Re:Remember that Censorship does exist at home too
on
Google's China Problem
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· Score: 1
Seen from Europe, US news have been so incredibly single-sided when it comes to War on Terror or Irak. And how often have you seen body bags coming back from Irak on national television?
The UK media is a bit better at that. When our soldiers get killed, you often see the coffins getting brought off the plane back home. It seems the right thing to do; if we're going to go to war, it's almost indecent to pretend there are no consequences.
And Europe is no better: the press was proudly displaying the Caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, boasting about how they support freedom of expression. Yet how many of those newspapers would accept to publish a carricature combining the Christ, the Holocaust, and phallic symbols.
Three or four newspapers displayed those, as far as I can remember. The rest discussed them but didn't reprint them. And FWIW, (a) most of them, (b) very few of them, (c) you don't know the tabloids at all, do you?
Can we conceive that for muslim communities, displaying a representation of their prophet is just as unacceptable as using 4-letter words in the US?
I wish they would not cause riots because of this, on the other hand they don't have the means to muzzle our mass media as other communities can.
Using those words may well be unacceptable in the US mass media. I'm not in the US, although this post will likely have an American readership. Let's see what we can do.
Fuck Fuck Cunting Bastard Fuck Arsefaced Shiteating Motherfucking Fuckwits, Fuck You And Your Hell-Damned Raggedcunted Daughter. And, let's get the religious angle in: Fuck Christ And Fuck His Holy Fucking Whore Mother, They Fuck Each Other Anyway.
Riots, anybody? No? Threats to behead the foulmouthed foreigner? Still no? Who'd have thought it.
Moreover, maybe as you say, in some Muslim communities, displaying a picture of the Prophet is offensive. Too bad. As far as I know, Denmark isn't a Muslim community. Neither is France, neither is Germany - although all three have some Muslims living there. Should the press censor themselves to suit every last minority sect? There are people in the world who believe all sorts of things are obscene or offensive; however, most of them just have to put up with it. I personally find Cherie Blair's face extremely offensive, but I don't riot about it.
I don't think that there are a lot of people around who could fill 10 GB with legal music.
Filling ten gigabytes with legal iTunes downloads: yeah, few enough people will do that.
But filling ten gigabytes by going to the CD collection you've accumulated over the last twenty years and systematically ripping the whole lot? That's easily done, especially if you rip at a decent bitrate.
Not only that, there are plenty of people with a hell of a lot of illegal music. That's still no reason why Apple wouldn't want to sell them giant-capacity iPods. Sure, they won't become iTunes customers, but they still make their money on the iPod, right?
... there are deadlier things in the world than radioactivity. Humans have ways of dealing with most of them; wild animals don't. Sure, radiation causes cancer - but if you're a wild animal living in the Ukrainian wilderness, chances are something else is going to get you first.
I wonder if what's really going on here is that humans live long enough to be troubled by the Chernobyl - and so have all buggered off - while the animals can expect to die young from unrelated causes anyway, and love Chernobyl because there are no people around.
In Oblivion (spoilers follow), you work for the Dark Brotherhood and interact with several of their members while performing missions of dubious morality, until you are told that there's a traitor in the Brotherhood, and now you must kill all your friends just to be safe.
See, everybody? THIS is why all the smart kids out of assassin school sign up with the Morag Tong. You can be sure of steady advancement in a safe and secure environment, in which the only people who need to get killed are those who have writs out on them. Well, them and the Dark Brotherhood.
Sure, people say we're a stuffy, traditionalist institution of the creaky old Dunmer establishment, but it sure beats the scene you can expect with the other lot...
Apply: the Recruitment Desk, Morag Tong Central Headquarters, In the Bottom of a Locked Hatch in a Disused Storage Room in the Unlit Basement Full of Diseased Rats Under the Arena Fighters' Locker Room, Vivec City, Vvardenfell. Beware of the leopard.
I suspect that a few years down the line you will a Lancet study on a whole slew of Revolution related injuries - RSI, bruises and fractures etc. - caused by a system that requires someone to wave a controller around, possibly quite forcefully.
Another scenario. I'm playing Super Super Katana Fighter F Revolution-chan on my new huge TV screen with the Revolution controller. I've been playing it for three hours now, using the controller as a sword. Its motions translate to those of the legendary Moon Katana on screen, and I've carved my way through Bad Fighter Ototototo, Evil Mage-wizard Kamumimo and I'm up against Big Ultimate Monster Fufuuru-sama. My hands are sweating badly from all this swinging around of a little plastic stick, but this is the final fight and I'm about to win...
... swing from below to get beneath his guard...
... oh shit...
... slippery hands...
... no grip...
SMAAAAAASSSHHH!
There will be some truly livid parents next Boxing Day, I guarantee. And lots of new TVs sold shortly afterwards.
So, with a spinning black hole, is the black hole spinning inside the universe, or is the universe spinning around the black hole? Or is it both and neither at the same time?
Buggered if I know. Ask Mach. And then go spin a bucket of water on its axis for a while...
I dont understand why MS doesnt just say "Ok, fuck you" and withdraw from europe. Refuse to sell their products or provide support to anyone in the EU and only provide support for existing liscences until they expire.
Most obvious reason: the EU is the world's biggest market. The MS shareholders would go berserk on the spot.
More subtle reason: if MS left, in an attempt to blackmail the EU... 'right, you don't like us, try doing without Vista!' one of two things would happen:
1) it turns out that the EU can do just fine without Vista. So why should anyone else cough up for the 'upgrade'? MS loses money.
2) it turns out that the EU economy is crippled without MS products. Very well: issue an edict, all Microsoft copyrights within the EU are revoked. End of problem. Microsoft screams in agony as every geek across a very heavily wired continent puts Vista up on FTP. Legally.
Unfortunately, THORP is currently closed due to a large leak of radioactive material.
Note that when we say 'leak', we're not talking about 'into the outside world', or anything. The stuff leaked out of a pipe, into a backup chamber which was intended to... contain any leaks. Which it did, just fine.
The trouble here is the sheer quantity of the stuff, and the fact that nobody noticed the leak for so long.
Make it so that it just takes an incredible amount of energy to accelerate anything past say 100mph. So make the speed of light say 200mph for Lorentz transformation purposes, but other than that make the physics semi-realistic. Would that make swords axes and arrows the state of the art as far as combat technology goes?
Not really. A relativistic bullet from a gunman in Slow Light World won't hit you that much sooner than an arrow from an archer, but will carry a whole hell of a lot more kinetic energy and so will deal more damage. It's the kinetic energy that's the advantage of real-world bullets too, more than the travel time; I don't recall hearing that mediaeval archers were troubled by people dodging arrows.
200mph light might be more interesting for a steampunk setting, rather than mediaeval fantasy. Suppose you live in such a world and you build the Mallard...
But for a consumer, all that matters is the cost of energy: if 1W from electricity costs the same as 1W from gas
It generally doesn't, because of the conversion and transmission losses. Heating by electricity is more expensive than heating by gas, because the power plant has to burn more gas to supply that electricity than you would have had to burn yourself to heat your hom directly. If gas prices were to rise, then electricity prices would rise along with them (and have been doing just that).
However, in some circumstances this may change; if, say, the Russians were to cut off the gas supplies to Europe, it might make sense for the French to just leave on their lightbulbs, because their nuclear-supplied electricity would suddenly be preferable to burning what little expensive gas is available. And if you happen to live in Iceland, then you may as well please yourself, you lucky sods with your cheap clean geothermal power...
It seems to me the more heat I produce from my bulb/processor, the less my temperature regulator will pull energy from my heating system (based on gas, which is becoming more expensive). What's wrong with this way of thinking?
There's an extra layer of inefficiency. If you heat your house by burning gas, you get nearly perfect efficiency: almost every joule of heat liberated by the chemical reaction goes into your house, with a relatively small amount of waste heat going up the chimney; modern boilers are very efficient indeed at getting every bit of heat they can.
If, OTOH, you heat your house by electric current - i.e. by the waste heat from your electrical devices - then somewhere in the world there's a power plant burning gas on your behalf. That plant converts gas to heat at higher efficiency than your boiler, but then wastes energy in the conversion to electricity, and then even more is lost in transmission to your home.
So, if you switch to more economical lighting, your boiler will have to burn a little extra gas because you're no longer getting the heating effect of old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs. But that's more than offset at the power plant, where they have to burn less gas because you're consuming less electricity.
You know, there ought to be some status in law, where a person's opinion is no longer regarded as more meaningful than purely entropic noise. Lets call it cum granum salis. A person having this status could neither be sole plaintiff nor sole witness in a legal case.
Not quite the same thing, but there's a concept of the 'vexatious litigant' in some places. They're forbidden to sue anybody, because they've abused the courts repeatedly and egregiously. The British courts' killfile is here, and I notice from the wikipedia link that the notorious Christian extremist Fred Phelps is listed as a vexatious litigant in the US.
I still can't figure out how the hell people can stand gaps in their music where no gap should exist. (I.e. tracks that have continuity between them.)
So true. First thing I did after I installed Rockbox on my iHP-140 was play Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Oh, the joy when it got the 'Billy Shears' transition perfectly right...
Does Rockbox let an iRiver function as an external USB hard drive? I sort of wanted to get an iRiver a while back, because it seemed to be the best bank-for-buck (compared to iPod) but it seemed to be 'doze-only.
WTF?
Can't speak for the newer models, but my iHP-140 appears as a USB hard drive, I cp files onto it, it plays 'em. I haven't even touched the CD of software that came with it.
I've installed Rockbox, but even with the original firmware it worked that way.
US forces raid a house in Afghanistan based on a tipoff that the house contains Al Qaeda members... US forces have no evidence that they are members of Al Qaeda other than the tipoff from locals
So, in other words: a neighbour who doesn't like you very much denounces you to the authorities, and you get disappeared off to the concentration camp, because they can't try you (no real evidence) and they can't possibly just let you go.
The wisdom that can be learned from Nazi Germany is that when a country becomes unjustly militant against its neighbors, they must be stopped immediatly.
Wow. And you're using this line to justify your support for Bush? Classic.
Here's another SAS soldier described as first-rate who has refused to return to Iraq:
He's just been on a discussion panel on Newsnight on this subject. He said that it could easily have been him on trial; if his CO hadn't discharged him when he made clear his intention to leave the Army, he would have refused to go and would have been court-martialled in the same way.
Another man on the panel - I forget his background - suggested that it may be a result of overstretch. Perhaps, he suggested, the Air Force doctor's CO simply couldn't replace him? Recruitment has been difficult in recent years, for reasons which should be bloody obvious.
The Brits seem very concerned about it, to the point of getting Condi and... some State Dept official whose name I forget on the BBC Today interview program and grilling them on it. (Not American media softball throwing, either. Real calling bullshit and holding feet to fire.)
Just to make sure you're not getting a false impression here... Yes, Guantanamo Bay is widely considered an abomination, and I would say it's the number one reason why British people are becoming uneasy about our alliance with the US, but - don't think that's the only, or even the main, reason why Condi got a tough time from the British media. They do that to everyone.
For a long time now British political interviewing has been dominated by Jeremy Paxman. I think he's mellowed somewhat in recent years, but he remains dangerous; his motto has always been 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?' He's always been a tough interviewer, and occasionally outright hostile.
One legendary question-and-not-answer session later, every reporter on every broadcaster in the country wants to be like him. Everyone gets a tough time now.
Oh, and if you're wondering... no, he didn't threaten to overrule him. He might have said so at the time.
British citizens in Guantanamo get out again pretty sharpish on account of UK Government pressure
The UK government was reluctant to make a fuss about Britons in that place to begin with, and then the US government paid little attention to said pressure for years afterwards.
The Tipton three, for instance, were first imprisoned in November 2001, and later released in March 2004. Moazzam Begg was disappeared in February 2002, from Islamabad, Pakistan, and released in January 2005. Hardly sharpish.
Can you name even one person who has been "shipped off sans due process to an offshore prison camp" who wasn't captured in a war zone under arms while not wearing a uniform?
You've been told a fair few already, here are two more:
Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil al-Banna. Disappeared from the Gambia, where they had just arrived from the UK on business, into the loving care of the CIA, and thence to the gulag in Cuba. Probably sold out to the Americans by MI5.
Mostly from wondering how the hell evolution arrives at a stick insect and whether anyone had ever found a half-stick insect.
Well, regarding how the hell evolution arrives at a stick insect: the advantage of looking like that is obvious, it's camouflage. Avoid getting eaten by birds.
It's common to hear from creationists that camouflage either works perfectly or not at all. That evolution couldn't get towards a stick insect gradually, because it would have to look [i]enough[/i] like a stick to fool a bird to begin with, before natural selection could begin work on refining the disguise gradually.
But really... an insect living on a stick that's just a little longer and narrower than its cousins might be blatantly obvious, to a bird looking straight at it, hunting in broad daylight, but what about at night? Or to a bird that's flying past at a distance, not really hunting but kind of peckish? That slight difference in shape could save its life.
And in the end, if I'm an insect on a stick, my camouflage doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be better than yours. The bird will go for you first.
Run the tape on for a hundred thousand years and you have stick insects that you can't spot even when you know for a fact you're looking at a branch with a dozen stick insects on it, in bright light, right in front of your nose.
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The UK media is a bit better at that. When our soldiers get killed, you often see the coffins getting brought off the plane back home. It seems the right thing to do; if we're going to go to war, it's almost indecent to pretend there are no consequences. And Europe is no better: the press was proudly displaying the Caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, boasting about how they support freedom of expression. Yet how many of those newspapers would accept to publish a carricature combining the Christ, the Holocaust, and phallic symbols.
Three or four newspapers displayed those, as far as I can remember. The rest discussed them but didn't reprint them. And FWIW, (a) most of them, (b) very few of them, (c) you don't know the tabloids at all, do you?
Can we conceive that for muslim communities, displaying a representation of their prophet is just as unacceptable as using 4-letter words in the US? I wish they would not cause riots because of this, on the other hand they don't have the means to muzzle our mass media as other communities can.
Using those words may well be unacceptable in the US mass media. I'm not in the US, although this post will likely have an American readership. Let's see what we can do.
Fuck Fuck Cunting Bastard Fuck Arsefaced Shiteating Motherfucking Fuckwits, Fuck You And Your Hell-Damned Raggedcunted Daughter. And, let's get the religious angle in: Fuck Christ And Fuck His Holy Fucking Whore Mother, They Fuck Each Other Anyway.
Riots, anybody? No? Threats to behead the foulmouthed foreigner? Still no? Who'd have thought it.
Moreover, maybe as you say, in some Muslim communities, displaying a picture of the Prophet is offensive. Too bad. As far as I know, Denmark isn't a Muslim community. Neither is France, neither is Germany - although all three have some Muslims living there. Should the press censor themselves to suit every last minority sect? There are people in the world who believe all sorts of things are obscene or offensive; however, most of them just have to put up with it. I personally find Cherie Blair's face extremely offensive, but I don't riot about it.
Filling ten gigabytes with legal iTunes downloads: yeah, few enough people will do that.
But filling ten gigabytes by going to the CD collection you've accumulated over the last twenty years and systematically ripping the whole lot? That's easily done, especially if you rip at a decent bitrate.
Not only that, there are plenty of people with a hell of a lot of illegal music. That's still no reason why Apple wouldn't want to sell them giant-capacity iPods. Sure, they won't become iTunes customers, but they still make their money on the iPod, right?
I wonder if what's really going on here is that humans live long enough to be troubled by the Chernobyl - and so have all buggered off - while the animals can expect to die young from unrelated causes anyway, and love Chernobyl because there are no people around.
I mean, it's happened before.
See, everybody? THIS is why all the smart kids out of assassin school sign up with the Morag Tong. You can be sure of steady advancement in a safe and secure environment, in which the only people who need to get killed are those who have writs out on them. Well, them and the Dark Brotherhood.
Sure, people say we're a stuffy, traditionalist institution of the creaky old Dunmer establishment, but it sure beats the scene you can expect with the other lot...
Apply: the Recruitment Desk, Morag Tong Central Headquarters, In the Bottom of a Locked Hatch in a Disused Storage Room in the Unlit Basement Full of Diseased Rats Under the Arena Fighters' Locker Room, Vivec City, Vvardenfell. Beware of the leopard.
Another scenario. I'm playing Super Super Katana Fighter F Revolution-chan on my new huge TV screen with the Revolution controller. I've been playing it for three hours now, using the controller as a sword. Its motions translate to those of the legendary Moon Katana on screen, and I've carved my way through Bad Fighter Ototototo, Evil Mage-wizard Kamumimo and I'm up against Big Ultimate Monster Fufuuru-sama. My hands are sweating badly from all this swinging around of a little plastic stick, but this is the final fight and I'm about to win...
... swing from below to get beneath his guard...
... oh shit...
... slippery hands ...
... no grip ...
SMAAAAAASSSHHH!
There will be some truly livid parents next Boxing Day, I guarantee. And lots of new TVs sold shortly afterwards.
Buggered if I know. Ask Mach. And then go spin a bucket of water on its axis for a while...
Most obvious reason: the EU is the world's biggest market. The MS shareholders would go berserk on the spot.
More subtle reason: if MS left, in an attempt to blackmail the EU... 'right, you don't like us, try doing without Vista!' one of two things would happen:
1) it turns out that the EU can do just fine without Vista. So why should anyone else cough up for the 'upgrade'? MS loses money.
2) it turns out that the EU economy is crippled without MS products. Very well: issue an edict, all Microsoft copyrights within the EU are revoked. End of problem. Microsoft screams in agony as every geek across a very heavily wired continent puts Vista up on FTP. Legally.
Note that when we say 'leak', we're not talking about 'into the outside world', or anything. The stuff leaked out of a pipe, into a backup chamber which was intended to... contain any leaks. Which it did, just fine.
The trouble here is the sheer quantity of the stuff, and the fact that nobody noticed the leak for so long.
Not really. A relativistic bullet from a gunman in Slow Light World won't hit you that much sooner than an arrow from an archer, but will carry a whole hell of a lot more kinetic energy and so will deal more damage. It's the kinetic energy that's the advantage of real-world bullets too, more than the travel time; I don't recall hearing that mediaeval archers were troubled by people dodging arrows.
200mph light might be more interesting for a steampunk setting, rather than mediaeval fantasy. Suppose you live in such a world and you build the Mallard...
It generally doesn't, because of the conversion and transmission losses. Heating by electricity is more expensive than heating by gas, because the power plant has to burn more gas to supply that electricity than you would have had to burn yourself to heat your hom directly. If gas prices were to rise, then electricity prices would rise along with them (and have been doing just that).
However, in some circumstances this may change; if, say, the Russians were to cut off the gas supplies to Europe, it might make sense for the French to just leave on their lightbulbs, because their nuclear-supplied electricity would suddenly be preferable to burning what little expensive gas is available. And if you happen to live in Iceland, then you may as well please yourself, you lucky sods with your cheap clean geothermal power...
There's an extra layer of inefficiency. If you heat your house by burning gas, you get nearly perfect efficiency: almost every joule of heat liberated by the chemical reaction goes into your house, with a relatively small amount of waste heat going up the chimney; modern boilers are very efficient indeed at getting every bit of heat they can.
If, OTOH, you heat your house by electric current - i.e. by the waste heat from your electrical devices - then somewhere in the world there's a power plant burning gas on your behalf. That plant converts gas to heat at higher efficiency than your boiler, but then wastes energy in the conversion to electricity, and then even more is lost in transmission to your home.
So, if you switch to more economical lighting, your boiler will have to burn a little extra gas because you're no longer getting the heating effect of old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs. But that's more than offset at the power plant, where they have to burn less gas because you're consuming less electricity.
Not quite the same thing, but there's a concept of the 'vexatious litigant' in some places. They're forbidden to sue anybody, because they've abused the courts repeatedly and egregiously. The British courts' killfile is here, and I notice from the wikipedia link that the notorious Christian extremist Fred Phelps is listed as a vexatious litigant in the US.
So true. First thing I did after I installed Rockbox on my iHP-140 was play Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Oh, the joy when it got the 'Billy Shears' transition perfectly right...
WTF?
Can't speak for the newer models, but my iHP-140 appears as a USB hard drive, I cp files onto it, it plays 'em. I haven't even touched the CD of software that came with it.
I've installed Rockbox, but even with the original firmware it worked that way.
So, in other words: a neighbour who doesn't like you very much denounces you to the authorities, and you get disappeared off to the concentration camp, because they can't try you (no real evidence) and they can't possibly just let you go.
In Soviet Russia... no, wait...
Wow. And you're using this line to justify your support for Bush? Classic.
If they make it cheap enough I might buy one just in order to play Katamari.
He's just been on a discussion panel on Newsnight on this subject. He said that it could easily have been him on trial; if his CO hadn't discharged him when he made clear his intention to leave the Army, he would have refused to go and would have been court-martialled in the same way.
Another man on the panel - I forget his background - suggested that it may be a result of overstretch. Perhaps, he suggested, the Air Force doctor's CO simply couldn't replace him? Recruitment has been difficult in recent years, for reasons which should be bloody obvious.
Just to make sure you're not getting a false impression here... Yes, Guantanamo Bay is widely considered an abomination, and I would say it's the number one reason why British people are becoming uneasy about our alliance with the US, but - don't think that's the only, or even the main, reason why Condi got a tough time from the British media. They do that to everyone.
For a long time now British political interviewing has been dominated by Jeremy Paxman. I think he's mellowed somewhat in recent years, but he remains dangerous; his motto has always been 'Why is this lying bastard lying to me?' He's always been a tough interviewer, and occasionally outright hostile.
His finest hour: interviewing Michael Howard in 1997, shortly before the fall of the Tory government.
One legendary question-and-not-answer session later, every reporter on every broadcaster in the country wants to be like him. Everyone gets a tough time now.
Oh, and if you're wondering... no, he didn't threaten to overrule him. He might have said so at the time.
The UK government was reluctant to make a fuss about Britons in that place to begin with, and then the US government paid little attention to said pressure for years afterwards.
The Tipton three, for instance, were first imprisoned in November 2001, and later released in March 2004. Moazzam Begg was disappeared in February 2002, from Islamabad, Pakistan, and released in January 2005. Hardly sharpish.
You've been told a fair few already, here are two more:
Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil al-Banna. Disappeared from the Gambia, where they had just arrived from the UK on business, into the loving care of the CIA, and thence to the gulag in Cuba. Probably sold out to the Americans by MI5.
Dude, I totally need that +12 Spear of Destiny. I'm trying to kill Arael, the big glowy bird thing, it's got some real nasty psi attacks...
* throws spear *
w00t! Nailed it! TAKE THAT j00 ANGEL LUSER!
Er, the spear? Um. Over there somewhere...
Well, regarding how the hell evolution arrives at a stick insect: the advantage of looking like that is obvious, it's camouflage. Avoid getting eaten by birds.
It's common to hear from creationists that camouflage either works perfectly or not at all. That evolution couldn't get towards a stick insect gradually, because it would have to look [i]enough[/i] like a stick to fool a bird to begin with, before natural selection could begin work on refining the disguise gradually.
But really... an insect living on a stick that's just a little longer and narrower than its cousins might be blatantly obvious, to a bird looking straight at it, hunting in broad daylight, but what about at night? Or to a bird that's flying past at a distance, not really hunting but kind of peckish? That slight difference in shape could save its life.
And in the end, if I'm an insect on a stick, my camouflage doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be better than yours. The bird will go for you first.
Run the tape on for a hundred thousand years and you have stick insects that you can't spot even when you know for a fact you're looking at a branch with a dozen stick insects on it, in bright light, right in front of your nose.
Yes, that's right. That's what he said. We have always been at war with Eurasia.