> Chinese is something you read. > Mandarin is something you speak.
Technically, that's an oversimplification.
It's a *good* oversimplification, because it's almost entirely correct. But reality is somewhat more complicated.
More precisely, Mandarin is a very popular dialect of Chinese (perhaps the most popular, although measuring popularity is inherently a bit subjective), and the differences between the major dialects of Chinese are significantly more pronounced in speech than in writing.
> how the hell did one company get to create a > monopoly on taxi service in a major city?
We're talking about New York here. Absolutely everything in the city is run by ridiculously out-of-control uberpowerful closed-shop unions. It's not just driving a taxi. You can't get work as a garbage collector in New York without paying a huge annual fee to the garbage collector's union. You can't work at a gas station without joining a union. You can't bag groceries without joining a union. I'm pretty sure Pratchett studied New York before writing about Ankh Morpork. If having a muggers' union didn't violate so many federal and state laws, New York City would probably do it.
Why anybody trying to start a nationwide business would think it was a good idea to kick things off in New York is totally beyond me, unless they just plain Did Not Do The Homework.
It's obvious that you didn't read it. You're repeating things that other people have said, which are very obviously incompatible with the actual text. You're not alone, of course, far from it. The ratio of people who cite it or comment on it to people who have actually read it is higher for this passage than perhaps any other thing ever written in the history of human language.
The passage is in fact not vague at all in anything resembling the way you suggest. Anyone who tells you that it is vague is lying or has not read the passage. The text is actually rather unequivocal and uncompromising: a husband is to treat his wife's needs and desires as more important than his own, to look out for her in preference to himself, and to sacrifice himself for her if necessary. Really. It says that. Look it up.
Additionally, the word "obey" (more often translated "submit") is used for both sides of the relationship. The very first time it is used in the passage, it says "submit to _one another_" (allelon -- sorry about the transliteration, but Slashcode does not allow actual Greek). The relationship is mutual. Yes, the male and female sides of the relationship are described in different words, but the basic principle of placing the other person before yourself is consistent for both, and if anything the wording there is more detailed and uncompromising when it speaks of how the husband is to behave.
Yes, the passage has been _misused_ and _misapplied_ to justify a lot of stuff, but that's just people doing whatever they want and making excuses, as usual. The passage itself is clear, if you actually read it.
Other interesting things that NetHack may teach you child include habitually laying clothes on the floor to see what pets will do with them, and refusing to wear any that your pet doesn't pick up; training pets to steal from shops; deliberately dropping rings down sinks to see what happens; picking up any useful object you find anywhere and stashing it in the next box or chest you find; killing pretty much anything that moves, unless it offers you an important service; sacrificing the fresh bodies of your enemies on altars to pagan gods; eating the dead bodies of virtually every new kind of organism you encounter (paying particular attention to molds and fungi) to see if it grants you a useful resistance; wearing a blindfold or towel around your head to see things in the dark; wearing a coat, boots, gloves, and a hat but no pants; greasing the hat and coat and applying a fresh thick layer of grease every time it wears off; obsessively carrying a lizard corpse around at all times and refusing to part with it; making a point of getting drunk right before reading material that would otherwise be harmful; keeping any gray stones you happen to find that can be kicked but aren't flint; and writing the current time on books whenever you read them.
You're right: the Bible is the easy answer -- so much so, in fact, that it seems kind of weird that the question even has to be asked. Really, the only way anybody could give a different answer would be if they were largely unfamiliar with the Bible (which, granted, is depressingly common these days).
> which books, of any type or genre, have had a significant impact on your life?
I've gotta say the Bible, hands down, more than all other books combined. Indeed, it's had more impact on my *career* than any other book, nevermind about my life.
However, if you narrow it down to directly IT-related stuff, then I'd probably say Programming Perl, Effective Perl Programming, Beyond Fear, and the Inform Designer's Manual, not necessarily in that order.
There's evil and then there's evil and then there's evil.
On the one hand, all false religions (and false secular philosophies, for that matter) are evil, because they teach fallacy as truth, and that's bad. So yes, in that sense, non-militant Islam is still evil, after a fashion... or at least wrong. (Is there a difference between wrong and evil? Perhaps a difference of degree, with a fuzzy line between them? Really I think they're basically the same phenomenon.)
But that's not even remotely the same category of evil as the militant stuff that seeks to connect religion with the state and force conversion on pain of death. We call that "Sharia law" in the case of Islam, but the Roman Catholic state church in medieval Europe also qualifies, as does any human government that executes people for declining the official state-sanctioned religion. This sort of thing is much more evil, much more outright _wicked_, than merely propagating falsehood to people who are willing to listen.
If God himself comes tangibly to Earth and sets up a divine government in person, one that is not run by men but directly by God himself, fine. He, being God, would have the right to do that and, presumably, would also have the ability to do it in a just and right way. Men, manifestly, don't, and every time it's ever been tried, however well intentioned at first, the results have consistently been horrific in the long term. Evil.
> For what it's worth, according to Netmarketshare [stats]
Those are fairly believable figures. They don't exactly match mine, but the deviations are not extreme and are possible to explain in a variety of more or less plausible ways. Their stats are probably based on a larger sample than mine.
> Netmarketshare's report on mobile devices is very different.
My mobile device UA stats are changing rather significantly from quarter to quarter, as entire product lines drop out of use and others debut on a fairly regular basis. The only really sweeping generalizations I can make are as follows:
1. Mobile usage overall is growing rather rapidly. I started paying closer attention when it topped 5% of total usage on a site I maintain, just a few months ago. I am pretty sure it will top 10% by the end of the current calendar year. If you'd told me two years ago that that would happen, I would have been rather skeptical.
2. Most mobile devices (that are used to access websites) appear to run either iOS or Android. There are numerous others, but they're minor players. The big boys are iOS and Android.
3. Most mobile browsing appears to be WebKit-based. Mobile Safari seems to be either the most popular mobile browser or the most popular mobile UA string to spoof, maybe both. (Sometimes you can tell it's being spoofed. Amazon Silk, for example, spoofs Mobile Safari but also puts its own identifying tag in, so it's easy to split out. Of course, Silk is WebKit-based, so from a content development perspective the difference is not extremely important. I do like to make my stats as accurate as I can, though.)
4. Furthermore, most mobile browsing now appears to be based on versions of WebKit recent enough that they can handle CSS media queries. Such mobile browsers are much easier for a web developer to support than the ones just a couple of years ago. From this I conclude that most cellphone users have discarded their previous-generation phones or relegated them pretty much exclusively to voice call usage.
5. Currently, phones appear to outnumber tablets roughly two to one (just counting the ones that people are actually using to browse websites). However, this ratio has not been stable for very long. (It changed when the iPad was released and changed again when the major ebook reader vendors started putting web browsers on their readers and turning them into tablets. It could easily change again if some other market event shakes things up again. The tablet market is not mature and therefore not very predictable.)
In practice, as a web developer, the conclusion I draw from this is that it is highly desirable for most websites to use media queries to reduce the number of columns as the screen width decreases so that it becomes possible to view the site in a single column if the user happens to be on a small screen, such as on a phone.
The design I am currently working on for our site where I work can now handle horizontal resolutions as low as 170px without introducing any horizontal scrollbars. At large widths, such as on a high-resolution wide-screen desktop display, the layout has three columns with a nice amount of whitespace between them and some subtle decorations in a few places to make the space look less bare (e.g., the header at the top gets an extra textured gradient fading in on the left edge and a photo of our nicely photogenic building on the right, if there's room to do that without crowding things). Media queries rock. The default look, for browsers that don't support media queries, is designed to not screw anything up too badly down to 800px.
Bear in mind, those are stats from a site visited almost exclusively by web content developers, most of whom are fairly active on the computer, use it a lot, and are less averse to upgrades than average. It's not an entirely representative sample of the internet at large. Out-of-the-box defaults, such as what comes on a computer when you buy it at the store, would naturally be expected to be significantly underrepresented in such a sample. Newer browsers would tend to be somewhat overrepresented.
I estimate Firefox usage at something more like 20% and holding fairly steady with minor fluctuations month by month. (New versions of other things come out, and people switch over, then new versions of Firefox come out, and people switch back...) IE is around 45% and has been declining steadily since the turn of the century. Chrome, which has been increasing since its introduction, has recently or will soon surpass Firefox if its trend continues, but the most marked increase I've seen in recent quarters is in mobile devices, most of which either use or convincingly spoof Mobile Safari.
Google presumably has more precise stats, broken down by geographic region, although their numbers may be somewhat skewed toward Chrome, much as Microsoft's are skewed toward IE. Slashdot's stats would be skewed in a manner similar to that of W3Schools, with perhaps an additional skew toward browsers that run on *nix systems and/or from the command line. Know your audience.
> I know about the new speedy release scheme, but how is it > possible that version 16 is released when 15 is only at 15.0.1?
Apparently you've *heard* of the new speedy release scheme but don't actually _know_ about it.
Point releases are no longer planned in to the release schedule. After 15.0.1, the next planned, scheduled release would be 16.0, and after that 17.0 then 18.0. That's the whole point of the new speedy release scheme: every planned release, no matter how minor, gets a new major version number, so that Firefox can be more like Chrome.
Thus, there would only be a 15.0.2 release in the event that a security flaw is discovered in 15.0.1 that needs to be fixed before 16.0 is ready.
(The fact that Chrome is still actively gaining market share while Firefox has plateaued couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Chrome is much newer and therefore still finding its place, nor could it have anything whatsoever to do with the aggressive advertising that Google does for Chrome on several of their very popular services. No, surely it must be because Chrome has a weird and confusing UI design and is in version twenty-something already. Obviously if Firefox is to be successful it must copy the _least_ attractive features of Chrome to the greatest extent possible. Soon new versions of Firefox will start installing themselves in user-writable locations in each user account separately by default, just to make sure all network administrators hate it with a fiery passion.)
> Please, someone, make a browser that doesnt suck.
Oh, they already did that. It's called Firefox 2.0.0.20.
Open-source programmers famously don't like to re-invent the wheel, so naturally since making a browser that doesn't suck has already been done, it's now a solved problem and therefore no longer interesting to work on.
The community has therefore moved on to newer and better things, like combining related toolbar buttons into one (back/forward), unnecessarily changing how user data (such as bookmarks) are stored on disk, combining unrelated toolbar buttons into one (stop/reload), eliminating useful features (e.g., the status bar), moving UI elements to new and interesting parts of the screen (stop/reload again, not to mention the notorious Tabs On Top), and so on and so forth.
> But the main problem I see with totally public > access is that the public aren't ready for it.
The public weren't (and aren't) ready for the internet, yet here it is. Previously, the public very manifestly weren't ready for the horseless carriage, but we take cars very much for granted now.
Some things in life you don't get to be ready for.
> Are you planning to have to send a synthetic to the > other side of the complex with a laptop to pilot the ship in?
*Shrug*. Might be a useful capability to have. Maybe you'll want to crawl in there to install new cables, or to get at the access panels from the back side, or for some other reason. Think of them as Jefferies tubes.
Yeah, conduit is the first thing I was going to say too.
I mean, if you'd built the thing in 1990, you could have put in cat3 phone cable and A/V coax, and three years later you'd have been wanting network cable. If you'd built in 1994 and put in twenex cable, three years later you'd have wanted cat5. If you'd built in 1998 and put in cat5, three years later you'd have been wondering about cat5e. Maybe in a couple of years you'll want fiber optic cables. Then again, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll want KVM cables, or a new kind of audio/video cable, or USB5, or eSATA4, or WestBridge ExternalBUS cable, or IEEE 1394k, or whatever kind of cable your new SAN uses, or QuantumLine entanglement cable, or liquid-argon lines for the new cooling system, or some other wonderful new thing they come out with six weeks after your drywall is put in. Who knows? Hooray for progress.
If you put in plenty of good conduit, you can run whatever kind of cable you need, without ripping up the walls or, even less fun than that, messing around with a half-stiff plumber's tape trying to figure out whether there's another hole through the next wall stud somewhere.
Ideally, the conduit should be in relatively straight, relatively short runs leading from one easily-accessed junction box to another, each of which in turn connects to others. The *main* junction boxes should be connected to one another via 2-3 runs (each) of extra-large conduit, and then from those main boxes you can have branch conduits running out to the peripheral ones.
And yeah, leaving a pull line in each segment of conduit is always good.
Good duct work is also nice, and put in about twice as many bathrooms as you think you need, because it's a real pain to add more later. Storage space is also good.
> So you've never heard of Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T?
I was not aware that they offered IPv6 service. This is the first I've heard of that. Must be fairly new.
By "constantly expanding", I'm guessing you mean expanding geographically. Yes?
So is it something along the lines of "the trial area where it is possible to buy this access now encompasses significant parts of Silicon Valley, plus Lower Manhattan and downtown Chicago", or is it more like "if you live in a city of a hundred thousand people or more, there's a good chance you might be able to get it, especially if you're on the east or west coast"?
(Not that the difference matters to me. I live in a city of eleven thousand people in the Midwest.)
> Time Warner has been running trials as well.
Sure, and Google is running *trials* of driverless cars, but you can't actually buy one, nor is there yet a timeframe for when you will be able to do so.
> a very large number of US ISPs are not IPv6 ready
IPv6 ready, you mean, in the sense of making connectivity service available to the public using IPv6? I was not aware that there were *any* ISPs who were IPv6 ready, or planning to be. Can you name one ISP that is? I cannot.
The thing is, there's no significant demand for it, outside of a handful of industry hobbyists. In terms of the general public, nobody cares about IPv6. They just want the internet, and at this point "the internet" is effectively synonymous with IPv4.
Which in turn probably has something to do with the ratio of IPv6-only sites and services to IPv4-only sites and services, a ratio that is so close to zero you'd need scientific notation to make it fit on one line. You can't use IPv6 to access the internet, in practice: a few sites work, but bazillions of other sites don't. Even if you could access most or all of the internet with IPv6, there still wouldn't be any real concrete advantage, because, you can *also* use IPv4 to access pretty much every single thing.
Thus, IPv6 provides... no benefit whatsoever to the individual and no benefit whatsoever to businesses either. In other words, it's Blu-Ray. The advantage to releasing a popular movie in Blu-Ray format is, you can make the Blu-Ray advocates happy for twelve seconds. The advantage to releasing it on DVD is, you can sell millions of copies. Coming from the consumer side, the advantage of buying a Blu-Ray player is even less compelling. IPv6 is in the same boat.
> I doubt very much that the girls who have their genitals > mutilated - typically without anesthesia - against their will > feel like their lack of consent is merely a Western idea.
I'm sure there are some -- but every society has a few individuals who disagree with some of the society's social mores. In general, however, I think you'd be surprised. One of the key reasons FGM is so hard to stamp out is that a lot of the mothers and grandmothers, who had it done themselves, are *appalled* at the notion of their daughters and granddaughters not having the procedure. The opposition to change in this matter is if anything stronger among the women than among the men, in many geographical areas.
Also, you completely missed my point about the difference between individualistic Western cultures versus collectivist Eastern cultures. You're upset about a crime committed against individuals, but you have no respect for laws designed to protect all of society.
As I said, I disagree with the Chinese position. But you would expect me to -- I was raised in the West.
> I tire of the ridiculous levels of relativism where everything is equally valid
Oh, yes, me too. I never claimed that. Certainly, some cultural views, even though they are held by many people, are objectively wrong. Both Eastern and Western cultures have problems -- but they have *different* problems. The tendency to lawlessness, and the willingness to easily dismiss another culture's laws as "backwards" without really understanding them, is a notable problem in Western cultures. I'll go one further: it's not just a problem: it's wickedness, a wickedness that we in the West are particularly prone to.
With that said, the East is certainly prone to some wickedness of its own. Since you brought up FGM, I'll throw that out as a fairly clear-cut example (pun not originally intended, but as soon as I wrote it I realized... and I'm going to let it stand).
> I doubt very much that the peaceful Falun Gong practitoners...
That was admittedly rather dumb. If the Chinese government had simply issued an official statement that "Falun Gong may be stupid, but it's not illegal, as long as you don't break any actual laws; if you do break laws, you will be treated like anyone else who breaks the same laws", nobody outside of China would ever have heard of it. Because they actively persecuted it, it became significantly more attractive to people who wanted to rebel, ideologically.
The Great Firewall is also an inherently unwise policy, IMO.
But just because you disagree with a law does not mean you should go out of your way to break it, when you are in the jurisdiction where it is the law. If you can obey the law with a clear conscience, you should. It is, after all, the law, and the rule of law is necessary to a functioning society.
(For the record: there *are*, at least potentially, laws that you *should* break, laws that specifically require you to do something morally wrong. China used to have at least one such a law -- one that I'm aware of -- but has toned it down substantially since Mao died, thank goodness.)
> Did anyone else notice that suddenly, almost overnight, people > started making mistakes like writing "loose" instead of "lose", > where this was a very rare sight a few years ago?
For some reason, that one doesn't bother me too much; however, I do still wince every single time I see "they're" and "their" or "its" and "it's" or "your" and "you're" or "cite" and "site" and "sight" interchanged, so I can sympathize with your annoyance.
Nonetheless, if you think we have too much groupthink in America, you would probably be best served staying out of eastern Asia. When it comes to pounding down every nail that sticks up, they make us look like rank amateurs. If an American got fired for not staying after work on his own time to participate in group calisthenics, for example, an army of lawyers would crawl out of the woodwork and have a field day.
Actually, it sounds to me like version control has something to do with finding ridiculously inefficient ways to divide up a workload. Instead of the first cook just saying "Okay, I'll do the eggs, you guys can start on the bacon and hash browns", he... cooks just one of the eggs, even though several are needed, and now instead of just telling the other two guys what he's doing, he wants to jot down notes on the recipe card. No, we are not going to run our business that way. No "version control" abominations for you clowns. Get back to work.
> Linux... was installed on Grimm's computers, > erasing the hard drive contents, which included > polling and voter identification data...
Ah, significant clue: There were significant non-public data on the computers.
> cement blocks were thrown... [as] a cover-up > for the attacks on the computers.
Actually, I'm betting that's a decoy. They were *supposed* to see the broken windows as the cover up, so that they'd see overwriting the drive's contents as the main attack, thus coming to the conclusion, since they had recent backups, that they had successfully survived the main attack with relatively little damage.
A properly paranoid computer security professional would conclude that overwriting the hard drive's contents was itself cover-up, a way of obscuring the main crime. In other words, the perpetrators probably stole copies of some or all of the non-public data that were on the computer(s). That was likely the main objective.
What they're going to _do_ with those stolen data is the next logical question. I don't know enough about the nature of the data to answer that one, but I bet the answer would be considerably more interesting than the "they used Linux to vandalize a Windows computer" angle.
> before Columbus sailed to the Americas, there... > Wasn't a lot of anything except a lot of forest.
A forest provides substantial quantities of food, water, breathable air, nearly-ready-to-use building materials (all you gotta do is cut it to the shape you want), and a variety of other resources. You can in fact actually live in a forest, with very little in the way of imported supplies. It feels a bit like camping out at first, until you get some infrastructure built, but it isn't quite the same as camping out in the vacuum of space on the far side of the moon.
The only reason to build a spacecraft up there would be to avoid having to get it out of Earth's gravity well in one piece after construction. Admittedly, that's a salient point. There are, however, numerous drawbacks. Notably, you still have to get the entire thing out of Earth's gravity well; the only improvement is now you have the option of doing so piece by piece instead of all at once.
In fact, China has real, actual Communism in its history and is still in the process of recovering from that.
But yeah, it's still called a "Communist" country now for largely political reasons that have little to do with their current economic policies.
Saying that communism is bad and doesn't work would be tantamount to saying that Chairman Mao was wrong about his entire philosophy of government, which in China is roughly the equivalent, politically, of going to America and proclaiming that Abraham Lincoln was a complete moron and a horrible President. Worse, actually, because in addition to your political career it could also end your life. So instead the Chinese government says that communism is wonderful, as long as it's done in the Chinese way -- and then they define the Chinese style of "Communism" to be whatever the current economic policies are, totally irrespective of whether anybody would have called that "Communism" when Mao was still alive. Semantics. Western governments mostly play along, because we have several _other_ objections to the Chinese style of government, so having people think of them as "Communist" and therefore evil doesn't really cause any major problems here -- well, not any more it doesn't. There was the whole "Only Nixon can go to China" thing, but that's in the past now.
So it's a holdover, old terminology that no longer strictly applies but we continue using it anyway. That's a bit different from the North Korean situation. There was _never_ anything even _remotely_ democratic about that government.
Indeed. I'd call it a moderately totalitarian hierarchical oligarchy.
China is becoming a fairly business-friendly place (which incidentally is why using a VPN will probably work, although that's just one very small example), which is why the word "moderately" is there. Attempting to do business in a highly totalitarian state is usually a bad idea.
Note that "business-friendly" does not necessarily imply "friendly to foreign political views." China is a place where I would recommend being extremely _vague_ if anybody asks you anything about any of your political views.
> Female genital mutilation has a victim. Accessing > a forbidden Web site that is censored by insecure > governments for political reasons does not.
On the other hand, that's a very Western perspective.
I suspect a lot of people in China would argue that political dissidents victimize the entire nation and culture, which is a great deal worse than victimizing one person.
I would disagree with them, as I assume you would too. To my way of thinking, non-violent political "dissidents" (i.e., people who entertain views that are at odds with those of the major political leaders) are if anything beneficial to society (perhaps not on an individual basis in all cases but collectively as a group they are beneficial, and attempting to weed out the non-beneficial ones would be harmful, because somebody would have to be empowered to determine which was which, and that would lend itself to severe abuse, and thus the most beneficial "dissidents" would likely be the most thoroughly quashed). That's how I look at it -- but I have lived my entire life in America, so you would rather _expect_ me to see it that way. Most Westerners do, because Westerners value diversity of thought and a variety of different ways of looking at things much more than we value conformity and groupthink. We like to have somebody to argue with, so we can exercise our rhetorical skills. That's a major part of our culture, going back at least to classical antiquity, if not earlier.
Nonetheless, if you're going to visit the Chinese people in their jurisdiction and treat their culture and their laws as unimportant because they do not match your own views, then we're right back where we started.
Relax. Even if there were no bacon at all, we'd still have chocolate chips.
At least, I hope we'll still have chocolate chips. Fortunately I don't think the major chocolate exporting countries have ever formed a cabal to limit the supply hitting the market and drive prices up. Shh... Don't give them any ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
> Chinese is something you read.
> Mandarin is something you speak.
Technically, that's an oversimplification.
It's a *good* oversimplification, because it's almost entirely correct. But reality is somewhat more complicated.
More precisely, Mandarin is a very popular dialect of Chinese (perhaps the most popular, although measuring popularity is inherently a bit subjective), and the differences between the major dialects of Chinese are significantly more pronounced in speech than in writing.
> how the hell did one company get to create a
> monopoly on taxi service in a major city?
We're talking about New York here. Absolutely everything in the city is run by ridiculously out-of-control uberpowerful closed-shop unions. It's not just driving a taxi. You can't get work as a garbage collector in New York without paying a huge annual fee to the garbage collector's union. You can't work at a gas station without joining a union. You can't bag groceries without joining a union. I'm pretty sure Pratchett studied New York before writing about Ankh Morpork. If having a muggers' union didn't violate so many federal and state laws, New York City would probably do it.
Why anybody trying to start a nationwide business would think it was a good idea to kick things off in New York is totally beyond me, unless they just plain Did Not Do The Homework.
It's obvious that you didn't read it. You're repeating things that other people have said, which are very obviously incompatible with the actual text. You're not alone, of course, far from it. The ratio of people who cite it or comment on it to people who have actually read it is higher for this passage than perhaps any other thing ever written in the history of human language.
The passage is in fact not vague at all in anything resembling the way you suggest. Anyone who tells you that it is vague is lying or has not read the passage. The text is actually rather unequivocal and uncompromising: a husband is to treat his wife's needs and desires as more important than his own, to look out for her in preference to himself, and to sacrifice himself for her if necessary. Really. It says that. Look it up.
Additionally, the word "obey" (more often translated "submit") is used for both sides of the relationship. The very first time it is used in the passage, it says "submit to _one another_" (allelon -- sorry about the transliteration, but Slashcode does not allow actual Greek). The relationship is mutual. Yes, the male and female sides of the relationship are described in different words, but the basic principle of placing the other person before yourself is consistent for both, and if anything the wording there is more detailed and uncompromising when it speaks of how the husband is to behave.
Yes, the passage has been _misused_ and _misapplied_ to justify a lot of stuff, but that's just people doing whatever they want and making excuses, as usual. The passage itself is clear, if you actually read it.
Other interesting things that NetHack may teach you child include habitually laying clothes on the floor to see what pets will do with them, and refusing to wear any that your pet doesn't pick up; training pets to steal from shops; deliberately dropping rings down sinks to see what happens; picking up any useful object you find anywhere and stashing it in the next box or chest you find; killing pretty much anything that moves, unless it offers you an important service; sacrificing the fresh bodies of your enemies on altars to pagan gods; eating the dead bodies of virtually every new kind of organism you encounter (paying particular attention to molds and fungi) to see if it grants you a useful resistance; wearing a blindfold or towel around your head to see things in the dark; wearing a coat, boots, gloves, and a hat but no pants; greasing the hat and coat and applying a fresh thick layer of grease every time it wears off; obsessively carrying a lizard corpse around at all times and refusing to part with it; making a point of getting drunk right before reading material that would otherwise be harmful; keeping any gray stones you happen to find that can be kicked but aren't flint; and writing the current time on books whenever you read them.
You're right: the Bible is the easy answer -- so much so, in fact, that it seems kind of weird that the question even has to be asked. Really, the only way anybody could give a different answer would be if they were largely unfamiliar with the Bible (which, granted, is depressingly common these days).
> which books, of any type or genre, have had a significant impact on your life?
I've gotta say the Bible, hands down, more than all other books combined. Indeed, it's had more impact on my *career* than any other book, nevermind about my life.
However, if you narrow it down to directly IT-related stuff, then I'd probably say Programming Perl, Effective Perl Programming, Beyond Fear, and the Inform Designer's Manual, not necessarily in that order.
HTH.HAND.
> What about non-militant Islam, is that evil?
There's evil and then there's evil and then there's evil.
On the one hand, all false religions (and false secular philosophies, for that matter) are evil, because they teach fallacy as truth, and that's bad. So yes, in that sense, non-militant Islam is still evil, after a fashion... or at least wrong. (Is there a difference between wrong and evil? Perhaps a difference of degree, with a fuzzy line between them? Really I think they're basically the same phenomenon.)
But that's not even remotely the same category of evil as the militant stuff that seeks to connect religion with the state and force conversion on pain of death. We call that "Sharia law" in the case of Islam, but the Roman Catholic state church in medieval Europe also qualifies, as does any human government that executes people for declining the official state-sanctioned religion. This sort of thing is much more evil, much more outright _wicked_, than merely propagating falsehood to people who are willing to listen.
If God himself comes tangibly to Earth and sets up a divine government in person, one that is not run by men but directly by God himself, fine. He, being God, would have the right to do that and, presumably, would also have the ability to do it in a just and right way. Men, manifestly, don't, and every time it's ever been tried, however well intentioned at first, the results have consistently been horrific in the long term. Evil.
> For what it's worth, according to Netmarketshare [stats]
Those are fairly believable figures. They don't exactly match mine, but the deviations are not extreme and are possible to explain in a variety of more or less plausible ways. Their stats are probably based on a larger sample than mine.
> Netmarketshare's report on mobile devices is very different.
My mobile device UA stats are changing rather significantly from quarter to quarter, as entire product lines drop out of use and others debut on a fairly regular basis. The only really sweeping generalizations I can make are as follows:
1. Mobile usage overall is growing rather rapidly. I started paying closer attention when it topped 5% of total usage on a site I maintain, just a few months ago. I am pretty sure it will top 10% by the end of the current calendar year. If you'd told me two years ago that that would happen, I would have been rather skeptical.
2. Most mobile devices (that are used to access websites) appear to run either iOS or Android. There are numerous others, but they're minor players. The big boys are iOS and Android.
3. Most mobile browsing appears to be WebKit-based. Mobile Safari seems to be either the most popular mobile browser or the most popular mobile UA string to spoof, maybe both. (Sometimes you can tell it's being spoofed. Amazon Silk, for example, spoofs Mobile Safari but also puts its own identifying tag in, so it's easy to split out. Of course, Silk is WebKit-based, so from a content development perspective the difference is not extremely important. I do like to make my stats as accurate as I can, though.)
4. Furthermore, most mobile browsing now appears to be based on versions of WebKit recent enough that they can handle CSS media queries. Such mobile browsers are much easier for a web developer to support than the ones just a couple of years ago. From this I conclude that most cellphone users have discarded their previous-generation phones or relegated them pretty much exclusively to voice call usage.
5. Currently, phones appear to outnumber tablets roughly two to one (just counting the ones that people are actually using to browse websites). However, this ratio has not been stable for very long. (It changed when the iPad was released and changed again when the major ebook reader vendors started putting web browsers on their readers and turning them into tablets. It could easily change again if some other market event shakes things up again. The tablet market is not mature and therefore not very predictable.)
In practice, as a web developer, the conclusion I draw from this is that it is highly desirable for most websites to use media queries to reduce the number of columns as the screen width decreases so that it becomes possible to view the site in a single column if the user happens to be on a small screen, such as on a phone.
The design I am currently working on for our site where I work can now handle horizontal resolutions as low as 170px without introducing any horizontal scrollbars. At large widths, such as on a high-resolution wide-screen desktop display, the layout has three columns with a nice amount of whitespace between them and some subtle decorations in a few places to make the space look less bare (e.g., the header at the top gets an extra textured gradient fading in on the left edge and a photo of our nicely photogenic building on the right, if there's room to do that without crowding things). Media queries rock. The default look, for browsers that don't support media queries, is designed to not screw anything up too badly down to 800px.
I tried Firefox 3, but it kept losing tabs on me. I downgraded to Firefox 2 and have not looked back.
> http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Bear in mind, those are stats from a site visited almost exclusively by web content developers, most of whom are fairly active on the computer, use it a lot, and are less averse to upgrades than average. It's not an entirely representative sample of the internet at large. Out-of-the-box defaults, such as what comes on a computer when you buy it at the store, would naturally be expected to be significantly underrepresented in such a sample. Newer browsers would tend to be somewhat overrepresented.
I estimate Firefox usage at something more like 20% and holding fairly steady with minor fluctuations month by month. (New versions of other things come out, and people switch over, then new versions of Firefox come out, and people switch back...) IE is around 45% and has been declining steadily since the turn of the century. Chrome, which has been increasing since its introduction, has recently or will soon surpass Firefox if its trend continues, but the most marked increase I've seen in recent quarters is in mobile devices, most of which either use or convincingly spoof Mobile Safari.
Google presumably has more precise stats, broken down by geographic region, although their numbers may be somewhat skewed toward Chrome, much as Microsoft's are skewed toward IE. Slashdot's stats would be skewed in a manner similar to that of W3Schools, with perhaps an additional skew toward browsers that run on *nix systems and/or from the command line. Know your audience.
> I know about the new speedy release scheme, but how is it
> possible that version 16 is released when 15 is only at 15.0.1?
Apparently you've *heard* of the new speedy release scheme but don't actually _know_ about it.
Point releases are no longer planned in to the release schedule. After 15.0.1, the next planned, scheduled release would be 16.0, and after that 17.0 then 18.0. That's the whole point of the new speedy release scheme: every planned release, no matter how minor, gets a new major version number, so that Firefox can be more like Chrome.
Thus, there would only be a 15.0.2 release in the event that a security flaw is discovered in 15.0.1 that needs to be fixed before 16.0 is ready.
(The fact that Chrome is still actively gaining market share while Firefox has plateaued couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Chrome is much newer and therefore still finding its place, nor could it have anything whatsoever to do with the aggressive advertising that Google does for Chrome on several of their very popular services. No, surely it must be because Chrome has a weird and confusing UI design and is in version twenty-something already. Obviously if Firefox is to be successful it must copy the _least_ attractive features of Chrome to the greatest extent possible. Soon new versions of Firefox will start installing themselves in user-writable locations in each user account separately by default, just to make sure all network administrators hate it with a fiery passion.)
> Please, someone, make a browser that doesnt suck.
Oh, they already did that. It's called Firefox 2.0.0.20.
Open-source programmers famously don't like to re-invent the wheel, so naturally since making a browser that doesn't suck has already been done, it's now a solved problem and therefore no longer interesting to work on.
The community has therefore moved on to newer and better things, like combining related toolbar buttons into one (back/forward), unnecessarily changing how user data (such as bookmarks) are stored on disk, combining unrelated toolbar buttons into one (stop/reload), eliminating useful features (e.g., the status bar), moving UI elements to new and interesting parts of the screen (stop/reload again, not to mention the notorious Tabs On Top), and so on and so forth.
> But the main problem I see with totally public
> access is that the public aren't ready for it.
The public weren't (and aren't) ready for the internet, yet here it is. Previously, the public very manifestly weren't ready for the horseless carriage, but we take cars very much for granted now.
Some things in life you don't get to be ready for.
> Are you planning to have to send a synthetic to the
> other side of the complex with a laptop to pilot the ship in?
*Shrug*. Might be a useful capability to have. Maybe you'll want to crawl in there to install new cables, or to get at the access panels from the back side, or for some other reason. Think of them as Jefferies tubes.
Yeah, conduit is the first thing I was going to say too.
I mean, if you'd built the thing in 1990, you could have put in cat3 phone cable and A/V coax, and three years later you'd have been wanting network cable. If you'd built in 1994 and put in twenex cable, three years later you'd have wanted cat5. If you'd built in 1998 and put in cat5, three years later you'd have been wondering about cat5e. Maybe in a couple of years you'll want fiber optic cables. Then again, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll want KVM cables, or a new kind of audio/video cable, or USB5, or eSATA4, or WestBridge ExternalBUS cable, or IEEE 1394k, or whatever kind of cable your new SAN uses, or QuantumLine entanglement cable, or liquid-argon lines for the new cooling system, or some other wonderful new thing they come out with six weeks after your drywall is put in. Who knows? Hooray for progress.
If you put in plenty of good conduit, you can run whatever kind of cable you need, without ripping up the walls or, even less fun than that, messing around with a half-stiff plumber's tape trying to figure out whether there's another hole through the next wall stud somewhere.
Ideally, the conduit should be in relatively straight, relatively short runs leading from one easily-accessed junction box to another, each of which in turn connects to others. The *main* junction boxes should be connected to one another via 2-3 runs (each) of extra-large conduit, and then from those main boxes you can have branch conduits running out to the peripheral ones.
And yeah, leaving a pull line in each segment of conduit is always good.
Good duct work is also nice, and put in about twice as many bathrooms as you think you need, because it's a real pain to add more later. Storage space is also good.
> So you've never heard of Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T?
I was not aware that they offered IPv6 service. This is the first I've heard of that. Must be fairly new.
By "constantly expanding", I'm guessing you mean expanding geographically. Yes?
So is it something along the lines of "the trial area where it is possible to buy this access now encompasses significant parts of Silicon Valley, plus Lower Manhattan and downtown Chicago", or is it more like "if you live in a city of a hundred thousand people or more, there's a good chance you might be able to get it, especially if you're on the east or west coast"?
(Not that the difference matters to me. I live in a city of eleven thousand people in the Midwest.)
> Time Warner has been running trials as well.
Sure, and Google is running *trials* of driverless cars, but you can't actually buy one, nor is there yet a timeframe for when you will be able to do so.
> a very large number of US ISPs are not IPv6 ready
IPv6 ready, you mean, in the sense of making connectivity service available to the public using IPv6? I was not aware that there were *any* ISPs who were IPv6 ready, or planning to be. Can you name one ISP that is? I cannot.
The thing is, there's no significant demand for it, outside of a handful of industry hobbyists. In terms of the general public, nobody cares about IPv6. They just want the internet, and at this point "the internet" is effectively synonymous with IPv4.
Which in turn probably has something to do with the ratio of IPv6-only sites and services to IPv4-only sites and services, a ratio that is so close to zero you'd need scientific notation to make it fit on one line. You can't use IPv6 to access the internet, in practice: a few sites work, but bazillions of other sites don't. Even if you could access most or all of the internet with IPv6, there still wouldn't be any real concrete advantage, because, you can *also* use IPv4 to access pretty much every single thing.
Thus, IPv6 provides... no benefit whatsoever to the individual and no benefit whatsoever to businesses either. In other words, it's Blu-Ray. The advantage to releasing a popular movie in Blu-Ray format is, you can make the Blu-Ray advocates happy for twelve seconds. The advantage to releasing it on DVD is, you can sell millions of copies. Coming from the consumer side, the advantage of buying a Blu-Ray player is even less compelling. IPv6 is in the same boat.
> I doubt very much that the girls who have their genitals
...
> mutilated - typically without anesthesia - against their will
> feel like their lack of consent is merely a Western idea.
I'm sure there are some -- but every society has a few individuals who disagree with some of the society's social mores. In general, however, I think you'd be surprised. One of the key reasons FGM is so hard to stamp out is that a lot of the mothers and grandmothers, who had it done themselves, are *appalled* at the notion of their daughters and granddaughters not having the procedure. The opposition to change in this matter is if anything stronger among the women than among the men, in many geographical areas.
Also, you completely missed my point about the difference between individualistic Western cultures versus collectivist Eastern cultures. You're upset about a crime committed against individuals, but you have no respect for laws designed to protect all of society.
As I said, I disagree with the Chinese position. But you would expect me to -- I was raised in the West.
> I tire of the ridiculous levels of relativism where everything is equally valid
Oh, yes, me too. I never claimed that. Certainly, some cultural views, even though they are held by many people, are objectively wrong. Both Eastern and Western cultures have problems -- but they have *different* problems. The tendency to lawlessness, and the willingness to easily dismiss another culture's laws as "backwards" without really understanding them, is a notable problem in Western cultures. I'll go one further: it's not just a problem: it's wickedness, a wickedness that we in the West are particularly prone to.
With that said, the East is certainly prone to some wickedness of its own. Since you brought up FGM, I'll throw that out as a fairly clear-cut example (pun not originally intended, but as soon as I wrote it I realized... and I'm going to let it stand).
> I doubt very much that the peaceful Falun Gong practitoners
That was admittedly rather dumb. If the Chinese government had simply issued an official statement that "Falun Gong may be stupid, but it's not illegal, as long as you don't break any actual laws; if you do break laws, you will be treated like anyone else who breaks the same laws", nobody outside of China would ever have heard of it. Because they actively persecuted it, it became significantly more attractive to people who wanted to rebel, ideologically.
The Great Firewall is also an inherently unwise policy, IMO.
But just because you disagree with a law does not mean you should go out of your way to break it, when you are in the jurisdiction where it is the law. If you can obey the law with a clear conscience, you should. It is, after all, the law, and the rule of law is necessary to a functioning society.
(For the record: there *are*, at least potentially, laws that you *should* break, laws that specifically require you to do something morally wrong. China used to have at least one such a law -- one that I'm aware of -- but has toned it down substantially since Mao died, thank goodness.)
> Did anyone else notice that suddenly, almost overnight, people
> started making mistakes like writing "loose" instead of "lose",
> where this was a very rare sight a few years ago?
For some reason, that one doesn't bother me too much; however, I do still wince every single time I see "they're" and "their" or "its" and "it's" or "your" and "you're" or "cite" and "site" and "sight" interchanged, so I can sympathize with your annoyance.
Nonetheless, if you think we have too much groupthink in America, you would probably be best served staying out of eastern Asia. When it comes to pounding down every nail that sticks up, they make us look like rank amateurs. If an American got fired for not staying after work on his own time to participate in group calisthenics, for example, an army of lawyers would crawl out of the woodwork and have a field day.
Actually, it sounds to me like version control has something to do with finding ridiculously inefficient ways to divide up a workload. Instead of the first cook just saying "Okay, I'll do the eggs, you guys can start on the bacon and hash browns", he... cooks just one of the eggs, even though several are needed, and now instead of just telling the other two guys what he's doing, he wants to jot down notes on the recipe card. No, we are not going to run our business that way. No "version control" abominations for you clowns. Get back to work.
> Linux... was installed on Grimm's computers,
... [as] a cover-up
> erasing the hard drive contents, which included
> polling and voter identification data...
Ah, significant clue:
There were significant non-public data on the computers.
> cement blocks were thrown
> for the attacks on the computers.
Actually, I'm betting that's a decoy. They were *supposed* to see the broken windows as the cover up, so that they'd see overwriting the drive's contents as the main attack, thus coming to the conclusion, since they had recent backups, that they had successfully survived the main attack with relatively little damage.
A properly paranoid computer security professional would conclude that overwriting the hard drive's contents was itself cover-up, a way of obscuring the main crime. In other words, the perpetrators probably stole copies of some or all of the non-public data that were on the computer(s). That was likely the main objective.
What they're going to _do_ with those stolen data is the next logical question. I don't know enough about the nature of the data to answer that one, but I bet the answer would be considerably more interesting than the "they used Linux to vandalize a Windows computer" angle.
> before Columbus sailed to the Americas, there ...
> Wasn't a lot of anything except a lot of forest.
A forest provides substantial quantities of food, water, breathable air, nearly-ready-to-use building materials (all you gotta do is cut it to the shape you want), and a variety of other resources. You can in fact actually live in a forest, with very little in the way of imported supplies. It feels a bit like camping out at first, until you get some infrastructure built, but it isn't quite the same as camping out in the vacuum of space on the far side of the moon.
The only reason to build a spacecraft up there would be to avoid having to get it out of Earth's gravity well in one piece after construction. Admittedly, that's a salient point. There are, however, numerous drawbacks. Notably, you still have to get the entire thing out of Earth's gravity well; the only improvement is now you have the option of doing so piece by piece instead of all at once.
In fact, China has real, actual Communism in its history and is still in the process of recovering from that.
But yeah, it's still called a "Communist" country now for largely political reasons that have little to do with their current economic policies.
Saying that communism is bad and doesn't work would be tantamount to saying that Chairman Mao was wrong about his entire philosophy of government, which in China is roughly the equivalent, politically, of going to America and proclaiming that Abraham Lincoln was a complete moron and a horrible President. Worse, actually, because in addition to your political career it could also end your life. So instead the Chinese government says that communism is wonderful, as long as it's done in the Chinese way -- and then they define the Chinese style of "Communism" to be whatever the current economic policies are, totally irrespective of whether anybody would have called that "Communism" when Mao was still alive. Semantics. Western governments mostly play along, because we have several _other_ objections to the Chinese style of government, so having people think of them as "Communist" and therefore evil doesn't really cause any major problems here -- well, not any more it doesn't. There was the whole "Only Nixon can go to China" thing, but that's in the past now.
So it's a holdover, old terminology that no longer strictly applies but we continue using it anyway. That's a bit different from the North Korean situation. There was _never_ anything even _remotely_ democratic about that government.
Indeed. I'd call it a moderately totalitarian hierarchical oligarchy.
China is becoming a fairly business-friendly place (which incidentally is why using a VPN will probably work, although that's just one very small example), which is why the word "moderately" is there. Attempting to do business in a highly totalitarian state is usually a bad idea.
Note that "business-friendly" does not necessarily imply "friendly to foreign political views." China is a place where I would recommend being extremely _vague_ if anybody asks you anything about any of your political views.
> Female genital mutilation has a victim. Accessing
> a forbidden Web site that is censored by insecure
> governments for political reasons does not.
On the other hand, that's a very Western perspective.
I suspect a lot of people in China would argue that political dissidents victimize the entire nation and culture, which is a great deal worse than victimizing one person.
I would disagree with them, as I assume you would too. To my way of thinking, non-violent political "dissidents" (i.e., people who entertain views that are at odds with those of the major political leaders) are if anything beneficial to society (perhaps not on an individual basis in all cases but collectively as a group they are beneficial, and attempting to weed out the non-beneficial ones would be harmful, because somebody would have to be empowered to determine which was which, and that would lend itself to severe abuse, and thus the most beneficial "dissidents" would likely be the most thoroughly quashed). That's how I look at it -- but I have lived my entire life in America, so you would rather _expect_ me to see it that way. Most Westerners do, because Westerners value diversity of thought and a variety of different ways of looking at things much more than we value conformity and groupthink. We like to have somebody to argue with, so we can exercise our rhetorical skills. That's a major part of our culture, going back at least to classical antiquity, if not earlier.
Nonetheless, if you're going to visit the Chinese people in their jurisdiction and treat their culture and their laws as unimportant because they do not match your own views, then we're right back where we started.
Relax. Even if there were no bacon at all, we'd still have chocolate chips.
At least, I hope we'll still have chocolate chips. Fortunately I don't think the major chocolate exporting countries have ever formed a cabal to limit the supply hitting the market and drive prices up. Shh... Don't give them any ideas.