Religion not only breeds conformity, it breeds ignorance, even an individualist person who deflects from the mainstream will run bumbling in the dark because they literally don't know any better.
I was raised going to church, and there I certainly saw my share of small-minded, ignorant bigotry. However, I've seen exactly the same kind small-minded ignorant bigotry here on Slashdot, at my university, and in my office among non-religious types. You can see it in extreme Marxist publications and in more moderate Freethinkers talks; you can see it in middle-eastern Jihadist organizations and in Soviet-era communist organizations. Religion does not by any means have a monopoly on conformity, group-think, ignorance, and bigotry.
Having had a read through the court docs that have come to light thus far, I'd say Geohotz has this case in the bag if his legal representation can stand up.
But if his legal representation could stand up, wouldn't they have stopped this restraining order in the first place?
worse still, the design overrides your minimum font size (which is completely unforgivable), and is absolutely unusable on high dpi screens.
And the default font for text is san-serif. Guess what guys, those serifs aren't just pretty; they make it easier to figure out what letter you're seeing when the font size is small. That's why standard practice is to make headers sans-serif, text serif.
I can't agree that resizing to 1024 or 800 is in any way a good idea, as you'd lose an awful lot of information, and it's just not necessary if you use a file format with compression. The loss in quality would be huge if you do anything other than look at the images on your ipad or something - even a laptop screen is easily larger than the resolutions you quote, and forget about printing up to A4 size.
Well yeah, that's why I said you need to triage. You've got your girl with a beautiful, genuine smile next to the top of a mountain? Or a close-up of an exotic flower just in bloom? Leave it as high quality as you can make it. You took a picture of a funny engrish translation in a shop, or your girl sticking her tongue out at you? You just don't need it that big. You're never going to print that A4. Even if you took a picture of that boat cruise at night which looks cool but is blurry because the boat was rocking gently -- you're never going to look at that on anything other than your computer screen. No need to make it any larger.
Maybe 1024 is too small; but the number of pixels is N^2, so even cutting it down a bit has a big impact. Max of 1600 should be bigger than you ever need.
And I've found, even just recompressing it makes a big difference.
Regarding RAW: My wife is a professional photographer, and from her perspective the main advantage of RAW over jpeg is if you're going to do anything with the color. JPEG compression takes advantage of the fact that your eye can't detect changes in hue very much; so it will make slight changes to make the image compress better. But guess what happens now if you want to increase the green content? Now you've got little dots of brown in your mostly green areas, and little dots of green in the other areas. But if all you're going to do is play with the levels and crop, JPEG should be fine.
Actually, probably one of the best things he could do is resize the vast majority of his images. Only really beautiful, highly-detailed shots need to be full-resolution. Ones that are mostly of people or funny events can be sized down so the long edge is 1024, or maybe even 800; ones that are a little blurry because of motion / low light / whatever, but still interesting, can be cut down smaller yet. Even the full-sized ones can be recompressed by a program with more horsepower and time (unlike a camera, which has little horsepower and has to get it done fast enough to take the next shot) with almost no discernible loss of quality. That alone will cut your 16GB image collection down to under 1GB.
And to make it more practical: processor architects sometimes end up with big tangled messes of of logic gates to implement certain "formulas" of logic in their chips. Sometimes, the output of a big set of logic gates often seems to be FALSE for most of the inputs they try. If the output is false for *all* inputs, then they don't really need that big mess of gates at all, they can just hard-wire it to FALSE. If it has a handful of TRUE outputs (i.e., the logic can be "satisfied), then they have to keep it.
One way to test it, of course, would be to just try all possible combinations, but this is O(2^n) on the number of inputs. But no one so far (unless the guy in this story is right) has been able to make it any better than exponential.
I'm sure the next step will be medical records, legal records or naked pictures.
I almost feel like if you put your medical records, legal records, and naked pictures of yourself on FB, you deserve what you get. Not really, but almost.
Seriously, I've consistently made it a point not to put stuff on FB I wouldn't want everyone to see. My mom, my boss, people from high school -- I know they're all listening when I post something. And, I know that if I go to a country like China, it's not unlikely that the Chinese government could see that information if they decided they want to. So, there are a lot of things about my life that I don't post about. FB knows about the good things, but not the bad things; and there are some pretty cruddy things going on in my life right now that you wouldn't know about by looking at my Facebook feed.
So why do I care if some company has my address? What are they going to do with it -- send me mail? I already get tons of junk mail and fliers. Heck, my bank probably sells my name, address, and marketable details about me already. What's the big deal?
Microsoft still seems to think it's the 1990s, ie the managers think that the only competition they face comes from within Microsoft.
I'm not connected to Microsoft in any way, but from what I've heard, they set it up this way on purpose.
See, I read this book called Guns, Germs, and Steel, a really awesome book by Jared Diamond. It digs into history, geography, biology, anthropology and more, all to find the deepest, most fundamental answer a simple question: Why it is that Europe invaded the Americas, rather than the Americas invading Europe?
Near the end of the book, he talks about how China was at some point more technologically advanced than Europe, and actually began exploring the globe; but stopped before getting into colonialism or sailing across the Pacific. Diamond hypothesized that part of the reason was a monoculture -- at some point one of the emperors of China forbade exploration because he was afraid of competition from the explorers (or something like that), and after that no one happened to take it up again. Whereas, in Europe, everyone was in competition with each other; once the technology and economy was there for colonialism, one of the countries was bound to try it, and then all the other countries would be forced to follow suit or be left in the dust. He supported this thesis by the fact that Christopher Columbus proposed the trip to two other countries and was turned down, before Spain took up his offer. If Columbus had been in China, he would have been turned down, and that would have been the end.
So (apparently -- all this is from memory reading the book), Bill Gates and some other Silicon Valley people heard some of his talks or read early versions of his book, and came to him to ask advice about how to set up a company structure such that the company was more like Europe (forced by internal competition to innovate) than like China (one bad decision leads to no innovation).
I read the book some time ago, and I thought that the idea of setting up internal competition sounded interesting at the time. But every time I hear horror stories of vicious internal competition at Microsoft, I think about Diamond's China / Europe analogy; and how differently things work out based on the context in which they're applied.
Anyway, awesome book, incredibly in-depth but also very readable. Definitely recommended.
Jelly is completely smooth, jam contains seeds, marmalade contains peel.
When using technical language (i.e., on the side of bottles), jelly is clear (i.e., just made with juice, sugar, and pectin), jam contains actual fruit pulp, but pureed until it's smooth; preserves contains big chunks of the fruit.
But in common usage, "jelly" is the generic term for jelly, jam, and preserves. I've never heard anyone say "peanut butter and preserves sandwich" or "peanut butter and jam sandwich", even if their preferred preserved fruit spread contained pulp.
I fail to see how this makes the computer "your own" or allows you to customize it to your requirements.
At very least it would allow you to invest in a high-quality monitor or two, maybe even a specialty keyboard and mouse combo, that you could take with you when you move to another company.
Before FB, they had email, forums, IRC, IMs, why did they need a web based communicaiton tool?
I can see that you don't really "get" Facebook. That's OK, I'm not judging you -- if you don't like that way of communicating, fine. But the fact is that it is a new way of communicating which a huge amount of people (myself included) find valuable. Just because you don't get it or like it, doesn't mean it's going to go away -- any more than because I don't generally like or watch TV means that TV is somehow on the edge of dying.
Once they were all over those web based networks, why did every 2-3 years one network win over the users of a former network-de-jour? Because every one was purely technically "better" than all the former ones?
No, but Facebook (or something like it) will stay because Facebook is better than all the former ones.
I was skeptical about FB at first as well. I'd tried Friendster and a bunch of those other lame ones, and determined that they were basically just competitions for who could invite the most people, with no actual value to them. Really lame. I thought FB would be the same.
But it's not. The reason FB overtook MySpace is that, even though MySpace does actually add value (unlike older incarnations), Facebook adds even more.
Facebook is a new way of communicating. It makes it a lot easier to keep in low-maintenance updates with what's going on in people's lives. I know and am interested in hundreds of people, and hundreds of people are interested in me.
Think about it this way -- depending on the situation, there's an overhead to communication. If you live with someone, it's really easy to just come home and start talking about whatever random stuff happened to you during the day. It's not being narcissistic to tell your spouse / roommate / guys you hang out with several times a week about something frustrating that happened at work, or this crazy thing some girl did on a date. That's what sharing your life is about.
However, how many people would you e-mail about the frustrating thing that happened at work, or call to tell them about? Probably only someone really close to you that's not living with you -- a good friend who's living in another city, or a spouse when they're travelling.
What FB allows you to do is to share that kind of low-key information with people who you would share it with if they were within earshot, without actually having to be within earshot. The result is not only that I know a lot more about what's going on in my cousins' and friends' lives, but also that I find that people I only had a slight acquaintance with I'm now much better friends with -- they're a lot cooler than I had ever realized, because we never before had the opportunity to share that kind of thing.
So whether Facebook itself succeeds or fails is a business question. But the Facebook style of interaction is here to stay; if Facebook goes under or jumps the shark to make money, someone will build another way of doing the same thing. it's not going away any more than Internet Search would go if Altavista went under, or e-mail would go if Hotmail went under.
It sounds to me like what you're saying is that because the written form has more information than the spoken form (i.e., the large number of potential homophones are disambiguated), that there has developed a sort of literature-culture, which takes advantage of this fact to be more concise when written. Because that information is missing when spoken, it cannot be properly translated into spoken language or pinyin.
It's obvious that this sort of literature-culture, like the poem you linked to, cannot exist without the written characters, because, as you point out, you lose information.
However, what percentage of the actual language as used takes advantage of this? Spoken language outweighs written language probably by a factor of thousands to one (if not more). Even of the written language, how many signs, or instruction manuals, or websites, or textbooks, or even novels even use it? And of those that do, how many would be just as good without it?
Consider it as a cost-benefits analysis. The benefit of having the different characters include (1) that it's cool, (2) that it enables this more concise "written-only" language, which I'm sure is an enjoyable art form for those who know it.
Now consider the cost: rather than learning to write 20-some odd letters, children have to grind through learning to read and write thousands upon thousands of characters just to be able to read a newspaper. Not everyone who has the cognitive ability for pinyin has the cognitive ability for the characters, so that has to have a major impact on literacy rates. And even for people who can grind through and manage a decent amount of characters, how much does that turn them off to reading and learning? And even for those who can learn 10,000 characters, consider what else that time could have been spent learning, rather than learning the characters. And consider the barrier-to-entry for people trying to learn Mandarin and travel in China. Is being able to make a poem of all "shi" really worth all that?
So, is the Chinese character dispensable for this written-only literature? Of course not. Is it dispensable for Chinese as a whole? Absolutely.
Pinyin or other romanization techniques (plus tones) simply cannot convey the same meaning as the original characters, though you can guess.
Wait, are you saying that two people speaking Mandarin can't really understand each other properly without writing things down? That's ridiculous. Languages (other than sign languages) are first spoken languages, and then written languages. If you can write down what was spoken (including tones), you should be able to understand as much as was spoken.
It is also fair to say that multiple languages are important - current studies suggest that for each language you learn, you add 5+ years to your brain's functional lifespan
Ref?
Here's one for you: Mental Stimulation Postpones, Then Speeds Dementia. They studied older people, and found that people who were mentally more active postponed the onset of dementia; but that once it set in, the dementia progressed much faster. They theorize that the brain damage occurs no matter what you do, but that if you keep an active mind, your brain has the flexibility to adapt or "route around" the damage for a while. But eventually, there's just not enough gray cells to do what you used to do, and your mind succumbs to the inevitable.
Hell, how many English-speaking people even realize that there isn't A language called "Chinese"?
I'm currently studying Mandarin, and in my experience, even most Mandarin speakers call Mandarin "Chinese" (in Mandarin). The mandarin word for China is "zhong guo" (middle kingdom). The Mandarin word for written Chinese (shared by both Cantonese and Mandarin) is "zhong wen" -- (middle [kingdom] writing). The Mandarin word for Mandarin is "han yue" (Han [people group] speech). But when speaking in Mandarin to most Chinese speakers, they talk about me speaking "zhong wen" rather than "han yue", even though I don't write or read.
After attaining medium proficiency in typing, the gain in productivity of faster typing is minimal.
What do you think about the argument that someone who can type fast is more likely to be liberal / more complete with comments that he writes in the code?
Slashdot is representative of the whole of society now?
No, you said that people get worked up when we talk about taboos. But on Slashdot, my experience is the idea that men are just better than women at computers / math / chess is not taboo, but very welcome.
To think that men are equal to women is a bit like denying the sky is blue.
I don't think anyone thinks men and women are the same. But think of it this way.
Suppose, for the sake of arugment, that the only reason there are fewer top women in chess (or computers) is that there are biological differences, either in ability or in inclination. If that's the case, then there's not really anything we can or should do about it. That's just the way things are. We can continue doing things the way we've always done them without feeling bad about it.
Suppose, on the other hand, that there's no biological difference between men and women wrt chess, and the only reason there are fewer top women in chess is that there's a cultural bias such that fewer women consider studying chess: i.e., chess is a "boy thing" and fewer women are likely to try to take it up. In that case, no one has really done anything "wrong", but it's still the case that the chess world is actually losing out -- there are women out there that could have been a Kasparov or a Kramnik, but didn't simply because they didn't try chess. If that's the case, it makes sense to try to do more to recruit younger women, encourage them to play, and to combat the cultural bias. In that way, the chess community as a whole will benefit.
Suppose, however, that there actually is a subtle discrimination in the chess world that, even if not intentional, persistently discourages women from becoming involved. Men think women aren't as good; and so they treat women in subtle ways as if they aren't going to be very good; and so women pick that up, and expect not to be very good. Maybe when Gary Kasparov was just starting, there was a young girl Katrina in the same class, who had the same native talent as Gary. But because she was a girl, she got less attention from her chess coach, and less encouragement; and because of that, didn't excel; and ended up enjoying chess as a hobby, but never studied it seriously, and thus never became a grandmaster*. For every Hou Yifan, who seriously set to study chess, there may be a dozen Katrinas, who have a huge amount of talent and begin with a mild interest but end up discouraged and never go far; or, they get involved but they never have the confidence that men do -- for the simple reason that they're treated differently than men. If that's the case, then again, the chess world is losing out in a big way -- and not only that, the attitude of "Maybe men are just better at women than chess" is actively harmful, not only to the women, but to the chess community as a whole.
Worse yet, suppose (hypothetically) that the real reason there aren't as many successful women in chess is that there's entrenched sexism -- a "boys club" that makes sexist jokes and generally makes it unpleasant for a woman to be involved in serious chess. Then for every Hou Yifan who can put up with the sexism, there will be three or four who give up in disgust. (Even Hou Yifan is young -- she may yet give up in disgust.) If that's the situation, then not only is chess missing out, but there's something actively wrong going on, and we really have a moral obligation to try to correct it.
Now, I'm not really involved in the chess community; but it seems likely to me that the reason there aren't as many grandmaster women in chess is likely to be some combination of all of these. Because the biological explanation is actually harmful if it causes prejudice, it's better if we first look to all the other ones, and only believe it if it's been proven scientifically (i.e., taking a random sample of children and enrolling them all in chess programs). Even then, we sho
but has never done as well as she does in women's only events.
You mean, she hasn't played as well (i.e., her ability seems lower), or she hasn't placed as well (i.e., many people placed higher than her)?
If she (or other women) actually play less well at mixed-gender events, I'd suspect some kind of subtle (or not-so-subtle) sexist overtones that made it uncomfortable for women.
due to evil, vile, horrible, sexist, chauvinist, males.
No, in any group that becomes a significant majority -- be it male, female, white, Christian, atheist, or whatever -- will tend, without active prcoesses counteracting it, to discriminate in subtle and not-so-subtle ways against the minority. An atheist in an all-Christian setting, or a Christian in an all-Muslim setting, or a white guy in an all-African-American setting, or a guy in an all-girl setting (e.g., social work) -- all of them will tend to experience discrimination. There will always be a range of people -- some who actively combat it, and try to be inclusive, some who are total assholes to the minorities and don't feel bad about it, and a mix of people in between. How the minorities fare will depend on the distribution of the people in the majority.
And I have to say, in my experience, CS guys, and especially FLOSS guys, suck at this. Instead of keeping an open mind, actively looking for any roadblocks which may limit women becoming involved, and rooting those out, the vast majority of men I see respond just like you do. They jump to the simplest and most convenient explanation without actually talking to a woman or looking at the facts, and then get defensive and refuse to consider another perspective.
Think of it this way. Even if it were the case that there is a biological component to the different performance between men and women in certain fields (chess, computers, math, &c), isn't it possible that there are also other causes, which are sociological in nature, and therefore can (and should) be changed? And wouldn't it make sense to do whatever we can to try to remove those barriers, so that women who do have the ability can participate and contribute?
Men and women are different. However, a huge amount of the difference in outcomes between men and women are much better explained by sociology than by biology. Look at the evidence with an open mind sometime.
the fact of gender inequality (earth round) in the face of a global cultist belief that genders are equal (world is flat).
Except that the vast majority of tech men, in my experience, don't believe that apparent differences in performance have more to do with sociology than with biology. The conclusion almost everyone jumps to, without looking at the actual evidence, is, "Well, maybe men are just better than women". Bzzzt. There is a lot of evidence for alternate explanations, but most techies I've talked to just don't want to hear it.
So Slashdot bringing up the maybe-women-arent-as-good-at-chess idea is playing to the crowd, not challenging a cultist belief.
Except that at the grandmaster level, there's no hiding anything. Both of you know exactly what the implications of each move are, strategically and tactically for several moves ahead.
One of the biggest differences I've seen between actual warfare and chess, and it's a doozy, is the ability to do two things at once. Chess tactics essentially all boils down to taking advantage of that fact that you can only make one move at a time, by forcing your opponent to choose between the lesser of two bad options. And while there are certainly limitations in warfare you can take advantage of, only moving one soldier at a time isn't one of them.
My cats look directly and intently at my face every day,
Mine too. Which makes it especially interesting that many autistic children don't look at people's eyes by instinct, and actually have to be trained to look at a person's face when listening or talking to someone.
A link to Theo's post on the subject is much more informative.
Highlights:
Two of the guys named in the original allegation did work on the security stack, but
Almost certainly didn't check in any malicious code, and
"wrote much code in many areas that we all rely on. Daily. Outside the ipsec stack."
Also:
I believe that NETSEC was probably contracted to write backdoors
as alleged.
If those were written, I don't believe they made it into our
tree. They might have been deployed as their own product.
Slashdot Mirror
I was raised going to church, and there I certainly saw my share of small-minded, ignorant bigotry. However, I've seen exactly the same kind small-minded ignorant bigotry here on Slashdot, at my university, and in my office among non-religious types. You can see it in extreme Marxist publications and in more moderate Freethinkers talks; you can see it in middle-eastern Jihadist organizations and in Soviet-era communist organizations. Religion does not by any means have a monopoly on conformity, group-think, ignorance, and bigotry.
It's people that are the problem.
But if his legal representation could stand up, wouldn't they have stopped this restraining order in the first place?
And the default font for text is san-serif. Guess what guys, those serifs aren't just pretty; they make it easier to figure out what letter you're seeing when the font size is small. That's why standard practice is to make headers sans-serif, text serif.
Well yeah, that's why I said you need to triage. You've got your girl with a beautiful, genuine smile next to the top of a mountain? Or a close-up of an exotic flower just in bloom? Leave it as high quality as you can make it. You took a picture of a funny engrish translation in a shop, or your girl sticking her tongue out at you? You just don't need it that big. You're never going to print that A4. Even if you took a picture of that boat cruise at night which looks cool but is blurry because the boat was rocking gently -- you're never going to look at that on anything other than your computer screen. No need to make it any larger.
Maybe 1024 is too small; but the number of pixels is N^2, so even cutting it down a bit has a big impact. Max of 1600 should be bigger than you ever need.
And I've found, even just recompressing it makes a big difference.
Regarding RAW: My wife is a professional photographer, and from her perspective the main advantage of RAW over jpeg is if you're going to do anything with the color. JPEG compression takes advantage of the fact that your eye can't detect changes in hue very much; so it will make slight changes to make the image compress better. But guess what happens now if you want to increase the green content? Now you've got little dots of brown in your mostly green areas, and little dots of green in the other areas. But if all you're going to do is play with the levels and crop, JPEG should be fine.
Actually, probably one of the best things he could do is resize the vast majority of his images. Only really beautiful, highly-detailed shots need to be full-resolution. Ones that are mostly of people or funny events can be sized down so the long edge is 1024, or maybe even 800; ones that are a little blurry because of motion / low light / whatever, but still interesting, can be cut down smaller yet. Even the full-sized ones can be recompressed by a program with more horsepower and time (unlike a camera, which has little horsepower and has to get it done fast enough to take the next shot) with almost no discernible loss of quality. That alone will cut your 16GB image collection down to under 1GB.
And to make it more practical: processor architects sometimes end up with big tangled messes of of logic gates to implement certain "formulas" of logic in their chips. Sometimes, the output of a big set of logic gates often seems to be FALSE for most of the inputs they try. If the output is false for *all* inputs, then they don't really need that big mess of gates at all, they can just hard-wire it to FALSE. If it has a handful of TRUE outputs (i.e., the logic can be "satisfied), then they have to keep it.
One way to test it, of course, would be to just try all possible combinations, but this is O(2^n) on the number of inputs. But no one so far (unless the guy in this story is right) has been able to make it any better than exponential.
I almost feel like if you put your medical records, legal records, and naked pictures of yourself on FB, you deserve what you get. Not really, but almost.
Seriously, I've consistently made it a point not to put stuff on FB I wouldn't want everyone to see. My mom, my boss, people from high school -- I know they're all listening when I post something. And, I know that if I go to a country like China, it's not unlikely that the Chinese government could see that information if they decided they want to. So, there are a lot of things about my life that I don't post about. FB knows about the good things, but not the bad things; and there are some pretty cruddy things going on in my life right now that you wouldn't know about by looking at my Facebook feed.
So why do I care if some company has my address? What are they going to do with it -- send me mail? I already get tons of junk mail and fliers. Heck, my bank probably sells my name, address, and marketable details about me already. What's the big deal?
I'm not connected to Microsoft in any way, but from what I've heard, they set it up this way on purpose.
See, I read this book called Guns, Germs, and Steel, a really awesome book by Jared Diamond. It digs into history, geography, biology, anthropology and more, all to find the deepest, most fundamental answer a simple question: Why it is that Europe invaded the Americas, rather than the Americas invading Europe?
Near the end of the book, he talks about how China was at some point more technologically advanced than Europe, and actually began exploring the globe; but stopped before getting into colonialism or sailing across the Pacific. Diamond hypothesized that part of the reason was a monoculture -- at some point one of the emperors of China forbade exploration because he was afraid of competition from the explorers (or something like that), and after that no one happened to take it up again. Whereas, in Europe, everyone was in competition with each other; once the technology and economy was there for colonialism, one of the countries was bound to try it, and then all the other countries would be forced to follow suit or be left in the dust. He supported this thesis by the fact that Christopher Columbus proposed the trip to two other countries and was turned down, before Spain took up his offer. If Columbus had been in China, he would have been turned down, and that would have been the end.
So (apparently -- all this is from memory reading the book), Bill Gates and some other Silicon Valley people heard some of his talks or read early versions of his book, and came to him to ask advice about how to set up a company structure such that the company was more like Europe (forced by internal competition to innovate) than like China (one bad decision leads to no innovation).
I read the book some time ago, and I thought that the idea of setting up internal competition sounded interesting at the time. But every time I hear horror stories of vicious internal competition at Microsoft, I think about Diamond's China / Europe analogy; and how differently things work out based on the context in which they're applied.
Anyway, awesome book, incredibly in-depth but also very readable. Definitely recommended.
When using technical language (i.e., on the side of bottles), jelly is clear (i.e., just made with juice, sugar, and pectin), jam contains actual fruit pulp, but pureed until it's smooth; preserves contains big chunks of the fruit.
But in common usage, "jelly" is the generic term for jelly, jam, and preserves. I've never heard anyone say "peanut butter and preserves sandwich" or "peanut butter and jam sandwich", even if their preferred preserved fruit spread contained pulp.
At very least it would allow you to invest in a high-quality monitor or two, maybe even a specialty keyboard and mouse combo, that you could take with you when you move to another company.
I can see that you don't really "get" Facebook. That's OK, I'm not judging you -- if you don't like that way of communicating, fine. But the fact is that it is a new way of communicating which a huge amount of people (myself included) find valuable. Just because you don't get it or like it, doesn't mean it's going to go away -- any more than because I don't generally like or watch TV means that TV is somehow on the edge of dying.
No, but Facebook (or something like it) will stay because Facebook is better than all the former ones.
I was skeptical about FB at first as well. I'd tried Friendster and a bunch of those other lame ones, and determined that they were basically just competitions for who could invite the most people, with no actual value to them. Really lame. I thought FB would be the same.
But it's not. The reason FB overtook MySpace is that, even though MySpace does actually add value (unlike older incarnations), Facebook adds even more.
Facebook is a new way of communicating. It makes it a lot easier to keep in low-maintenance updates with what's going on in people's lives. I know and am interested in hundreds of people, and hundreds of people are interested in me.
Think about it this way -- depending on the situation, there's an overhead to communication. If you live with someone, it's really easy to just come home and start talking about whatever random stuff happened to you during the day. It's not being narcissistic to tell your spouse / roommate / guys you hang out with several times a week about something frustrating that happened at work, or this crazy thing some girl did on a date. That's what sharing your life is about.
However, how many people would you e-mail about the frustrating thing that happened at work, or call to tell them about? Probably only someone really close to you that's not living with you -- a good friend who's living in another city, or a spouse when they're travelling.
What FB allows you to do is to share that kind of low-key information with people who you would share it with if they were within earshot, without actually having to be within earshot. The result is not only that I know a lot more about what's going on in my cousins' and friends' lives, but also that I find that people I only had a slight acquaintance with I'm now much better friends with -- they're a lot cooler than I had ever realized, because we never before had the opportunity to share that kind of thing.
So whether Facebook itself succeeds or fails is a business question. But the Facebook style of interaction is here to stay; if Facebook goes under or jumps the shark to make money, someone will build another way of doing the same thing. it's not going away any more than Internet Search would go if Altavista went under, or e-mail would go if Hotmail went under.
Not only that, the news media want us to worry -- worry keeps people hooked on watching the news.
It sounds to me like what you're saying is that because the written form has more information than the spoken form (i.e., the large number of potential homophones are disambiguated), that there has developed a sort of literature-culture, which takes advantage of this fact to be more concise when written. Because that information is missing when spoken, it cannot be properly translated into spoken language or pinyin.
It's obvious that this sort of literature-culture, like the poem you linked to, cannot exist without the written characters, because, as you point out, you lose information.
However, what percentage of the actual language as used takes advantage of this? Spoken language outweighs written language probably by a factor of thousands to one (if not more). Even of the written language, how many signs, or instruction manuals, or websites, or textbooks, or even novels even use it? And of those that do, how many would be just as good without it?
Consider it as a cost-benefits analysis. The benefit of having the different characters include (1) that it's cool, (2) that it enables this more concise "written-only" language, which I'm sure is an enjoyable art form for those who know it.
Now consider the cost: rather than learning to write 20-some odd letters, children have to grind through learning to read and write thousands upon thousands of characters just to be able to read a newspaper. Not everyone who has the cognitive ability for pinyin has the cognitive ability for the characters, so that has to have a major impact on literacy rates. And even for people who can grind through and manage a decent amount of characters, how much does that turn them off to reading and learning? And even for those who can learn 10,000 characters, consider what else that time could have been spent learning, rather than learning the characters. And consider the barrier-to-entry for people trying to learn Mandarin and travel in China. Is being able to make a poem of all "shi" really worth all that?
So, is the Chinese character dispensable for this written-only literature? Of course not. Is it dispensable for Chinese as a whole? Absolutely.
Wait, are you saying that two people speaking Mandarin can't really understand each other properly without writing things down? That's ridiculous. Languages (other than sign languages) are first spoken languages, and then written languages. If you can write down what was spoken (including tones), you should be able to understand as much as was spoken.
Ref?
Here's one for you: Mental Stimulation Postpones, Then Speeds Dementia. They studied older people, and found that people who were mentally more active postponed the onset of dementia; but that once it set in, the dementia progressed much faster. They theorize that the brain damage occurs no matter what you do, but that if you keep an active mind, your brain has the flexibility to adapt or "route around" the damage for a while. But eventually, there's just not enough gray cells to do what you used to do, and your mind succumbs to the inevitable.
I'm currently studying Mandarin, and in my experience, even most Mandarin speakers call Mandarin "Chinese" (in Mandarin). The mandarin word for China is "zhong guo" (middle kingdom). The Mandarin word for written Chinese (shared by both Cantonese and Mandarin) is "zhong wen" -- (middle [kingdom] writing). The Mandarin word for Mandarin is "han yue" (Han [people group] speech). But when speaking in Mandarin to most Chinese speakers, they talk about me speaking "zhong wen" rather than "han yue", even though I don't write or read.
What do you think about the argument that someone who can type fast is more likely to be liberal / more complete with comments that he writes in the code?
No, you said that people get worked up when we talk about taboos. But on Slashdot, my experience is the idea that men are just better than women at computers / math / chess is not taboo, but very welcome.
I don't think anyone thinks men and women are the same. But think of it this way.
Suppose, for the sake of arugment, that the only reason there are fewer top women in chess (or computers) is that there are biological differences, either in ability or in inclination. If that's the case, then there's not really anything we can or should do about it. That's just the way things are. We can continue doing things the way we've always done them without feeling bad about it.
Suppose, on the other hand, that there's no biological difference between men and women wrt chess, and the only reason there are fewer top women in chess is that there's a cultural bias such that fewer women consider studying chess: i.e., chess is a "boy thing" and fewer women are likely to try to take it up. In that case, no one has really done anything "wrong", but it's still the case that the chess world is actually losing out -- there are women out there that could have been a Kasparov or a Kramnik, but didn't simply because they didn't try chess. If that's the case, it makes sense to try to do more to recruit younger women, encourage them to play, and to combat the cultural bias. In that way, the chess community as a whole will benefit.
Suppose, however, that there actually is a subtle discrimination in the chess world that, even if not intentional, persistently discourages women from becoming involved. Men think women aren't as good; and so they treat women in subtle ways as if they aren't going to be very good; and so women pick that up, and expect not to be very good. Maybe when Gary Kasparov was just starting, there was a young girl Katrina in the same class, who had the same native talent as Gary. But because she was a girl, she got less attention from her chess coach, and less encouragement; and because of that, didn't excel; and ended up enjoying chess as a hobby, but never studied it seriously, and thus never became a grandmaster*. For every Hou Yifan, who seriously set to study chess, there may be a dozen Katrinas, who have a huge amount of talent and begin with a mild interest but end up discouraged and never go far; or, they get involved but they never have the confidence that men do -- for the simple reason that they're treated differently than men. If that's the case, then again, the chess world is losing out in a big way -- and not only that, the attitude of "Maybe men are just better at women than chess" is actively harmful, not only to the women, but to the chess community as a whole.
Worse yet, suppose (hypothetically) that the real reason there aren't as many successful women in chess is that there's entrenched sexism -- a "boys club" that makes sexist jokes and generally makes it unpleasant for a woman to be involved in serious chess. Then for every Hou Yifan who can put up with the sexism, there will be three or four who give up in disgust. (Even Hou Yifan is young -- she may yet give up in disgust.) If that's the situation, then not only is chess missing out, but there's something actively wrong going on, and we really have a moral obligation to try to correct it.
Now, I'm not really involved in the chess community; but it seems likely to me that the reason there aren't as many grandmaster women in chess is likely to be some combination of all of these. Because the biological explanation is actually harmful if it causes prejudice, it's better if we first look to all the other ones, and only believe it if it's been proven scientifically (i.e., taking a random sample of children and enrolling them all in chess programs). Even then, we sho
You mean, she hasn't played as well (i.e., her ability seems lower), or she hasn't placed as well (i.e., many people placed higher than her)?
If she (or other women) actually play less well at mixed-gender events, I'd suspect some kind of subtle (or not-so-subtle) sexist overtones that made it uncomfortable for women.
No, in any group that becomes a significant majority -- be it male, female, white, Christian, atheist, or whatever -- will tend, without active prcoesses counteracting it, to discriminate in subtle and not-so-subtle ways against the minority. An atheist in an all-Christian setting, or a Christian in an all-Muslim setting, or a white guy in an all-African-American setting, or a guy in an all-girl setting (e.g., social work) -- all of them will tend to experience discrimination. There will always be a range of people -- some who actively combat it, and try to be inclusive, some who are total assholes to the minorities and don't feel bad about it, and a mix of people in between. How the minorities fare will depend on the distribution of the people in the majority.
And I have to say, in my experience, CS guys, and especially FLOSS guys, suck at this. Instead of keeping an open mind, actively looking for any roadblocks which may limit women becoming involved, and rooting those out, the vast majority of men I see respond just like you do. They jump to the simplest and most convenient explanation without actually talking to a woman or looking at the facts, and then get defensive and refuse to consider another perspective.
Think of it this way. Even if it were the case that there is a biological component to the different performance between men and women in certain fields (chess, computers, math, &c), isn't it possible that there are also other causes, which are sociological in nature, and therefore can (and should) be changed? And wouldn't it make sense to do whatever we can to try to remove those barriers, so that women who do have the ability can participate and contribute?
Men and women are different. However, a huge amount of the difference in outcomes between men and women are much better explained by sociology than by biology. Look at the evidence with an open mind sometime.
Except that the vast majority of tech men, in my experience, don't believe that apparent differences in performance have more to do with sociology than with biology. The conclusion almost everyone jumps to, without looking at the actual evidence, is, "Well, maybe men are just better than women". Bzzzt. There is a lot of evidence for alternate explanations, but most techies I've talked to just don't want to hear it.
So Slashdot bringing up the maybe-women-arent-as-good-at-chess idea is playing to the crowd, not challenging a cultist belief.
Except that at the grandmaster level, there's no hiding anything. Both of you know exactly what the implications of each move are, strategically and tactically for several moves ahead.
One of the biggest differences I've seen between actual warfare and chess, and it's a doozy, is the ability to do two things at once. Chess tactics essentially all boils down to taking advantage of that fact that you can only make one move at a time, by forcing your opponent to choose between the lesser of two bad options. And while there are certainly limitations in warfare you can take advantage of, only moving one soldier at a time isn't one of them.
Mine too. Which makes it especially interesting that many autistic children don't look at people's eyes by instinct, and actually have to be trained to look at a person's face when listening or talking to someone.
A link to Theo's post on the subject is much more informative.
Highlights:
Also: