I cannot imagine a concerted effort of Chinese hackers or those in sympathy with the Chinese people
As I wrote in another comment here, I suspect the Chinese people are generally in favour of censorship. Though people in the West may want to paint the Chinese masses as a suffering people yearning to break free of the yoke of oppressive government, such a portrayal may not stand up to facts. Indeed, just last week in the International Herald Tribune (the international version of the New York Times) there was an article about how Chinese students nowadays think Tiananmen-square style civic commitment needs to be nipped in the bud, because it would threaten China's economic development that is making them very happy.
I imagine things will stay pretty much the same as they always have, even if the censorship is moving from the Great Firewall of China to the PC. Before, if you were an expat or a clued-up local, you would just install Tor on your PC. Now you would just wipe the hard drive and install your OS of choice from a trustworthy CD. The Chinese government can be happy that the vast majority of people will not seek to get around the blocks, and the intelligentsia will find it easy to get the information they want. It seems like a win for both sides.
I would caution, however, against vilifying China too much in this regard. Even much of the Chinese intelligentsia believes that their country needs a brutal government to avoid total chaos. Often the very Chinese you think would be rebelling against measures like this--people who read foreign news and travel or even reside abroad--think it necessary for the health of their country. Moments like this do lead one to question if American notions of freedom are truly applicable to every country.
It's Firefox. Slashdot has looked like crap for at least a month now. For a news for nerds site, it's curious that they aren't concerned with making it look decent on one of the most popular browsers among nerds.
It is quite amazing to me that we have evolved the ability to react to things moving far faster than any remote situation that we would ever run into in nature. With modern nutrition the best of the best barely brake 20 mph for short distances, and fast predators are not that much faster.
I've always admired Gene Wolfe's defense of calvary in his science-fiction tetralogy The Book of the New Sun. In his vision of the far future, warring armies fight on horseback, but with beasts genetically engineered to be faster and tougher. The idea is that living creatures, that can heal, reproduce, and feed themselves by grazing on widely available grasses might be more reliable than machinery which needs fuel and spare parts.
I get the feeling that people think our government is broken. It is no more broken than your car is if you drive to work backwards. Either you are using it wrong, or you are too stupid to use it correctly. Either way, don't blame the car; get a new driver.
Blaming the voters for government problems might have been reasonable two centuries ago, but it's pretty widely recognized in political science that the way American democracy is set up leads necessarily to two-party stagnation and deadlock. While parliamentary systems have their flaws, I'd say the US is rather broken in comparison.
Until you demonstrate some evidence that smoking marijuana actually makes one more likely to get into an accident, you're just FUDding.
It doesn't matter how more likely marijuana makes drivers get into accidents. The law as it currently stands forbids driving while intoxicated, and that could be with prescription drugs or weed just as much as alcohol.
At least with startups like Cuil those quick bursts let devs install an air hockey table and beanbags in their office, or even go through lots of blow and hookers, and feel the rush of knowing your going to be the next Google (before it all comes crashing down, of course). Meanwhile, over at Microsoft the launch of a new technology isn't changing anyone's lives.
The utility of Nutshell books?
on
SQL in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While I got quite some milage out of my copy of Python in a Nutshell back in the day, online documentation has much improved and I feel just as comfortable hitting a few keys to get the reference material I want as flipping through pages. O'Reilly Nutshell guides seem to me consigned to that most infamous category of tech reading printed material: the bathroom book.
As a Navy veteran, I'd like to add the usual caveats:
The military isn't for everyone.
Training in the military tends to be on equipment exclusive to the military, therefore badly preparing you for work in the civilian world.
A university degree is vital towards getting a job with any security, and the last exceptions are disappearing quickly. But the military's promise of helping you with university education is pretty hollow, as the GI Bill won't even cover a single year of tuition at a decent university. You're consigned to community colleges and obscure state universities.
At least with university you can still take advantage of your youth and see the world during the generous vacation periods. In the military, your mobility is exceedingly limited and by the time you get out, you feel like you screwed yourself.
It's "science fiction", not "predictions of the future". These are creative and imaginative writers. They aren't trying to predict what is going to happen in the future.
Come on, it's obvious to even casual readers of science fiction that SF authors enjoy dabbling in futurism. One example is the afterword of Larry Niven's short story collection Flatlander, about a future so full of organ transplanting that even minor crimes get the death penalty so that your organs can be distributed to a greedy public. Though forty years ago harvesting organs from prisoners was a pretty out there concept, Niven points to contemporary China and says "I told you this could happen."
That is to say that in some sutras the authors put those words into Buddha's mouth, but the bulk of the corpus indicates that Buddhism squarely inherited the Vedic pantheon. What Buddha thought himself is irrelevant to Buddhism, really, because the historical figure is pretty much lost. All one can go by are the writings, which were written long after his death. The case is much like that for Christianity, where people fight all the time about what Jesus really meant, when one can either take something on faith and stop arguing about it, or accept that the historical figure is unrecoverable and stop fighting about it.
As the Buddha left behind no personal writings, and all sutras date from at the earliest a century after his death, discussions about what the man himself did or did believe are pointless. For the tenets of the religion/philosophical system/what-have-you called Buddhism, one can only go by the sutras and the tradition carried out by believers. All of these, except for the rather haughty redefinition of Buddhism by Westerners over the last half century, squarely believe in the supernatural.
The funny part about this is that Buddhism IS SECULAR. There is no debate here either. Buddha specifically said he knew nothing about god, the afterlife, or anything spiritual.
Really? Then in the Avatamsakata Sutra why does Buddha ascend to heaven and have a chat with Indra and his buddies? Even though Buddhism may consider the Buddha nature higher than any god, it inherited the whole Vedic pantheon. Furthermore, the notion of reincarnation that is central to Buddhism is completely supernatural.
I know Western elites have tried hard to rip everything supernatural out of Buddhism to appease their sensibilities and then present it to the world as "real Buddhism", but it doesn't at all jive with Buddhism as actually practiced by billions of followers over the last 2500 years.
It's kind of difficult to use the restrooms if you are a single traveler working on your notebook. Going to the bathroom would require closing my laptop, packing it, grabbing all my luggage, and trying to use the facilities without my bag being urinated on because airport bathrooms are often cramped. Since I'm rarely waiting at an airport for all that long, I don't usually mind holding it until I board the plane.
You forgot to mention wine. We've known conclusively for well over a decade now that wine has a beneficial effect when taken together with the Mediterranean diet.
Of course, the gp is absolutely right that airport food costs way too much. This has more to do with the airports than the restaurants, though, since they charge an arm and a leg for retail space. The exception in my experience is Barcelona: food costs the same in town as at the airport.
Airport food may also be overpriced because one firm has a monopoly on dining in the airport. The dining areas in Girona airport (Barcelona's budget airline airport) are ridiculously overpriced, but also all managed by the same company. An airport like Chicago has representatives of a number of fast food chains and prices aren't that much more than in downtown Chicago.
Reminds of a day spent on a waterfront last year, when I observed that though pigeons and seagulls would frolic in the same stretch of promenade, they didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of the other species. When I said to my friend, "Do you think birds can be racist?", she just looked at me funny.
While Crichton's Jurassic Park did indeed have scientists cloning dinosaurs from blood sucked up by mosquitos now trapped in amber, supplementing the missing portions with amphibian DNA, I've seen that possibility more or less debunked since the novel was published. Much more promising seems the idea of using soft tissues that are by some great luck preserved inside fossils, of which a couple of cases have been publicized in recent years.
If you really haven't met anyone like this before, maybe you need to try harder to actually meet people in the places you travel to, or at least try harder to listen and understand them
I spend a lot of time with locals. My own personal motivation for travel is language practice, so spending as much time as possible communicating with locals is important. I tend to hitchhike and stay with locals when the opportunity arises, because I love that one-on-one contact. Most of the people I meet, when they learn that I travel most of the time, complain about how they feel bored in their community with their crap job and they wish they could travel too. A surprising amount of people have opened up to me about how they regret getting married and having children.
Because I know lots of people who simply find travel a nuisance
Do they actually have the means to travel as lifestyle? Because if they don't have that opportunity yet, then it may be that they simply don't realize how much they crave travel. Look, I used to imagine it was unusual to want to travel all the time. But then I saw so many of my peers with no prior interest in travel become affluent, and now they are all over the world.
I would think this newfounding spying power would be mainly limited to Google Earth. Walking around in an oppressive regime with ultra-miniaturized electronics can often draw great suspicion.
I hear that claim from time to time, but in practice I've never met anyone who got the chance to travel freely and didn't take it, unless they were already shackled down by a spouse or children.
The IT professionals that are working from beaches I'm sure are few and far between.
Who said I was talking about IT? While IT is part of the knowledge economy, there's many other fields out there. I mainly do translations and proofreading, for example, and there's no end of work in sight.
BTW...I'm writing this from my waterfront home on the Emerald Coast of Florida
Nice. But what if you want to go trekking in the High Pamirs or clubbing in Hong Kong? How are you going to bring your car painting job there?
Even though blue-collar jobs might provide some job security in that they can't be given to people far away, that same quality keeps you chained to one community, nervously watching your few vacation times fall away. The best part of working in a "knowledge economy" field is that you can go wherever you want whenever you want. Sure, I have to take steps to ensure I keep my job in an unstable economy, and I have to be prepared to jump to another opportunity if necessary. But it's a whole lot nicer to travel most of the year and do my work from a laptop on some of the most glorious beaches in the world than it is to be trapped in a podunk town all but 1-4 weeks a year.
The universe is a computational system as the Alpha Wolf himself proved in A New Kind of Science
Do you get paid by Wolfram to laud him on Internet fora or something? Though the man himself thought he was squarely establishing himself as one of the greats with that book, it was received by the community as lacking any real original insight and being mostly un-peer-reviewed hype. There was plenty of news about him and the book here on Slashdot at the time.
If anyone is really considering reading A New Kind of Science, I'd suggest taking a look first at the Amazon reviews first to get an idea of how worthwhile an enterprise it is.
You're comparing apples to oranges. A soft drug like cannabis is not a hard drug like meth. A much more reasonable comparison would be between meth and heroin, and even though Holland has kept heroin addiction rates down through compassionate policies, they have never considered legalizing and taxing heroin. You have nothing to back up your call that the US legalize and tax meth.
As for the closing of coffeeshops, it is not due only to drug tourism, although the loads of idiot Brits getting into trouble did make it easy to introduce new policies. Throughout Dutch society there is a rising belief that cannabis should be pushed back underground.
Slashdot Mirror
As I wrote in another comment here, I suspect the Chinese people are generally in favour of censorship. Though people in the West may want to paint the Chinese masses as a suffering people yearning to break free of the yoke of oppressive government, such a portrayal may not stand up to facts. Indeed, just last week in the International Herald Tribune (the international version of the New York Times) there was an article about how Chinese students nowadays think Tiananmen-square style civic commitment needs to be nipped in the bud, because it would threaten China's economic development that is making them very happy.
I imagine things will stay pretty much the same as they always have, even if the censorship is moving from the Great Firewall of China to the PC. Before, if you were an expat or a clued-up local, you would just install Tor on your PC. Now you would just wipe the hard drive and install your OS of choice from a trustworthy CD. The Chinese government can be happy that the vast majority of people will not seek to get around the blocks, and the intelligentsia will find it easy to get the information they want. It seems like a win for both sides.
I would caution, however, against vilifying China too much in this regard. Even much of the Chinese intelligentsia believes that their country needs a brutal government to avoid total chaos. Often the very Chinese you think would be rebelling against measures like this--people who read foreign news and travel or even reside abroad--think it necessary for the health of their country. Moments like this do lead one to question if American notions of freedom are truly applicable to every country.
It's Firefox. Slashdot has looked like crap for at least a month now. For a news for nerds site, it's curious that they aren't concerned with making it look decent on one of the most popular browsers among nerds.
I've always admired Gene Wolfe's defense of calvary in his science-fiction tetralogy The Book of the New Sun . In his vision of the far future, warring armies fight on horseback, but with beasts genetically engineered to be faster and tougher. The idea is that living creatures, that can heal, reproduce, and feed themselves by grazing on widely available grasses might be more reliable than machinery which needs fuel and spare parts.
Blaming the voters for government problems might have been reasonable two centuries ago, but it's pretty widely recognized in political science that the way American democracy is set up leads necessarily to two-party stagnation and deadlock. While parliamentary systems have their flaws, I'd say the US is rather broken in comparison.
It doesn't matter how more likely marijuana makes drivers get into accidents. The law as it currently stands forbids driving while intoxicated, and that could be with prescription drugs or weed just as much as alcohol.
At least with startups like Cuil those quick bursts let devs install an air hockey table and beanbags in their office, or even go through lots of blow and hookers, and feel the rush of knowing your going to be the next Google (before it all comes crashing down, of course). Meanwhile, over at Microsoft the launch of a new technology isn't changing anyone's lives.
While I got quite some milage out of my copy of Python in a Nutshell back in the day, online documentation has much improved and I feel just as comfortable hitting a few keys to get the reference material I want as flipping through pages. O'Reilly Nutshell guides seem to me consigned to that most infamous category of tech reading printed material: the bathroom book.
As a Navy veteran, I'd like to add the usual caveats:
Come on, it's obvious to even casual readers of science fiction that SF authors enjoy dabbling in futurism. One example is the afterword of Larry Niven's short story collection Flatlander , about a future so full of organ transplanting that even minor crimes get the death penalty so that your organs can be distributed to a greedy public. Though forty years ago harvesting organs from prisoners was a pretty out there concept, Niven points to contemporary China and says "I told you this could happen."
That is to say that in some sutras the authors put those words into Buddha's mouth, but the bulk of the corpus indicates that Buddhism squarely inherited the Vedic pantheon. What Buddha thought himself is irrelevant to Buddhism, really, because the historical figure is pretty much lost. All one can go by are the writings, which were written long after his death. The case is much like that for Christianity, where people fight all the time about what Jesus really meant, when one can either take something on faith and stop arguing about it, or accept that the historical figure is unrecoverable and stop fighting about it.
As the Buddha left behind no personal writings, and all sutras date from at the earliest a century after his death, discussions about what the man himself did or did believe are pointless. For the tenets of the religion/philosophical system/what-have-you called Buddhism, one can only go by the sutras and the tradition carried out by believers. All of these, except for the rather haughty redefinition of Buddhism by Westerners over the last half century, squarely believe in the supernatural.
Really? Then in the Avatamsakata Sutra why does Buddha ascend to heaven and have a chat with Indra and his buddies? Even though Buddhism may consider the Buddha nature higher than any god, it inherited the whole Vedic pantheon. Furthermore, the notion of reincarnation that is central to Buddhism is completely supernatural.
I know Western elites have tried hard to rip everything supernatural out of Buddhism to appease their sensibilities and then present it to the world as "real Buddhism", but it doesn't at all jive with Buddhism as actually practiced by billions of followers over the last 2500 years.
It's kind of difficult to use the restrooms if you are a single traveler working on your notebook. Going to the bathroom would require closing my laptop, packing it, grabbing all my luggage, and trying to use the facilities without my bag being urinated on because airport bathrooms are often cramped. Since I'm rarely waiting at an airport for all that long, I don't usually mind holding it until I board the plane.
You forgot to mention wine. We've known conclusively for well over a decade now that wine has a beneficial effect when taken together with the Mediterranean diet.
Airport food may also be overpriced because one firm has a monopoly on dining in the airport. The dining areas in Girona airport (Barcelona's budget airline airport) are ridiculously overpriced, but also all managed by the same company. An airport like Chicago has representatives of a number of fast food chains and prices aren't that much more than in downtown Chicago.
Reminds of a day spent on a waterfront last year, when I observed that though pigeons and seagulls would frolic in the same stretch of promenade, they didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of the other species. When I said to my friend, "Do you think birds can be racist?", she just looked at me funny.
While Crichton's Jurassic Park did indeed have scientists cloning dinosaurs from blood sucked up by mosquitos now trapped in amber, supplementing the missing portions with amphibian DNA, I've seen that possibility more or less debunked since the novel was published. Much more promising seems the idea of using soft tissues that are by some great luck preserved inside fossils, of which a couple of cases have been publicized in recent years.
I spend a lot of time with locals. My own personal motivation for travel is language practice, so spending as much time as possible communicating with locals is important. I tend to hitchhike and stay with locals when the opportunity arises, because I love that one-on-one contact. Most of the people I meet, when they learn that I travel most of the time, complain about how they feel bored in their community with their crap job and they wish they could travel too. A surprising amount of people have opened up to me about how they regret getting married and having children.
Do they actually have the means to travel as lifestyle? Because if they don't have that opportunity yet, then it may be that they simply don't realize how much they crave travel. Look, I used to imagine it was unusual to want to travel all the time. But then I saw so many of my peers with no prior interest in travel become affluent, and now they are all over the world.
I would think this newfounding spying power would be mainly limited to Google Earth. Walking around in an oppressive regime with ultra-miniaturized electronics can often draw great suspicion.
I hear that claim from time to time, but in practice I've never met anyone who got the chance to travel freely and didn't take it, unless they were already shackled down by a spouse or children.
Who said I was talking about IT? While IT is part of the knowledge economy, there's many other fields out there. I mainly do translations and proofreading, for example, and there's no end of work in sight.
Nice. But what if you want to go trekking in the High Pamirs or clubbing in Hong Kong? How are you going to bring your car painting job there?
Even though blue-collar jobs might provide some job security in that they can't be given to people far away, that same quality keeps you chained to one community, nervously watching your few vacation times fall away. The best part of working in a "knowledge economy" field is that you can go wherever you want whenever you want. Sure, I have to take steps to ensure I keep my job in an unstable economy, and I have to be prepared to jump to another opportunity if necessary. But it's a whole lot nicer to travel most of the year and do my work from a laptop on some of the most glorious beaches in the world than it is to be trapped in a podunk town all but 1-4 weeks a year.
Do you get paid by Wolfram to laud him on Internet fora or something? Though the man himself thought he was squarely establishing himself as one of the greats with that book, it was received by the community as lacking any real original insight and being mostly un-peer-reviewed hype. There was plenty of news about him and the book here on Slashdot at the time.
If anyone is really considering reading A New Kind of Science , I'd suggest taking a look first at the Amazon reviews first to get an idea of how worthwhile an enterprise it is.
You're comparing apples to oranges. A soft drug like cannabis is not a hard drug like meth. A much more reasonable comparison would be between meth and heroin, and even though Holland has kept heroin addiction rates down through compassionate policies, they have never considered legalizing and taxing heroin. You have nothing to back up your call that the US legalize and tax meth.
As for the closing of coffeeshops, it is not due only to drug tourism, although the loads of idiot Brits getting into trouble did make it easy to introduce new policies. Throughout Dutch society there is a rising belief that cannabis should be pushed back underground.