call a friend on the mainland There are approximately six people in Taiwan who would sell nuke tech to China (which is, after all, the country that keeps shooting missile "warning shots" at them). Besides, China also already has the Bomb, and doesn't need 1960s-era fuse technology (look for the phrase "quite dated"). Much more likely that the stuff would get sold to Japan (though they're understandably touchy about the whole nuclear thing still) or S. Korea, in which case the US probably wouldn't mind too much; but the biggest use of all would be for Taiwan to start building a couple missiles of its own, which is why you'll see that now China is (predictably) kicking up a fuss about the whole thing. After all, they want ALL US arms sales to Taiwan to stop, because they want Taiwan defenseless.
It looks like the story was preemptively spread mainly to convince China that nothing actually had happened (per a cursory reading of this), especially in light of recent developments in Taiwanese mid-range missile technology (which I did not know about). Think that's about the best I can do to explain...
It's not random at all. We have tons of military shipments to Taiwan.
We go to great lengths to ensure that (current) ideological enemies don't get the Bomb. Neutral parties, we are concerned but don't intervene (we disapproved of India, but didn't go to any great lengths to stop it, and then basically had to accept Pakistan in too or we'd have a war). Friends, we couldn't care less (Israel ferinstance).
I don't know that a few nuked cities is better than a non-nuclear war fought correctly, but to paraphrase the old slogan:
God made nations. Oppenheimer made nations equal.
You think it was a couple of irrelevant parts. To the process involved in controlling them, this was an "escape" from the process
No, I think it was a couple of extremely important parts, that were shipped to a friendly country who, as far as I can tell, promptly returned them unmolested, meaning that the only people who should really care are the ones who'll be reworking the process to prevent future escapes.
Your 1) is pretty much the only valid part. Absolutely no one (aside from a couple bureaucrats) would care if we'd mis-shipped a couple boxes of Imperial-unit wrenches.
I understand the significance of accidental nuclear proliferation, but that doesn't mean that every time the system screws up it needs to be front-page news. Time to implement some new process controls, and in the mean time, the actual event was a push.
You know, I read a couple articles about this yesterday afternoon.
I can't seem to figure out why it was being reported at all. The story as it's published is "nothing much happened, somebody filled out the shipping form wrong, we returned it all to sender." So in whose interest is this story being reported?
It would be a reasonable story to spread as cover if the shipment had been intentional and China found out about it (or if there had been, say, six fuses shipped and four returned); or it could be a useful story to ratchet up tensions with China before the Olympics (to whoever's benefit). Thing is, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I don't really buy that without it being more obvious whose interest it serves; but if it's just a "gotcha" story talking about how the US military screwed up, then the shots fired in the Suez might be a more interesting one (especially since as of yesterday afternoon the USAF was denying that anybody got hurt).
So, in short, this nuke-fuse story is weird, and I can't figure out why it's getting reported.
(Full disclosure: I wish Taiwan had nukes, to make sure China stays polite and on its side of the Strait.)
In the absence of the mythical, impossible strong-AI, there will always be an important role for experts -- you know, thinking meat, sitting there pushing charges through neurons, having opinions about stuff -- and those experts will probably use a lot of mechanized search tools to improve the breadth of their knowledge, their awareness of knowledge, and the accessibility of information. Technology and people work together!
But you're an idiot if you take out the wetware-based BS filter.
It's coordinating all that expert opinion, and filtering out the drivel, that poses the great organizational challenge of our collective information future. Wiki-based approaches are a good first step; maybe a "trusted-wiki" like Citizendium will be the next step; it's definitely going to keep evolving. But it's long been recognized by the reasonable that if you want an informed opinion, rather than a pattern match, you ask the librarian. We've known that since Alexandria -- nay, Ur -- and it's a shame we keep forgetting.
See, anyone that stands up and say these actions are wrong would be labeled a traitor by both politicians and majority of the citizens alike. So politicians tries to avoid denouncing anti-foreigner actions for the sake of their own skin.
It's more than that; that kind of nationalism (such as the "eternal dominance" claims over Tibet and Taiwan) serves directly to legitimize the power and prestige of the existing government. They're not just scared to denounce it; they actively encourage it because it helps promote their power. People who are passionately committed to their existing government and to what they see it as standing for don't much care if they technically can't vote or publicly disagree with policy; and it's much easier to convince a mob that they're The Best, from The Longest Cultural Tradition, with a Manifest Destiny Over Everything, etc. than to convince them that they don't need a public sphere because Things Are In Good Hands. Especially in the sticks, where there's no other distraction because they won't get rich and live fat, dumb, and happy.
If you think about it, it's exactly the same tactics that function very effectively in (ferinstance) conservative politics in the US.
the absolute dictate against ex post facto laws spawns them instead of stopping them
I agree that the other abuses of constitutional rights which you mention have been happening, but I wasn't aware of any ex post facto laws turning up... eh?
Serves me right for trusting anything I read on Wikipedia -- the Tjmayerinsf revision as of 5:45 AM on 3/21 indicated that it was published in the December issue of the Israel Journal of Mathematics, but that's subsequently been edited (which I suppose is something that happens a lot when you post a link to a wiki page in a/. comment that gets modded up quickly... heh). I was going on that, figuring the thing had been in print for three months. TBH, I just skimmed TFA when I read it, since I was specifically looking for information about what actually happened, rather than just the human-interest fluff; missed the part where the AP said the issue hadn't been published yet.
No, my point was that some math nerd should've posted it when they read about it in the journal, not when it finally got picked up by some other pop-news source. Only Slashdot tends to be run by the poseurs, not the real thing, so we get links to (basically) the AP summary, rather than getting the "news" news. My issue is more with Slashdot's sourcing and editing than anything else; I'd rather have a summary that provides information and background, with a link to the real mccoy, than a summary that says almost nothing at all about what the news is, linking to an article that is similarly more of a fluff or color-commentary piece rather than anything substantive.
BTW, I thought the original post made it clear that I'd never even heard of the problem before the/. article came up; I just looked it up on Wikipedia since the summary itself offered virtually no explanation of what the math curiosity in question was.
A couple I have seen... were run like Nazi concentration camps....They took trainloads of people, stripped them of everything valuable, and herded half of them into gas chambers, and had the other half shove them in ovens?
Man, Corporate America is worse than even I thought.:This message sponsored by PATHIN:
1. Here's wtf the problem even is, for those of us who aren't all up in the "mathematical curiosities" business. Basically the question is, for a specific kind of graph (where you can go from point A to a finite number of points B, C, or D, etc) can you label the possible paths from each point so that, starting from anywhere, you can follow an invariable rule that will get you to a specific destination point. (Check the link, the picture makes much more sense).
2. Apparently his proof was published last September. It's "news" because it's just now hitting the semi-mainstream press. You people fail at nerddom.
Yeah, you're not understanding what they mean by framing. (It's ok, it's never really presented very clearly, even though talking about "framing" has become a hip thing to do).
"Framing" as it's used in this article is a more scientific approach to spin -- or rather, it's the cognitive explanation of why spin works. We think of spin as distorting the truth, but it's actually about the context in which information is presented, which determines how (and whether) it is integrated into the existing worldview. For instance, welfare reform: all of us carry around both the ideas of personal responsibility and social obligation, but Ronald Reagan (and subsequently Newt Gingrich) were successful because they discussed people on welfare as those who needed to take personal responsibility for their circumstances, instead of those the taxpayers had a moral obligation to help; both are likely true in any given case (they could've made better decisions, but it doesn't change the fact that they need help from the government) but if you view the fundamental problem as "these people lack personal responsibility," you will view the solution as "take away the handouts so they develop the strength to care for themselves"; if you approach it from a frame of "we have an obligation to help" then you view the solution as "increase the subsidies so they live better lives and have better access to opportunities." Or there's a difference in how you frame US involvement in Iraq, as liberation vs. invasion; both descriptions have some validity (since Hussein was a terrible guy, but their terrible guy), but one side frames it as "freeing people from oppression," in which case why wouldn't you support it, and how dare those insurgents resist; the other side frames it as "unwelcome meddling in their domestic affairs," in which case why would we ever get involved when we weren't invited, and will obviously be resented and viewed as meddling colonialists with suspect motives.
The topic is the presentation of science and how to integrate scientific knowledge with the slew of other ideas and opinions that the audience already holds about the world. Politicians (particularly conservative politicians) have been extremely effective at getting people to use those world-models which make their statements reasonable and true, and minimize their own (coexisting) world-models which make those statements seem wrongheaded.
Using patented technologies these days is as simple as thinking up something obvious and uncomplicated, without reference to what is patented.
To be fair, the whole problem with patent trolling is that this isn't all that simple any more. Obvious and uncomplicated things get patented with alarming frequency.
Looks like this isn't the first time these guys have litigated this. Infringing this software seems to be a habit.
Anyway, I wonder if this is a good thing for PR. If companies point to this to be even more reluctant to adopt F/OSS solutions, and make subcontractors indemnify themselves, and basically make everybody CTheirA even more tightly, it will likely be a bad thing for everybody involved; Open Source Software gets less support from the mainstream, services cost more (because of all that R&D poured into re-inventing this "wheel" thing everybody's talking about), and everybody misses out on the fruits of useful labor that could be shared.
Obviously "letting them get away with it" is not an acceptable option, and I'm very glad to see a settlement suggesting the enforcability of the GPL (even if it isn't precedent-setting or anything), but I just wish that we could have had this victory without possibly raising more fears in the suspender-and-two-belts corporate world. OSS coders need money too, and a lot of it is going to come from folks who use software without directly selling it.
That'd be complicated in the Tibetan situation, since a lot of those people who live in Tibet and don't want independence would be recent Han transplants. It'd be (to choose as non-offensive a comparison as I can make) sort of like holding a plebiscite in Kansas while that territory was applying for Statehood -- if you were to have done so and counted both the White votes and the Native American ones, you would have gotten very different results than if you counted only the Native American votes.
See, the problem here is that the press is increasingly talking only to itself. That's why each of the cable news channels is running the same filler over and over -- "Quick, CNN's covering that story, get me video of that now!" etc.
And politicans have figured out how to play this echo chamber to turn the media into a propaganda tool. Dan Rather is an excellent point -- he went forward with a story that was actually true, and the spin folks at Fox managed to get him fired over the fact that they used the wrong document to prove it (there were other, non-forged documents demonstrating the truth of the POINT of the story). The "Swiftboating" is another example -- the guys were cranks, liars, political operatives, but they got some coverage, so everyone else had to immediately rush to cover them, lending more and more legitimacy to things that weren't actually true.
But then, truth costs money; echoing babble is much cheaper. And when you've got 188 hours of cable news to fill every week per channel, well... you're surely not going to pay reporters to actually find out stuff to fill that time, are you?
Exactly!...but now cue some libertarian to come in here and say that if something like that ever actually happened, obviously Market Competition would cause a new, truth-telling, diverse-story-reporting media conglomerate empire to spring into existence...
Errm... sorry... do you have a magic bottomless barrel of oil that you're holding out on? The rest of us who use it for just about everything would kind of like to know...
Slashdot Mirror
Russia would be interested too.
Russia's already got more nukes than it knows what to do with. (Or than it knows where they are. Oops.)
call a friend on the mainland
There are approximately six people in Taiwan who would sell nuke tech to China (which is, after all, the country that keeps shooting missile "warning shots" at them). Besides, China also already has the Bomb, and doesn't need 1960s-era fuse technology (look for the phrase "quite dated"). Much more likely that the stuff would get sold to Japan (though they're understandably touchy about the whole nuclear thing still) or S. Korea, in which case the US probably wouldn't mind too much; but the biggest use of all would be for Taiwan to start building a couple missiles of its own, which is why you'll see that now China is (predictably) kicking up a fuss about the whole thing. After all, they want ALL US arms sales to Taiwan to stop, because they want Taiwan defenseless.
It looks like the story was preemptively spread mainly to convince China that nothing actually had happened (per a cursory reading of this), especially in light of recent developments in Taiwanese mid-range missile technology (which I did not know about). Think that's about the best I can do to explain...
It's not random at all. We have tons of military shipments to Taiwan.
We go to great lengths to ensure that (current) ideological enemies don't get the Bomb. Neutral parties, we are concerned but don't intervene (we disapproved of India, but didn't go to any great lengths to stop it, and then basically had to accept Pakistan in too or we'd have a war). Friends, we couldn't care less (Israel ferinstance).
I don't know that a few nuked cities is better than a non-nuclear war fought correctly, but to paraphrase the old slogan: God made nations. Oppenheimer made nations equal.
You think it was a couple of irrelevant parts. To the process involved in controlling them, this was an "escape" from the process
No, I think it was a couple of extremely important parts, that were shipped to a friendly country who, as far as I can tell, promptly returned them unmolested, meaning that the only people who should really care are the ones who'll be reworking the process to prevent future escapes.
Your 1) is pretty much the only valid part. Absolutely no one (aside from a couple bureaucrats) would care if we'd mis-shipped a couple boxes of Imperial-unit wrenches.
I understand the significance of accidental nuclear proliferation, but that doesn't mean that every time the system screws up it needs to be front-page news. Time to implement some new process controls, and in the mean time, the actual event was a push.
You know, I read a couple articles about this yesterday afternoon.
I can't seem to figure out why it was being reported at all. The story as it's published is "nothing much happened, somebody filled out the shipping form wrong, we returned it all to sender." So in whose interest is this story being reported?
It would be a reasonable story to spread as cover if the shipment had been intentional and China found out about it (or if there had been, say, six fuses shipped and four returned); or it could be a useful story to ratchet up tensions with China before the Olympics (to whoever's benefit). Thing is, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I don't really buy that without it being more obvious whose interest it serves; but if it's just a "gotcha" story talking about how the US military screwed up, then the shots fired in the Suez might be a more interesting one (especially since as of yesterday afternoon the USAF was denying that anybody got hurt).
So, in short, this nuke-fuse story is weird, and I can't figure out why it's getting reported.
(Full disclosure: I wish Taiwan had nukes, to make sure China stays polite and on its side of the Strait.)
Or, "1995 called, it wants its Yahoo! back."
In the absence of the mythical, impossible strong-AI, there will always be an important role for experts -- you know, thinking meat, sitting there pushing charges through neurons, having opinions about stuff -- and those experts will probably use a lot of mechanized search tools to improve the breadth of their knowledge, their awareness of knowledge, and the accessibility of information. Technology and people work together!
But you're an idiot if you take out the wetware-based BS filter.
It's coordinating all that expert opinion, and filtering out the drivel, that poses the great organizational challenge of our collective information future. Wiki-based approaches are a good first step; maybe a "trusted-wiki" like Citizendium will be the next step; it's definitely going to keep evolving. But it's long been recognized by the reasonable that if you want an informed opinion, rather than a pattern match, you ask the librarian. We've known that since Alexandria -- nay, Ur -- and it's a shame we keep forgetting.
See, anyone that stands up and say these actions are wrong would be labeled a traitor by both politicians and majority of the citizens alike. So politicians tries to avoid denouncing anti-foreigner actions for the sake of their own skin.
It's more than that; that kind of nationalism (such as the "eternal dominance" claims over Tibet and Taiwan) serves directly to legitimize the power and prestige of the existing government. They're not just scared to denounce it; they actively encourage it because it helps promote their power. People who are passionately committed to their existing government and to what they see it as standing for don't much care if they technically can't vote or publicly disagree with policy; and it's much easier to convince a mob that they're The Best, from The Longest Cultural Tradition, with a Manifest Destiny Over Everything, etc. than to convince them that they don't need a public sphere because Things Are In Good Hands. Especially in the sticks, where there's no other distraction because they won't get rich and live fat, dumb, and happy.
If you think about it, it's exactly the same tactics that function very effectively in (ferinstance) conservative politics in the US.
the absolute dictate against ex post facto laws spawns them instead of stopping them
I agree that the other abuses of constitutional rights which you mention have been happening, but I wasn't aware of any ex post facto laws turning up... eh?
Serves me right for trusting anything I read on Wikipedia -- the Tjmayerinsf revision as of 5:45 AM on 3/21 indicated that it was published in the December issue of the Israel Journal of Mathematics, but that's subsequently been edited (which I suppose is something that happens a lot when you post a link to a wiki page in a /. comment that gets modded up quickly... heh). I was going on that, figuring the thing had been in print for three months. TBH, I just skimmed TFA when I read it, since I was specifically looking for information about what actually happened, rather than just the human-interest fluff; missed the part where the AP said the issue hadn't been published yet.
No, my point was that some math nerd should've posted it when they read about it in the journal, not when it finally got picked up by some other pop-news source. Only Slashdot tends to be run by the poseurs, not the real thing, so we get links to (basically) the AP summary, rather than getting the "news" news. My issue is more with Slashdot's sourcing and editing than anything else; I'd rather have a summary that provides information and background, with a link to the real mccoy, than a summary that says almost nothing at all about what the news is, linking to an article that is similarly more of a fluff or color-commentary piece rather than anything substantive.
/. article came up; I just looked it up on Wikipedia since the summary itself offered virtually no explanation of what the math curiosity in question was.
BTW, I thought the original post made it clear that I'd never even heard of the problem before the
A couple I have seen... were run like Nazi concentration camps. ...They took trainloads of people, stripped them of everything valuable, and herded half of them into gas chambers, and had the other half shove them in ovens?
:This message sponsored by PATHIN:
Man, Corporate America is worse than even I thought.
3 mos = real-time, synchoronous? Maybe if your news is delivered by IP-over-Caravel...
Hooray for inheritance! You'd think folks on this site would understand that, no?
1. Here's wtf the problem even is, for those of us who aren't all up in the "mathematical curiosities" business. Basically the question is, for a specific kind of graph (where you can go from point A to a finite number of points B, C, or D, etc) can you label the possible paths from each point so that, starting from anywhere, you can follow an invariable rule that will get you to a specific destination point. (Check the link, the picture makes much more sense).
2. Apparently his proof was published last September. It's "news" because it's just now hitting the semi-mainstream press. You people fail at nerddom.
Yeah, you're not understanding what they mean by framing. (It's ok, it's never really presented very clearly, even though talking about "framing" has become a hip thing to do).
Background: cognitive frame, conceptual metaphor, George Lakoff.
"Framing" as it's used in this article is a more scientific approach to spin -- or rather, it's the cognitive explanation of why spin works. We think of spin as distorting the truth, but it's actually about the context in which information is presented, which determines how (and whether) it is integrated into the existing worldview. For instance, welfare reform: all of us carry around both the ideas of personal responsibility and social obligation, but Ronald Reagan (and subsequently Newt Gingrich) were successful because they discussed people on welfare as those who needed to take personal responsibility for their circumstances, instead of those the taxpayers had a moral obligation to help; both are likely true in any given case (they could've made better decisions, but it doesn't change the fact that they need help from the government) but if you view the fundamental problem as "these people lack personal responsibility," you will view the solution as "take away the handouts so they develop the strength to care for themselves"; if you approach it from a frame of "we have an obligation to help" then you view the solution as "increase the subsidies so they live better lives and have better access to opportunities." Or there's a difference in how you frame US involvement in Iraq, as liberation vs. invasion; both descriptions have some validity (since Hussein was a terrible guy, but their terrible guy), but one side frames it as "freeing people from oppression," in which case why wouldn't you support it, and how dare those insurgents resist; the other side frames it as "unwelcome meddling in their domestic affairs," in which case why would we ever get involved when we weren't invited, and will obviously be resented and viewed as meddling colonialists with suspect motives.
The topic is the presentation of science and how to integrate scientific knowledge with the slew of other ideas and opinions that the audience already holds about the world. Politicians (particularly conservative politicians) have been extremely effective at getting people to use those world-models which make their statements reasonable and true, and minimize their own (coexisting) world-models which make those statements seem wrongheaded.
There's always the BSD option.
True! But it's a distinction that I suspect still gets lost on a lot of the suits.
Using patented technologies these days is as simple as thinking up something obvious and uncomplicated, without reference to what is patented.
To be fair, the whole problem with patent trolling is that this isn't all that simple any more. Obvious and uncomplicated things get patented with alarming frequency.
Looks like this isn't the first time these guys have litigated this. Infringing this software seems to be a habit.
Anyway, I wonder if this is a good thing for PR. If companies point to this to be even more reluctant to adopt F/OSS solutions, and make subcontractors indemnify themselves, and basically make everybody CTheirA even more tightly, it will likely be a bad thing for everybody involved; Open Source Software gets less support from the mainstream, services cost more (because of all that R&D poured into re-inventing this "wheel" thing everybody's talking about), and everybody misses out on the fruits of useful labor that could be shared.
Obviously "letting them get away with it" is not an acceptable option, and I'm very glad to see a settlement suggesting the enforcability of the GPL (even if it isn't precedent-setting or anything), but I just wish that we could have had this victory without possibly raising more fears in the suspender-and-two-belts corporate world. OSS coders need money too, and a lot of it is going to come from folks who use software without directly selling it.
That'd be complicated in the Tibetan situation, since a lot of those people who live in Tibet and don't want independence would be recent Han transplants. It'd be (to choose as non-offensive a comparison as I can make) sort of like holding a plebiscite in Kansas while that territory was applying for Statehood -- if you were to have done so and counted both the White votes and the Native American ones, you would have gotten very different results than if you counted only the Native American votes.
See, the problem here is that the press is increasingly talking only to itself. That's why each of the cable news channels is running the same filler over and over -- "Quick, CNN's covering that story, get me video of that now!" etc.
And politicans have figured out how to play this echo chamber to turn the media into a propaganda tool. Dan Rather is an excellent point -- he went forward with a story that was actually true, and the spin folks at Fox managed to get him fired over the fact that they used the wrong document to prove it (there were other, non-forged documents demonstrating the truth of the POINT of the story). The "Swiftboating" is another example -- the guys were cranks, liars, political operatives, but they got some coverage, so everyone else had to immediately rush to cover them, lending more and more legitimacy to things that weren't actually true.
But then, truth costs money; echoing babble is much cheaper. And when you've got 188 hours of cable news to fill every week per channel, well... you're surely not going to pay reporters to actually find out stuff to fill that time, are you?
Exactly! ...but now cue some libertarian to come in here and say that if something like that ever actually happened, obviously Market Competition would cause a new, truth-telling, diverse-story-reporting media conglomerate empire to spring into existence...
Recall all those moments in your life that your hair was cut/ripped out and if that hair didn't grow back, what your head would look like now??
Like this?
Errm... sorry... do you have a magic bottomless barrel of oil that you're holding out on? The rest of us who use it for just about everything would kind of like to know...
nt