I'm somewhat worried that I couldn't find a definition of "terrorist" in the motion... I mean, what's preventing China from declaring the Taiwanese government "terrorist?" (Remember, they group terrorist and separatists under the same grouping...) or Tibet? Or India and Kashmiri separatists?
Speaking as someone who's lineage traces back to China (my parents are actually Taiwanese), I can say with confidence that the problem is the *government* not the people. My grandparents often speak of a willingness to consider reunification but only if the government of China were better. Thousands of Hong Kong natives left in the few years before it was returned to China; why? Just look at the leadership.
Actually, I believe that even if the U.S. didn't sometimes see China as a potential enemy, the Chinese government would continue to do the same. The hardliners in the government *need* a large power in order to maintain their monopoly on power.
Not to mention that the anti-China bias that's prevalent on Taiwan is rather well founded...
The Chinese Communist Party is only "Communist" nominally... recently President Jiang Zemin infuriated some of the hardliners by allowing "capitalists" to join the party membership. If you look at his record, he's been known to be an opportunist. In fact, his entire record reflects this (read Tiannanmen Square Papers for more details).
The reason that the U.S. has begun to embrace China is precisely because they are no longer real communists, which translates to "exploitation" markets: think, corporations can make use of prison labor at a fraction of the cost of expensive U.S. workers.
All that's remaining of the original Maoism is an authoritarian government running a country by propaganda.
Given that it's a University System, I suspect that any normal user in that system isn't allowed to use it for "for profit" purposes. Carnegie Mellon (to use an example I'm more familiar with) has an explicit "University Computers are a shared resource and may not be used for for-profit purposes." Obviously if you're doing work for the university, it's exempted... but RC5 clearly violates that. Computing Services freezes your account if they find you violating the terms of services, and there are some people who (on their spare time) go around mortis'ing nohup'ed RC5 clients...
Yahoo is already going to become a porn site. So in that case, you'll be out of luck, because then "Yahooo.com" would be "brand dilution". *snicker*
yours,
Many acknowledge that downloading illegal music from the Web is wrong but feel that students play only a tiny role in the larger problem of pirated music. The entrance of organized crime groups into the business of pirating music is perceived as far more serious.
They completely miss the real source of the problem. Bootlegs in Taiwan are plentiful and public, and there is no enforcement on the retail level. You can easily purchase a bootleg "collection" CD in any large department store. In this way, the whole "cheaper is better, regardless of source" concept is promulgated throughout society. If the IFPI is serious about decreasing profit margins, then they should attack the criminal organizations creating these that clearly violate Taiwanese copyright, not students that are engaging in what may actually be considered fair use under Taiwanese law. My impression is that the law there has not yet been clarified in that manner.
At least in the U.S., the CDs we buy in stores are bona fide copies. Now, I'm no fan of RIAA; I believe that they don't really serve a purpose other than to promote a monopolistic view for music, to keep the recording industry's profit margins nice and fat while the common artist is screwed.
But I sincerely hope that the RIAA doesn't start using the Gestapo tactics that the IFPI is using.
yours,
... is that it's not the government, it's multi-national conglomerates. In this case it's the RIAA, but if you look at the trends, every industry has blood on its hands when it comes to personal freedoms.
It's not the government we need to fight, it's these companies, and this requires significantly more clue on the part of our representatives in government. yours,
I read the site, and it's awfully informative. Now, if there is documentation on paper as to what previous search engines did, then, that is a "prior art" case... in which case I think Altavista's gonna have difficulty collecting. However, that is all dependent on the targets of the lawsuits knowing enough to go for prior art and invalidating their lawsuit. It could also be possible that some choose to settle. I really hope for the former outcome. Of course, I am not a lawyer... yet.
I feel asleep at the wheel on that one, since I quite agree with you on the renewable resources tack. However, while finite resources *are* available, there is little incentive to switch; the cost/benefit ratio just isn't right (for the power generating corporations left to themselves). With nuclear power there's the NIMBY syndrome: nobody wants one, despite the fact that France has demonstrated that it's possible to run a relatively safe system.
I'm glad you didn't mention hydroelectric, since that powersource, while "infinite", causes environmental (and speciec) damage in of itself. yours,
You won't need to install ssh or vi, since it comes built in (well, in the Beta anyway). What you *will* need (thanks to Steve Jobs) is a c++ compiler.
The install is really funny in that way; it comes with gdb, but is missing gcc, almost like the developers just rm'd it right before shipping.
The government screwed it up in pushing for deregulation in the first place. This was one area in which some oversight is necessary to ensure that supply meets demand completely, as opposed to the normal conventional economic stance that there's the "balance" that consumers are willing and able to pay.
It can be argued that allowing the rates of consumers to rise dramatically would be a very good way to get people to conserve, and I normally would be a proponent of that. However, energy is sometimes not one of those flexible commodities in which one can decide to use or not use (during inclement weather conditions), and it is due to this that it's a rather harsh "flat (as in amount, not rate) tax" on the poorer populations.
>> And no, conservation is not the answer. Not in the past, not now, and never will be.
Conservation is a part of the solution, but only a slow long-term (read: 50-100 years) one. First and foremost, it's an attitude adjustment that indeed the pie *is* limited. Sorry, dude, there's just not an infinite amount of coal on this earth.
But a short term solution is still needed. Building more power plants (at what would normally be considered unwise cost/benefit) would have solved this problem. Be that as it may, I think the worst thing to do at this point is to allow this crisis to wreck the long-term checks to ensure environmental safety, etc. that are in place in California.
The government is only part of the problem. In this case it's the problem because it fell for the propaganda of a special business group.
So, a sub-culture in Boston (and I'm speaking strictly from classroom experience, so anyone who belongs to said subset can go ahead and correct me), known as the "Brahmins," actually have what we could categorized as Boston/British accent. The people are a small and dwindling number of families that have historically been seen as the highest upper-crust of Boston; the money in the families are very, very old. In a video on accents I watched in Sociolinguistics, we heard one of these people speak, and you couldn't quite tell where the Boston accent ended and the British accent began.
Now, given this information, it's quite a possibility that that was the accent that the Kennedy's had. I don't know, however, since I'm not old enough to have heard either of the Kennedy's speak, and I've only heard the occassional recording of JFK.
Of course, using Occam's Razor, it's just actor incompetence... but it would certainly be interesting to see that.
Speaking of accents, I get the feeling that we're never going to see a President of the United States from the northeast again, especially given the demographics, census, and population trends.
You HAVE no liberty, and it's not only the government's fault. Read "Manufacturing Consent" and "Profit over People" by Noam Chomsky to see how corporations are also a culprit.
Unfortunately this article is merely a verbalization of a principle of the "lesser of two evils"... it just simply depends on which you think is the lesser.
He's quite correct in one thing, though. You are only as free as the information given to us. Certainly, conspiracy theorists will accuse the government of manipulating information in order to control the public, but corporations don't even hide that fact. Marketing is ALL about spin, whether you like it or not. A product does NOT necessarily have to be truly superior for a company to claim it is such.
And anyway, with such information surpressed, companies need only please the shareholders, not necessarily make products people will buy naturally. They make products they think they can convince people they need, and more often than not, it's successful. How often have you decided you *really* needed a gadget that was advertised on TV? I generally don't have that problem, but there are those I know that get swayed by those sleazy snake-oil infomercials.
So, to sum up; an economic argument only works when everyone has the ability to put together all different sides of the issue and figure out what is best. However, it is in the corporation's best interest to prevent that from happening.
I'm one of those people who switched to Mac (in anticipation) for Mac OS X. The only reason I continued to use a Windows box was twofold: Professional music creation programs, and the fact I'm normally too lazy to deal with most set up issues.
After trying OS X beta (and giving away my windoze box), I have to say that I'm incredibly happy I made the switchover. It has been an incredibly expensive proposition, but at least it has everything I use, and for anything I *don't* have, I can (most of the times) grab some GNU stuff, and compile it on my own. Most of the time, though, I just sit there happily clicking the buttons.
Though the article might have a particular bias, I think the system addresses enough of the issues that the moderates had. Now, if only they had a native X server implementation... hm....
Actually, during one of the development cycles, MS threatened to stop working with Intel and work only with AMD.
Intel does work with other OS's, but that makes the assumptions that other companies actively work with Intel. With the greater public knowledge / work on Linux, there are now people that work on that particular segment.
Wintel has never been "alive" so to speak. When I worked there, we took great pains to clarify that "Intel actively works with all developers"... so whether that be Microsoft, or Linux, there are engineers at Intel that will work to ensure the next generation chips will have software for them. After all, what good is hardware if you can't do anything with it?
Additionally, it was made clear to everyone that we were not to use the word "wintel". In fact, at the employee orientation, we were shown a video clip of how <b>not</b> to talk about competitors--a clip of Bill Gates.
Unlike what many people think, my feeling was that there was actually a rather large animosity against Microsoft; many of the developers felt that Microsoft was unfairly bullying them around.
The problem is that right now a whole lot of Software people are Artists (in demeanor, attitude, etc.). I'm not saying that Artists do not have their place; indeed, those that design web-sites, etc. should be Artists, but user application developers, system engineers, network engineers, (and I would even argue sysadmins) should NOT be Artists. Unfortunately there are too many of the above people that are.
I believe that privacy is a very important issue. Encryption is one of those things that helps privacy. The clinton administration has done nothing on this issue, and so we have less freedom and less national security than ever before in the past. I will change all that. I can ensure both more freedom and more national security. It's good for business if we allow them to extort encryption overseas. I mean, export. Except to China, because they already have all of our nuclear secrets. That is a bad thing. Clinton has done nothing to prevent that. Gore would continue to do nothing. I won't be a do nothing president. I work well with people, in getting things done.
Investing in the stock market in of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It can provide a company with much needed capital to produce greater growth. However, speculation is the act of putting money into a company on whim; for short term. Speculation, as I see it, is the factor in the stock market which destablizes it. Instead of investing in the long term, day traders do by the minute profit catching, irregardless of the actual value of the company. Additionally, I think it's safe to say that Nader is against any method in which you could make significant amounts of money at the expense of someone else, which is exactly what stock market speculation does: when everyone sells off their stock simultaneously to profit off of the skyward bound IPO, and it tanks, the people who joined in late are screwed.
It falls in line with the core belief that corporations, and those who are fortunate to have money to place in corporations, shouldn't be wholeheartedly congratulated for screwing over the hard working laborer.
For more information concerning the ways that corporations screw over democracy, check out this interview done with MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.
Um, do you know how independent WIPO actually is in terms of influence from the United States? Just like the U.N. (in which the U.S. has used its position in the Permanent Security Council) and the W.T.O., the United States basically rams through what it wants, and blythly ignores things that go against its wishes.
We only use those two fronts to pursue our own interests, where "our own interests" mean the interests of the corporations which fund our election campaigns.
That is one of the best reasons for publicly funded and restricted campaign contributions if there ever was one.
The WIPO is in the back pocket of the US based multinationals, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
These are called "Undergraduate TAs" these days ;)
I'm somewhat worried that I couldn't find a definition of "terrorist" in the motion... I mean, what's preventing China from declaring the Taiwanese government "terrorist?" (Remember, they group terrorist and separatists under the same grouping...) or Tibet? Or India and Kashmiri separatists?
-k
Speaking as someone who's lineage traces back to China (my parents are actually Taiwanese), I can say with confidence that the problem is the *government* not the people. My grandparents often speak of a willingness to consider reunification but only if the government of China were better. Thousands of Hong Kong natives left in the few years before it was returned to China; why? Just look at the leadership.
Actually, I believe that even if the U.S. didn't sometimes see China as a potential enemy, the Chinese government would continue to do the same. The hardliners in the government *need* a large power in order to maintain their monopoly on power.
Not to mention that the anti-China bias that's prevalent on Taiwan is rather well founded...
-k
The Chinese Communist Party is only "Communist" nominally... recently President Jiang Zemin infuriated some of the hardliners by allowing "capitalists" to join the party membership. If you look at his record, he's been known to be an opportunist. In fact, his entire record reflects this (read Tiannanmen Square Papers for more details).
The reason that the U.S. has begun to embrace China is precisely because they are no longer real communists, which translates to "exploitation" markets: think, corporations can make use of prison labor at a fraction of the cost of expensive U.S. workers.
All that's remaining of the original Maoism is an authoritarian government running a country by propaganda.
-k
Given that it's a University System, I suspect that any normal user in that system isn't allowed to use it for "for profit" purposes. Carnegie Mellon (to use an example I'm more familiar with) has an explicit "University Computers are a shared resource and may not be used for for-profit purposes." Obviously if you're doing work for the university, it's exempted... but RC5 clearly violates that. Computing Services freezes your account if they find you violating the terms of services, and there are some people who (on their spare time) go around mortis'ing nohup'ed RC5 clients...
yours,
Funny, I found them quite plentiful last summer.
yours,
Yahoo is already going to become a porn site. So in that case, you'll be out of luck, because then "Yahooo.com" would be "brand dilution". *snicker*
yours,
Many acknowledge that downloading illegal music from the Web is wrong but feel that students play only a tiny role in the larger problem of pirated music. The entrance of organized crime groups into the business of pirating music is perceived as far more serious.
They completely miss the real source of the problem. Bootlegs in Taiwan are plentiful and public, and there is no enforcement on the retail level. You can easily purchase a bootleg "collection" CD in any large department store. In this way, the whole "cheaper is better, regardless of source" concept is promulgated throughout society. If the IFPI is serious about decreasing profit margins, then they should attack the criminal organizations creating these that clearly violate Taiwanese copyright, not students that are engaging in what may actually be considered fair use under Taiwanese law. My impression is that the law there has not yet been clarified in that manner.
At least in the U.S., the CDs we buy in stores are bona fide copies. Now, I'm no fan of RIAA; I believe that they don't really serve a purpose other than to promote a monopolistic view for music, to keep the recording industry's profit margins nice and fat while the common artist is screwed.
But I sincerely hope that the RIAA doesn't start using the Gestapo tactics that the IFPI is using.
yours,
... is that it's not the government, it's multi-national conglomerates. In this case it's the RIAA, but if you look at the trends, every industry has blood on its hands when it comes to personal freedoms.
It's not the government we need to fight, it's these companies, and this requires significantly more clue on the part of our representatives in government.
yours,
I read the site, and it's awfully informative. Now, if there is documentation on paper as to what previous search engines did, then, that is a "prior art" case... in which case I think Altavista's gonna have difficulty collecting. However, that is all dependent on the targets of the lawsuits knowing enough to go for prior art and invalidating their lawsuit. It could also be possible that some choose to settle. I really hope for the former outcome. Of course, I am not a lawyer... yet.
yours,
I feel asleep at the wheel on that one, since I quite agree with you on the renewable resources tack. However, while finite resources *are* available, there is little incentive to switch; the cost/benefit ratio just isn't right (for the power generating corporations left to themselves). With nuclear power there's the NIMBY syndrome: nobody wants one, despite the fact that France has demonstrated that it's possible to run a relatively safe system.
I'm glad you didn't mention hydroelectric, since that powersource, while "infinite", causes environmental (and speciec) damage in of itself.
yours,
You won't need to install ssh or vi, since it comes built in (well, in the Beta anyway). What you *will* need (thanks to Steve Jobs) is a c++ compiler.
The install is really funny in that way; it comes with gdb, but is missing gcc, almost like the developers just rm'd it right before shipping.
Luckily, there's Darwin.
yours,
The government screwed it up in pushing for deregulation in the first place. This was one area in which some oversight is necessary to ensure that supply meets demand completely, as opposed to the normal conventional economic stance that there's the "balance" that consumers are willing and able to pay.
It can be argued that allowing the rates of consumers to rise dramatically would be a very good way to get people to conserve, and I normally would be a proponent of that. However, energy is sometimes not one of those flexible commodities in which one can decide to use or not use (during inclement weather conditions), and it is due to this that it's a rather harsh "flat (as in amount, not rate) tax" on the poorer populations.
>> And no, conservation is not the answer. Not in the past, not now, and never will be.
Conservation is a part of the solution, but only a slow long-term (read: 50-100 years) one. First and foremost, it's an attitude adjustment that indeed the pie *is* limited. Sorry, dude, there's just not an infinite amount of coal on this earth.
But a short term solution is still needed. Building more power plants (at what would normally be considered unwise cost/benefit) would have solved this problem. Be that as it may, I think the worst thing to do at this point is to allow this crisis to wreck the long-term checks to ensure environmental safety, etc. that are in place in California.
The government is only part of the problem. In this case it's the problem because it fell for the propaganda of a special business group.
yours,
So, a sub-culture in Boston (and I'm speaking strictly from classroom experience, so anyone who belongs to said subset can go ahead and correct me), known as the "Brahmins," actually have what we could categorized as Boston/British accent. The people are a small and dwindling number of families that have historically been seen as the highest upper-crust of Boston; the money in the families are very, very old. In a video on accents I watched in Sociolinguistics, we heard one of these people speak, and you couldn't quite tell where the Boston accent ended and the British accent began.
Now, given this information, it's quite a possibility that that was the accent that the Kennedy's had. I don't know, however, since I'm not old enough to have heard either of the Kennedy's speak, and I've only heard the occassional recording of JFK.
Of course, using Occam's Razor, it's just actor incompetence... but it would certainly be interesting to see that.
Speaking of accents, I get the feeling that we're never going to see a President of the United States from the northeast again, especially given the demographics, census, and population trends.
yours,
You HAVE no liberty, and it's not only the government's fault. Read "Manufacturing Consent" and "Profit over People" by Noam Chomsky to see how corporations are also a culprit.
... it just simply depends on which you think is the lesser.
Unfortunately this article is merely a verbalization of a principle of the "lesser of two evils"
yours,
He's quite correct in one thing, though. You are only as free as the information given to us. Certainly, conspiracy theorists will accuse the government of manipulating information in order to control the public, but corporations don't even hide that fact. Marketing is ALL about spin, whether you like it or not. A product does NOT necessarily have to be truly superior for a company to claim it is such.
And anyway, with such information surpressed, companies need only please the shareholders, not necessarily make products people will buy naturally. They make products they think they can convince people they need, and more often than not, it's successful. How often have you decided you *really* needed a gadget that was advertised on TV? I generally don't have that problem, but there are those I know that get swayed by those sleazy snake-oil infomercials.
So, to sum up; an economic argument only works when everyone has the ability to put together all different sides of the issue and figure out what is best. However, it is in the corporation's best interest to prevent that from happening.
yours,
I'm one of those people who switched to Mac (in anticipation) for Mac OS X. The only reason I continued to use a Windows box was twofold: Professional music creation programs, and the fact I'm normally too lazy to deal with most set up issues.
After trying OS X beta (and giving away my windoze box), I have to say that I'm incredibly happy I made the switchover. It has been an incredibly expensive proposition, but at least it has everything I use, and for anything I *don't* have, I can (most of the times) grab some GNU stuff, and compile it on my own. Most of the time, though, I just sit there happily clicking the buttons.
Though the article might have a particular bias, I think the system addresses enough of the issues that the moderates had. Now, if only they had a native X server implementation... hm....
yours,
Actually, during one of the development cycles, MS threatened to stop working with Intel and work only with AMD.
Intel does work with other OS's, but that makes the assumptions that other companies actively work with Intel. With the greater public knowledge / work on Linux, there are now people that work on that particular segment.
yours,
Wintel has never been "alive" so to speak. When I worked there, we took great pains to clarify that "Intel actively works with all developers" ... so whether that be Microsoft, or Linux, there are engineers at Intel that will work to ensure the next generation chips will have software for them. After all, what good is hardware if you can't do anything with it?
Additionally, it was made clear to everyone that we were not to use the word "wintel". In fact, at the employee orientation, we were shown a video clip of how <b>not</b> to talk about competitors--a clip of Bill Gates.
Unlike what many people think, my feeling was that there was actually a rather large animosity against Microsoft; many of the developers felt that Microsoft was unfairly bullying them around.
yours,
The problem is that right now a whole lot of Software people are Artists (in demeanor, attitude, etc.). I'm not saying that Artists do not have their place; indeed, those that design web-sites, etc. should be Artists, but user application developers, system engineers, network engineers, (and I would even argue sysadmins) should NOT be Artists. Unfortunately there are too many of the above people that are.
yours,
Yes, but even when you're doing research, you need to cite where the research comes from.
yours,
When the information doesn't come from only one source, it is still customary to cite all of the sources involved.
yours,
I believe that privacy is a very important issue. Encryption is one of those things that helps privacy. The clinton administration has done nothing on this issue, and so we have less freedom and less national security than ever before in the past. I will change all that. I can ensure both more freedom and more national security. It's good for business if we allow them to extort encryption overseas. I mean, export. Except to China, because they already have all of our nuclear secrets. That is a bad thing. Clinton has done nothing to prevent that. Gore would continue to do nothing. I won't be a do nothing president. I work well with people, in getting things done.
What was the question again?
yours,
Investing in the stock market in of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It can provide a company with much needed capital to produce greater growth. However, speculation is the act of putting money into a company on whim; for short term. Speculation, as I see it, is the factor in the stock market which destablizes it. Instead of investing in the long term, day traders do by the minute profit catching, irregardless of the actual value of the company. Additionally, I think it's safe to say that Nader is against any method in which you could make significant amounts of money at the expense of someone else, which is exactly what stock market speculation does: when everyone sells off their stock simultaneously to profit off of the skyward bound IPO, and it tanks, the people who joined in late are screwed.
It falls in line with the core belief that corporations, and those who are fortunate to have money to place in corporations, shouldn't be wholeheartedly congratulated for screwing over the hard working laborer.
For more information concerning the ways that corporations screw over democracy, check out this interview done with MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.
yours,
Um, do you know how independent WIPO actually is in terms of influence from the United States? Just like the U.N. (in which the U.S. has used its position in the Permanent Security Council) and the W.T.O., the United States basically rams through what it wants, and blythly ignores things that go against its wishes.
We only use those two fronts to pursue our own interests, where "our own interests" mean the interests of the corporations which fund our election campaigns.
That is one of the best reasons for publicly funded and restricted campaign contributions if there ever was one.
The WIPO is in the back pocket of the US based multinationals, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
yours,