One of the three keys with two hot girls in white tank tops, with the words "Now Playing" written on top of them? Hmmmm, wonder what that key is programmed for...
I haven't read the full text of the treaty, so I don't claim to be an expert. However, the problem that Bush and his team were faced with, but perhaps incorrectly addressed, was that the underlying calculus of the ABM treaty is changing. Originally it was a treaty between two opposing sides who, though strongly opposed and antagonistic, could still be expected to act relatively rationally in their own best interests. NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and China monopolized nuclear weapons at the time, and as long as Mutually Assured Destruction was the order of the day, rational self interest dictated that neither side initiate a nuclear war with the other, and conventional proxy wars around the globe were prevented from escalating to nuclear dimensions.
However, the power vaccuum left by the implosion of the Soviet Union is now being filled by rogue nations headed by relatively unstable and unpredictable autocrats like Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Add suicidal apocolyptic religious fundamentalism to the mix and MAD no longer seems to be the rational deterrent to a nuclear first-strike that it once was.
The new nuclear security reality for America is that we need to address the new danger of a rogue launch of relatively small numbers of nuclear missiles, while not upsetting the MAD deterrent between the US and Russia and China. A fine diplomatic line to walk, and Bush's modus operandi appeared more akin to that of a bull in a china shop than that of an experienced, sophisticated diplomat like his father. I have no idea what went on in the negotiations behind closed doors between the US and Russia, but the outcome of pissing off Russia by failing to take steps to assuage their concerns was far from ideal. I question how sincerely Bush's team (and the Russians as well for that matter) endeavored for a win-win outcome in their response to these changing realities. Both Russia's primary security requirements and America's are clear in the matter, and the failure to find a mutually acceptible solution is disappointing, puzzling, and somewhat suspicious.
Didn't you get the memo? No one on/. (except the QA crowd) runs Linux kernel 2.6 either, we're still all on 2.4, waiting for 2.6 to mature and stabilize, and some of us are still on 2.2, waiting for 2.4 to stabilize...
MySQL is fine for things where data integrity is not an absolute necessity, but where it is, for example the db's that store a multinational corporation's complete financial data, you couldn'ttrustMySQL. I understand MySQL 5 has made improvements in data integrity, but I don't know to what extent. MySQL developed their database for speed and convenience, which is why webdevs like it, and succeeded in creating a very fast db, but sacrificed correctness and integrity for it.
True, the Chinese have faced worse from their government, but in a much more isolated, less interconnected age, with fewer foreigners and media involved, and no Communist Party aspirations of joining the WTO and leading the world economically. Something like the Cultural Revolution could not happen today without massive consequences for the Chinese government. Because of that, Chinese people have less disincentive to demand more from their elected representatives (yes, elected, at local levels, even though the only idealogy that candidates are allowed to profess is that of the Party). They still have to be careful, and can be "disappeared" if not, but at least there are no thugs roaming the streets summarily executing teachers and intellectuals.
And since Google is not even the most popular search engine in China, what does it matter in terms of information access if they're not there? Other engines will take up the slack, as you point out, so they're not really completely cutting off access. Maybe Google has a better index, but I'm sure that important, non-politicized info like science and technology are available in abundance on the other engines. I even hear some Chinese people claim that the Chinese search engines give better results, though I can't verify since I don't speak Chinese.
Anyway, I don't think the Chinese would suffer significantly degraded access to information without Google. Their other engines are good enough, and Google isn't even the market share leader in China anyway. So Google's argument that it's better for them to provide some info rather than none is a bit of red herring, since in economic terms there are acceptible substitute goods for Google. It may be better for Google to provide some info (and Adwords/Sense) rather than none, but not necessarily for the Chinese people.
Google states that "while removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission." Assuming that Google's only alternative was to refuse to censor their results, and hence be completely filtered by the Great Firewall, I would argue that that option would have been more consistent with their mission than their chosen path.
The absence of the world's largest, most popular search engine inside the Chinese firewall would have been as glaringly obvious as a pink elephant. The Chinese people aren't idiots, they know their government censors information, and they would know why Google had suddenly been blocked by the firewall. Word would get out, through the grapevine and other unofficial channels, and it might even constitute an embarrassing loss of face for the Communist party. Of course, the Chinese would much prefer that Baidu, Sino, or one of their own home-grown search engines be the #1 search engine, but they would still know that the only truly reliable search engine, the one that refuses to censor their information, was Google, and had been blocked by their government. Unlike Americans, the Chinese have long memories, and such an association would pay off in PR and face for Google in the long term.
Google on the other hand might take a stock price hit, but no investor could say they were't warned that Google might make decisions based on long-term considerations rather than short term stock-price-propping, or that Google's corporate values might sometimes conflict with the best interests of their stock price. However, such a move would certainly solidify the image of Google as a singular organization with the most honest and accurate search results worldwide, truly dedicated to its mission of organizing all the world's information.
Furthermore, Google's refusal to cooperate with the Chinese Government might have opened the door for other search engines, media, and businesses to follow suit, and emboldened the Chinese people and businesses to demand more unfettered access to information and less government interference. Someone mentioned on/. in a comment on one of the other articles about Google's recent decision that one problem that international businesses, particularly media, face in dealing with China is that they all deal individually with the Chinese government, and hence have little to no leverage. The Chinese government needs multinationals right now as much as, or more than, multinationals need China, but China needs them in aggregate rather than individually, so can take a divide-and-conquer approach at regulating them. What is needed is an industry organization, formal or informal, dedicated to upholding freedom of the press, to which all media companies operating in China can belong, a support network that mutually resists the pressure by the Chinese government on any one company to censor information. Google refusing to censor its results could have been a step in that direction, and if any company has the clout to the lead the formation of such an organization, it's Google.
So this appears to be an unfortunately wasted opportunity, for Google to make a strong political statement based on its values, that might have hurt it in the short term but most likely have paid off in PR and face in the long-term.
However, as so many people like to say, the US is not the rest of the world. There are other countries, with other values, and they aren't necessarily the same as ours. Are they "wrong"? What makes ours "right"? Because we like them?
Because our values are fundamentally designed to minimize human suffering by protecting the weak from the strong, the minority from the majority, the peaceful from the violent. That we don't always perfectly live up to them is not a critique of our values, but of our weakness as a society, our unwillingness and/or inability to thwart those among us who would violate them. The attempt at curtailing power, and its corrupting influence, be it via our guaranteed freedoms, the checks and balances of our government and other Constitutional constrictions, or via anti-trust laws, or via crimial law, etc. are expressions of our belief that everyone should be safe from the destructive whims of the powerful and corrupt.
The moral relativism you express in your posting also happens to have been used as the fundamental philosophical justification for the murderous rampages of Communism during the past century. The short logic goes like this: Everything is relative, there is no absolute truth:: therefore there is no absolute morality:: therefore right or wrong is only what each culture decides it to be. The Communists continued by mixing materialism into the mix, saying that in a materialist existence, human beings have no soul but are rather organic automatons, carrying out our biological programming with no free-will, doomed to go through life responding to stimuli in a predeterimined manner. Therefore, the individual, and her life and happiness, are worth nothing; rather all that matters is the overall happiness of society. Since there is no absolute right or wrong, a society is perfectly justified in maximizing its overall happiness by whatever means it chooses. The Communists chose information control, psychological programming, and mass murder of those who would not be reprogrammed to accept the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Most of this you can verify at Marxists.org.
I don't claim that there is an absolute truth, and if there is I question whether any human can fully know it. However, it should be apparent to all that the values a society adapts and institutionalizes (or fails to) have real consequences for real people. One of the Communists' fallacies was in believing that they could maximize society's overall happiness by destroying the happiness of some individuals, a mindset that instead curtailed the happiness, and lives, of most of the populace.
America's values on the other hand are diametrically opposed - the happiness of the individual is the happiness of society, and while many people are unhappy for a variety of reasons, we are on average much happier, safer, and better off than the average person living under Communist (or to be precise, Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist) values.
Never forget that, regardless of the outcome of the dispute between relativism and absolutism (which we may never know), the values a socity embraces have real consequences for that society. Pay attention to those consequences, and, dare I say it, compare them, evaluate them, and judge them. Some values, and their consequences, are better than others.
Not quite, sounds like the title was written by LISP-kiddie trying incorporate some recursion. Try this instead: 'Asynchronous Requests with Javascript and Asynchronous Requests with Javascript and Asynchronous Requests with Javascript and Asynchronous Requests with Javascript..."
Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.'
No, that's not what he said, stop twisting his words to set up a straw man you can then revel in knocking down. If you watch Jobs' full keynote presentation you'll see that he specifically compares only processor benchmarks, not system benchmarks. He even made the disclaimer: "Now everything's not gonna run 2 to 3 X faster, you know the disks aren't 2 to 3 X, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, [the Core Duo] is 2 to 3 times faster [than the G5]."
I'm pretty sure that, in order to call it "using" a computer, some sort of interface must exist, be it keyboard mouse and monitor, binary switch, light gun, real gun, neural link, telekinesis, or whatever. Otherwise, you're not using it, are you?
Does shotgun count? That's a kind of interface, I think MS perfected it...
National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors
Next thing you know the world will be ravaged by a rogue band of T-2000's, made of perfectly disguised, indestructable biomimetic nanoconducting polyalloy!
but is there any way this project won't end up crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
Crushed, no, but possibly delayed. Use Airbus as your precedent - they coordinated a huge project, across multiple businesses and countries and got the job done. This sounds like an Internet project of a similar scale and methodology as Airbus - corporations and governments working together. Although to survive and prosper in Internet time you gotta move a lot faster than if you're building airplanes, which the French government may have trouble with. Of course, governments don't have to profit to survive...
Cool, social welfare for the IT crowd! My girlfriend wants to move back to her home in Europe, perfect timing! 6 month vacations, 35-hour weeks, can't fire me for not working rules, and all sorts of other goodies! Goodbye freedom-fries, hello petite fours!
Oh, and did somebody say something about building a search engine?
IntelliJ IDEA is available for a free 30 day trial. Just download it and try it out, and you should be able to answer your own question. I did and decided that while IDEA is good, Eclipse has more compelling price:performance.
Slashdot Mirror
It's slashdot, what do you think he meant? ;)
"Doesn't the field become richer when the wider spectrum of legal thought is explored and encouraged?"
Intellectually and ethically, or financially?
One of the three keys with two hot girls in white tank tops, with the words "Now Playing" written on top of them? Hmmmm, wonder what that key is programmed for...
I haven't read the full text of the treaty, so I don't claim to be an expert. However, the problem that Bush and his team were faced with, but perhaps incorrectly addressed, was that the underlying calculus of the ABM treaty is changing. Originally it was a treaty between two opposing sides who, though strongly opposed and antagonistic, could still be expected to act relatively rationally in their own best interests. NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and China monopolized nuclear weapons at the time, and as long as Mutually Assured Destruction was the order of the day, rational self interest dictated that neither side initiate a nuclear war with the other, and conventional proxy wars around the globe were prevented from escalating to nuclear dimensions.
However, the power vaccuum left by the implosion of the Soviet Union is now being filled by rogue nations headed by relatively unstable and unpredictable autocrats like Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Add suicidal apocolyptic religious fundamentalism to the mix and MAD no longer seems to be the rational deterrent to a nuclear first-strike that it once was.
The new nuclear security reality for America is that we need to address the new danger of a rogue launch of relatively small numbers of nuclear missiles, while not upsetting the MAD deterrent between the US and Russia and China. A fine diplomatic line to walk, and Bush's modus operandi appeared more akin to that of a bull in a china shop than that of an experienced, sophisticated diplomat like his father. I have no idea what went on in the negotiations behind closed doors between the US and Russia, but the outcome of pissing off Russia by failing to take steps to assuage their concerns was far from ideal. I question how sincerely Bush's team (and the Russians as well for that matter) endeavored for a win-win outcome in their response to these changing realities. Both Russia's primary security requirements and America's are clear in the matter, and the failure to find a mutually acceptible solution is disappointing, puzzling, and somewhat suspicious.
Didn't you get the memo? No one on /. (except the QA crowd) runs Linux kernel 2.6 either, we're still all on 2.4, waiting for 2.6 to mature and stabilize, and some of us are still on 2.2, waiting for 2.4 to stabilize...
[ducks]
MySQL is fine for things where data integrity is not an absolute necessity, but where it is, for example the db's that store a multinational corporation's complete financial data, you couldn't trust MySQL. I understand MySQL 5 has made improvements in data integrity, but I don't know to what extent. MySQL developed their database for speed and convenience, which is why webdevs like it, and succeeded in creating a very fast db, but sacrificed correctness and integrity for it.
Griffin: We think now that we understand in substantial technical detail the mechanism by which the foam is and was liberated.
::rolleyes::
It wasn't a liberation, it was an occupation, I tell you!!! That foam never even wanted to be liberated!
Seriously, why not just say "detached", "stripped", or some other, more relevant word?
True. I think that's the silver lining around this cloud...
Ok!
True, the Chinese have faced worse from their government, but in a much more isolated, less interconnected age, with fewer foreigners and media involved, and no Communist Party aspirations of joining the WTO and leading the world economically. Something like the Cultural Revolution could not happen today without massive consequences for the Chinese government. Because of that, Chinese people have less disincentive to demand more from their elected representatives (yes, elected, at local levels, even though the only idealogy that candidates are allowed to profess is that of the Party). They still have to be careful, and can be "disappeared" if not, but at least there are no thugs roaming the streets summarily executing teachers and intellectuals.
And since Google is not even the most popular search engine in China, what does it matter in terms of information access if they're not there? Other engines will take up the slack, as you point out, so they're not really completely cutting off access. Maybe Google has a better index, but I'm sure that important, non-politicized info like science and technology are available in abundance on the other engines. I even hear some Chinese people claim that the Chinese search engines give better results, though I can't verify since I don't speak Chinese.
Anyway, I don't think the Chinese would suffer significantly degraded access to information without Google. Their other engines are good enough, and Google isn't even the market share leader in China anyway. So Google's argument that it's better for them to provide some info rather than none is a bit of red herring, since in economic terms there are acceptible substitute goods for Google. It may be better for Google to provide some info (and Adwords/Sense) rather than none, but not necessarily for the Chinese people.
Unfortunately, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire Martian copper salvo will probably be accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
It doesn't really sound like Intel is playing catch-up here.
Except in the one area that really matters - actual chip performance.
Google states that "while removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission." Assuming that Google's only alternative was to refuse to censor their results, and hence be completely filtered by the Great Firewall, I would argue that that option would have been more consistent with their mission than their chosen path.
/. in a comment on one of the other articles about Google's recent decision that one problem that international businesses, particularly media, face in dealing with China is that they all deal individually with the Chinese government, and hence have little to no leverage. The Chinese government needs multinationals right now as much as, or more than, multinationals need China, but China needs them in aggregate rather than individually, so can take a divide-and-conquer approach at regulating them. What is needed is an industry organization, formal or informal, dedicated to upholding freedom of the press, to which all media companies operating in China can belong, a support network that mutually resists the pressure by the Chinese government on any one company to censor information. Google refusing to censor its results could have been a step in that direction, and if any company has the clout to the lead the formation of such an organization, it's Google.
The absence of the world's largest, most popular search engine inside the Chinese firewall would have been as glaringly obvious as a pink elephant. The Chinese people aren't idiots, they know their government censors information, and they would know why Google had suddenly been blocked by the firewall. Word would get out, through the grapevine and other unofficial channels, and it might even constitute an embarrassing loss of face for the Communist party. Of course, the Chinese would much prefer that Baidu, Sino, or one of their own home-grown search engines be the #1 search engine, but they would still know that the only truly reliable search engine, the one that refuses to censor their information, was Google, and had been blocked by their government. Unlike Americans, the Chinese have long memories, and such an association would pay off in PR and face for Google in the long term.
Google on the other hand might take a stock price hit, but no investor could say they were't warned that Google might make decisions based on long-term considerations rather than short term stock-price-propping, or that Google's corporate values might sometimes conflict with the best interests of their stock price. However, such a move would certainly solidify the image of Google as a singular organization with the most honest and accurate search results worldwide, truly dedicated to its mission of organizing all the world's information.
Furthermore, Google's refusal to cooperate with the Chinese Government might have opened the door for other search engines, media, and businesses to follow suit, and emboldened the Chinese people and businesses to demand more unfettered access to information and less government interference. Someone mentioned on
So this appears to be an unfortunately wasted opportunity, for Google to make a strong political statement based on its values, that might have hurt it in the short term but most likely have paid off in PR and face in the long-term.
Google, we expected better.
However, as so many people like to say, the US is not the rest of the world. There are other countries, with other values, and they aren't necessarily the same as ours. Are they "wrong"? What makes ours "right"? Because we like them?
:: therefore there is no absolute morality :: therefore right or wrong is only what each culture decides it to be. The Communists continued by mixing materialism into the mix, saying that in a materialist existence, human beings have no soul but are rather organic automatons, carrying out our biological programming with no free-will, doomed to go through life responding to stimuli in a predeterimined manner. Therefore, the individual, and her life and happiness, are worth nothing; rather all that matters is the overall happiness of society. Since there is no absolute right or wrong, a society is perfectly justified in maximizing its overall happiness by whatever means it chooses. The Communists chose information control, psychological programming, and mass murder of those who would not be reprogrammed to accept the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Most of this you can verify at Marxists.org.
Because our values are fundamentally designed to minimize human suffering by protecting the weak from the strong, the minority from the majority, the peaceful from the violent. That we don't always perfectly live up to them is not a critique of our values, but of our weakness as a society, our unwillingness and/or inability to thwart those among us who would violate them. The attempt at curtailing power, and its corrupting influence, be it via our guaranteed freedoms, the checks and balances of our government and other Constitutional constrictions, or via anti-trust laws, or via crimial law, etc. are expressions of our belief that everyone should be safe from the destructive whims of the powerful and corrupt.
The moral relativism you express in your posting also happens to have been used as the fundamental philosophical justification for the murderous rampages of Communism during the past century. The short logic goes like this: Everything is relative, there is no absolute truth
I don't claim that there is an absolute truth, and if there is I question whether any human can fully know it. However, it should be apparent to all that the values a society adapts and institutionalizes (or fails to) have real consequences for real people. One of the Communists' fallacies was in believing that they could maximize society's overall happiness by destroying the happiness of some individuals, a mindset that instead curtailed the happiness, and lives, of most of the populace.
America's values on the other hand are diametrically opposed - the happiness of the individual is the happiness of society, and while many people are unhappy for a variety of reasons, we are on average much happier, safer, and better off than the average person living under Communist (or to be precise, Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist) values.
Never forget that, regardless of the outcome of the dispute between relativism and absolutism (which we may never know), the values a socity embraces have real consequences for that society. Pay attention to those consequences, and, dare I say it, compare them, evaluate them, and judge them. Some values, and their consequences, are better than others.
[channeling Mark Twain]
There are three kinds of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts!
Not quite, sounds like the title was written by LISP-kiddie trying incorporate some recursion. Try this instead: 'Asynchronous Requests with Javascript and Asynchronous Requests with Javascript and Asynchronous Requests with Javascript and Asynchronous Requests with Javascript ..."
Barry Norton writes "Steve Jobs, at the MacWorld tradeshow, boasted: 'the new iMac [with] Intel processor is two to three times faster than the iMac G5.'
No, that's not what he said, stop twisting his words to set up a straw man you can then revel in knocking down. If you watch Jobs' full keynote presentation you'll see that he specifically compares only processor benchmarks, not system benchmarks. He even made the disclaimer: "Now everything's not gonna run 2 to 3 X faster, you know the disks aren't 2 to 3 X, etc., but on the most important benchmarks, [the Core Duo] is 2 to 3 times faster [than the G5]."
Just use Opera and type into the address bar "g [querystring]" for a direct Google search. That's about as efficient as you can to get.
But then Akamai runs them all on linux, whereas I belive Hotmail is all Windows based. You do the math.
So much for lower TCO due to less expensive staffing costs...
I'm pretty sure that, in order to call it "using" a computer, some sort of interface must exist, be it keyboard mouse and monitor, binary switch, light gun, real gun, neural link, telekinesis, or whatever. Otherwise, you're not using it, are you?
Does shotgun count? That's a kind of interface, I think MS perfected it...
[ducks]
Laugh people, it was a joke.
National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors
Next thing you know the world will be ravaged by a rogue band of T-2000's, made of perfectly disguised, indestructable biomimetic nanoconducting polyalloy!
but is there any way this project won't end up crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy?
Crushed, no, but possibly delayed. Use Airbus as your precedent - they coordinated a huge project, across multiple businesses and countries and got the job done. This sounds like an Internet project of a similar scale and methodology as Airbus - corporations and governments working together. Although to survive and prosper in Internet time you gotta move a lot faster than if you're building airplanes, which the French government may have trouble with. Of course, governments don't have to profit to survive...
Cool, social welfare for the IT crowd! My girlfriend wants to move back to her home in Europe, perfect timing! 6 month vacations, 35-hour weeks, can't fire me for not working rules, and all sorts of other goodies! Goodbye freedom-fries, hello petite fours!
Oh, and did somebody say something about building a search engine?
[ducks]
IntelliJ IDEA is available for a free 30 day trial. Just download it and try it out, and you should be able to answer your own question. I did and decided that while IDEA is good, Eclipse has more compelling price:performance.
There are other free options as well:
Oracle JDeveloper
Borland JBuilder
And maybe a few others if you search Google for "free Java IDE".