Personally, I prefer noisy places to silent places. I currently reside part of the year in Finland, and the taciturn nature of the people and the strict noise laws only add to the depression caused by the lack of sunlight and long winters. When I leave Finland for somewhere like Cairo or Hong Kong, it's like rejoining civilization.
Back in the 1960s, Larry Niven (in World of Ptaavs, now collected in Three Books of Known Space) suggested that the future will get ever noisier, thanks to a rising population and people living closer together in the metropolis, necessitating changes in human evolution. Well, nowadays sound-proofing materials and noise-canceling headphones are getting cheaper and cheaper, so noise is a nuisance that can be overcome.
While hitchhiking in Russia, I got a lift in a brand new luxury car driven by two local Amway salesmen. Apparently Amway is huge in certain parts of the country. While multi-level marketing has faded in the United States, the Internet and the ability to expand to Eastern Europe have given it a new lease on life. I actually see Ponzi schemes as better than multi-level marketing. In a Ponzi scheme, the guy who takes your money may well not be someone you're closely acquainted with. With things like Amway, however, even if the org doesn't officially encourage you to harass your friends to buy stuff, that's basically what it comes down to in the end. Someone who gets into multi-level marketing hard core tends to end up alone and friendless.
Skype has already been accused of having a half-assed approach to security in order to appease government agencies. It's a pity that there's no widely available encrypted voice applications. A decade ago when the nerd community was toying with PGPfone, it seemed like widespread encrypted telephony was right around the corner. Ekiga announced encryption for the 3.0 release, but then quietly buried those plans, and as nice as it is to have easy encryption in Pidgin, the app remains limited to text chat.
Why is it that the US is a major target of Amnesty International again?
Because Amnesty International has jumped the shark. But that's natural. All NGOs tend to drift away from their original mission over time. Not a few early Amnesty activists think that it has been taken over by ferociously anti-American elements, who are willing to overlook even more heinous deeds in full-on dictatorships and focus more on criticizing the US.
The welfare state isn't just health care and unemployment. It's also free university education, excellent public libraries, excellent support for the arts (e.g. internationally famous orchestras and cheaper tickets to see them).
Look at the Nordic countries before the introduction of the welfare state: massive emigration, with people pressed by hunger and poverty to go to some of the most deserted parts of North America. Now look at them after the introduction of the welfare state: economic successes, with high standards of living, a high level of happiness among the populace, and immigration. And this is a bad thing how?
I am always against taxes, these taxes are some of the more ridiculous ones.
How do you propose paying for the high standard of living (among the highest in the world) in the Nordic countries? When I moved to Finland, I expected to feel a little irked upon seeing 40% of my income taken in taxes, but one I realized just how good we have it here, I say they could take a little more if they needed. While you personally may disagree with high taxation and wish to remain in the US (or even move somewhere cheaper), the strippers who are making loads of money without paying taxes are probably nonetheless enjoying the fruits of the welfare state, which is hypocritical.
It's bad for an economy when an entrepreneur has to first take into consideration the taxes before engaging in a business enterprise or even consider them.
Getting a new "tax card" from your local tax office before engaging in any kind of serious employment is how it's done in many parts of the world, from Finland to Japan. You worry about taxes before the money starts rolling in, not when you have to file like in the US. Is that bad for the economy? I don't think so, as plenty of states with high standards of living work like this.
In his collection The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem has two engineers create a computer capable of creating poetry. The resulting poem is a love poem full of references to mathematics. I wonder if this old computer served as Lem's inspiration.
The Sapir-Worf hypothesis states that you can only conceptualize those things that your language supports.
Cute. But whenever the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is brought before a popular audience, it's always worth mentioning that the hypothesis in its strict form (the language constrains the way you think) is rejected by the vast majority of linguistics, and even its less strict form (that language influences the way you think) is highly contentious. Unfortunately, from popular media like Stephenson's Snow Crash and reports that "the Japanese have a word for it", there's much misunderstanding about how languages actually differ and how those differences appear to speakers.
Seriously. Mod parent up. I went to see a neurologist a few years ago and she was visibly horrified when I told her I drank about 6 cups of coffee a day.
That's funny, I live in Finland, which is proud of being one of the greatest coffee consumers in the world (something like an average of 6-8 cups a day per capita), and yet I've never heard public health warnings about drinking too much coffee. And I'm sure I would hear something if it were really that dangerous, as this is a welfare state that tries to limit unhealthy habits in order to save on healthcare expenses (the gov hopes to completely wipe out smoking soon).
IMHO, listening in on conversations to suspected terrorist contacts outside the US can be useful if the information sheds light on terrorist operations. Listening in on conversations that occur completely within our borders? That's tres KGB or Stasi.
The US has long ensured it can keep tabs on domestic communications by asking its partners among the UKUSA signals interception agreement countries to do the tapping for us.
The radical left in this country has a paranoia about its own people.
Nice troll. But just in case people don't know, attempts to get around wiretapping restrictions have been found in all past administrations since the NSA's inception, whether they be Republican or Democrat.
I didn't vote for Obama. I voted Libertarian. If you want to end the corruption and game playing with business, you should too.
It doesn't make any sense to advise a person to vote Libertarian if their only concern is the corruption in the two mainstream parties and they don't actually agree with the Libertarian platform. But it's nice that you guys on the fringe right have a party to vote for. For me, a US citizen residing in the Nordic countries, I'd like to use my absentee vote to bring the US closer to the standard of living we have here, but there's no US party that falls in that portion of the political spectrum.
The little R next to the president's name indicating party changed to a D and some Wikipedia pages were updated.
When it comes to wiretapping, the same status quo was maintained when Bush senior yielded the presidency to Clinton. In fact, Clinton expanded wiretapping for US economic gains, claiming it would "level the playing field." See James Bamford's Body of Secrets.
Nearly all our presidents over the last few decades have pretty much been in agreement that violation of privacy is cool. The exception is Carter, who actually tried hard to limit the intercepts. And old-time NSA employees, military and civilian, despise him for it, because a lot of them get off on unhindered access to communications.
Have you reread Eon lately? While it was a childhood favourite of mine, when I turned to it again a few years ago after a long time away, I was appalled by the wooden characters, silly sex scenes, and misunderstandings of Soviet geography. Sure, the ideas in it, the infinitely long tunnel through spacetime and futuristic modifications of the human body, are pretty cool, but I'm no longer satisfied by hard science fiction that can't also be decent well-rounded literature.
A more limited term and more lenient fair-use and modification would go a long way. But content can NOT be free. It has to be paid for. The eventual viewer may not pay directly and instead pay through advertising or some such, but it's the same thing.
I wouldn't mind going back to patronage. After all, Greece and Rome had no notion of copyright, and in fact they had teams of amanuenses copying literature and selling it in the marketplace with no money going back to the author, but they still produced some of the greatest works of literature of all time. Plus, the upper classes tend to have better taste in arts, so a solution that gives more power to them to decide content than just anyone would probably be a positive step.
has confused everyone from Lawrence Lessig to the EFF
No surprise that Lessig is unhappy with the approach. While lauded on Slashdot, Lessig only wants to restore copyright to the original length instead of abolishing it completely so that our music and film downloading habits are not threatened. I picked up Lessig's latest book Remix because I thought he was going to sock it to The Man, only to be aghast that he really just wants to replace a fairly monolithic Man with a bunch of smaller Men, and stifle the enormous benefit of filesharing.
Speaking as a native English speaker resident in Finland, the idea that all young Finns are so wonderfully multilingual is unfortunately not the case. Especially outside of Helsinki, it's pretty easy to find young people who can't even hold a simple conversation in English, and the average Finns has about as much passion for the still-obligatory Swedish as Hungarians or Romanians did for Russian in the times of Communism. There are plenty of monolingual Finns.
In Larry Niven's Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander), the protagonist lost his arm in an accident, but found that without the physical arm he had developed telekinesis with the remaining phantom hand feeling. This persisted after he got a new arm transplanted, so he had in effect three arms. Now, one can discount Niven's interest in the paranormal, peculiar for a writer usually lauded for the believable science of his stories. But I'd be interested to know if in reality the feeling of a phantom limb would persist even after a new prosthetic or even human transplant were added.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I prefer noisy places to silent places. I currently reside part of the year in Finland, and the taciturn nature of the people and the strict noise laws only add to the depression caused by the lack of sunlight and long winters. When I leave Finland for somewhere like Cairo or Hong Kong, it's like rejoining civilization.
Back in the 1960s, Larry Niven (in World of Ptaavs, now collected in Three Books of Known Space ) suggested that the future will get ever noisier, thanks to a rising population and people living closer together in the metropolis, necessitating changes in human evolution. Well, nowadays sound-proofing materials and noise-canceling headphones are getting cheaper and cheaper, so noise is a nuisance that can be overcome.
While hitchhiking in Russia, I got a lift in a brand new luxury car driven by two local Amway salesmen. Apparently Amway is huge in certain parts of the country. While multi-level marketing has faded in the United States, the Internet and the ability to expand to Eastern Europe have given it a new lease on life. I actually see Ponzi schemes as better than multi-level marketing. In a Ponzi scheme, the guy who takes your money may well not be someone you're closely acquainted with. With things like Amway, however, even if the org doesn't officially encourage you to harass your friends to buy stuff, that's basically what it comes down to in the end. Someone who gets into multi-level marketing hard core tends to end up alone and friendless.
That was intended for 3.0, which was already released months ago.
There's also hiding links to shock sites.
Skype has already been accused of having a half-assed approach to security in order to appease government agencies. It's a pity that there's no widely available encrypted voice applications. A decade ago when the nerd community was toying with PGPfone, it seemed like widespread encrypted telephony was right around the corner. Ekiga announced encryption for the 3.0 release, but then quietly buried those plans, and as nice as it is to have easy encryption in Pidgin, the app remains limited to text chat.
Because Amnesty International has jumped the shark. But that's natural. All NGOs tend to drift away from their original mission over time. Not a few early Amnesty activists think that it has been taken over by ferociously anti-American elements, who are willing to overlook even more heinous deeds in full-on dictatorships and focus more on criticizing the US.
The welfare state isn't just health care and unemployment. It's also free university education, excellent public libraries, excellent support for the arts (e.g. internationally famous orchestras and cheaper tickets to see them).
Look at the Nordic countries before the introduction of the welfare state: massive emigration, with people pressed by hunger and poverty to go to some of the most deserted parts of North America. Now look at them after the introduction of the welfare state: economic successes, with high standards of living, a high level of happiness among the populace, and immigration. And this is a bad thing how?
How do you propose paying for the high standard of living (among the highest in the world) in the Nordic countries? When I moved to Finland, I expected to feel a little irked upon seeing 40% of my income taken in taxes, but one I realized just how good we have it here, I say they could take a little more if they needed. While you personally may disagree with high taxation and wish to remain in the US (or even move somewhere cheaper), the strippers who are making loads of money without paying taxes are probably nonetheless enjoying the fruits of the welfare state, which is hypocritical.
Getting a new "tax card" from your local tax office before engaging in any kind of serious employment is how it's done in many parts of the world, from Finland to Japan. You worry about taxes before the money starts rolling in, not when you have to file like in the US. Is that bad for the economy? I don't think so, as plenty of states with high standards of living work like this.
In his collection The Cyberiad , Stanislaw Lem has two engineers create a computer capable of creating poetry. The resulting poem is a love poem full of references to mathematics. I wonder if this old computer served as Lem's inspiration.
Because the water is not pure and there are corrossive elements in it.
The NSA has volunteered to help fix the cables.
Cute. But whenever the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is brought before a popular audience, it's always worth mentioning that the hypothesis in its strict form (the language constrains the way you think) is rejected by the vast majority of linguistics, and even its less strict form (that language influences the way you think) is highly contentious. Unfortunately, from popular media like Stephenson's Snow Crash and reports that "the Japanese have a word for it", there's much misunderstanding about how languages actually differ and how those differences appear to speakers.
It's great how we no longer have to fear malicious Internet traffic, now that the evil bit has been set on every such packet.
That's funny, I live in Finland, which is proud of being one of the greatest coffee consumers in the world (something like an average of 6-8 cups a day per capita), and yet I've never heard public health warnings about drinking too much coffee. And I'm sure I would hear something if it were really that dangerous, as this is a welfare state that tries to limit unhealthy habits in order to save on healthcare expenses (the gov hopes to completely wipe out smoking soon).
The US has long ensured it can keep tabs on domestic communications by asking its partners among the UKUSA signals interception agreement countries to do the tapping for us.
Nice troll. But just in case people don't know, attempts to get around wiretapping restrictions have been found in all past administrations since the NSA's inception, whether they be Republican or Democrat.
It doesn't make any sense to advise a person to vote Libertarian if their only concern is the corruption in the two mainstream parties and they don't actually agree with the Libertarian platform. But it's nice that you guys on the fringe right have a party to vote for. For me, a US citizen residing in the Nordic countries, I'd like to use my absentee vote to bring the US closer to the standard of living we have here, but there's no US party that falls in that portion of the political spectrum.
When it comes to wiretapping, the same status quo was maintained when Bush senior yielded the presidency to Clinton. In fact, Clinton expanded wiretapping for US economic gains, claiming it would "level the playing field." See James Bamford's Body of Secrets .
Nearly all our presidents over the last few decades have pretty much been in agreement that violation of privacy is cool. The exception is Carter, who actually tried hard to limit the intercepts. And old-time NSA employees, military and civilian, despise him for it, because a lot of them get off on unhindered access to communications.
Have you reread Eon lately? While it was a childhood favourite of mine, when I turned to it again a few years ago after a long time away, I was appalled by the wooden characters, silly sex scenes, and misunderstandings of Soviet geography. Sure, the ideas in it, the infinitely long tunnel through spacetime and futuristic modifications of the human body, are pretty cool, but I'm no longer satisfied by hard science fiction that can't also be decent well-rounded literature.
The building of new ports takes years. They aren't something you can just knock up in a day.
I wouldn't mind going back to patronage. After all, Greece and Rome had no notion of copyright, and in fact they had teams of amanuenses copying literature and selling it in the marketplace with no money going back to the author, but they still produced some of the greatest works of literature of all time. Plus, the upper classes tend to have better taste in arts, so a solution that gives more power to them to decide content than just anyone would probably be a positive step.
No surprise that Lessig is unhappy with the approach. While lauded on Slashdot, Lessig only wants to restore copyright to the original length instead of abolishing it completely so that our music and film downloading habits are not threatened. I picked up Lessig's latest book Remix because I thought he was going to sock it to The Man, only to be aghast that he really just wants to replace a fairly monolithic Man with a bunch of smaller Men, and stifle the enormous benefit of filesharing.
Speaking as a native English speaker resident in Finland, the idea that all young Finns are so wonderfully multilingual is unfortunately not the case. Especially outside of Helsinki, it's pretty easy to find young people who can't even hold a simple conversation in English, and the average Finns has about as much passion for the still-obligatory Swedish as Hungarians or Romanians did for Russian in the times of Communism. There are plenty of monolingual Finns.
In Larry Niven's Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ), the protagonist lost his arm in an accident, but found that without the physical arm he had developed telekinesis with the remaining phantom hand feeling. This persisted after he got a new arm transplanted, so he had in effect three arms. Now, one can discount Niven's interest in the paranormal, peculiar for a writer usually lauded for the believable science of his stories. But I'd be interested to know if in reality the feeling of a phantom limb would persist even after a new prosthetic or even human transplant were added.