Clearly what Yahoo! should have done is to hire a private army, sent in some hard hitting accountants and auditers to control them and direct operations and offered their customer all the protection he needs even if that means a main strike on Beijing.
I don't understand your position, on the one hand you seem annoyed that Yahoo! have to adhere to Chinese law and on the other hand you tell us to refuse to give any 'power' to the either companies or the government and thus deprive them of their power to do anything about the situation either.
The more people put pressure on their own governments to to put pressure on China the more good can be done but simply ranting about it on Slashdot isn't likely to do any good at all.
Yahoo is operating a business in China so it is bound to act in accordance with Chinese laws. You cannot simply decide you do not agree with a countries law and you are going to ignore them.
Obviously there is an ethical argument that maybe Yahoo should not be doing business in China but in the absence of any US laws prohibiting them from operating Chinese search engines and given the fact China represents a huge market its easy to see why Yahoo has decided to do business there.
If Yahoo did pull out of China then any other search engine would be subject to the same Chinese laws as Yahoo was so it seems to me that Reporters Without Borders should concentrate on efforts to change Chinese law to suit their own ideas more accurately rather than critising companies which whatever else they may be doing are helping to bring jobs and money to Chinese people.
Obviously China does have a less than perfect record on such things as humans rights and this is something most people would like to see improved however this is really a political problem which requires a political solution, international companies are not renowned for their ability to affect political change in foreign countries and if their shareholders have given them the mandate to trade in them then that is what they must do.
I don't think so, I may have left out the part about the maniac walking into the post office and yelling at the other people in the queue
"You gotta help me man, my letters are broke I need help !"
And the bit where someone tells him to read the poster on the wall and he says
"Yeah I read it but I don't get it, you need to tell me what to do"
And a young person inexperienced in the rules about making eye contact with foaming at mouth nutcases says
"Well look, just wait in this queue to buy your stamp and they will post it for you." "What do you mean queue ? I don't think I need to wait in any queues, I don't know anyhing about any queues buddy" "No, this is a queue and you need to wait in it" "I think you're wrong, my letters don't work like that" "They do, now just wait in this queue" "Move aside buddy, I'm coming into this queue. Move will you !" "No, you have to wait at the end of the queue." "Which end ? I think it's OK me waiting here" "No, it's not. Go to the end of the queue. No ! Not that end !" "Why not man, I'll get there quicker at this end" "You just can't do that, wait at the other end" "Then what, what do I do when I get to the other end of this here queue ? I don't see why I can't just go to the other end right away." "Then you go to the counter and give the lady your letter" "What counter ? What's a counter, why do I have to go the counter. It doesn't say anything about counters on that poster I read" "The counter is the big, well, counter at the end of this queue. Can't you see that ?" "There's no need to be like that buddy, I'm just asking for a little help here is all" "So when you get to the counter give the lady your letter and she will sell you a stamp and post it for you." "Whoah, just slow a down a bit here, I tried that queue thing and I still don't see any counter so don't go getting ahead of yourself going on about ladies and stamps" "You need to wait in the queue until you get the counter" "I've done that, where's the counter ?" "You need to wait UNTIL EVERYONE IN FRONT OF YOU IN THE QUEUE HAS BEEN DEALT WITH !!" "You didn't tell me that earlier, why didn't just tell me that at the start ?" "Look I'm sorry but just wait here and read the poster yourself, it explains it all. I have to go now." "How am I supposed to get anyhelp around here ? Geez, a little help is all I want. You are such an asshole for not helping me pal and now I'm going to just ditch this stupid letter crap of yours and go an moan about you on slashdot. Last time I ever use your stupid letters. I hope you're happy."
I'm not an anti social person and I agree I like people much more when they decide to help me but equally I don't approach people with a preconcieved idea that they are somehow honour bound to help me out.
People are free to make their own decisions as to how they spend their time and how they relate to other people, they may make decisions you don't like but that doesn't classify them absolutely in society as an asshole.
Over here it's a Post or Letter Box you'd be looking for to post a letter.
"So you should never expect anyone to give up their free time to help you, but it's perfectly normal and acceptible for them to give up their free time to lash out needlessly at you. Got it."
Yes, I think you have now. Good. People can give up their free time to do what they like provided it's not against the law.
It feels good to have helped you realise this, thanks for the opportunity.
I don't think the original poster said they were calling him names they just stated that he should go back and read the documentation. This is a perfectly reasonable response especially since the guys problem seems to be that he doesn't understand the documentation. What better way is there of understanding something other than reading it through until you do ?
I'm not sure if it was the original poster who says he posted this query a number of times or whether it was someone else but it seems as though not replying is just asking for the question to be repeated ad-infinitum so this is a good reason to bother to reply.
I totally agree that if once he found the answer to his problems he documented that answer somewhere on the web it would make life better for the everyone and I also agree that it is nicer to give nice, helpful answers rather than short instructions but just because someone tells you to read the documentation does not make them an asshole which is essentially what the original poster was saying.
"Here's a silly real world example: say I wanted to send a letter to a friend in another city. Why should I learn how the post office operates in order to send the letter?"
Because if you didn't your friend would never receive his letter. If you didn't bother to find out how would you know what a post box was or that you had to write an address on the envelope or that you needed an envelope or that you needed to buy a stamp or that you needed to put the letter in a letter box ?
Yes in an ideal world everything we would ever want to know would be right there at our fingertips, we would but need to ask the question to have a queue forming of people clamouring to provide us with the answer.
Unfortunately it's not an ideal world and no one should have any expectation and that they should be able to do something without putting in any effort themselves. I agree that a lot of applications work a lot more smoothly on Windows & Macs than they do on Linux right now but when things do wrong it can be just as hard, if not harder, to arrive at a satisfactory solution with Windows or Mac software.
The difference is that most people pay for support for Windows or Mac software but, although there is always an option to pay for Linux support, they do not seem to pay for it. It is then not surprising that they find support they have paid for better than support they haven't.
Just because someone hasn't gone out of their way to solve your problem for you doesn't make them an asshole.
The guy went on the IRC channel and said "I've read the documentation and I don't understand it". It is highly likely that given his lack of understanding talking him through fixing his problem is going to take a long time and be a very frustrating process.
I have dealt with people professionally who want to do things they have absolutley no understanding of and it's a long drawn out painful task, I can see why no one would want to go through this if they aren't getting paid.
The guy already has his answer on what he can do next from his own question, he can identify which bits of the documentation he doesn't understand, research the area on Google and experiment until he does understand it, yes that is probably going to take a while but why should anyone expect other people to give up their time for your problem if you aren't willing to give up your own time for the problem ?
I suppose an argument for the other side here is that humans don't like to have changes forced upon them and in situations where they feel as though a change is being forced on them their first reaction is to deny or ignore the fact that the change will happen. When it becomes impossible to deny it any longer then they will try to resist it and it's not until the change has happened and they can begin to see where they will fit in to the new conditions that they begin to accept it.
If climate change is genuine then it is going to mean that we are forced to change a lot of the ways we are used to doing things both personally and as a society so it is perhaps not surprising that we see here on/. and in the world at large so many people willing to deny that climate change is actually happening and trying to resist any attempts to alter our behaviour as though it did exist.
Climate change is not likely to cause any major effects overnight so we can look forward to an increase in the level of denial even if the evidence for climate change grows stronger and more irrefutable.
I think it's generally accepted that Osama Bin Laden is the behind the events of 9/11, the US has my full support in hunting him down and capturing him. It's possible attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan helped this cause but it's certain that invading Iraq has absolutley nothing to with finding or punishing the people behind 9/11.
I think the main reason assasination is such a no no is that most world leaders realise if it became an accepted form of warfare then it would actually be their lives on the line rather than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of troops who aren't them and who they don't know.
Assasination seems to be perfectly acceptable against targets which you are positive cannot retaliate or change the worldwide consensus of the merits of assination.
The British Empire was well up to the task of dealing with Germany by the time the Americans joined in, Germany could not have invaded the UK mainland and was no longer much of a threat to the her other territories in Africa and India. Britain could probably not have invaded mainland Europe so the end result would have been a standoff between Britain & Germany.
In the meantime Russia would be still be winning on the Eastern front and would eventually beat Germany and take over Europe at which point both the future of both the US and the UK would be very different especially since it would the Russia and not the US making use of all the German developments in rocket science etc.
The problem with mounting the lasers on the ground is that they will not be in a line of site to anywhere near the area a mobile plane flying 4 or 5 ( probably much higher ) miles up will have a line of site to.
You could of course build a giant tower 20miles high on top of a mountain but that would also be a very expensive and tricky to engineer and would also be prime target number 1 in the event of any conflict.
Yes certainly NASA should come around your house every time they want to plan a mission or spend some money and take time to explain it all to you v e r y s l o w l y indeed so you'll understand and be in a position to to give the yea or nay to whether or not they can go ahead with their plans.
Of course if you weren't so stupid and could read all the information NASA provides for yourself without the massive expense involved in having NASA come and talk to you specially we'd all be a lot better off.
You agree that the Linux kernel can be stripped down to a smaller size so I don't understand why you think it would be too "fat" for this $100 dollar laptop project since its likely that they would be using a customised distribution which they could easily ensure was of an appropriate size for their purpose.
There would be two groups of people watching this televised miracle.
The first group to which you seem to belong would throw up their hands and shout "Behold ! A miracle" and go off to their churchs or families to celebrate and leave it at that.
The second group of people would say "We have just witnessed something which we can't explain" and they would go to Times Square and investigate whatever it was that happened as thoroughly as they could, see what they could learn from it and devise and test various scenarios of what might have happened, how it might have happened and why it happened.
Luckily for us the world we live in today is largely built by the second group of people since if we left it to the first we would be still be coming out of our caves during thunder storms and saying to each other "Behold ! the miracle of the bright light and loud noise has once again manifested its self - to the sacred corner everyone and lets celebrate!".
I am willing to accept the possibility that occasionally things may happen which have absolutely no explanation but as yet humanity as not come across any, there have been no miracles in the history of human existence so far so I'd say it was highly unlikely in the extreme that anything you may be witnessing in Times Square is actually a miracle.
That being the case you couldn't possibly shout "Miracle !" immediatley after it happened since you would not have had time to investigate any natural causes of the event in order to rule them out and prove that this event was infact a miracle. Really you would have to wait until the last sentient being in the universe has died and been unable to explain the event before you could even begin to consider labelling whatever you saw as a miracle.
That fact you probably wouldn't wait this long and simply jump to conclusions straight away shows you are in fact a foaming at the mouth moron and incapable of understanding anything which does not fit with your own preconcieved beliefs.
I think the term extorition is entirely appropriate !
It seems to me that the Telcos are suggesting that they set up an entireley unecessary tiering system which benefits nobody and then charge people for using this entirely unecessary system on top of the charges these people are already paying.
As an added bonus to the Telcos, but no one else, they can also use this entirely unecessary tiering system they have just built to charge internet users they actually have no existing connection with on the basis that if the companies don't pay up they will degrade the service available to end users for those companies not willing to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly what Yahoo! should have done is to hire a private army, sent in some hard hitting accountants and auditers to control them and direct operations and offered their customer all the protection he needs even if that means a main strike on Beijing.
I don't understand your position, on the one hand you seem annoyed that Yahoo! have to adhere to Chinese law and on the other hand you tell us to refuse to give any 'power' to the either companies or the government and thus deprive them of their power to do anything about the situation either.
The more people put pressure on their own governments to to put pressure on China the more good can be done but simply ranting about it on Slashdot isn't likely to do any good at all.
It's the suede/denim secret police
they have come for your uncool niece
Yahoo is operating a business in China so it is bound to act in accordance with Chinese laws. You cannot simply decide you do not agree with a countries law and you are going to ignore them.
Obviously there is an ethical argument that maybe Yahoo should not be doing business in China but in the absence of any US laws prohibiting them from operating Chinese search engines and given the fact China represents a huge market its easy to see why Yahoo has decided to do business there.
If Yahoo did pull out of China then any other search engine would be subject to the same Chinese laws as Yahoo was so it seems to me that Reporters Without Borders should concentrate on efforts to change Chinese law to suit their own ideas more accurately rather than critising companies which whatever else they may be doing are helping to bring jobs and money to Chinese people.
Obviously China does have a less than perfect record on such things as humans rights and this is something most people would like to see improved however this is really a political problem which requires a political solution, international companies are not renowned for their ability to affect political change in foreign countries and if their shareholders have given them the mandate to trade in them then that is what they must do.
I don't think so, I may have left out the part about the maniac walking into the post office and yelling at the other people in the queue
"You gotta help me man, my letters are broke I need help !"
And the bit where someone tells him to read the poster on the wall and he says
"Yeah I read it but I don't get it, you need to tell me what to do"
And a young person inexperienced in the rules about making eye contact with foaming at mouth nutcases says
"Well look, just wait in this queue to buy your stamp and they will post it for you."
"What do you mean queue ? I don't think I need to wait in any queues, I don't know anyhing about any queues buddy"
"No, this is a queue and you need to wait in it"
"I think you're wrong, my letters don't work like that"
"They do, now just wait in this queue"
"Move aside buddy, I'm coming into this queue. Move will you !"
"No, you have to wait at the end of the queue."
"Which end ? I think it's OK me waiting here"
"No, it's not. Go to the end of the queue. No ! Not that end !"
"Why not man, I'll get there quicker at this end"
"You just can't do that, wait at the other end"
"Then what, what do I do when I get to the other end of this here queue ? I don't see why I can't just go to the other end right away."
"Then you go to the counter and give the lady your letter"
"What counter ? What's a counter, why do I have to go the counter. It doesn't say anything about counters on that poster I read"
"The counter is the big, well, counter at the end of this queue. Can't you see that ?"
"There's no need to be like that buddy, I'm just asking for a little help here is all"
"So when you get to the counter give the lady your letter and she will sell you a stamp and post it for you."
"Whoah, just slow a down a bit here, I tried that queue thing and I still don't see any counter so don't go getting ahead of yourself going on about ladies and stamps"
"You need to wait in the queue until you get the counter"
"I've done that, where's the counter ?"
"You need to wait UNTIL EVERYONE IN FRONT OF YOU IN THE QUEUE HAS BEEN DEALT WITH !!"
"You didn't tell me that earlier, why didn't just tell me that at the start ?"
"Look I'm sorry but just wait here and read the poster yourself, it explains it all. I have to go now."
"How am I supposed to get anyhelp around here ? Geez, a little help is all I want. You are such an asshole for not helping me pal and now I'm going to just ditch this stupid letter crap of yours and go an moan about you on slashdot. Last time I ever use your stupid letters. I hope you're happy."
I'm not an anti social person and I agree I like people much more when they decide to help me but equally I don't approach people with a preconcieved idea that they are somehow honour bound to help me out.
People are free to make their own decisions as to how they spend their time and how they relate to other people, they may make decisions you don't like but that doesn't classify them absolutely in society as an asshole.
Over here it's a Post or Letter Box you'd be looking for to post a letter.
"So you should never expect anyone to give up their free time to help you, but it's perfectly normal and acceptible for them to give up their free time to lash out needlessly at you. Got it."
Yes, I think you have now. Good. People can give up their free time to do what they like provided it's not against the law.
It feels good to have helped you realise this, thanks for the opportunity.
I don't think the original poster said they were calling him names they just stated that he should go back and read the documentation. This is a perfectly reasonable response especially since the guys problem seems to be that he doesn't understand the documentation. What better way is there of understanding something other than reading it through until you do ?
I'm not sure if it was the original poster who says he posted this query a number of times or whether it was someone else but it seems as though not replying is just asking for the question to be repeated ad-infinitum so this is a good reason to bother to reply.
I totally agree that if once he found the answer to his problems he documented that answer somewhere on the web it would make life better for the everyone and I also agree that it is nicer to give nice, helpful answers rather than short instructions but just because someone tells you to read the documentation does not make them an asshole which is essentially what the original poster was saying.
"Here's a silly real world example: say I wanted to send a letter to a friend in another city. Why should I learn how the post office operates in order to send the letter?"
Because if you didn't your friend would never receive his letter. If you didn't bother to find out how would you know what a post box was or that you had to write an address on the envelope or that you needed an envelope or that you needed to buy a stamp or that you needed to put the letter in a letter box ?
Yes in an ideal world everything we would ever want to know would be right there at our fingertips, we would but need to ask the question to have a queue forming of people clamouring to provide us with the answer.
Unfortunately it's not an ideal world and no one should have any expectation and that they should be able to do something without putting in any effort themselves. I agree that a lot of applications work a lot more smoothly on Windows & Macs than they do on Linux right now but when things do wrong it can be just as hard, if not harder, to arrive at a satisfactory solution with Windows or Mac software.
The difference is that most people pay for support for Windows or Mac software but, although there is always an option to pay for Linux support, they do not seem to pay for it. It is then not surprising that they find support they have paid for better than support they haven't.
+5 Informative ? Moderators please look at timecops posting history and web link and realise this is just a troll !
Just because someone hasn't gone out of their way to solve your problem for you doesn't make them an asshole.
The guy went on the IRC channel and said "I've read the documentation and I don't understand it". It is highly likely that given his lack of understanding talking him through fixing his problem is going to take a long time and be a very frustrating process.
I have dealt with people professionally who want to do things they have absolutley no understanding of and it's a long drawn out painful task, I can see why no one would want to go through this if they aren't getting paid.
The guy already has his answer on what he can do next from his own question, he can identify which bits of the documentation he doesn't understand, research the area on Google and experiment until he does understand it, yes that is probably going to take a while but why should anyone expect other people to give up their time for your problem if you aren't willing to give up your own time for the problem ?
I suppose an argument for the other side here is that humans don't like to have changes forced upon them and in situations where they feel as though a change is being forced on them their first reaction is to deny or ignore the fact that the change will happen. When it becomes impossible to deny it any longer then they will try to resist it and it's not until the change has happened and they can begin to see where they will fit in to the new conditions that they begin to accept it.
/. and in the world at large so many people willing to deny that climate change is actually happening and trying to resist any attempts to alter our behaviour as though it did exist.
If climate change is genuine then it is going to mean that we are forced to change a lot of the ways we are used to doing things both personally and as a society so it is perhaps not surprising that we see here on
Climate change is not likely to cause any major effects overnight so we can look forward to an increase in the level of denial even if the evidence for climate change grows stronger and more irrefutable.
So what, you're saying that things which can happen from natural causes can't also happen through human causes ?
I think it's generally accepted that Osama Bin Laden is the behind the events of 9/11, the US has my full support in hunting him down and capturing him. It's possible attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan helped this cause but it's certain that invading Iraq has absolutley nothing to with finding or punishing the people behind 9/11.
I think the main reason assasination is such a no no is that most world leaders realise if it became an accepted form of warfare then it would actually be their lives on the line rather than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of troops who aren't them and who they don't know.
Assasination seems to be perfectly acceptable against targets which you are positive cannot retaliate or change the worldwide consensus of the merits of assination.
The British Empire was well up to the task of dealing with Germany by the time the Americans joined in, Germany could not have invaded the UK mainland and was no longer much of a threat to the her other territories in Africa and India. Britain could probably not have invaded mainland Europe so the end result would have been a standoff between Britain & Germany.
In the meantime Russia would be still be winning on the Eastern front and would eventually beat Germany and take over Europe at which point both the future of both the US and the UK would be very different especially since it would the Russia and not the US making use of all the German developments in rocket science etc.
Or develop some material which is transparent to this kind of light ?
The problem with mounting the lasers on the ground is that they will not be in a line of site to anywhere near the area a mobile plane flying 4 or 5 ( probably much higher ) miles up will have a line of site to.
You could of course build a giant tower 20miles high on top of a mountain but that would also be a very expensive and tricky to engineer and would also be prime target number 1 in the event of any conflict.
It seems to me someone should persuade George Bush to fire the USA at the moon, there's no terrorists or WMD up there to worry him.
Yes certainly NASA should come around your house every time they want to plan a mission or spend some money and take time to explain it all to you v e r y s l o w l y indeed so you'll understand and be in a position to to give the yea or nay to whether or not they can go ahead with their plans.
Of course if you weren't so stupid and could read all the information NASA provides for yourself without the massive expense involved in having NASA come and talk to you specially we'd all be a lot better off.
It's not very hard to keep up with /.
Yes, very original. Well done.
You agree that the Linux kernel can be stripped down to a smaller size so I don't understand why you think it would be too "fat" for this $100 dollar laptop project since its likely that they would be using a customised distribution which they could easily ensure was of an appropriate size for their purpose.
40,000 Canadian Dollars is currently worth 19,998 Great British Pounds which doesn't really sound like a lot of money at all for a scientific study.
There would be two groups of people watching this televised miracle.
The first group to which you seem to belong would throw up their hands and shout "Behold ! A miracle" and go off to their churchs or families to celebrate and leave it at that.
The second group of people would say "We have just witnessed something which we can't explain" and they would go to Times Square and investigate whatever it was that happened as thoroughly as they could, see what they could learn from it and devise and test various scenarios of what might have happened, how it might have happened and why it happened.
Luckily for us the world we live in today is largely built by the second group of people since if we left it to the first we would be still be coming out of our caves during thunder storms and saying to each other "Behold ! the miracle of the bright light and loud noise has once again manifested its self - to the sacred corner everyone and lets celebrate!".
I am willing to accept the possibility that occasionally things may happen which have absolutely no explanation but as yet humanity as not come across any, there have been no miracles in the history of human existence so far so I'd say it was highly unlikely in the extreme that anything you may be witnessing in Times Square is actually a miracle.
That being the case you couldn't possibly shout "Miracle !" immediatley after it happened since you would not have had time to investigate any natural causes of the event in order to rule them out and prove that this event was infact a miracle. Really you would have to wait until the last sentient being in the universe has died and been unable to explain the event before you could even begin to consider labelling whatever you saw as a miracle.
That fact you probably wouldn't wait this long and simply jump to conclusions straight away shows you are in fact a foaming at the mouth moron and incapable of understanding anything which does not fit with your own preconcieved beliefs.
I think the term extorition is entirely appropriate !
It seems to me that the Telcos are suggesting that they set up an entireley unecessary tiering system which benefits nobody and then charge people for using this entirely unecessary system on top of the charges these people are already paying.
As an added bonus to the Telcos, but no one else, they can also use this entirely unecessary tiering system they have just built to charge internet users they actually have no existing connection with on the basis that if the companies don't pay up they will degrade the service available to end users for those companies not willing to pay.