They don't regulate pollution or provide education to the poor because the government is poor and corrupt. It costs money and takes political will to do these things. And it is especially difficult to do when you're considering the second most populous country on the planet.
Having said that, the US doesn't regulate pollution either...
Compared to most other 3rd world countries it is doing pretty well. You can't compare it to northern countries.
I agree though - there's no reason to suppose Indians are more into free speech than anyone else. Indeed, I think quite the opposite: their politicians get away with almost anything, and indeed the vast majority of Indian developers use Microsoft products.
I think Stallman's comments stem from him being a bit of a hippy with the usual preconceptions about India being, like, so cosmic man...
Actually, NT 4 and later don't have microkernels (for example video drivers run in kernel mode, which is the main cause of the BSOD).
M$'s original 3.5 release of NT did, but it went too slowly...
Re:Big announcement with be OS X for Intel
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 1
You'd like to think so. However, Apple doesn't make any money from software, so it'd be a commercial disaster for them to do that - suddenly there'd be a massive drop in Mac hardware sales which is where they make most of their money.
The only reason I'd really like to see OSX ported to Intel is so I can use applications like Cubase on it. Maybe someone will find a way of emulating the OSX API - anyone know how difficult that would be given its closeness to BSD?
Think Monsanto are bad? Check out Union Carbide!
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you think this is bad, check out what American comanies do outside America. In 1984 gas leaking from a tank in a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India IMMEDIATELY KILLED 8000 people, with the death toll subsequently rising to 16000 over the last 15 years. 40% of the women pregnant at the time of the disaster spontaneously aborted. Many children were born with severe permanent disabilities. Nearly 1/5 of the population of 500,000 are TODAY suffering from a myriad of exposure-related diseases. Chromosomal abberations have also been found in the exposed population, suggesting congenital malformations in the next generation.
Union Carbide settled with the Indian government for $470 million, 1/10 of what Exxon were fined for their pollution of the Alaskan coastline. The chairman of Union Carbide is indicted for culpable homicide, but has absconded and is known to be living in a beach house in Florida.
Source: Bhopal.org, NOT Union Carbide's own site, which is much slicker and comes top of a Google search on union+carbide+bhopal.
This is because the P4 is a very peculiar beast that needs many optimisations for the code to run fast. Indeed, when Intel first shipped it they had to ship a specially optimised MPEG decoder for it to appear any faster than the PIII on benchmarks. For more info, check this out:
Compilers are notoriously slow at catching up with the latest processor design, and you can probably expect gcc to catch up with the P4 around the time it's superseded by the 64-bit babies.
This is not to slur gcc - M$'s Visual Studio compiler suite hasn't yet been optimised for the P4 as far as I know (although I expect the.NET version will be) despite the vastly greater resources they have to throw at it...
Much as I hate to say it, the Intel McKinley looks like a very well designed piece of kit, and it appears Intel have learned from their mistakes with the P4 by including a big, fast 3-level cache on the McKinley. It's also good to see them reducing their pipeline size, which means it may finally be able to compete with the G4 in terms of efficiency. However, this is of course going to kick them in the teeth in terms of competing on processor speed, which they have been pushing so hard recently in their marketing.
The same can't be said of AMD's offering, although in fairness the Hammer is not directed at the server market unlike the McKinley. The pipeline is longer than both their previous design and the McKinley, which is going to give them a performance hit. We can only hope that their cache is as good as Intel's.
What amazes me is that they can still keep adding instruction extensions without too much of a performance hit. Anyone looked at the latest instruction set documentation for these processors? Eugh! The pain of backwards compatibility...
Criminals will always be able to get guns. When has a ban ever stopped the black market from providing anything?
Quite right. As any economist will tell you, supply side controls are generally highly inefficient. I still think that letting everyone have guns is the wrong way to go. What if people started using them? Violent crime rates are just one statistic, and don't tell you a lot about the state of society in general. I don't think that a society where a large percentage of the population possess guns is one I particularly want to live in. Perhaps I'm just a dirty wooly liberal hippy.
Hello? Anyone in there? I didn't use the statistics because the poster said they were inadmissible, not because I don't know them. He is not interested in statistics. This is called reading what the person you are flaming^H^H^H^H^H^H^H replying to said. Maybe you should try it sometime.
In fact I did produce an argument if you read past the colon. What I didn't do was back it up with statistics, because the original poster claims that statistics are manipulated by governments and are inadmissable, which I am prepared to admit.
I also said that gun laws, if badly drafted or enforced, might lead to a rise in violent crime, as your example shows.
Apart from the fact that your atrocious spelling casts doubt on your intellect, there are several glaring flaws in your argument.
The word 'freedom' needs to be used carefully. What if I ask for the freedom to murder people or rob them? If you stop me, surely you are denying my freedom and rights! This should vividly demonstrate that freedom is not the same as being "allowed to do what I would like". With freedom comes responsibility, as the old saying goes, and with your freedom to own a gun comes the responsibility not to use it unless there is sufficient justification.
However, sufficient justification is rather difficult to quantify, especially in a situation where you are caught unawares (such as during a crime) or are not fully in control of your faculties (such as being angry). This factor is massively multiplied when you are in command of a device that easily allows you to kill other people.
Killing people is a serious matter, and human nature being what it is I think it should be made as difficult as possible to do so. Given the demonstrable number of miscarriages of justice on death row in the US, where people are tried by a jury, consider how many miscarriages of justice occur when someone fires off a gun at someone because he or she is angry or not in possession of all of the facts.
The claim that violent crime is lowered by relaxing gun laws is ridiculous: if criminals were not able to obtain guns they would not be able to use them in violent crime. However, gun control laws may be a bad solution if they are watered down or badly enforced, as is often the case in America due to pressure from reactionaries such as yourself.
Finally, your claim (backed up by no argument whatsoever) that the rise of the Nazi party and the second world war might not have happened if European citizens were allowed to carry guns (at least I think this is what you are arguing - you don't make yourself very clear) is frankly laughable. The only people close enough to assassinate Hitler were Germans, and most of them supported Hitler, because guess what? He was democratically elected.
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, then we can be like the US and have a huge gap between the rich and poor, massive crime, a totally disenfranchised working class, a criminally expensive healthcare system and a crap corporate-sponsored education system! And then, once we've done that, perhaps we can go and blow up some people in other countries when their governments argue with us! Bring it on!
When the US learns the meaning of social justice perhaps it can join the EU too...
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
>The UK is just a little shitty country stuck
>between having to do most of their business with
>Europe and wanting to be a boot licking whore to
>Washington. They are just as narrow minded and
>NIH affected as their American masters, except
>they're a very little country
Well, not all of us are, and a large and growing number of us would like nothing better than to be fully inside Europe and to get as quickly away from American economic policies as possible.
Unfortunately most people like me don't get heard because most of the press is controlled by that jackbooted reactionary Murdoch who we continue to allow to give us all a bad name despite the fact he's Australian. The Tories had a lot to do with it too, as I believe someone may have mentioned;)
Anyway, the typical xenophobic stuff you read in the British media makes me very ashamed, so please give people like me a break and don't assume we're all narrow minded freaks - we're just a bit quieter than them, so you have to listen a bit harder to hear us.
This could easily be construed as racism (before anyone marks me down for being a troll, no I am not necessarily accusing the poster of being racist).
Asian culture, and Indian culture particularly (the only one I know much about) places very high emphasis upon respect for authority, especially with respect to knowledge. This has many important consequences, of which a couple are:
1) The education system emphasises learning by rote over learning problem-solving skills. It is not unusual to see people reciting books in order to learn them by heart who do not understand much of what they read. These people go on to do very well in Indian exams.
2) There are a lot of exceptionally good Indian mathematicians and theoretical physicists. This is probably because mathematics is a deductive system rather than a hypotheco-inductive system like experimental physics, and hence is easier for people who have studied under the education system.
The most important thing to remember though is that there are many many Indians (some of whom I am lucky enough to know) who are extremely creative and intelligent people, despite their flawed education system.
Brain structure displays a disappearingly small variance across race. The vast majority of genetic differences between races are, unsurprisingly, concerned with external body morphology. If you understand "how your mind works" to be a combination of (racially independent) genetic brain structure plus, more importantly, very powerful cultural influence, then yes, the poster is to some extent correct, except that of course this is a massive generalisation and the number of Asians for whom it is *not* true is probably comparable in size to the population of the US.
Knowledge can be (and often is) defined as justified true belief: I have a true belief about the world, and I have a reliable justification for this truth = knowledge. Most of the argument has focussed on what constitutes a reliable justification. Can any justification be completely reliable?
Opinion is divided on this point. David Hume said you can never know things about the world for sure, because most of our knowledge (i.e. anything that is not, like some people think maths is, a priori) comes from inductive reasoning, rather than deductive reasoning which is guaranteed to preserve truth.
Induction means inferring future behaviour from past behaviour, for example inferring from the fact that the sun has risen every day so far that it will rise in the future, or, less successfully, from the fact I have never so far got lung cancer from smoking to the fact that I will never do so.
Inductive reasoning as used by humans for everyday facts about the world is generally successful, but Hume was at a loss to explain why. If he'd lived after Darwin he'd have cottoned on to the fact that creatures that don't successfully use induction don't tend to survive for very long.
However, inductive reasoning can still never guarantee you knowledge, because logically speaking past behaviour is no guide to future behaviour. It is logically possible that the laws of physics might change at any moment.
So truth and reason are exactly the problem: we may believe we have knowledge, but reason and logic tell us we can never know for sure...
Slashdot Mirror
They don't regulate pollution or provide education to the poor because the government is poor and corrupt. It costs money and takes political will to do these things. And it is especially difficult to do when you're considering the second most populous country on the planet.
Having said that, the US doesn't regulate pollution either...
Compared to most other 3rd world countries it is doing pretty well. You can't compare it to northern countries.
I agree though - there's no reason to suppose Indians are more into free speech than anyone else. Indeed, I think quite the opposite: their politicians get away with almost anything, and indeed the vast majority of Indian developers use Microsoft products.
I think Stallman's comments stem from him being a bit of a hippy with the usual preconceptions about India being, like, so cosmic man...
I think he was referring to Italy under the fascists (i.e. 2nd world war) rather than modern Italy.
Actually, NT 4 and later don't have microkernels (for example video drivers run in kernel mode, which is the main cause of the BSOD). M$'s original 3.5 release of NT did, but it went too slowly...
You'd like to think so. However, Apple doesn't make any money from software, so it'd be a commercial disaster for them to do that - suddenly there'd be a massive drop in Mac hardware sales which is where they make most of their money.
The only reason I'd really like to see OSX ported to Intel is so I can use applications like Cubase on it. Maybe someone will find a way of emulating the OSX API - anyone know how difficult that would be given its closeness to BSD?
If you think this is bad, check out what American comanies do outside America. In 1984 gas leaking from a tank in a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India IMMEDIATELY KILLED 8000 people, with the death toll subsequently rising to 16000 over the last 15 years. 40% of the women pregnant at the time of the disaster spontaneously aborted. Many children were born with severe permanent disabilities. Nearly 1/5 of the population of 500,000 are TODAY suffering from a myriad of exposure-related diseases. Chromosomal abberations have also been found in the exposed population, suggesting congenital malformations in the next generation.
Union Carbide settled with the Indian government for $470 million, 1/10 of what Exxon were fined for their pollution of the Alaskan coastline. The chairman of Union Carbide is indicted for culpable homicide, but has absconded and is known to be living in a beach house in Florida.
Source: Bhopal.org, NOT Union Carbide's own site, which is much slicker and comes top of a Google search on union+carbide+bhopal.
This is because the P4 is a very peculiar beast that needs many optimisations for the code to run fast. Indeed, when Intel first shipped it they had to ship a specially optimised MPEG decoder for it to appear any faster than the PIII on benchmarks. For more info, check this out:
.NET version will be) despite the vastly greater resources they have to throw at it...
Compilers are notoriously slow at catching up with the latest processor design, and you can probably expect gcc to catch up with the P4 around the time it's superseded by the 64-bit babies.
This is not to slur gcc - M$'s Visual Studio compiler suite hasn't yet been optimised for the P4 as far as I know (although I expect the
Much as I hate to say it, the Intel McKinley looks like a very well designed piece of kit, and it appears Intel have learned from their mistakes with the P4 by including a big, fast 3-level cache on the McKinley. It's also good to see them reducing their pipeline size, which means it may finally be able to compete with the G4 in terms of efficiency. However, this is of course going to kick them in the teeth in terms of competing on processor speed, which they have been pushing so hard recently in their marketing.
The same can't be said of AMD's offering, although in fairness the Hammer is not directed at the server market unlike the McKinley. The pipeline is longer than both their previous design and the McKinley, which is going to give them a performance hit. We can only hope that their cache is as good as Intel's.
What amazes me is that they can still keep adding instruction extensions without too much of a performance hit. Anyone looked at the latest instruction set documentation for these processors? Eugh! The pain of backwards compatibility...
Criminals will always be able to get guns. When has a ban ever stopped the black market from providing anything? Quite right. As any economist will tell you, supply side controls are generally highly inefficient. I still think that letting everyone have guns is the wrong way to go. What if people started using them? Violent crime rates are just one statistic, and don't tell you a lot about the state of society in general. I don't think that a society where a large percentage of the population possess guns is one I particularly want to live in. Perhaps I'm just a dirty wooly liberal hippy.
Hello? Anyone in there? I didn't use the statistics because the poster said they were inadmissible, not because I don't know them. He is not interested in statistics. This is called reading what the person you are flaming^H^H^H^H^H^H^H replying to said. Maybe you should try it sometime.
In fact I did produce an argument if you read past the colon. What I didn't do was back it up with statistics, because the original poster claims that statistics are manipulated by governments and are inadmissable, which I am prepared to admit. I also said that gun laws, if badly drafted or enforced, might lead to a rise in violent crime, as your example shows.
Apart from the fact that your atrocious spelling casts doubt on your intellect, there are several glaring flaws in your argument.
The word 'freedom' needs to be used carefully. What if I ask for the freedom to murder people or rob them? If you stop me, surely you are denying my freedom and rights! This should vividly demonstrate that freedom is not the same as being "allowed to do what I would like". With freedom comes responsibility, as the old saying goes, and with your freedom to own a gun comes the responsibility not to use it unless there is sufficient justification.
However, sufficient justification is rather difficult to quantify, especially in a situation where you are caught unawares (such as during a crime) or are not fully in control of your faculties (such as being angry). This factor is massively multiplied when you are in command of a device that easily allows you to kill other people.
Killing people is a serious matter, and human nature being what it is I think it should be made as difficult as possible to do so. Given the demonstrable number of miscarriages of justice on death row in the US, where people are tried by a jury, consider how many miscarriages of justice occur when someone fires off a gun at someone because he or she is angry or not in possession of all of the facts.
The claim that violent crime is lowered by relaxing gun laws is ridiculous: if criminals were not able to obtain guns they would not be able to use them in violent crime. However, gun control laws may be a bad solution if they are watered down or badly enforced, as is often the case in America due to pressure from reactionaries such as yourself.
Finally, your claim (backed up by no argument whatsoever) that the rise of the Nazi party and the second world war might not have happened if European citizens were allowed to carry guns (at least I think this is what you are arguing - you don't make yourself very clear) is frankly laughable. The only people close enough to assassinate Hitler were Germans, and most of them supported Hitler, because guess what? He was democratically elected.
Yeah, then we can be like the US and have a huge gap between the rich and poor, massive crime, a totally disenfranchised working class, a criminally expensive healthcare system and a crap corporate-sponsored education system! And then, once we've done that, perhaps we can go and blow up some people in other countries when their governments argue with us! Bring it on! When the US learns the meaning of social justice perhaps it can join the EU too...
>The UK is just a little shitty country stuck
;)
>between having to do most of their business with
>Europe and wanting to be a boot licking whore to
>Washington. They are just as narrow minded and
>NIH affected as their American masters, except
>they're a very little country
Well, not all of us are, and a large and growing number of us would like nothing better than to be fully inside Europe and to get as quickly away from American economic policies as possible.
Unfortunately most people like me don't get heard because most of the press is controlled by that jackbooted reactionary Murdoch who we continue to allow to give us all a bad name despite the fact he's Australian. The Tories had a lot to do with it too, as I believe someone may have mentioned
Anyway, the typical xenophobic stuff you read in the British media makes me very ashamed, so please give people like me a break and don't assume we're all narrow minded freaks - we're just a bit quieter than them, so you have to listen a bit harder to hear us.
Their minds don't work like that
This could easily be construed as racism (before anyone marks me down for being a troll, no I am not necessarily accusing the poster of being racist).
Asian culture, and Indian culture particularly (the only one I know much about) places very high emphasis upon respect for authority, especially with respect to knowledge. This has many important consequences, of which a couple are:
1) The education system emphasises learning by rote over learning problem-solving skills. It is not unusual to see people reciting books in order to learn them by heart who do not understand much of what they read. These people go on to do very well in Indian exams.
2) There are a lot of exceptionally good Indian mathematicians and theoretical physicists. This is probably because mathematics is a deductive system rather than a hypotheco-inductive system like experimental physics, and hence is easier for people who have studied under the education system.
The most important thing to remember though is that there are many many Indians (some of whom I am lucky enough to know) who are extremely creative and intelligent people, despite their flawed education system.
Brain structure displays a disappearingly small variance across race. The vast majority of genetic differences between races are, unsurprisingly, concerned with external body morphology. If you understand "how your mind works" to be a combination of (racially independent) genetic brain structure plus, more importantly, very powerful cultural influence, then yes, the poster is to some extent correct, except that of course this is a massive generalisation and the number of Asians for whom it is *not* true is probably comparable in size to the population of the US.
Is this some kind of philosophy troll?
Knowledge can be (and often is) defined as justified true belief: I have a true belief about the world, and I have a reliable justification for this truth = knowledge. Most of the argument has focussed on what constitutes a reliable justification. Can any justification be completely reliable?
Opinion is divided on this point. David Hume said you can never know things about the world for sure, because most of our knowledge (i.e. anything that is not, like some people think maths is, a priori) comes from inductive reasoning, rather than deductive reasoning which is guaranteed to preserve truth.
Induction means inferring future behaviour from past behaviour, for example inferring from the fact that the sun has risen every day so far that it will rise in the future, or, less successfully, from the fact I have never so far got lung cancer from smoking to the fact that I will never do so.
Inductive reasoning as used by humans for everyday facts about the world is generally successful, but Hume was at a loss to explain why. If he'd lived after Darwin he'd have cottoned on to the fact that creatures that don't successfully use induction don't tend to survive for very long.
However, inductive reasoning can still never guarantee you knowledge, because logically speaking past behaviour is no guide to future behaviour. It is logically possible that the laws of physics might change at any moment.
So truth and reason are exactly the problem: we may believe we have knowledge, but reason and logic tell us we can never know for sure...