It's strange that Everything has changed to the point where people are actually comparing it to Wikipedia. I was an Everything user in its very first days, and back then we noded any nonsense we wanted for fun. But the editors got more and more serious. I left when they made the transition to Everything2. Writing long articles went against the entire spirit of the original Everything, and having people vote you down was nasty. Since then I occasionally revisit and see how many of my old nodes have been deleted.
Despite sucking all the fun out of noding, Everything is still fundamentally not built to become a useful reference like Wikipedia. The voting system only allows deletion, it's not nearly as powerful as a wiki for peer reviewing. Everything lacks Wikipedia's clear content guidelines and NPOV policy, so much of it is still subjective nonsense. I don't think it's very enlightened at all --- nowadays, Everything is neither fun (to me at least) nor useful.
Honestly though, except for the German one the non-English wikipedias are pretty lame. The Japanese Wikipedia is quite large but from what I've seen, they have lower standards there --- it's nothing but lists with no depth. The rest of the wikipedias are all pretty tiny right now.
India and China may have large populations but only a tiny fraction of those people have computers and are educated enough to decently contribute to Wikipedia. Those wikipedias aren't going to be important before 2 or 3 decades from now (at least). en.wikipedia.org is going to remain "the" Wikipedia for a long time.
I have yet to see a good reason why it was necessary for the doc to have evil cyborg tentacles to control the fusion reaction instead of just using the Canadarm or something. Also, why is a fusion scientist also a brilliant expert in neurorobotics?
if 911 ended with "I'm John Kerry and I approved this message"
I'll just add that Kerry really does not want to do this, anyway. Remember what happened to Clark in the primaries when Moore endorsed him and accused Bush of being a deserter at the same time. Moore is more extreme than Kerry needs to be to attract swing voters. If Kerry gets associated with Moore's ideas in the public's mind, he's dead meat.
Kerry's campaign has been remarkably silent on the film so far. He doesn't want to trash it, thus weakening its effect on Bush, but he doesn't want to be seen as endorsing it either. I think Kerry may be more scared of Moore than Bush is.
Anyway, I've put my argument forward, and I don't think your response refutes it. I'll just address this point because it's factually inaccurate:
On your Japan example, I note that they had McArthur.
The SCAP left very early, I don't remember the exact date but it was around or before the Korean war. The Japanese economic "miracle" began well after MacArthur left, in the 1960s and 1970s. Ascribing Japanese economic growth to him is completely wrong because for most of his term he was actively trying to shrink the Japanese economy, to prevent them from ever again building an army that could threaten the United States. The United States only changed its tune when the Cold War started and they realized Japan was actually an ally.
I certainly do assert it. Not so much transparency and free trade (though I think they can do good), but the democratic institutions.
You're crediting the Chinese government for economic growth. Indeed, 10% growth is impressive stuff. But how hard is it really to grow at that rate when you're starting from an extremely poor population (per capita GDP 1/10th of the US) and you have a huge wealth of technologies to copy from more advanced countries? Japan did the exact same thing decades ago, and they did it with a democratic government. China's system for economic growth is no better than that of Western liberal democracies. They're growing fast for now, but if and when they become an advanced economy they'll grow in the 2-3% range like everybody else.
And I'm not sure what you mean with your sovereignty comment. Massing armed forces, blustering and pointing missiles is a workable system for sovereignty? If you want to see a really workable system for sovereignty, take a look at Canada and Quebec, where they have well-disciplined referendums and legal procedures for the eventuality of separation. And more generally, Chinese foreign policy is not so well-advised; they are too chummy with North Korea and unreasonably hostile to Japan over 50-year-old grudges.
And there are bigger problems with China. Censorship, shooting dissidents and crushing religions you don't like is not acceptable in my book. Nor are massive ill-advised dam projects displacing millions of peasants (who in general are not at all well off in China today). Nor is being ruled by a dynasty of secretive, totally unaccountable technocrats who may or may not be acting in China's best interest.
Essentially the only thing China is currently doing right is their double-digit growth, and as I explained above it has been done by other countries in their shoes and mainly requires stability, avoiding corruption and being open to free trade --- essentially, just not screwing up. Considering the many obvious problems with the Chinese government, I don't at all understand how you can claim it is superior to Western liberal democracies. There is no evidence for that claim.
Taiwan will never voluntarily become a part of China until the mainland catches up with Taiwan's political system. Even then I think they probably won't be very happy with it: they've gotten to like their de facto independence and they really don't see any reason why they should be getting orders from the mainland. Taiwan has always pretty much been a separate country with a separate culture, and it's just been annexed to the empire periodically.
What I hope is that the mainland Chinese will become saner on this issue with time, and stop insisting on this useless annexation. It may be a false hope, though.
Bad analogy, provided needs are the same, the market is much better at evaluating software than movies. Or do you disagree with the market that Google is the best search engine?
Not really necessary or cost-effective, IMHO. As any marketer will tell you, the most effective form of advertising is word-of-mouth, and Mozilla has plenty of that on its side. Now that much of the tech-savvy avant-garde has switched to firefox, it should gradually trickle down to the average user. (I know my friends are using firefox, and a lot of other slashdotters are reporting the same.) I think traditional advertising wouldn't nearly be as effective as the slow avalanche that Mozilla is building up. As long as they keep working on their browser quality, they should gain more and more ground from IE without any explicit marketing effort.
Unless Microsoft wakes up to the threat and restarts work on their browser, of course (but that wouldn't be a bad outcome either --- yay competition!).
Nah, I think it's better to just live with them. It won't accomplish anything to dash off angry messages to your acquaintances --- it's just more rudeness on your part. I think it's better to be a bit forgiving of these things. They aren't as tech-savvy as you and usually mean well. How hard is it really for you to delete a nonsense chain-letter now and then from an acquaintance?
That boggles the mind. Didn't any of these people know enough to think that no reports are magically sent to Microsoft when you e-mail someone? (... imagine the privacy implications!) Or have enough elementary business sense to realize that Microsoft won't just send people money for nothing?
The point would be that Moore sucks for peddling misrepresentations, I think. "Smart people will be able to see through it" is no excuse for distorting the facts. Serious documentaries --- and whatever Moore claims, this documentary is very serious because it deals with important issues in today's America --- should strive for reasonable argumentation, not just cheap shots and raw entertainment value.
That said, the film certainly shouldn't be censored.
In the end, these selective type of litanies are the biggest type of lies of all.
No, it's not the worst type of lie. The worst types of lies are from people like Holocaust deniers, who blatantly make up "facts" from fake sources, relying on the fact that most people won't bother looking them up for themselves. (AFAIK, Moore hasn't done this --- every elementary fact is true, even if the interpretation can be objectionable.) Moore and Limbaugh are pretty tame in comparison.
Since they don't peddle outright falsehoods, if you take the time to read both Moore and Limbaugh you will get some facts from both sides of the debate, and you will start to get a balanced perspective. On controversial topics, it's rarely a good idea to get all your facts from a single source, even if it's less shamelessly slanted than those two.
Re:Just don't touch Superman
on
Spider-Man in India
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Never mind that Superman was foreigner who crashed into the midwest quite by chance to begin with.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of this. Best superman spinoff ever. I love the hammer and sickle instead of his S!
Er, the address bar is already integrated with search. It sends you to the Google I'm feeling lucky result. This makes perfect sense to me, since normally the address bar sends you straight to the page you want, not to some annoying intermediate search page.
IMHO, the address bar is not about going "places", it is about going to a place. Search is about going "places". What I mean by this is that if you have a specific, popular site in mind (like "foobar corp", or "slashdot"), you use the address bar, but if you don't have a specific page in mind but only some desired information, then you use a search engine. They are two separate concepts.
If you want one exact site but don't remember the URL, the I'm feeling lucky search is great, and a natural extension of the address bar. Sending you to a google results page would not be so natural. It would be very annoying if I had to go through an intermediate search page when I *know* the I'm feeling lucky will work. When I'm not looking for one exact site, I use the google bar.
I don't have real proof, this is mostly a pet theory of mine. I have observed when talking to Japanese people, though, that they view America's gun culture as a central feature of the country, IMHO emphasizing it beyond its true importance. More than one Japanese person has told me that they fear going to America because they are afraid they are going to get shot.
I mostly meant violence, I just threw in "sex" in there as a bonus because that's how many American people describe anime. You're right that sex appeal in anime is a prevalent feature which can't be accounted for by an illusory cultural filtering effect. However, anime women generally do not correspond to the "big-breasted vixen" stereotype carried by many Americans --- IMHO this stereotype again originates from the Japanese attempting to conform to American tastes.
One of the definitions of irony is a coincidence that goes against expectations. The expectation here is that the anime we see is violent because of Japanese culture. However, the truth (as I see it) is that it's violent mainly because of our culture.
Looks like honest-to-god irony to me. Don't try and nail me on it, I think carefully before using the word:).
Yeah, the GITS movie is actually quite obscure in Japan. As any anime fan knows, the vast majority of anime (putting aside the question of whether it's actually good or not) is not at all like Ghost in the Shell, and that sort of thing is not very appealing to most Japanese. The film just happened to be the subject of early marketing pushes for anime in America, probably because it involves a lot of futuristic, gritty violence.
The Western perception (steadily eroding, fortunately) that anime mainly consists of sex and gunfighting is ironic. Here's what happened, as I understand it: Japanese marketers saw American films like Terminator, figured that Americans like lots of sex and guns, and decided that they should only release in America those anime films "appealing to American tastes". The American perception of anime to a large extent reflects the Japanese perception of American tastes!
Some cultures in the world are still in the Bronze Age -- period.
Not really. Many people in the world are certainly very poor (though I'm still not sure if they've got it as bad as those living 2000 years ago), but modern technology has an influence even in the poorest countries. WHO vaccines for polio, malaria etc have reached even the most godforsaken countries of Africa, resulting in a considerable increase (something close to doubling, IIRC) in life expectancy in poor countries over the past hundred years. Poor people also often have access to modern materials to build their shacks, modern crossbred seeds for their little farms, etc. Of course, the influence of technology is not entirely positive --- it would be better if the warlords didn't have machine guns --- but I'm just saying that comparing today's poor countries with the Bronze Age isn't accurate.
What good is ubiquitous Internet connectivity to a people that are comparatively primitive?
It does sound silly at first sight to give wireless Internet access to people in abject poverty, but I think it would actually do them a lot of good. Imagine if we could distribute cheap Internet access stations to the poor --- they would have instant access to a giant wealth of information and education. Many people in poor countries have not had any primary education, and don't even know things that we consider incredibly basic and obvious. For example, they might not know that boiling water helps to kill germs and prevent disease, or that sex communicates AIDS. One of the most popular and important books in the world is a little UN booklet distributed in Africa that explains such basic concepts (I don't remember what it was called); it's been said that that booklet has saved thousands of lives.
The Internet would also help them to read about such things as politics and democracy, which would help reform the bad regimes in the poor parts of the world (which are a primary cause of poverty).
Finally, better communication systems would assist them with making their own businesses. I think that one of the best things we can do for the poor is to provide them with access to more information.
Not less valid, but certainly more of an indication that the speaker is a loony.
That people believe established religions is excusable, because they've been indoctrinated into it from their childhood, and because they see that a lot of intelligent people believe in it. Thus many otherwise rational people will believe in mainstream religions. It's a natural human effect, and we can't hold it against them. However, when it comes to non-mainstream, cultist religions, belief in one indicates potentially serious gullibility and lack of rational thought.
I can see someone being Catholic, considering the weight of the great Catholic Church behind it, and the reams of papers written by brilliant theologians over the years. But you can't be very thoughtful if you believe the wild claims of some little cult of Wiccans or Raelians.
If you'd taken the time to read the other replies, you'd see your arguments had already been made by others, and that I acknowledged I was wrong. Thanks for piling on more ad hominems though, I appreciate it. I admire the sharpness of your inference, figuring out that I'm an ignorant slut from a single slashdot post.
Yeah, I sure got nailed there by those 12 vicious replies. I concede defeat:). I'm actually rather embarrassed that the mods went and modded my post to 5, giving it high exposure when it turns out I was blatantly wrong on my main claim. Kind of a failure of the mod system there. If I could, I would mod myself back down and mod you up a little. I've got to stop dashing off quick posts when I'm not 100% sure that I've got my facts right.
Sorry for my ill-informed counter. Would've been nice if you had mentioned the Reichstag fire in your original post and saved me the trouble, though.
Slashdot Mirror
You can add Wikipedia to your search bar. Pretty convenient when you know it's going to be better than Google :).
Despite sucking all the fun out of noding, Everything is still fundamentally not built to become a useful reference like Wikipedia. The voting system only allows deletion, it's not nearly as powerful as a wiki for peer reviewing. Everything lacks Wikipedia's clear content guidelines and NPOV policy, so much of it is still subjective nonsense. I don't think it's very enlightened at all --- nowadays, Everything is neither fun (to me at least) nor useful.
India and China may have large populations but only a tiny fraction of those people have computers and are educated enough to decently contribute to Wikipedia. Those wikipedias aren't going to be important before 2 or 3 decades from now (at least). en.wikipedia.org is going to remain "the" Wikipedia for a long time.
I have yet to see a good reason why it was necessary for the doc to have evil cyborg tentacles to control the fusion reaction instead of just using the Canadarm or something. Also, why is a fusion scientist also a brilliant expert in neurorobotics?
I'll just add that Kerry really does not want to do this, anyway. Remember what happened to Clark in the primaries when Moore endorsed him and accused Bush of being a deserter at the same time. Moore is more extreme than Kerry needs to be to attract swing voters. If Kerry gets associated with Moore's ideas in the public's mind, he's dead meat.
Kerry's campaign has been remarkably silent on the film so far. He doesn't want to trash it, thus weakening its effect on Bush, but he doesn't want to be seen as endorsing it either. I think Kerry may be more scared of Moore than Bush is.
On your Japan example, I note that they had McArthur.
The SCAP left very early, I don't remember the exact date but it was around or before the Korean war. The Japanese economic "miracle" began well after MacArthur left, in the 1960s and 1970s. Ascribing Japanese economic growth to him is completely wrong because for most of his term he was actively trying to shrink the Japanese economy, to prevent them from ever again building an army that could threaten the United States. The United States only changed its tune when the Cold War started and they realized Japan was actually an ally.
You're crediting the Chinese government for economic growth. Indeed, 10% growth is impressive stuff. But how hard is it really to grow at that rate when you're starting from an extremely poor population (per capita GDP 1/10th of the US) and you have a huge wealth of technologies to copy from more advanced countries? Japan did the exact same thing decades ago, and they did it with a democratic government. China's system for economic growth is no better than that of Western liberal democracies. They're growing fast for now, but if and when they become an advanced economy they'll grow in the 2-3% range like everybody else.
And I'm not sure what you mean with your sovereignty comment. Massing armed forces, blustering and pointing missiles is a workable system for sovereignty? If you want to see a really workable system for sovereignty, take a look at Canada and Quebec, where they have well-disciplined referendums and legal procedures for the eventuality of separation. And more generally, Chinese foreign policy is not so well-advised; they are too chummy with North Korea and unreasonably hostile to Japan over 50-year-old grudges.
And there are bigger problems with China. Censorship, shooting dissidents and crushing religions you don't like is not acceptable in my book. Nor are massive ill-advised dam projects displacing millions of peasants (who in general are not at all well off in China today). Nor is being ruled by a dynasty of secretive, totally unaccountable technocrats who may or may not be acting in China's best interest.
Essentially the only thing China is currently doing right is their double-digit growth, and as I explained above it has been done by other countries in their shoes and mainly requires stability, avoiding corruption and being open to free trade --- essentially, just not screwing up. Considering the many obvious problems with the Chinese government, I don't at all understand how you can claim it is superior to Western liberal democracies. There is no evidence for that claim.
What I hope is that the mainland Chinese will become saner on this issue with time, and stop insisting on this useless annexation. It may be a false hope, though.
Bad analogy, provided needs are the same, the market is much better at evaluating software than movies. Or do you disagree with the market that Google is the best search engine?
Unless Microsoft wakes up to the threat and restarts work on their browser, of course (but that wouldn't be a bad outcome either --- yay competition!).
Nah, I think it's better to just live with them. It won't accomplish anything to dash off angry messages to your acquaintances --- it's just more rudeness on your part. I think it's better to be a bit forgiving of these things. They aren't as tech-savvy as you and usually mean well. How hard is it really for you to delete a nonsense chain-letter now and then from an acquaintance?
Did the company go down in flames?
That said, the film certainly shouldn't be censored.
No, it's not the worst type of lie. The worst types of lies are from people like Holocaust deniers, who blatantly make up "facts" from fake sources, relying on the fact that most people won't bother looking them up for themselves. (AFAIK, Moore hasn't done this --- every elementary fact is true, even if the interpretation can be objectionable.) Moore and Limbaugh are pretty tame in comparison.
Since they don't peddle outright falsehoods, if you take the time to read both Moore and Limbaugh you will get some facts from both sides of the debate, and you will start to get a balanced perspective. On controversial topics, it's rarely a good idea to get all your facts from a single source, even if it's less shamelessly slanted than those two.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of this. Best superman spinoff ever. I love the hammer and sickle instead of his S!
That, or plain old programmer stupidity. If I had a dime for every time I wrote a program that crashed because of a silly off-by-one error...
IMHO, the address bar is not about going "places", it is about going to a place. Search is about going "places". What I mean by this is that if you have a specific, popular site in mind (like "foobar corp", or "slashdot"), you use the address bar, but if you don't have a specific page in mind but only some desired information, then you use a search engine. They are two separate concepts.
If you want one exact site but don't remember the URL, the I'm feeling lucky search is great, and a natural extension of the address bar. Sending you to a google results page would not be so natural. It would be very annoying if I had to go through an intermediate search page when I *know* the I'm feeling lucky will work. When I'm not looking for one exact site, I use the google bar.
I mostly meant violence, I just threw in "sex" in there as a bonus because that's how many American people describe anime. You're right that sex appeal in anime is a prevalent feature which can't be accounted for by an illusory cultural filtering effect. However, anime women generally do not correspond to the "big-breasted vixen" stereotype carried by many Americans --- IMHO this stereotype again originates from the Japanese attempting to conform to American tastes.
Looks like honest-to-god irony to me. Don't try and nail me on it, I think carefully before using the word :).
The Western perception (steadily eroding, fortunately) that anime mainly consists of sex and gunfighting is ironic. Here's what happened, as I understand it: Japanese marketers saw American films like Terminator, figured that Americans like lots of sex and guns, and decided that they should only release in America those anime films "appealing to American tastes". The American perception of anime to a large extent reflects the Japanese perception of American tastes!
Not really. Many people in the world are certainly very poor (though I'm still not sure if they've got it as bad as those living 2000 years ago), but modern technology has an influence even in the poorest countries. WHO vaccines for polio, malaria etc have reached even the most godforsaken countries of Africa, resulting in a considerable increase (something close to doubling, IIRC) in life expectancy in poor countries over the past hundred years. Poor people also often have access to modern materials to build their shacks, modern crossbred seeds for their little farms, etc. Of course, the influence of technology is not entirely positive --- it would be better if the warlords didn't have machine guns --- but I'm just saying that comparing today's poor countries with the Bronze Age isn't accurate.
What good is ubiquitous Internet connectivity to a people that are comparatively primitive?
It does sound silly at first sight to give wireless Internet access to people in abject poverty, but I think it would actually do them a lot of good. Imagine if we could distribute cheap Internet access stations to the poor --- they would have instant access to a giant wealth of information and education. Many people in poor countries have not had any primary education, and don't even know things that we consider incredibly basic and obvious. For example, they might not know that boiling water helps to kill germs and prevent disease, or that sex communicates AIDS. One of the most popular and important books in the world is a little UN booklet distributed in Africa that explains such basic concepts (I don't remember what it was called); it's been said that that booklet has saved thousands of lives.
The Internet would also help them to read about such things as politics and democracy, which would help reform the bad regimes in the poor parts of the world (which are a primary cause of poverty). Finally, better communication systems would assist them with making their own businesses. I think that one of the best things we can do for the poor is to provide them with access to more information.
That people believe established religions is excusable, because they've been indoctrinated into it from their childhood, and because they see that a lot of intelligent people believe in it. Thus many otherwise rational people will believe in mainstream religions. It's a natural human effect, and we can't hold it against them. However, when it comes to non-mainstream, cultist religions, belief in one indicates potentially serious gullibility and lack of rational thought.
I can see someone being Catholic, considering the weight of the great Catholic Church behind it, and the reams of papers written by brilliant theologians over the years. But you can't be very thoughtful if you believe the wild claims of some little cult of Wiccans or Raelians.
If you'd taken the time to read the other replies, you'd see your arguments had already been made by others, and that I acknowledged I was wrong. Thanks for piling on more ad hominems though, I appreciate it. I admire the sharpness of your inference, figuring out that I'm an ignorant slut from a single slashdot post.
Sorry for my ill-informed counter. Would've been nice if you had mentioned the Reichstag fire in your original post and saved me the trouble, though.