He also wrote in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book in which he won his Pulitzer Prize, that computer chess players would never beat humans. He's a brilliant writer and has a gift for making the incredibly difficult simple, but his track record in predicting the future isn't great.
There are special prosecutors for when Congress finds that there needs to be an investigation into the Executive, and the President has no power of removal over the special prosecutor. But for ordinary affairs, the Department of Justice argues the government's case in court. If anything it would be a far greater violation of the separation of powers if the DOJ were part of the judicial branch: then you'd have the same branch of government accusing, trying, and convicting people, which is pretty much the defintion of an autocracy.
Well there's always the case of Japanese internment in California during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld the internment in a case called Korematsu. That was a dark chapter in our nation's history, and we're not in nearly such bad shape today: things are bad, yes, but racial minorities are not being rounded up in ordinary communities in America and held like animals in prison camps. For all the harassment and inconvenience those who are visibly Arab face in our society today, no court has yet proved unwilling to defend their rights when push comes to shove.
"There is no natural phenomenon that we call 'computer'"
So? It's a theoretical construct. There's no natural phenomenon that we call "integers" either, and yet the number theorists don't need to feel constrained by the limitations of computing hardware. Most mathematicians believe that there are prime numbers of a googol digits, for example, even if modern hardware couldn't hope to find them.
Computer science is not an empirical science, at least not generally; like mathematics, it is axiomatic. In this sense it is not constrained by the physical limitations of the current iteration of computer hardware, and (as usual) Dijkstra is absolutely right.
"In the US, this would count as contributory infringement I believe, and would be shut down."
No more so than medical malpractice insurance is contributory malpractice. Insurance for legal liability is a common thing.
The real reason this is not a long-term solution to the RIAA's lawsuits is that so far the RIAA has been settling for only about $5000 per case. If the party was insured, they might bring it to court and insist on the full $150,000 per infringement. No insurance could stand up to that; the provider would either go bankrupt or have to start charging obscenely high premiums.
I challenge you to name even one case where a very small company with very few assets has been sued by a patent troll. It doesn't happen; it's not worth the cost of litigation.
I bet if you compared the proportion of users who experienced problems with first generation Apple products, they'd be less than for any competing products on the PC side.
The hysteria is a combination of (1) Apple users' sometimes obnoxious levels of perfectionism, and (2) Apple's reputation for great customer satisfaction such that each and every flaw is a major news story.
It's not hard; people just have to manually delete (not obscure) data they want redacted. Then all outgoing Word files should be scrubbed of metadata. There are commercial packages, included in many groupware suites, that do this automatically. At the law firm where I work, every single Word file that gets emailed to an address outside the firm is automatically scrubbed of metadata by the server. If you try to save a document with Track Changes enabled, a dialog box warns you. If you try to email a document with Track Changes enabled, several layers of dialog boxes confirm that this is actually what you wanted to do.
The procedure you link to has people scrubbing the metadata by copying all the content of the document and pasting it into a new document. This puts too much trust in the user and does not clear some types of metadata anyway.
With a meritocratically oriented civil service that runs all the way to the top, the leaders of Chinese government tend to be engineers and scientists, whereas we in the democratic USA are stuck with lawyers.
You know, this is not exactly an endorsement of engineers and scientists.
Libel requires that the alleged tortfeasor know or should know that the statement is false. In this case the credit agency believes that the information is correct.
Of course if you submit appropriate documentation and they do not correct their error, then you may have a case; but I suspect that libel would be a pretty atypical way to go after them, and judges would therefore be loathe to credit it. I'm sure there are consumer protection laws that will provide a much lower fixed fine that they'd prefer to use in the interest of judicial legitimacy.
OSX was based on the FreeBSD kernel and leveraged a LOT of UNIX structure under the covers. Lift the GUI off of OSX and you essentially have a BSD box. This means, for Apple, a lot of the engineering had already been completed. They were just adding in their own layers of stuff. Vista on the otherhand is supposedly a near-completely rewrite from the NT kernel OSs (NT, 2k, XP). That's a massive difference in work effort involved.
Yes, but it's unnecessary work. Apple found a better way to do it. Microsoft doesn't deserve any sympathy for its wrongheaded and stubborn insistence on writing everything from the ground up.
Another possibility is that way more men than women play these games. So even if the same absolute number has gone on dates (which would make sense if each man dates one woman and vice versa online) then the proportion of men would be much lower.
It's the same process here except that you don't need to visit the Chamber of Commerce. I founded a non-profit corporation once, and it involved filling out just one form. Later, when the time came to dissolve it, it again took only one form.
It's true that Sarbanes-Oxley complicates things, but that's mostly for large businesses. It has all kinds of exemptions for small businesses and startups, and even most labor laws don't apply to companies below a certain size. If I had to guess, I'd say your friend from the Netherlands found his experience with American companies to be bureaucratic for two reasons:
(1) He was dealing with large American companies, to which all of these laws and regulations do apply, and (2) he had to work an interface *between* two countries, which is always harder than working within either one exclusively.
Especially with regard to this second point, America has a huge advantage simply because its domestic market is big enough to obviate the need for a startup to cross national boundaries with its business.
it's the ISP's infrastructure and they can choose their own business model.
And their cables run through my back yard. Since that's my private property, I can choose my own business model, and I think I will choose to make my property unavailable for their cables unless they pay me an annual Premium Access Fee. That's fair too, right? And if they refuse, I can just cut their cables out of my property with a backhoe, right?
Oh wait, I can't; they get utility easements granted by the government. Seems this infrastructure isn't quite as private as you were suggesting.
But I bet you're willing to eat yogurt even though you can't know for certain that the yogurt bacteria are not conscious. I bet you use paper, even though you can't know for certain that the trees are not conscious. And I bet your house has a foundation that was cut into the surface of the Earth, even though -- let's face it -- you can't know for certain that the Earth itself isn't conscious.
So you have exactly two internally consistent options. You could be utterly paralyzed and unable to live a remotely normal life for fear that you will hurt or kill something that you can't be certain isn't conscious, or you could admit that human rights come from being human and not from being conscious, that you can't even really define consciousness, and that embryos are biologically no more sophisticated than the yogurt bacteria, the paper trees, or the Earth's crust.
"I don't understand why there's anger at Google for obeying Chinese laws. Do I agree with those laws? Hell no. But business is business."
I see this a lot from slashdotters. In other words, you think a profit motive exempts them from morality. Would you say the same thing about a professional hit man?
"And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions."
So you also don't think that freedom from censorship (and by proxy freedom of speech and freedom of thought) is a particularly valuable freedom. You're entitled to your opinion, but it's a pretty sick one.
"I have no doubt that China will need to liberalize their government. If they want to be an effective technological power, they will need smart people and that means increasingly free access to information."
Unless they get help from companies like Google to enable them to reap the benefits of a modern society while maintaining an oppressive regime. Ordinarily there would be a tension between the people's demand for acccess to useful information and the government's oppression. Ultimately this would force the government either to reevaluate its oppression or face obsolescence in the modern world. Either way, it's a pressure on the government to reform and become more democratic. Google has at least partly relieved that pressure without forcing the government to come to terms with its oppression. Google is the enabler here. I think that's a seriously bad thing. Is it evil? I think so.
"Why is it up to Google to crusade against government policy? Are they some kind of political super-hero?"
At the risk of inciting the invocation of Godwin's Law, this same excuse could have been used by the Nazis responsible for pulling the levers on the gas chambers. Yes, those violations of fundamental human rights were far worse than these, but they're both violations of fundamental human rights, so the difference is one of degree and not category. If you're going to object to one and not the other you'd better have a logically sound way to distinguish between the two.
There is no way, on balance, that more information - seen by more people - can be anything but good for an eventually more open society in China.
There absolutely is a way that more information can be worse than less: if the information is misinformation, either by systematic inaccuracy or by systematic bias. Information has been used to oppress the masses ever since the invention of writing. Every oppressive regime that I can think of in recent history has had some analogue of a biased, state-sponsored newspaper. If China can make the whole internet look biased in their favor, that's even worse, because it carries with it the apparent credibility of other nations' opinions.
I concede the possibility that the amount of information that Yahoo and Google make available to the Chinese on balance helps them -- but this is not at all clear, and certainly there is a level at which it is not true. I'm sure that Kim Il Jong's propaganda rag prints the weather report, but I think the citizens of North Korea would be a good deal better off without their government's deafening lies even if it meant that they didn't know whether to expect sun or rain that day. Publishing some legitimately useful information alongside the propaganda does not mean that the whole package is good for the citizenry.
And in any case, this argument that you're making is a far cry from your GP post: that Yahoo should be excused from violating people's fundamental human rights -- and this is not hyperbole; at least three brave souls are languishing in a gulag because of Yahoo's loose lips -- because they can make a lot of money by doing so. If denouncing such a short-sighted and frankly downright evil principle constitutes sophistry, then fuck it, I'll put "sophist" on my business card.
Since when does a profit motive exempt anyone, corporation or human, from morality? Would you say that there is no moral problem with what hit men do for a living?
Slashdot Mirror
He also wrote in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book in which he won his Pulitzer Prize, that computer chess players would never beat humans. He's a brilliant writer and has a gift for making the incredibly difficult simple, but his track record in predicting the future isn't great.
There are special prosecutors for when Congress finds that there needs to be an investigation into the Executive, and the President has no power of removal over the special prosecutor. But for ordinary affairs, the Department of Justice argues the government's case in court. If anything it would be a far greater violation of the separation of powers if the DOJ were part of the judicial branch: then you'd have the same branch of government accusing, trying, and convicting people, which is pretty much the defintion of an autocracy.
Well there's always the case of Japanese internment in California during World War II. The Supreme Court upheld the internment in a case called Korematsu. That was a dark chapter in our nation's history, and we're not in nearly such bad shape today: things are bad, yes, but racial minorities are not being rounded up in ordinary communities in America and held like animals in prison camps. For all the harassment and inconvenience those who are visibly Arab face in our society today, no court has yet proved unwilling to defend their rights when push comes to shove.
"There is no natural phenomenon that we call 'computer'"
So? It's a theoretical construct. There's no natural phenomenon that we call "integers" either, and yet the number theorists don't need to feel constrained by the limitations of computing hardware. Most mathematicians believe that there are prime numbers of a googol digits, for example, even if modern hardware couldn't hope to find them.
Computer science is not an empirical science, at least not generally; like mathematics, it is axiomatic. In this sense it is not constrained by the physical limitations of the current iteration of computer hardware, and (as usual) Dijkstra is absolutely right.
"In the US, this would count as contributory infringement I believe, and would be shut down."
No more so than medical malpractice insurance is contributory malpractice. Insurance for legal liability is a common thing.
The real reason this is not a long-term solution to the RIAA's lawsuits is that so far the RIAA has been settling for only about $5000 per case. If the party was insured, they might bring it to court and insist on the full $150,000 per infringement. No insurance could stand up to that; the provider would either go bankrupt or have to start charging obscenely high premiums.
"No other part of the federal government has the capability to exercise such power"
Congress does.
I bet if you compared the proportion of users who experienced problems with first generation Apple products, they'd be less than for any competing products on the PC side.
The hysteria is a combination of (1) Apple users' sometimes obnoxious levels of perfectionism, and (2) Apple's reputation for great customer satisfaction such that each and every flaw is a major news story.
Of course, then you don't get the benefits of a vector-based pdf: selectable text, better (indeed, arbitrarily good) resolution, small filesize.
That still wouldn't delete text that you've obscured with a rectangle.
It's not hard; people just have to manually delete (not obscure) data they want redacted. Then all outgoing Word files should be scrubbed of metadata. There are commercial packages, included in many groupware suites, that do this automatically. At the law firm where I work, every single Word file that gets emailed to an address outside the firm is automatically scrubbed of metadata by the server. If you try to save a document with Track Changes enabled, a dialog box warns you. If you try to email a document with Track Changes enabled, several layers of dialog boxes confirm that this is actually what you wanted to do.
The procedure you link to has people scrubbing the metadata by copying all the content of the document and pasting it into a new document. This puts too much trust in the user and does not clear some types of metadata anyway.
Libel requires that the alleged tortfeasor know or should know that the statement is false. In this case the credit agency believes that the information is correct.
Of course if you submit appropriate documentation and they do not correct their error, then you may have a case; but I suspect that libel would be a pretty atypical way to go after them, and judges would therefore be loathe to credit it. I'm sure there are consumer protection laws that will provide a much lower fixed fine that they'd prefer to use in the interest of judicial legitimacy.
So why don't they work elsewhere?
Another possibility is that way more men than women play these games. So even if the same absolute number has gone on dates (which would make sense if each man dates one woman and vice versa online) then the proportion of men would be much lower.
It's the same process here except that you don't need to visit the Chamber of Commerce. I founded a non-profit corporation once, and it involved filling out just one form. Later, when the time came to dissolve it, it again took only one form.
It's true that Sarbanes-Oxley complicates things, but that's mostly for large businesses. It has all kinds of exemptions for small businesses and startups, and even most labor laws don't apply to companies below a certain size. If I had to guess, I'd say your friend from the Netherlands found his experience with American companies to be bureaucratic for two reasons:
(1) He was dealing with large American companies, to which all of these laws and regulations do apply, and
(2) he had to work an interface *between* two countries, which is always harder than working within either one exclusively.
Especially with regard to this second point, America has a huge advantage simply because its domestic market is big enough to obviate the need for a startup to cross national boundaries with its business.
And their cables run through my back yard. Since that's my private property, I can choose my own business model, and I think I will choose to make my property unavailable for their cables unless they pay me an annual Premium Access Fee. That's fair too, right? And if they refuse, I can just cut their cables out of my property with a backhoe, right?
Oh wait, I can't; they get utility easements granted by the government. Seems this infrastructure isn't quite as private as you were suggesting.
But I bet you're willing to eat yogurt even though you can't know for certain that the yogurt bacteria are not conscious. I bet you use paper, even though you can't know for certain that the trees are not conscious. And I bet your house has a foundation that was cut into the surface of the Earth, even though -- let's face it -- you can't know for certain that the Earth itself isn't conscious.
So you have exactly two internally consistent options. You could be utterly paralyzed and unable to live a remotely normal life for fear that you will hurt or kill something that you can't be certain isn't conscious, or you could admit that human rights come from being human and not from being conscious, that you can't even really define consciousness, and that embryos are biologically no more sophisticated than the yogurt bacteria, the paper trees, or the Earth's crust.
"I don't understand why there's anger at Google for obeying Chinese laws. Do I agree with those laws? Hell no. But business is business."
I see this a lot from slashdotters. In other words, you think a profit motive exempts them from morality. Would you say the same thing about a professional hit man?
"And before this discussion degenerates into WWII analogies, remember that Google is just a damn search engine and what's being repressed are just frigging web pages. No human is being abused or tortured by Google's actions."
So you also don't think that freedom from censorship (and by proxy freedom of speech and freedom of thought) is a particularly valuable freedom. You're entitled to your opinion, but it's a pretty sick one.
"I have no doubt that China will need to liberalize their government. If they want to be an effective technological power, they will need smart people and that means increasingly free access to information."
Unless they get help from companies like Google to enable them to reap the benefits of a modern society while maintaining an oppressive regime. Ordinarily there would be a tension between the people's demand for acccess to useful information and the government's oppression. Ultimately this would force the government either to reevaluate its oppression or face obsolescence in the modern world. Either way, it's a pressure on the government to reform and become more democratic. Google has at least partly relieved that pressure without forcing the government to come to terms with its oppression. Google is the enabler here. I think that's a seriously bad thing. Is it evil? I think so.
"Why is it up to Google to crusade against government policy? Are they some kind of political super-hero?"
At the risk of inciting the invocation of Godwin's Law, this same excuse could have been used by the Nazis responsible for pulling the levers on the gas chambers. Yes, those violations of fundamental human rights were far worse than these, but they're both violations of fundamental human rights, so the difference is one of degree and not category. If you're going to object to one and not the other you'd better have a logically sound way to distinguish between the two.
Okay. I can drink to that.
Yes -- and they're immoral!
There absolutely is a way that more information can be worse than less: if the information is misinformation, either by systematic inaccuracy or by systematic bias. Information has been used to oppress the masses ever since the invention of writing. Every oppressive regime that I can think of in recent history has had some analogue of a biased, state-sponsored newspaper. If China can make the whole internet look biased in their favor, that's even worse, because it carries with it the apparent credibility of other nations' opinions.
I concede the possibility that the amount of information that Yahoo and Google make available to the Chinese on balance helps them -- but this is not at all clear, and certainly there is a level at which it is not true. I'm sure that Kim Il Jong's propaganda rag prints the weather report, but I think the citizens of North Korea would be a good deal better off without their government's deafening lies even if it meant that they didn't know whether to expect sun or rain that day. Publishing some legitimately useful information alongside the propaganda does not mean that the whole package is good for the citizenry.
And in any case, this argument that you're making is a far cry from your GP post: that Yahoo should be excused from violating people's fundamental human rights -- and this is not hyperbole; at least three brave souls are languishing in a gulag because of Yahoo's loose lips -- because they can make a lot of money by doing so. If denouncing such a short-sighted and frankly downright evil principle constitutes sophistry, then fuck it, I'll put "sophist" on my business card.
Since when does a profit motive exempt anyone, corporation or human, from morality? Would you say that there is no moral problem with what hit men do for a living?