdot.
The best carbon chess players are still about equal with the best silicon chess players, and they sure as hell are not doing that with silicon-type logic (evaluating billions of nodes in a search tree). That implies to me that there's a hell of a lot of intuition, for want of a better word, in chess.
And yes, Spring is an incredibly powerful, flexible, and *simple* framework to use. I don't know that I've ever used the terms elegant or beautiful for software remotely related to J2EE, but Spring is amazing.
And no, I'm not involved in the project. Just a happy user.
Lisp still seems out of reach for the non-human primates though.
Yes, dispatch-conf in combination with RCS is great. You can use it to manage config updates for whatever config files you want. You just need to put anything other than /etc in the CONFIG_PROTECT variable. Another great thing about dispatch-conf is that it can be easily configured to auto-update the configuration files if only CVS headers are different, or there are no differences but whitespace and comments. Definitely a big quantum leap above etc-update.
The even more interesting thing about Rico is that when they quizzed him again a month later, he still fetched the new toy in response to the new name, though he had only been tested the one time a month before. That is pretty impressive!
Relgious-based intolerance was the root cause, not homosexuality. There is no problem with homosexuality if you live in a tolerant society, just as there are no problems with being black or a woman if you live in an enlightened society--not that we do, but you get the point.
And by the way, if you think it's on-topic just because it's sort-of, half-way, in part related to the real cause, do you also think it is on-topic for me to point out that G. Dubya Bush was an alcoholic coke fiend who has the IQ of a two-by-four every time there is an article about him anywhere?
Homosexuality didn't cause Turing's death any more than Bush's drug addictions caused him to be perhaps the stupidest elected official of modern times.
So you're saying that if wore a faux human skin outfit that looked exactly like i had skinned somebody alive to create it, I would be celebrating the beauty of humans?
See here.
Holy shit, this guy invented the shocker?! Somehow, I thought the guy who invented that would have been younger!
That falls under the second rule above.
Why doesn't it fall under the first rule also? It doesn't look like a number, so operators that operate on numbers should not be able to be used with "hello world 3". The programmer asked for addition on a string, which doesn't make sense because addition is an operation on numbers. What if I try to use + to do addition on a hashtable and an ordered list? Perhaps Perl will permit this too, and gives some very strange result, but surely this is not a good practice to follow in general, though perhaps that's why people say Perl is needlessly complex and a 'write only' language?
Perl doesn't like to second guess the programmer.
Hmmm, I'm not sure this is such a good general principle. Ditto for the link you referenced. Don't programmers sometimes (in many cases, often) ask for stupid things and make mistakes? Woudn't it be nice if the compiler or interpreter informed the programmer of this? Basing a language on the notion that people are infallible seems a bit iffy to me. A better guiding assumption might be that people are fallible and the compiler/interpreter should be on the lookout for mistakes.
Yes, it just has an extremely unusual conception of 'clean', much as the hackers who favor Perl.
It's economically more efficient to have differential pricing so that you can suck as much as possible out of the people who are willing to pay the most, then suck as much as possible out of the people who are willing to pay less, and so forth. It's cheaper to create and maintain only one codebase, but if the product were the same, nobody would pay more than the minimum. Thus, differential pricing by artificial limiters!, since corporations will always do what is cheapest and maximizes profitability. See this article by Hal Varian for more information.
I think that's the parent's point: "Hello world 3" doesn't look like a number, yet Perl treats it as if it were a number.
foo@bar:~$ perl -e 'print "Hello world 3" + "3", "\n"'
3
foo@bar:~$