About 8 months back I attempted to embed Gecko within an existing graphical user interface toolkit. Having heard so much from the open source community about how easy it was to do, I thought it would go rather quickly. Of course, it did not.
I'm not sure why you struggled, but I had no trouble embedding Gecko in a wxWidgets application - it took me a couple of hours at most.
WTF does my employer knowing when I go to the pub got to do with my security? If I'm f*cking kidnapped then by all means please let the police track my cellphone, thanks, but I see no reason why there needs to be a trade-off.
Honestly, nobody is forced to click on the first result that comes up in Google, and most users really are smart enough to be able to very quickly determine how relevant specific results in Google might be for them. For example, if I was looking for the website of the magazine called "Failure", it would take me all of about 50 milliseconds to see that I should click on the second result.
GoogleBombing may lead to nonsense like the above but it hardly impedes actual searches for information, it's more of a theoretical concern than a practical one. If it was such an awful problem then people would be moving away from Google. Fact is 99.9% of the time Google is still the best and quickest way to find pertinent information, and the day it stops being so is the day users flock elsewhere - and they'll do so, as quickly as they flocked to Google in the first place, because people can tell which search engines are good and which are not.
but I'd say the majority of google users do not share that perspective.
Clearly if the majority of users did share that perspective then AltaVista would still be a hugely popular search engine and Google would be nothing. People flocked to Google out of choice; unlike Windows nobody is was or ever has been forced in any way to use Google, not even indirectly.
I could go on, of course, but, suffice it to say that my feeling is that
Google is evolving away from the true indexing tool it started out as, and
into a controller of information.
What a load of crap. Those obscure sites with "gems" in them ARE STILL THERE, and still linked from elsewhere on the Web (you remember those blue underlined things called "hyperlinks"?). Google does not "remove" them from the Internet. Moreover there are hundreds of search engines, with many new ones frequently being created, so if you insist on using a search engine, you have your choice of many.
Nobody is forced to use Google. Google only "adds" new options for you, they cannot "subtract" options: You're complaining because Google doesn't help you find backwater sites, but WTF, if Google never existed at all then you still wouldn't have it any better at finding those backwater sites!? Google cannot block websites, they cannot remove websites from the Internet, they cannot force all users searching for information to go through Google.com in order to do so, they cannot prevent other new search engines from entering the market. If Google isn't useful to you just don't use it. The very reason Google's user base rose so incredibly quickly was that so many people found it so useful.
I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless
Yup, rather. The simple fact of the matter is that what's in Google's best interests is in our best interests too. Why? Because Google's revenue stream depends on people wanting to use their search engine. There is competition in the search engine market. Google needs to keep being the best search engine; if they don't, the users will flock elsewhere as quickly as they flocked to Google in the first place, and their revenue will evaporate. Google's "self-interest" is thus logically to serve us as best as is humanly possible.
The Google-bashing comments on here make out like people are forced to use Google or like Google has the power to "block" websites and various other BS.
If your goal is to be happy, then not blaming yourself for you failures is a pretty decent tactic.
Happiness aside, that's hardly a path to success. I'm reminded of those losers who go from one burger-flipping job to the next and are never able to hold down even such a simple job for very long without getting fire. Almost always there is an "I'm too good for this job" attitude.
Isn't the best to try to be realistic? I.e. recognise when failures were not your fault, and recognise when failures were? It will never always be one or the other, it will always be sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes a combination of the two.
If you RTA you'll see that the study doesn't seem to claim this, it only states "it is thought (by psychologists) that". That hardly sounds like a conclusion to me.
Slaves have to be fed/clothed/housed constantly, which makes them a continual burden on the economy (even if you sell them, you're just selling them elsewhere in the same economy). If you stop using your tractor you can just leave it parked somewhere and chances are it will probably be fine again a year later, although it may have rusted somewhat and may require a bit of maintenance. However, and this is a crucial distinction, it DOES NOT become a burden on the economy - you can leave it in a field until it totally rusts away and it won't cost the economy one more cent --- unlike slaves, who will have to be fed continually unless you let them die (even into unproductive retirement). New "bred" slaves also have to be fed/clothed/housed for nearly two decades before they become economically productive. A new tractor is productive immediately. The "variable costs" of slaves are much higher (proportionally) than those of a tractor. The variable costs of a tractor are directly proportional to the production value of the use of the tractor, while the variable costs of a slave remain similar (and high) regardless of the production value of that slave.
Anyway, a tractor is not "capital", it's an asset. The claim was that slaves are capital rather than labour. There are differences between humans and tractors but not as much as would appear from a superficial analysis: Labour really is more like a tractor than it is like capital (labour is an asset). It may seem odd to say slaves are like tractors, but this point should become increasingly clear as more and more sophisticated robots become part of the "workforce" in future (I mean, the difference between a tractor and a robot, and between a robot and humans, are really only 'degrees' right? Humans, tractors, robots - from an economic perspective it's all just "machinery" that has (a) up-front and maintenance costs and (b) can help produce something.)
They're only making it look like they're doing the right thing - relative to what they were doing for a short time. But hang on, they're still censoring. This is just a press release saying "we'll censor slightly less stringently than we used to". But they're still censoring at least as much as everyone else is - they're now doing exactly what everyone was saying "Google is evil" for just a week or two ago. And yet everyone falls for it and goes "wow look Microsoft is doing the right thing".
How it works is by first lowering expectations then pitching higher than the level of expectations: Microsoft is taking three steps:
neutral -> heavy censorship compliance -> "normal" censorship compliance.
We're seeing step 2 now, which looks like a positive move relative to the previous one. But if they had directly done this:
neutral -> "normal" censorship compliance
that's a "bad" move the media would be shouting "evil", and MS would have had no room to maneouvre.
If Google's PR department was as smart they would have done something similar, i.e. deliberately start with stricter filtering, then announce that they are going to "do the right thing" and allow a little more freedom (then adjusting things to what they actually are now anyway).
The timing of this move is pretty smart, and almost certainly deliberate --- i.e. just after Google got beaten up badly in the media for filtering results in China.
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.
Uh, but you have to feed them, clothe them and house them. In other words, "pay" them. How is that not a form of labour?
If the slaves added more (net) value in productivity than they consumed in the form of expenses (training, food etc.), then overall the slaves contributed to the economy. If the slaves cost more than the value they added, then overall they burdened the economy.
In a free and non-ideologized labour market if slavery were less economically efficient slavery than a system without slavery, it would be naturally self-correcting in the long run, because the slave owners would tend towards whatever labour increased their productivity most for the least expense. I.e. it seems logical to say "well, if the slaves cost more than they contributed, surely their owners would not have kept or wanted them", and hence, because the owners did keep their slaves, they must have been net contributors to economic growth.
But this implies intelligent 'rational' owners that know what's good for them. When you throw racism and other blind ideologies into the mix then you aren't necessarily talking about rational owners anymore. In Apartheid South Africa, the racist ideology of "separate development" overshadowed rationality and common sense, and attempts to create large pools of cheap unskilled labour (presuambly under the idea that this would be good for the economy) was a macroeconomic disaster - large pools of unskilled (and hence unproductive) people became a burden on society, because they cost money (to feed, house, clothe etc.) but could(/can) not produce anything of much value themselves. Slavery can be viewed in a similar light, but this does not necessarily imply that slavery had a negative effect on the economy --- slavery may have contributed to growth but simply in smaller amounts than might have happened without slavery. If that's the case, one could still say that part of the US's success was due to slavery, which I am inclined to believe, as the importers of slaves obviously saw reasons not only to keep slaves but keep importing new ones and fight against the abolition of slavery... these are not things you do for something that isn't helping you.
I think that by allowing freedom and allowing people to fully develop themeselves, net economic productivity can be maximised. E.g. some of those slaves might have become great doctors or inventors had they been allowed to develop themselves and choose their own desired paths in life. By not allowing some sub-group of people opportunities (e.g. women or black people or gays or whatever) you will inherently have a smaller pool from which to draw 'productive people'.
But Google hasn't blocked any of those Tiananmen Square massacre sites - there are plenty of other ways to access them still, given that the entire Web is full of billions of hyperlinks, and that there are thousands of other ways to publish URLs or spread them by word of mouth etc. Plus it's not as if as if the citizens had links to the massacre sites previously that they don't have now due to Google's filtering... Google hasn't "removed" any links to the massacre sites, they have merely failed to add links from their site that anyway weren't there before at all!
Yes, but the reason that something is 'propaganda' (even if it uses facts) is that it deceptively suggests that something not true is true --- it's not simply because somebody "doesn't like" the presented viewpoint that makes it propaganda. As all marketers know, it is very possible to be highly deceptive without *technically* lying. But it's the biased deception involved. If I state "the sky is blue" it's not propaganda even if all 6 billion people don't like what I said.
But there really are civilians dying in Iraq, the Bush administration really did underestimate the task of rebuilding, American servicemen really are getting killed in operations there, there really is contemplated military action against Iran, there really was prisoner abuse, there really are hostages, there really are frequent suicide bombings. Etc. etc.... These are all facts.
Are you suggesting that the media should suppress the facts? Leave out ugly truths and print only the happy truths?
If the truth hurts, don't blame the messenger.
Merely reporting facts doesn't indicate a bias. The question is HOW are those facts presented? Your "revealing" stats don't reveal that at all.
OK so you're suggesting that the media focuses too much on the negative stories. Let me let you in on something: This doesn't indicate bias, every single media outlet in the entire world focuses too heavily on negative, "sensationalist-value" stories. This has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with what sells. Happy stories just don't sell nearly as many papers.
In this instance, however, by preventing access to information
Uh, Google couldn't prevent anyone from accessing a website even if they wanted to, because Google do not control any of the intermediate Internet infrastructure between Chinese citizens and websites (i.e. Chinese telecomms and the 'great firewall'). If Google omits "slashdot.org" from my search results, tell me, in what way am I "prevented" from visiting slashdot.org? I can still type it into the address bar directly and it'll work, I can still tell my friends about it, or send it to people via e-mail, or publish the URL in newspapers, or spraypaint the URL on walls, or link to it from my blog, or hire a skywriter to write it in the air with smoke etc. Not to mention that I can still access slashdot.org from any of the tens of millions of OTHER websites on the Internet that link to it. Are you saying that Google will somehow make all of the hyperlinks on the entire Internet suddenly disappear?
The very fact that a site is in Google's index specifically means that it has already been linked to from somewhere *else* on the Internet... so by definition Google can never be the only entry point to a piece of information, and can never be the only way to find a particular website.
If it's "contagious" information (i.e. the public wants it) it WILL spread anyway even if it isn't in Google's results, there are bazillions of ways to pass info/URLs around without Google. Only the Chinese government can actually decide to literally *block* a site or not. Or are you suggesting Google has also been given the passwords to the 'great firewall' system?
It's nothing like a terrorist bomb at all, as there is a very important difference:
- With a bomb, something is taken away from the "end user" - they end up with less than they had before (e.g. maybe short some limbs, or loved ones).
- With Google creating a presence in China, even a censored one, some value is added to the end users but nothing is taken away. With Google there, the Chinese citizens have access to MORE information (and in more ways) than before Google was there. Google is only adding to what the "end user" already had, even though the 'amount' they're adding is less than what it could be as it is constrained by the government. But Google are not blocking sites that weren't already blocked - so they're not strictly "censoring" anything at all. The government is censoring sites. Google couldn't censor websites themselves even if they wanted to; unlike Cisco they don't offer "censorship technology". What Google provides always adds something that wasn't there before.
Anyway, if all you guys care so much about human rights violations in China, you would all be boycotting China's export. I bet your home is full of "made in China" stuff.
All you slashdotters whining about how evil Google is being here, answer this one question: How many "made in China" products do you have in your home?
Since many of you seem to feel so strongly about human rights abuses in China, why are you supporting the Chinese economy? Doesn't that make you evil too? You are giving the Chinese government the very money they use to kill and oppress their citizens.
Let's just admit that we all want "lots of cheap stuff from China" far more badly than we really want an end to human rights violations over there. Everyone's a vocal critic of China until the moment it inconveniences them in even the slightest way.
When I see people start boycotting China's exports (as South Africa's exports were boycotted during Apartheid), then we can start throwing accusations about how evil these companies are for doing business in a country with severe human rights issues. Until then, you're all equally complicit.
I can't see what it is that causes atheletes to improve persistantly [wikipedia.org] and why that logic can't be applied to education
Athletic records only measure the best of the best, i.e. outliers. They don't say anything about the athletic performance of the average person. An increasing population alone means more "outliers". The rest could probably be explained by our improved diets and knowledge of the body. The equivalent in academia would be to try look only at the most intelligent people throughout history (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Euler, Hawkins etc.). Unfortunately measuring "intelligence" is a lot harder than timing a sprint; any modern method can't be applied post-humously and cultural differences would make it impossible to benchmark intelligence tests from different eras against one another anyway, even if there was such a thing as an IQ test back in e.g. Newton's day.
Slashdot Mirror
About 8 months back I attempted to embed Gecko within an existing graphical user interface toolkit. Having heard so much from the open source community about how easy it was to do, I thought it would go rather quickly. Of course, it did not.
I'm not sure why you struggled, but I had no trouble embedding Gecko in a wxWidgets application - it took me a couple of hours at most.
WTF does my employer knowing when I go to the pub got to do with my security? If I'm f*cking kidnapped then by all means please let the police track my cellphone, thanks, but I see no reason why there needs to be a trade-off.
The bottom line is that Google wants to be the best search engine it can be.
They don't just want to. They need to!
Honestly, nobody is forced to click on the first result that comes up in Google, and most users really are smart enough to be able to very quickly determine how relevant specific results in Google might be for them. For example, if I was looking for the website of the magazine called "Failure", it would take me all of about 50 milliseconds to see that I should click on the second result.
GoogleBombing may lead to nonsense like the above but it hardly impedes actual searches for information, it's more of a theoretical concern than a practical one. If it was such an awful problem then people would be moving away from Google. Fact is 99.9% of the time Google is still the best and quickest way to find pertinent information, and the day it stops being so is the day users flock elsewhere - and they'll do so, as quickly as they flocked to Google in the first place, because people can tell which search engines are good and which are not.
but I'd say the majority of google users do not share that perspective.
Clearly if the majority of users did share that perspective then AltaVista would still be a hugely popular search engine and Google would be nothing. People flocked to Google out of choice; unlike Windows nobody is was or ever has been forced in any way to use Google, not even indirectly.
I could go on, of course, but, suffice it to say that my feeling is that Google is evolving away from the true indexing tool it started out as, and into a controller of information.
What a load of crap. Those obscure sites with "gems" in them ARE STILL THERE, and still linked from elsewhere on the Web (you remember those blue underlined things called "hyperlinks"?). Google does not "remove" them from the Internet. Moreover there are hundreds of search engines, with many new ones frequently being created, so if you insist on using a search engine, you have your choice of many.
Nobody is forced to use Google. Google only "adds" new options for you, they cannot "subtract" options: You're complaining because Google doesn't help you find backwater sites, but WTF, if Google never existed at all then you still wouldn't have it any better at finding those backwater sites!? Google cannot block websites, they cannot remove websites from the Internet, they cannot force all users searching for information to go through Google.com in order to do so, they cannot prevent other new search engines from entering the market. If Google isn't useful to you just don't use it. The very reason Google's user base rose so incredibly quickly was that so many people found it so useful.
I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless
Yup, rather. The simple fact of the matter is that what's in Google's best interests is in our best interests too. Why? Because Google's revenue stream depends on people wanting to use their search engine. There is competition in the search engine market. Google needs to keep being the best search engine; if they don't, the users will flock elsewhere as quickly as they flocked to Google in the first place, and their revenue will evaporate. Google's "self-interest" is thus logically to serve us as best as is humanly possible.
The Google-bashing comments on here make out like people are forced to use Google or like Google has the power to "block" websites and various other BS.
If your goal is to be happy, then not blaming yourself for you failures is a pretty decent tactic.
Happiness aside, that's hardly a path to success. I'm reminded of those losers who go from one burger-flipping job to the next and are never able to hold down even such a simple job for very long without getting fire. Almost always there is an "I'm too good for this job" attitude.
Isn't the best to try to be realistic? I.e. recognise when failures were not your fault, and recognise when failures were? It will never always be one or the other, it will always be sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes a combination of the two.
How do they get to making that leap
If you RTA you'll see that the study doesn't seem to claim this, it only states "it is thought (by psychologists) that". That hardly sounds like a conclusion to me.
d) Changes file associates such as .jpg back from (your favourite jpg viewer) to Microsoft apps.
Slaves have to be fed/clothed/housed constantly, which makes them a continual burden on the economy (even if you sell them, you're just selling them elsewhere in the same economy). If you stop using your tractor you can just leave it parked somewhere and chances are it will probably be fine again a year later, although it may have rusted somewhat and may require a bit of maintenance. However, and this is a crucial distinction, it DOES NOT become a burden on the economy - you can leave it in a field until it totally rusts away and it won't cost the economy one more cent --- unlike slaves, who will have to be fed continually unless you let them die (even into unproductive retirement). New "bred" slaves also have to be fed/clothed/housed for nearly two decades before they become economically productive. A new tractor is productive immediately. The "variable costs" of slaves are much higher (proportionally) than those of a tractor. The variable costs of a tractor are directly proportional to the production value of the use of the tractor, while the variable costs of a slave remain similar (and high) regardless of the production value of that slave.
Anyway, a tractor is not "capital", it's an asset. The claim was that slaves are capital rather than labour. There are differences between humans and tractors but not as much as would appear from a superficial analysis: Labour really is more like a tractor than it is like capital (labour is an asset). It may seem odd to say slaves are like tractors, but this point should become increasingly clear as more and more sophisticated robots become part of the "workforce" in future (I mean, the difference between a tractor and a robot, and between a robot and humans, are really only 'degrees' right? Humans, tractors, robots - from an economic perspective it's all just "machinery" that has (a) up-front and maintenance costs and (b) can help produce something.)
Uh, they're both still doing exactly the same things. So yes, please do feel free to be consistent and either hate both or be OK with both.
"Sticking it to censorship"? Puh-lease, are you that easily fooled by a press release? They're still censoring at least as much as Google is.
Sigh ... public manipulation 101.
They're only making it look like they're doing the right thing - relative to what they were doing for a short time. But hang on, they're still censoring. This is just a press release saying "we'll censor slightly less stringently than we used to". But they're still censoring at least as much as everyone else is - they're now doing exactly what everyone was saying "Google is evil" for just a week or two ago. And yet everyone falls for it and goes "wow look Microsoft is doing the right thing".
How it works is by first lowering expectations then pitching higher than the level of expectations: Microsoft is taking three steps:
neutral -> heavy censorship compliance -> "normal" censorship compliance.
We're seeing step 2 now, which looks like a positive move relative to the previous one. But if they had directly done this:
neutral -> "normal" censorship compliance
that's a "bad" move the media would be shouting "evil", and MS would have had no room to maneouvre.
If Google's PR department was as smart they would have done something similar, i.e. deliberately start with stricter filtering, then announce that they are going to "do the right thing" and allow a little more freedom (then adjusting things to what they actually are now anyway).
The timing of this move is pretty smart, and almost certainly deliberate --- i.e. just after Google got beaten up badly in the media for filtering results in China.
In other words even if you don't use FireFox you still indirectly benefit simply because of its existence and relative popularity.
This is what the "who cares" and "why doesn't everyone just use IE it's the standard" crowds don't understand.
100 years is "not long after"?
Yes.
Human history goes back tens of thousands of years.
Why is Africa such a mess? Because, basically, it has few middle class educated people.
Wow ... no offence, but that statement reveals that you have absolutely no knowledge of African history whatsoever.
First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.
Uh, but you have to feed them, clothe them and house them. In other words, "pay" them. How is that not a form of labour?
If the slaves added more (net) value in productivity than they consumed in the form of expenses (training, food etc.), then overall the slaves contributed to the economy. If the slaves cost more than the value they added, then overall they burdened the economy.
In a free and non-ideologized labour market if slavery were less economically efficient slavery than a system without slavery, it would be naturally self-correcting in the long run, because the slave owners would tend towards whatever labour increased their productivity most for the least expense. I.e. it seems logical to say "well, if the slaves cost more than they contributed, surely their owners would not have kept or wanted them", and hence, because the owners did keep their slaves, they must have been net contributors to economic growth.
But this implies intelligent 'rational' owners that know what's good for them. When you throw racism and other blind ideologies into the mix then you aren't necessarily talking about rational owners anymore. In Apartheid South Africa, the racist ideology of "separate development" overshadowed rationality and common sense, and attempts to create large pools of cheap unskilled labour (presuambly under the idea that this would be good for the economy) was a macroeconomic disaster - large pools of unskilled (and hence unproductive) people became a burden on society, because they cost money (to feed, house, clothe etc.) but could(/can) not produce anything of much value themselves. Slavery can be viewed in a similar light, but this does not necessarily imply that slavery had a negative effect on the economy --- slavery may have contributed to growth but simply in smaller amounts than might have happened without slavery. If that's the case, one could still say that part of the US's success was due to slavery, which I am inclined to believe, as the importers of slaves obviously saw reasons not only to keep slaves but keep importing new ones and fight against the abolition of slavery ... these are not things you do for something that isn't helping you.
I think that by allowing freedom and allowing people to fully develop themeselves, net economic productivity can be maximised. E.g. some of those slaves might have become great doctors or inventors had they been allowed to develop themselves and choose their own desired paths in life. By not allowing some sub-group of people opportunities (e.g. women or black people or gays or whatever) you will inherently have a smaller pool from which to draw 'productive people'.
But Google hasn't blocked any of those Tiananmen Square massacre sites - there are plenty of other ways to access them still, given that the entire Web is full of billions of hyperlinks, and that there are thousands of other ways to publish URLs or spread them by word of mouth etc. Plus it's not as if as if the citizens had links to the massacre sites previously that they don't have now due to Google's filtering ... Google hasn't "removed" any links to the massacre sites, they have merely failed to add links from their site that anyway weren't there before at all!
Yes, but the reason that something is 'propaganda' (even if it uses facts) is that it deceptively suggests that something not true is true --- it's not simply because somebody "doesn't like" the presented viewpoint that makes it propaganda. As all marketers know, it is very possible to be highly deceptive without *technically* lying. But it's the biased deception involved. If I state "the sky is blue" it's not propaganda even if all 6 billion people don't like what I said.
But there really are civilians dying in Iraq, the Bush administration really did underestimate the task of rebuilding, American servicemen really are getting killed in operations there, there really is contemplated military action against Iran, there really was prisoner abuse, there really are hostages, there really are frequent suicide bombings. Etc. etc. ... These are all facts.
Are you suggesting that the media should suppress the facts? Leave out ugly truths and print only the happy truths?
If the truth hurts, don't blame the messenger.
Merely reporting facts doesn't indicate a bias. The question is HOW are those facts presented? Your "revealing" stats don't reveal that at all.
OK so you're suggesting that the media focuses too much on the negative stories. Let me let you in on something: This doesn't indicate bias, every single media outlet in the entire world focuses too heavily on negative, "sensationalist-value" stories. This has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with what sells. Happy stories just don't sell nearly as many papers.
In this instance, however, by preventing access to information
Uh, Google couldn't prevent anyone from accessing a website even if they wanted to, because Google do not control any of the intermediate Internet infrastructure between Chinese citizens and websites (i.e. Chinese telecomms and the 'great firewall'). If Google omits "slashdot.org" from my search results, tell me, in what way am I "prevented" from visiting slashdot.org? I can still type it into the address bar directly and it'll work, I can still tell my friends about it, or send it to people via e-mail, or publish the URL in newspapers, or spraypaint the URL on walls, or link to it from my blog, or hire a skywriter to write it in the air with smoke etc. Not to mention that I can still access slashdot.org from any of the tens of millions of OTHER websites on the Internet that link to it. Are you saying that Google will somehow make all of the hyperlinks on the entire Internet suddenly disappear?
The very fact that a site is in Google's index specifically means that it has already been linked to from somewhere *else* on the Internet ... so by definition Google can never be the only entry point to a piece of information, and can never be the only way to find a particular website.
If it's "contagious" information (i.e. the public wants it) it WILL spread anyway even if it isn't in Google's results, there are bazillions of ways to pass info/URLs around without Google. Only the Chinese government can actually decide to literally *block* a site or not. Or are you suggesting Google has also been given the passwords to the 'great firewall' system?
What anti-American slant? (Or did somebody just tell you that the rest of the world is anti-American and you believed it?)
I suspect you'll find more "anti-American" media in the US itself than just about any other Western country.
It's nothing like a terrorist bomb at all, as there is a very important difference:
- With a bomb, something is taken away from the "end user" - they end up with less than they had before (e.g. maybe short some limbs, or loved ones).
- With Google creating a presence in China, even a censored one, some value is added to the end users but nothing is taken away. With Google there, the Chinese citizens have access to MORE information (and in more ways) than before Google was there. Google is only adding to what the "end user" already had, even though the 'amount' they're adding is less than what it could be as it is constrained by the government. But Google are not blocking sites that weren't already blocked - so they're not strictly "censoring" anything at all. The government is censoring sites. Google couldn't censor websites themselves even if they wanted to; unlike Cisco they don't offer "censorship technology". What Google provides always adds something that wasn't there before.
Anyway, if all you guys care so much about human rights violations in China, you would all be boycotting China's export. I bet your home is full of "made in China" stuff.
All you slashdotters whining about how evil Google is being here, answer this one question: How many "made in China" products do you have in your home?
Since many of you seem to feel so strongly about human rights abuses in China, why are you supporting the Chinese economy? Doesn't that make you evil too? You are giving the Chinese government the very money they use to kill and oppress their citizens.
Let's just admit that we all want "lots of cheap stuff from China" far more badly than we really want an end to human rights violations over there. Everyone's a vocal critic of China until the moment it inconveniences them in even the slightest way.
When I see people start boycotting China's exports (as South Africa's exports were boycotted during Apartheid), then we can start throwing accusations about how evil these companies are for doing business in a country with severe human rights issues. Until then, you're all equally complicit.
I can't see what it is that causes atheletes to improve persistantly [wikipedia.org] and why that logic can't be applied to education
Athletic records only measure the best of the best, i.e. outliers. They don't say anything about the athletic performance of the average person. An increasing population alone means more "outliers". The rest could probably be explained by our improved diets and knowledge of the body. The equivalent in academia would be to try look only at the most intelligent people throughout history (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Euler, Hawkins etc.). Unfortunately measuring "intelligence" is a lot harder than timing a sprint; any modern method can't be applied post-humously and cultural differences would make it impossible to benchmark intelligence tests from different eras against one another anyway, even if there was such a thing as an IQ test back in e.g. Newton's day.