Unless I see some proof of the US ogvernmetn being involved, I'm thinking it was a bussiness decision
Wouldn't it be in the US government's interest to keep the site hosted in the US? The desired surveillance of such a site would surely be much easier that way.
Iran is the 6th largest producer of oil, and likewise 6th largest oil reserves. You can bet that invading Iran is on the Bush administration's "TODO list" for the near future, but whether or not they can pull it off politically and strategically, e.g. gain the support they need, is uncertain. Bush is pumping up the propaganda about the need for "liberating" other countries, a cover of course, but even so invading Iran will make it increasingly obvious even to those who have up until now bought the propaganda that this war is not ideological or about "freedom" or terrorism but is about securing access to the world's remaining oil reserves. Bush may lose support in the short term. Alternatively, as the American public starts to realise the implications of "peak oil", and assuming that no alternate major energy source becomes apparent over the next 30 years, the majority may well eventually even begin to support the idea of invading countries purely on the basis of securing oil to protect the economy, although by then it will be a different president in power, but also likely to do what Bush is doing now, as the oil issue is going to get more pressing in the coming decades. Who knows, for Bush this may be 50% about the oil business and 50% about securing oil reserves for the future to protect the US economy, but in a few decades time it will be 100% about the latter.
The "article" doesn't just read like a marketing press release, it extremely obviously is just a marketing press release, yet I suppose blatant commercial plugs are not new to slashdot. In any case, this keyboard is obviously designed for newbies, computer illiterates who have never used a computer before. This is not necessarily a bad keyboard for that group, if you've ever worked with people who've never used computers at all before (e.g. picture telling someone to "press Escape" and watch them searchingly look around the whole keyboard with that blank open-mouth look newbs have when looking for a key they can't find). Alphabetic arrangement seems ideal for such people, and the colours are a good idea too. This product is> like a toy, a toy designed to make a better, more welcoming experience for new computer users, but certainly it's not aimed at anyone who does any serious amount of typing or computer work. It also certainly isn't a "new standard" and all the other BS marketing hype in that release.
Think of this thing is "training wheels" for new computer users, and it makes sense. Unfortunately this isn't obvious in the press release, which seems to be confused about its target market, sendsing all sorts of mixed signals about who this is aimed at, experienced users or inexperienced users. That's bad marketing; mixed signals means both groups will think it's for the other group.
And most importantly, marketing is what sells software - not quality.
Not really, this is a common misconception especially about Microsoft. Strategy is the key that has made Microsoft a winner in every single market they've ever won. Read up about Microsoft strong-arming OEMs to control the distribution channels for operating systems sold on all new PCs for years. This had nothing to do with marketing.
Apple aren't selling "different"; Apple's operating system is better. The design is better throughout, from an engineering perspective as well as an aesthetic perspective as well as a usability perspective. Mac users like it not because it makes them feel that they are "different", but because it really, genuinely is a nicer experience to drive a shiny Ferrari than a cheap Golf. There is nothing wrong with liking something that is better. (Granted, some of the fans become zealots, at which point they are no longer thinking about what is better but rather just "following an ideology", but these are no better than the anti-Mac crowd that blindly defend Windows PCs with illogical/incorrect arguments every time someone compliments a Mac. Recognizing and complimenting better engineering and design does not automatically make one a zealot.)
Europeans are the superior race? Ha ha ha! I hate to break it to you, but the peak of European civilisation has already passed (and yes, I'm white). We're has-beens, we had a good run but we're already on our way out, you only need to read up on a number of basic demographic trends in various countries to realise this. (Basically we went all soft and stopped making babies.) The problem with the US is precisely that you guys are only looking 30 years into the future and all you see is oil, all you are doing now is making sure you have oil 30 years from now. China is more far-sighted, and are looking 50-100 years into the future, when oil will no longer be irrelevant.. at which point the US will own the middle east but all they'll have is a desert, because the oil will be gone (I suppose you're going to tell me "oh please it'll never run out?"). Fact is, 30 years from now the world will be down to it's last 1/4 of oil, China knows this, and China doesn't want to have to get it's oil from the US, and so are already preparing to get the hell weaned off oil and onto the true energy source of the 21st century, nuclear (pebble-bed modular (PBMR) nuclear plants, the new relatively safe form of nuclear energy, no meltdown danger). You should do more reading, on second thoughts, no, don't worry, just keep "slumming it" and go back to watching TV and reading slashdot, don't worry, US will rule 4EVER DUDE.
"Get out of the way".. who is that aimed at, US or China, I can't tell? Certainly not me, because I'm neither American nor Chinese (which would have been obvious to you from my post if your reading skills were better), so your attempted insult was kinda stupid. Better luck next time. But, I agree with you 100%, USA is no different from other empires and all the hypocritial bull about freedom and democracy is just propaganda to gain support for their illegitimate cause of plundering the world's resources under guise of so-called "liberation". Bush's inauguration speech is proof that we will see more and more of this too. Fortunately China is already too powerful for the US. Unfortunately the American public is dumb enough to buy into it and believe it. War is war, it's always been about three things only: power, territory and resources. So-called "ideological" wars are really just about power. This is universal, there has never been an exception in human history, and never will be. I mean, who TF would spend billions taking over a country because they 'believed in the cause of liberation', holy crap, how stupid does a person have to be to believe that.
The issue is whether a standard can be made to determine --- specifically --- whether a particular image is or is not obscene.
Most probably not, because often the only thing that determines if an image is obscene is the context of the image, and the context of the image may well not be evident in the image itself. Thus removed from the context in which the image was taken, each observer only imagines what the context might have been based on their own experiences and prejudices. Example: an image of a topless black 13-year old girl. If the image is presented within the context of a sexualised video, for example, then pornography is (invisibly) "linked" to the image. If the toplessness is cultural, and the 'context' of the image (whether visible in the image or not) is a traditional African village where all the girls just walk around like that normally, then the image is not "sexualised" and is not obscene. But if there isn't enough evidence of the context available in the photograph then nobody can ever tell, nor can they tell what the intentions or feelings of the photographer were, assuming the photographer was "on trial". Now a hypothetical American tourist travelling through an African village, taking a few photographs of a topless 13-year old African girl... who the hell knows what he might have been thinking when he took those photos. If a parent takes a few baby snapshots of his/her naked child in a tub, along with some other family snaps, is it child pornography? Probably only the "context" can tell you that, e.g. "was the parent turned on", this is of course probably impossible to tell, yet when one starts looking for evidence of obscenity, you're going to find it, but then the obscenity really just originates in your own mind. It reminds me of that case where a mother was accused of child pornography of her own kids, after taking some snaps of them playing without clothes on.
* A 1987 study found that women who were battered, or subject to sexual aggression or humiliation, had partners who viewed significantly more pornography than those of a control group drawn from a mature university population. (3)
Repeat after me 100 times: "Correlation is not equal to causation." Please demonstrate that viewing pornography was the cause of increased sexual aggression. It's just as easy to argue, and is seemingly more likely, that people who are already "sexually aggressive" are more likely to watch porn than those who aren't. Or there may be other factors involved. The existence of a correlation does not allow conclusions to be drawn.
* A 1995 meta-analysis found that violent pornography might reinforce aggressive behavior and negative attitudes toward women. (4)
That's VIOLENT pornography. Other existing psychological studies have also demonstrated that viewing images/movies of violence (without porn involved) increase aggressive behaviour. So really your problem here may have nothing to do with the "pornography" component and everything to do with the "violence" component. Could you please separate the two (hint about "science": you should try only test one thing at a time, unless you have an ideology you want to falsely reinforce by incorrectly linking A to undesirable B), and demonstrate that non-violent pornography causes an increase in aggressive behaviour? It could VERY WELL be that non-violent pornography has no effect at all on aggression rates, and that the real culprit here that causes "harm to society" is images of violence.
* A US study of teenagers exposed to "Hard core" pornography, "Two-thirds of the males and 40% of the females reported wanting to try out some of the behaviors they had witnessed. And, 31% of males and 18% of the females admitted doing some of the things sexually they had seen in the pornography within a few days after exposure." (5)
So? I fail to see the harm demonstrated. It's also true that watching advertisements depicting people eating ice-cream increases the amount of ice-cream eating behaviour, 'your next assignment is to prove that ice-cream eating is harmful'.
* A 1987 "panel of clinicians and researchers concluded that pornography does stimulate attitudes and behavior that lead to gravely negative consequences for individuals and for society, and that these outcomes impair the mental, emotional, and physical health of children and adults." (6)
This sounds a little vague, there is not much information here. I know many well-adjusted people who have viewed a lot of pornography, if pornography is harmful why are the vast majority of people immune to these harmful effects?
* A 1993 study found, "Exposure to sexually stimulating materials may elicit aggressive behavior in youth who are predisposed to aggression. Sexually violent and degrading material elicits greater rates of aggression and may negatively affect male attitudes toward women." (7)
Again, images of violence are already known to increase aggression: please separate the "effects of images of violence" from "effects of images of naked women". Also, not all pornography depicts women being degraded... perhaps the cause of the problem here is not porn, but depictions of women being degraded? Is it possible that showing non-pornographic films of women being degraded also encourages more negative attitudes towards women? OF COURSE IT IS. You still haven't demonstrated that pornography is the cause.
* A 1984 evaluation of the increase in rape rates in various countries bears close correlation to liberalizing of restrictions on pornography. (8)
Correlation.. YAWN.. that means nothing. Demonstrate causality, please.
* Three separate studies demonstrate that exposure to violent pornography may increase males' laboratory aggression toward women. (9,10,11)
Again, this could have everything to do with images of violence and nothing to do with nakedness.
Wish I had mod points to mod you +1 Informative. Americans are clueless as to the attitudes you express because they arrogantly just disregard anyone other them as too irrelevant to even think about. Yes, the US is worried (rightly, but futilely) about losing their 'technology secrets' to China, as if they can somehow stop the inevitable by preventing 'tech transfer'. "Don't let China get our secrets, and we'll keep them out of space". Puh-lease.. China is going there ANYWAY, they don't need US technology or cooperation, it might help speed up the process a little but they certainly don't need it. It's not as if China can't learn the knowledge on their own, as the US did 40 odd years ago, of course they can. So either 'cooperate and accept "2nd position" working with us', or go it 'on your own' and, well, lose... yet the US is unable to imagine themselves in anything other than "position 1"; US vision of future sees China as second place always, so they would never accept any cooperation now that didn't have them in position of leader, yet 30 years things will look very different. Funny thing is, the US are funding Chinese development via trade deficit, and for what, a few cheap products? You said it.. China is coming, it's the dawn of the Chinese century. (And no I don't like it one bit..;)
Um, it's a bit late to pretend this was "really about Japan": The poster put US at position "1" and said "Westerners are, at least, 1 order of magnitude more compassionate than the Chinese". I didn't know Japanese were Westerners.
Our military force is a force for good
OMW, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, that has to be the single most naive comment I've ever read on slashdot. Wake up man, do a bit of research, the real world is out there waiting for you to learn about it if you'll only stop blindly believing everything you see on Fox and everything Bush says.
Ironic then that the US is a large funder of China's military expansion via massive trade deficit. Helping to create a significant potential military superpower 20 to 30 years from now, and for what --- a few cheap products now? Cheap shirts and plastic toys? Hope it's worth it.
Hey troll, let's look at the ratio of military spending to tsunami aid: China military spending: $60 billion. Ratio: 1000/1. USA military spending: $370 billion. Ratio: about 1050/1. Funny, I don't see any significant difference in the degree to which the priorities are distorted towards military rather than humanitarian spending, in fact the US fairs slightly worse.
Of course, you also neglect the incredibly obvious fact that this should be weighed against GDP for it to mean anything. Or do you seriously think that if Bill Gates gives $100 of his own cash to a charity, that that makes him more generous than a very poor person who gives $20 to that charity? That would be, um, dumb.
Your US aid figure amounts to a puny $1 donation per American. Wow, you guys are so generous, bet that $1 of yours really broke ya. Funny, a large percentage of Chinese people have to live off less than $1 a day.
Most "geek" types prefer keep a big collection of movies around, but you're forgetting that the majority of "normal" people out there can't be bothered to sit and manage and share private illegal movie collections (easily running into TBytes as we know!)... now, while an mp3 on an iPod is something you want to listen to over and over, movies are not generally watched over and over, and most people think of them in terms of "renting for a day" or a few days, perhaps for private, social or family viewing. Like renting a movie, they'll just want to download it, watch it, and delete it. So most people wouldn't need/want space for more than a few movies at most at any one time. 40GB/80GB seems perfect. Most people really do have 'better things to do' than sit and collect movies.
I have three different websites, all of which cater to very different demographics of people, and in all three I've seen a definite trend away from IE, mostly towards Firefox.
I used to use the analogy of a physical retail store when putting forth to the webdevelopers at a previous company why they should make the company website work in more than just IE.. the Mozilla/Netscape percentage was roughly 5 back then, and I argued "imagine a retail store that turned away 1 in every 20 customers that tried to walk through the door". Put like that, I think it really hits home just how dumb it is to try make an IE-only (public) website, especially if you're trying to sell something. What's great about these increasing Firefox numbers is not just that people are turning towards a better product and away from utter rubbish (and that people will get a bit less spyware/viruses etc.), but also that the higher percentage of FF users "forces" more web developers to make their websites more browser-neutral, as that number becomes "1 in 10 customers", then "1 in 8", and so on, until the decision is really obvious even to all the millions of luser web developers out there. And that is very good for the Web in general, as it becomes, once again, a big (sorta-kinda-loosely-speaking) "open standards" based network and not some giant "Microsoft network" that at one stage a few years ago it looked like it might end up becoming.
Since my banks got their online banking sites working in FF, I can't even remember when last I came across a webpage that needed IE, so I think many web developers have been taking notice of Firefox.
The technologies weren't "outsourced" there, nor was the development of the technology: They were invented there. The CD-ROM was created by Sony and Philips (Japan + Netherlands).
No amount of educating people on the world of physics and mankind's knowledge thereof is going to help here, because people just plain want to believe the junk-science-tinfoil-hat notions that the 'US gubmint is waaaay ahead'. For some that's more entertaining than the truth, and I guess people have a hard time 'disentangling' truth and entertainment. Still, one should never stop trying to educate, I suppose.
Reading Skills & Comprehension 101.. Suggest you go back and read GP again, because either you misunderstood it 180 deg, or you didn't read past the first sentence. OK, admittedly it might be construed as slightly ambiguous, but only very slightly.
This XML idea is essentially just recreating Pascal P-Code with the disadvantage of being incredibly verbose and bloated and not actually executable, and the minor gain that it is easily decompilable.
Have some respect for history... most "cool new" "revolutionary" ideas are not only old, they're usually even older than you think. People have short memories though so every few years everyone gets excited when the wheel is re-invented yet again.
I disabled comments on my blog purely because of the comment spam problem. Unfortunately the spammers are so f___ing stupid that their crawler doesn't even check this and still attempts to post comments. So I still have literally thousands upon thousands of hits a month from their dumb crawlers attempting to post spam comments. Now my website statistics are rendered effectively useless, because I get more hits from their crawlers than from real people (and I suspect they're using farms of zombie Windows machines, because they have thousands of different unrelated IPs, so it's hard to filter out their hits, damn you Microsoft).
Basically all of them, except... (you'll never see this coming) Microsoft's new desktop search engine.:-S
Correction, Apple's new Spotlight includes an API that allows third parties to add support for their own formats etc. I guess you were talking about the PC platform, but the way you spun it made it sound like MS were the only guys who had thought of this.
Do people think this is because we have evolved to the design to something which is useful and "optimal"
No. Far from it. It only takes a small amount of imagination to come up with thousands of ideas for improving the current crop of word processors. Innovation seems to have stopped almost entirely because Word rules in an anti-competitive fashion that has allowed Microsoft to let it stagnate and not bother with innovation, and all the other far smaller players, all strapped for R&D cash, just use their limited resources to as best as can mimic Word (i.e. mimic rubbish, because "that's what people know and want" right?). Current word processors are very bad, and although this should be obvious to anyone using Word it seemingly isn't, because people seem to lack the imagination to think "this could be better". One of these days a new innovative company is going to come along and break serious new ground, i.e. change the paradigms a little. But I think part of the problem is that many users have now been "trained" with all the BAD ideas in Word, and now all think that "this is how a word processor works", so now it's a case of software adapting to the dumb ways that people have now learned to use a particular type of software. As an example, have you ever wondered, if you start a new blank document, why you shouldn't be able to just click anywhere on the blank page where you want text to appear and start typing? If you clear your mind of all the years of "wrong things" you've been taught about how (current) word processors work, you'll probably realise it is in fact totally ridiculous and counter-intuitive that the cursor remains stubbornly in the top left - it's only intuitive if (a) you understand technically how current word processors are implemented, i.e. serial stream of data with formatting markers or (b) it's been hammered into you by years of (mis-)training that "this is how it works". It should be more like a piece of paper - click anywhere you want to start working, the software should figure out how to do it for you i.e. how to represent that internally. In 2005 this really shouldn't even be a difficult task for the computer to perform.
Heh.. indeed.. I remember when Google first came out, the name was unusual and it took me months to get used to it. It seemed such a clumsy and stupid name, and as I was familiar with "googol", it 'felt' to me every time that it somehow should rather have been, or was supposed to be, "googol".
Now "Google" is such an everyday word it seems perfectly natural to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful/informative .. this is precisely what it's about, I've been saying this for a while.
Unless I see some proof of the US ogvernmetn being involved, I'm thinking it was a bussiness decision
Wouldn't it be in the US government's interest to keep the site hosted in the US? The desired surveillance of such a site would surely be much easier that way.
Iran is the 6th largest producer of oil, and likewise 6th largest oil reserves. You can bet that invading Iran is on the Bush administration's "TODO list" for the near future, but whether or not they can pull it off politically and strategically, e.g. gain the support they need, is uncertain. Bush is pumping up the propaganda about the need for "liberating" other countries, a cover of course, but even so invading Iran will make it increasingly obvious even to those who have up until now bought the propaganda that this war is not ideological or about "freedom" or terrorism but is about securing access to the world's remaining oil reserves. Bush may lose support in the short term. Alternatively, as the American public starts to realise the implications of "peak oil", and assuming that no alternate major energy source becomes apparent over the next 30 years, the majority may well eventually even begin to support the idea of invading countries purely on the basis of securing oil to protect the economy, although by then it will be a different president in power, but also likely to do what Bush is doing now, as the oil issue is going to get more pressing in the coming decades. Who knows, for Bush this may be 50% about the oil business and 50% about securing oil reserves for the future to protect the US economy, but in a few decades time it will be 100% about the latter.
The "article" doesn't just read like a marketing press release, it extremely obviously is just a marketing press release, yet I suppose blatant commercial plugs are not new to slashdot. In any case, this keyboard is obviously designed for newbies, computer illiterates who have never used a computer before. This is not necessarily a bad keyboard for that group, if you've ever worked with people who've never used computers at all before (e.g. picture telling someone to "press Escape" and watch them searchingly look around the whole keyboard with that blank open-mouth look newbs have when looking for a key they can't find). Alphabetic arrangement seems ideal for such people, and the colours are a good idea too. This product is> like a toy, a toy designed to make a better, more welcoming experience for new computer users, but certainly it's not aimed at anyone who does any serious amount of typing or computer work. It also certainly isn't a "new standard" and all the other BS marketing hype in that release.
Think of this thing is "training wheels" for new computer users, and it makes sense. Unfortunately this isn't obvious in the press release, which seems to be confused about its target market, sendsing all sorts of mixed signals about who this is aimed at, experienced users or inexperienced users. That's bad marketing; mixed signals means both groups will think it's for the other group.
And most importantly, marketing is what sells software - not quality.
Not really, this is a common misconception especially about Microsoft. Strategy is the key that has made Microsoft a winner in every single market they've ever won. Read up about Microsoft strong-arming OEMs to control the distribution channels for operating systems sold on all new PCs for years. This had nothing to do with marketing.
Apple aren't selling "different"; Apple's operating system is better. The design is better throughout, from an engineering perspective as well as an aesthetic perspective as well as a usability perspective. Mac users like it not because it makes them feel that they are "different", but because it really, genuinely is a nicer experience to drive a shiny Ferrari than a cheap Golf. There is nothing wrong with liking something that is better. (Granted, some of the fans become zealots, at which point they are no longer thinking about what is better but rather just "following an ideology", but these are no better than the anti-Mac crowd that blindly defend Windows PCs with illogical/incorrect arguments every time someone compliments a Mac. Recognizing and complimenting better engineering and design does not automatically make one a zealot.)
(minor correction)
Europeans are the superior race? Ha ha ha! I hate to break it to you, but the peak of European civilisation has already passed (and yes, I'm white). We're has-beens, we had a good run but we're already on our way out, you only need to read up on a number of basic demographic trends in various countries to realise this. (Basically we went all soft and stopped making babies.) The problem with the US is precisely that you guys are only looking 30 years into the future and all you see is oil, all you are doing now is making sure you have oil 30 years from now. China is more far-sighted, and are looking 50-100 years into the future, when oil will no longer be irrelevant .. at which point the US will own the middle east but all they'll have is a desert, because the oil will be gone (I suppose you're going to tell me "oh please it'll never run out?"). Fact is, 30 years from now the world will be down to it's last 1/4 of oil, China knows this, and China doesn't want to have to get it's oil from the US, and so are already preparing to get the hell weaned off oil and onto the true energy source of the 21st century, nuclear (pebble-bed modular (PBMR) nuclear plants, the new relatively safe form of nuclear energy, no meltdown danger). You should do more reading, on second thoughts, no, don't worry, just keep "slumming it" and go back to watching TV and reading slashdot, don't worry, US will rule 4EVER DUDE.
"Get out of the way" .. who is that aimed at, US or China, I can't tell? Certainly not me, because I'm neither American nor Chinese (which would have been obvious to you from my post if your reading skills were better), so your attempted insult was kinda stupid. Better luck next time. But, I agree with you 100%, USA is no different from other empires and all the hypocritial bull about freedom and democracy is just propaganda to gain support for their illegitimate cause of plundering the world's resources under guise of so-called "liberation". Bush's inauguration speech is proof that we will see more and more of this too. Fortunately China is already too powerful for the US. Unfortunately the American public is dumb enough to buy into it and believe it. War is war, it's always been about three things only: power, territory and resources. So-called "ideological" wars are really just about power. This is universal, there has never been an exception in human history, and never will be. I mean, who TF would spend billions taking over a country because they 'believed in the cause of liberation', holy crap, how stupid does a person have to be to believe that.
The issue is whether a standard can be made to determine --- specifically --- whether a particular image is or is not obscene.
Most probably not, because often the only thing that determines if an image is obscene is the context of the image, and the context of the image may well not be evident in the image itself. Thus removed from the context in which the image was taken, each observer only imagines what the context might have been based on their own experiences and prejudices. Example: an image of a topless black 13-year old girl. If the image is presented within the context of a sexualised video, for example, then pornography is (invisibly) "linked" to the image. If the toplessness is cultural, and the 'context' of the image (whether visible in the image or not) is a traditional African village where all the girls just walk around like that normally, then the image is not "sexualised" and is not obscene. But if there isn't enough evidence of the context available in the photograph then nobody can ever tell, nor can they tell what the intentions or feelings of the photographer were, assuming the photographer was "on trial". Now a hypothetical American tourist travelling through an African village, taking a few photographs of a topless 13-year old African girl ... who the hell knows what he might have been thinking when he took those photos. If a parent takes a few baby snapshots of his/her naked child in a tub, along with some other family snaps, is it child pornography? Probably only the "context" can tell you that, e.g. "was the parent turned on", this is of course probably impossible to tell, yet when one starts looking for evidence of obscenity, you're going to find it, but then the obscenity really just originates in your own mind. It reminds me of that case where a mother was accused of child pornography of her own kids, after taking some snaps of them playing without clothes on.
* A 1987 study found that women who were battered, or subject to sexual aggression or humiliation, had partners who viewed significantly more pornography than those of a control group drawn from a mature university population. (3)
Repeat after me 100 times: "Correlation is not equal to causation." Please demonstrate that viewing pornography was the cause of increased sexual aggression. It's just as easy to argue, and is seemingly more likely, that people who are already "sexually aggressive" are more likely to watch porn than those who aren't. Or there may be other factors involved. The existence of a correlation does not allow conclusions to be drawn.
* A 1995 meta-analysis found that violent pornography might reinforce aggressive behavior and negative attitudes toward women. (4)
That's VIOLENT pornography. Other existing psychological studies have also demonstrated that viewing images/movies of violence (without porn involved) increase aggressive behaviour. So really your problem here may have nothing to do with the "pornography" component and everything to do with the "violence" component. Could you please separate the two (hint about "science": you should try only test one thing at a time, unless you have an ideology you want to falsely reinforce by incorrectly linking A to undesirable B), and demonstrate that non-violent pornography causes an increase in aggressive behaviour? It could VERY WELL be that non-violent pornography has no effect at all on aggression rates, and that the real culprit here that causes "harm to society" is images of violence.
* A US study of teenagers exposed to "Hard core" pornography, "Two-thirds of the males and 40% of the females reported wanting to try out some of the behaviors they had witnessed. And, 31% of males and 18% of the females admitted doing some of the things sexually they had seen in the pornography within a few days after exposure." (5)
So? I fail to see the harm demonstrated. It's also true that watching advertisements depicting people eating ice-cream increases the amount of ice-cream eating behaviour, 'your next assignment is to prove that ice-cream eating is harmful'.
* A 1987 "panel of clinicians and researchers concluded that pornography does stimulate attitudes and behavior that lead to gravely negative consequences for individuals and for society, and that these outcomes impair the mental, emotional, and physical health of children and adults." (6)
This sounds a little vague, there is not much information here. I know many well-adjusted people who have viewed a lot of pornography, if pornography is harmful why are the vast majority of people immune to these harmful effects?
* A 1993 study found, "Exposure to sexually stimulating materials may elicit aggressive behavior in youth who are predisposed to aggression. Sexually violent and degrading material elicits greater rates of aggression and may negatively affect male attitudes toward women." (7)
Again, images of violence are already known to increase aggression: please separate the "effects of images of violence" from "effects of images of naked women". Also, not all pornography depicts women being degraded ... perhaps the cause of the problem here is not porn, but depictions of women being degraded? Is it possible that showing non-pornographic films of women being degraded also encourages more negative attitudes towards women? OF COURSE IT IS. You still haven't demonstrated that pornography is the cause.
* A 1984 evaluation of the increase in rape rates in various countries bears close correlation to liberalizing of restrictions on pornography. (8)
Correlation .. YAWN .. that means nothing. Demonstrate causality, please.
* Three separate studies demonstrate that exposure to violent pornography may increase males' laboratory aggression toward women. (9,10,11)
Again, this could have everything to do with images of violence and nothing to do with nakedness.
Wish I had mod points to mod you +1 Informative. Americans are clueless as to the attitudes you express because they arrogantly just disregard anyone other them as too irrelevant to even think about. Yes, the US is worried (rightly, but futilely) about losing their 'technology secrets' to China, as if they can somehow stop the inevitable by preventing 'tech transfer'. "Don't let China get our secrets, and we'll keep them out of space". Puh-lease .. China is going there ANYWAY, they don't need US technology or cooperation, it might help speed up the process a little but they certainly don't need it. It's not as if China can't learn the knowledge on their own, as the US did 40 odd years ago, of course they can. So either 'cooperate and accept "2nd position" working with us', or go it 'on your own' and, well, lose ... yet the US is unable to imagine themselves in anything other than "position 1"; US vision of future sees China as second place always, so they would never accept any cooperation now that didn't have them in position of leader, yet 30 years things will look very different. Funny thing is, the US are funding Chinese development via trade deficit, and for what, a few cheap products? You said it .. China is coming, it's the dawn of the Chinese century. (And no I don't like it one bit .. ;)
Um, it's a bit late to pretend this was "really about Japan": The poster put US at position "1" and said "Westerners are, at least, 1 order of magnitude more compassionate than the Chinese". I didn't know Japanese were Westerners.
Our military force is a force for good
OMW, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, that has to be the single most naive comment I've ever read on slashdot. Wake up man, do a bit of research, the real world is out there waiting for you to learn about it if you'll only stop blindly believing everything you see on Fox and everything Bush says.
Ironic then that the US is a large funder of China's military expansion via massive trade deficit. Helping to create a significant potential military superpower 20 to 30 years from now, and for what --- a few cheap products now? Cheap shirts and plastic toys? Hope it's worth it.
Hey troll, let's look at the ratio of military spending to tsunami aid: China military spending: $60 billion. Ratio: 1000/1.
USA military spending: $370 billion. Ratio: about 1050/1. Funny, I don't see any significant difference in the degree to which the priorities are distorted towards military rather than humanitarian spending, in fact the US fairs slightly worse.
Of course, you also neglect the incredibly obvious fact that this should be weighed against GDP for it to mean anything. Or do you seriously think that if Bill Gates gives $100 of his own cash to a charity, that that makes him more generous than a very poor person who gives $20 to that charity? That would be, um, dumb.
Your US aid figure amounts to a puny $1 donation per American. Wow, you guys are so generous, bet that $1 of yours really broke ya. Funny, a large percentage of Chinese people have to live off less than $1 a day.
Most "geek" types prefer keep a big collection of movies around, but you're forgetting that the majority of "normal" people out there can't be bothered to sit and manage and share private illegal movie collections (easily running into TBytes as we know!) ... now, while an mp3 on an iPod is something you want to listen to over and over, movies are not generally watched over and over, and most people think of them in terms of "renting for a day" or a few days, perhaps for private, social or family viewing. Like renting a movie, they'll just want to download it, watch it, and delete it. So most people wouldn't need/want space for more than a few movies at most at any one time. 40GB/80GB seems perfect. Most people really do have 'better things to do' than sit and collect movies.
I have three different websites, all of which cater to very different demographics of people, and in all three I've seen a definite trend away from IE, mostly towards Firefox.
I used to use the analogy of a physical retail store when putting forth to the webdevelopers at a previous company why they should make the company website work in more than just IE .. the Mozilla/Netscape percentage was roughly 5 back then, and I argued "imagine a retail store that turned away 1 in every 20 customers that tried to walk through the door". Put like that, I think it really hits home just how dumb it is to try make an IE-only (public) website, especially if you're trying to sell something. What's great about these increasing Firefox numbers is not just that people are turning towards a better product and away from utter rubbish (and that people will get a bit less spyware/viruses etc.), but also that the higher percentage of FF users "forces" more web developers to make their websites more browser-neutral, as that number becomes "1 in 10 customers", then "1 in 8", and so on, until the decision is really obvious even to all the millions of luser web developers out there. And that is very good for the Web in general, as it becomes, once again, a big (sorta-kinda-loosely-speaking) "open standards" based network and not some giant "Microsoft network" that at one stage a few years ago it looked like it might end up becoming.
Since my banks got their online banking sites working in FF, I can't even remember when last I came across a webpage that needed IE, so I think many web developers have been taking notice of Firefox.
The technologies weren't "outsourced" there, nor was the development of the technology: They were invented there. The CD-ROM was created by Sony and Philips (Japan + Netherlands).
No amount of educating people on the world of physics and mankind's knowledge thereof is going to help here, because people just plain want to believe the junk-science-tinfoil-hat notions that the 'US gubmint is waaaay ahead'. For some that's more entertaining than the truth, and I guess people have a hard time 'disentangling' truth and entertainment. Still, one should never stop trying to educate, I suppose.
It seems like you basically arrived at what Asic Eng said, just with less of a blanket condemnation of price discrimination.
Reading Skills & Comprehension 101 .. Suggest you go back and read GP again, because either you misunderstood it 180 deg, or you didn't read past the first sentence. OK, admittedly it might be construed as slightly ambiguous, but only very slightly.
This XML idea is essentially just recreating Pascal P-Code with the disadvantage of being incredibly verbose and bloated and not actually executable, and the minor gain that it is easily decompilable.
Have some respect for history ... most "cool new" "revolutionary" ideas are not only old, they're usually even older than you think. People have short memories though so every few years everyone gets excited when the wheel is re-invented yet again.
I disabled comments on my blog purely because of the comment spam problem. Unfortunately the spammers are so f___ing stupid that their crawler doesn't even check this and still attempts to post comments. So I still have literally thousands upon thousands of hits a month from their dumb crawlers attempting to post spam comments. Now my website statistics are rendered effectively useless, because I get more hits from their crawlers than from real people (and I suspect they're using farms of zombie Windows machines, because they have thousands of different unrelated IPs, so it's hard to filter out their hits, damn you Microsoft).
Basically all of them, except... (you'll never see this coming) Microsoft's new desktop search engine. :-S
Correction, Apple's new Spotlight includes an API that allows third parties to add support for their own formats etc. I guess you were talking about the PC platform, but the way you spun it made it sound like MS were the only guys who had thought of this.
Do people think this is because we have evolved to the design to something which is useful and "optimal"
No. Far from it. It only takes a small amount of imagination to come up with thousands of ideas for improving the current crop of word processors. Innovation seems to have stopped almost entirely because Word rules in an anti-competitive fashion that has allowed Microsoft to let it stagnate and not bother with innovation, and all the other far smaller players, all strapped for R&D cash, just use their limited resources to as best as can mimic Word (i.e. mimic rubbish, because "that's what people know and want" right?). Current word processors are very bad, and although this should be obvious to anyone using Word it seemingly isn't, because people seem to lack the imagination to think "this could be better". One of these days a new innovative company is going to come along and break serious new ground, i.e. change the paradigms a little. But I think part of the problem is that many users have now been "trained" with all the BAD ideas in Word, and now all think that "this is how a word processor works", so now it's a case of software adapting to the dumb ways that people have now learned to use a particular type of software. As an example, have you ever wondered, if you start a new blank document, why you shouldn't be able to just click anywhere on the blank page where you want text to appear and start typing? If you clear your mind of all the years of "wrong things" you've been taught about how (current) word processors work, you'll probably realise it is in fact totally ridiculous and counter-intuitive that the cursor remains stubbornly in the top left - it's only intuitive if (a) you understand technically how current word processors are implemented, i.e. serial stream of data with formatting markers or (b) it's been hammered into you by years of (mis-)training that "this is how it works". It should be more like a piece of paper - click anywhere you want to start working, the software should figure out how to do it for you i.e. how to represent that internally. In 2005 this really shouldn't even be a difficult task for the computer to perform.
Heh .. indeed .. I remember when Google first came out, the name was unusual and it took me months to get used to it. It seemed such a clumsy and stupid name, and as I was familiar with "googol", it 'felt' to me every time that it somehow should rather have been, or was supposed to be, "googol".
Now "Google" is such an everyday word it seems perfectly natural to me.