What I said was that most students do NOT enjoy learning, and they do NOT enjoy it because of how they have been made to do it. I am suggesting that their failure to enjoy learning is not the way people naturally are. It's an artificial product of the way we have chosen to teach them, and as such, it could be changed.
No, I'm afraid it couldn't, not really. A school is supposed to make students "productive members of society", which in our society means that they'll be good employees. Now, an employee works for a living. Sure, a few do enjoy their work, but most would rather do their own thing, and only work because they have to, on pain of starvation.
The key here is understanding that school curriculum is not relevant to most people's personal interests, it's relevant to their future as wage slaves, so learning it is just as much fun as any other utterly pointless forced activity. To make extra sure that students understand this, the teachers constantly emphasize that all of it is for the sake of their future jobs - which, as even an elementary school student knows, are usually hated or at least not enjoyed by those that do them.
How much enthusiasm could you work up to learn something that'll do nothing but make you better at some activity you hate but must do nonetheless, no matter how it's taught? That's right, not bloody much. It's not that the students dislike learning, nor the method of teaching, it's that they dislike the goal of that learning, and would have to be insane not to. There's no getting around that.
Part of enjoying life is learning, stretching your mind and your body.
Well, in school you get to sit on an uncomfortable seat behind your table memorizing correct answers to test questions while both wither. That's if you're lucky; if you're unlucky, the local bullies realize that you're a captive victim and make you their plaything.
Oh well, I guess it's a learning experience alright, even if the lesson might not be the one you intended.
I disagree with paying kids for good grades because it incetivizes cheating, and it removes the main reason for learning: it's fun.
Learning is fun. Being force-fed irrelevant and often factually incorrect garbage based on a curriculum developed by politicians on the basis of furthering their political goals is mind-numbingly boring.
Think about this. Do you learn a new programming language because you are forced to? Because your boss pays you more? Or because it's fun?
Do your kids learn in school about the history of some place they've never been to, likely never will, and has no relevance to them whatsoever because it's fun or because their teacher tells them to? And do they learn potentially useful things, like why did things go the way they did and how does that compare to similar happenings elsewhere, or do they get to memorize a bunch of dates and regurgitate them on tests, to be never used again?
I took special note of that section as well. It appears to me that it didn't incentivize the kids to learn more for the sake of knowledge or their future, but rather, toward acquiring more skill at gaming the system so they could earn more in the short term.
Is that really all that surprising? Most people - children and adults alike - make their decisions based on immediate satisfaction, or at the most on the timeline of next paycheck. And why not? Human lives last only 7-8 decades or so; why waste a decade - 1/8th of your total lifetime - to be better able to compete for the privilege to do 60-80 hour weeks to benefit shareholders? Especially when you know that your work could be offshored at any moment, no matter how highly trained you are?
I'd say that kids are pretty smart to enjoy their lives in the present rather than worrying about future, because unless you are both genius and very lucky you're pretty much guaranteed to be screwed, no matter how hard you work - and if you are a lucky genius, you'll do okay anyway. It's wasting your life constantly competing to be on top that's stupid, even insane, and also for the vast majority of those who do it completely pointless, for there can only be one.
Turned out that even those who stayed in school and got paid the most, wound up being losers just as often as the unpaid kids. Five years later they were no better off; under 15% had gone on to make anything worthwhile of their lives.
Ah, evidence:). Most people are losers and never do anything worthwile. And that's a good thing: society would disintegrate if everyone strived to live up to their potential, rather than finding a niche and being happy or at least content there.
Yes, absolutely. You're still stuck with the constraints of the hardware. You only have two modes for most modern CPUs. The kernel runs in protected mode, and other things run in unprotected mode. Some code would be permitted by the kernel to make system calls. Other code would have to use something like a call gate to request that another program calls the kernel on its behalf.
Um, what? I presume you meant Ring 0 with protected mode, and Ring 1 with unprotected. But that has very little to do with anything: the only things which need Ring 0 access are device drivers, and even there only the part that actually communicates with the device. Most things, like filesystem drivers, could be run without these privileges; and even things like graphic drivers could run without them, and use some kind of common PCIe driver to actually communicate with their device.
System call is a call made from userspace program to kernel. I think you meant direct hardware access by that.
The point is that objects, groups of objects, processes, and VMs are all special cases of the same general abstraction. By supporting the general case properly at the lowest level, you make implementing all of the special cases very easy.
Yes, Wikipedia seems to indeed have a category for pedophilia-related articles, describing such things as the Catholic scandal, child grooming, various kidnapping cases and related stuff. I'm a bit unsure what makes this "child pornography" - does Mr. Sanger perhaps become turned on reading about the activities of less savory Catholic priests? Dunno what images he's referring to, either - the only ones I found were photographs of Greek vases. As for "lolicon", AFAIK it's legal in most countries due to it being cartoon not related to real people in any way.
Each nested process could only do things that the parent permitted and the top-level parent could only do things that the OS permitted.
Would there be a real separation between userspace and OS in this kind of system? Seems to me that you've described a microkernel system, where interprocess communication is handled through unnamed pipes.
There should be one process per webpage, with a caching demon handling common images and resources.
There should be one network IO, one HTML (and image and whatever) parser, one script VM, one rendering and one UI response thread per page. I'm sick and tired of Firefox locking up regularly when browsing the net, even on a 4-core machine. Parallelize everything that can be parallelized, and never ever block or run a heavy computing operation with a lock held.
Javascript should not be able to stop the browser from responding to clicks, even if it enters an eternal loop. This is also a performance matter: if you can guarantee that Javascript never blocks the browser, and a hung script can be killed by other threads, you can JIT compile it without having to insert breakpoints at every iteration of every loop. You can just let pre-emptive multitasking worry about killing it when necessary.
So it makes sense in the Japanese worldview to demand a virtual face-to-face meeting in order to link to information and stories. The linker is a supplicant who must throw himself at the feet of the information "daimyo". To do any less would shame both the supplicant and the lord.
So... Do Japanese newspaper owners disembowel themselves when they're shamed? Or are they only daimyos when that happens to benefit them?
I would also like to add that, in Japanese traditions, a businessman - a member of the merchant class - calling himself a daimyo - a samurai lord - is ridiculous, and likely to end very badly for him.
No, it's called "Ease of Use". Not everyone even knows what an IP address is, and expecting every single person on the planet to understand the concept is ludicrous.
It's ludicrous to expect people to understand the concept of address? Because IP address is simply your address in the Internet. And domain name is simply a kind of phonebook that makes looking them up easier. And, since you can automate a lot of things with a computer, we automated the address lookup thing so you don't have to do it manually, the browser or whatever does it for you.
I pity the fool who tries to use the Internet but is too stupid to understand the above.
Anyway, the reason we use Adblock instead of a custom hosts file is because it's much more convenient to be able to right-click on something and choose to block it from a menu than find the source address and add it to the hosts file by hand.
Google is delivering us the technologies sci-fi was promising over 60 years ago. It's delivering them because it understands that immediate and all consuming lust for payment and profit is not always the best way to improve technology or its use.
But yeah, all those old "cyber-space" things have pretty much been superceded. The one thing we still don't have is faster-than-light travel and nuclear fusion. Two things: FTL travel, nuclear fusion and... Amongst the things we still don't have - I'll come in again. Nobody expects the actual future!
The Finnish net filter is currently optional depending of the service provider. You have to activate it yourself manually if you choose to filter your traffic according to the police provided list of sites.
When you say stuff like this, it makes you sound like what you REALLY care about is being able to get your music for free.
Not really, I'm far more interested in the fine drama sites like this offer:). There's nothing like pouring myself a hot cup of coffee early in the morning, sitting in front of the computer, firing up the browser and seeing a story on Slashdot's the front page with a title like "Drug found to cause hallucinations! This proves that there is no afterlife!" and 700+ comments on it.
I love the smell of burning karma and caffeine in the morning.
I have no sympathy for your cause, sir.
All the more reason for me to champion these anonymizing networks, so I don't have to depend on sympathy from strangers, now isn't it you peasant?
Not unless all warfare is terrorism. That's certainly a possible position to take, however there's little reason to single out H&N for that.
The more people talk, the more these deep-founded feelings emerge.
Um, what feelings?
You're mixing the two. Either the bombings were militarily justified or not. If your feelings about the war crimes of the military are influencing your decision, then you're considering collective punishment, albeit with an excuse up your sleeve.
Of course dropping atomic bombs was militarily justified, being the most effective means available to force Japan to surrender with least casualties to the USA. The question is whether it was morally justified, and to determine that you have to consider more than just what strategy happens to be most convenient.
There is a difference between collective punishment, where causing suffering is the goal in itself, and collateral damage, where suffering is the unfortunate side effect of the means chosen to achieve a goal.
Abandoning the planned de-industrialisation of the axis countries is widely considered a strategic decision rather than an act of compassion.
The fact that compassion is an evolved trait strongly suggests it's often the best strategic decision:).
Most military superior technologies only avoid deaths of your own combatents, and increase the numbers of civilian casualties, as with air strikes and nuclear weapons.
Being superior enough means you don't have to resort to carpet-bombing cities to win. And having less casualties on your side decreases the chances of your own troops taking their anger out on locals on occupied areas, as happened in Vietnam.
Morally and philosophically this is indeed an interesting question, but the rules of war are quite clear about this.
Rules of war attempt to codify morality.
I wasn't suggesting that. But if you drop a bomb on a city and then point to one man who's in charge, that's running from responsibility for your actions. It was the american military which decided to bomb the city and kill thousands of civilians, not Hirohito.
100,000 civilians in Hiroshima and 80,000+ in Nagasaki, so it's more like hundreds of thousands.
Tell me, who is responsible for the Germans who died in WWII, Churchill or Hitler? Because the former certainly ordered more bombing raids that killed them than the latter. Yes, US Army dropped the atomic bombs, but it was Japan who pushed things to the point where that was the best available solution.
Rape is unavoidable when you have an army of rough men occupy a country. Massacres are unavoidable when you have thousands of frustrated soldiers with heavy weaponry under pressure.
Neither rape nor massacres are unavoidable. They happen when nihilism and anger win over discipline and moral restraints.
The historical context is that nationaist sentiment was extremely strong in the former half of the twentieth century. Combined with an enemy stereotype that had been built up over the previous years and the overall racial hostility towards asians in the era, many Americans indeed considered the entire people of Japan to be responsible and punishable. This sentiment is reflected in the reporting of the time.
Really, now? And all the reports of Japanese atrocities, told by the very people who suffered them 60 years after the war ended, are they too just propaganda? You know, the atrocities Japanese directed against other asians?
But yes, you are quite correct about ultra-nationalism being the main reason for war, you're simply not associating it with the coun
For example, my sister was very upset that someone wrote a sequel to Gone With the Wind, because the original author didn't want a sequel to be written (it was written after her death). That could have been prevented with modern copyright law.
Your sister didn't have to read it, now did she? She loses absolutely nothing for said sequel existing. On the other hand, the people who did read and enjoy it would lose something had it been prevented from existing.
You have made an argument against, not for, copyright law.
A lot of people view the descendants of Tolkien as the official guardians of the lore, and would be annoyed if someone else tried to hijack that (although the result couldn't possibly be worse than the cartoons).
And a lot of people say screnw that and hijack it anyway. Which is okay, because Tolkien also used elements from common cultural heritage - the works of people who became him - to create his works, so why should it be held more sacred than them?
People like the feeling of officialness. They want the original author to be able to own the work. I think this is related to the fact that in our culture we really don't like plagiarism.
I notice a lot of people haven't objected to Disney ripping off everything from Tarzan to Jungle Book to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves.
In other words, if you want to get political motion behind copyright reform, you are not only going to find the ideal economic balance, you're also going to have to find a way to convince people that giving control to the original author isn't all that important. Otherwise you can forget reforming copyright law. I am not sure of the best argument for this, maybe someone else can think of a convincing one.
People are already just fine with this, as proven by the fact that Tolkien-inspired art doesn't seem to draw a negative response, nor do the orcs and elves in pretty much every fantasy work. In fact, they are constantly creating derivative works from everything imaginable. That's not a new phenomenom either, but has been with us ever since stone-age hunter-gatherers told stories around a campfire.
No, what you have to do is convince politicians that not criminalizing normal human behaviour is more important than bribes from Disney. That's never going to happen, so let's concentrate our efforts on improving various anonymizing networks like Freenet or Tor that make it easier to ignore such laws. That also has the added social benefit of countering censorship in general.
Your post reeks of collective punishment. War atrocities are awful, but the idea that an entire population should be killed for the crimes of a minority is the same kind of stubborn "them against us" ideology that fuels the massacres themselves.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't about punishment, they were about "enough is enough, surrender or DIE". Had the bombs been dropped after Japan surrendered, that had been collective punishment; as it was, it was a military action whose civilian casualties were justified by them being considered (rightly, IMHO) murderous genocidal bastards.
Notice how no mass killing of population took place in Japan after the surrender - in fact, the victors helped rebuild the country - and contrast this to what happened in Japan-occupied territories.
When a country is, for a lack of better word, evil, that doesn't justify collective punishment, but it does justify increasingly brutal methods of taking it down. I view this largely as I view death penalty: I don't support killing people after they've been subdued, since keeping them imprisoned for the rest of their lives is sufficient to keep the rest of the population safe, but I sure do support the right of police to shoot to kill in sufficiently nasty situation - and, at some point of escalation, not even trying to get the perp alive anymore.
Describing civilian deaths as unavoidable is an attempt to deal with the uncomfortable idea that one's own actions are indeed questionable.
Civilian deaths are unavoidable in a war. If you are using weapons en masse, then some of them will inevitable end up killing civilians. If you are superior enough to your enemy, you can go out of your way to try to avoid that, and still win; if you're not, prepare for massive casualties.
People who think that symmetrical warfare can be conducted so it won't kill lots of civilians are fooling themselves. That doesn't mean it justifiable, just that the act of waging war will inevitably have it as a result, and it should be taken into account when considering whether the war itself is justifiable. And besides, most armed forces in such a conflict are consist of conscripted troops; is it really any better to kill someone who's forced to wear a uniform on pain of death than someone who was lucky enough to be allowed to stay at home?
The same goes for pushing the blame on Hirohito.
Hirohito was the Emperor of Japan when all this happened. On what grounds should he be absolved of responsibility for Japan's actions, or the results of them? Especially since one of the main reasons Japan kept fighting was to protect Hirohito from being accused of war crimes, so they themselves seem to agree that he had some responsibility there.
In fact many military atrocities are more or less a direct result of commanders accepting the war crimes of subordinates as a necessity.
Yes, that happened in Vietnam. It has nothing to do with atomic bombings, which were ordered and authorized - in writing, in fact, since the subordinate in question refused to carry out such a thing on verbal orders alone - from the very top. They may or may not have been war crimes, but had nothing to do with things getting out of hand, which you described.
We should shake off the old remnants of nationalism and racism and be able to objectively scrutinize the actions of certain armies without having to give some weak historical justification.
It is rather hard to scrutinize historical actions without considering their historical context. Sure, if the bombings happened today the atrocities Japan committed prior to and during WWII would be weak justification. However, the bombings didn't happen today, they happened right after the events that I pointed to as justifications.
As for nationalism and racism, Imperial Japan was guilty of both, and committed many if not most of its atrocities because of them. Ask any of their neighbours for the details.
Sorry but the average German or Japanese person was so far removed from the actual war crimes (as the average American is from the recent ambulance shooting) especially seeing as neither Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany were repreistative governments.
I presume you meant "representative".
Nazi Germany was, in fact, representative; they were elected into power, and didn't exactly hide their intents. Japanese government wasn't elected, but it enjoyed the whole-hearted support of its subjects nonetheless.
If this was not true the de-nazification and de-imperialsisation of these nations would have been impossible.
If it was true, then neither de-nazification or de-imperialization would had been necessary, as both ideologies would had simply disappeared once the governments of Germany and Japan had been eliminated. The whole point of de-nazification was to root out the support the movement enjoyed amongst the lower leves of society.
But history proved that it wasnt, so I'm sorry if I've broken your horribly inept propaganda.
What propaganda? The grandparent painted USA as villains who massacred two cities of innocent people for fun. I pointed out that the "innocent people" had engaged in decades of atrocity after atrocity, had began the war themselves, and had refused to surrender despite knowing full well they couldn't win.
Civilians in WWII were considered valid targets by all sides this does not automatically make them guilty targets.
No; however, living right next to Auswitch and continuing to support a regime that runs it while knowing full well what's going on in there does.
I thought that, by now, we would have computerized bank accounts with asymmetric encryption, so that I can write a shell script and put it in a cron job to automatically send the $20 monthly payment to my MMORPG provider.
I can just tell my bank to conduct a given electronic money transfer every month, no shell scripts needed. But then again, I live in Finland, not USA:p.
The electronic pseudocheck would have a date, a recipient, an amount, and an RSA digital signature.
No offence, but for such a large economy, you sure have a primitive money handling system. Who the heck uses checks anymore, just wire the money from yours to the target account.
1) Did they owe the claimant a duty of care?
Yes. By getting direct access to their bank accounts, they had to take care not to overcharge.
The real WTF is right here. Why on Earth did you give a third party the ability to withdraw funds from your bank account? What did you think would happen?
Whether a controlled and dignified end to you life should be a moral right may be open to discussion, but at least people should be able to inform themselves on the issue, right?
If people are able to inform themselves on an issue, they might make a choice that's contrary to your moral stance. This is especially likely if your moral stance can be summarized as "people should suffer greatly for my peace of mind". That's why places like Australia, China, Britain, Finland etc. want to restrict their citizens ability to access information.
Ah, it may be irresponsible to you but the owner of that company owes no one anything.
I'm pretty sure that stock options come with the expectation that the company will be managed in such a way that their value will be greatest possible. It's certainly implied in the option system, howeve I'm unfamiliar with the laws surrounding this issue. Could someone confirm this either way?
That's right, not even his workers.
I have noticed a disturbing tendency of corporations demanding loyalty from their workers yet giving none in return. This, in turn, breeds cynicism in said workers and makes things like stealing company assets seem more acceptable to them, perhaps even desirable.
There's a reason why humans developed empathy: it makes groups far more efficient, since their members don't have to waste their energy worrying about getting a dagger in their back. But I guess the psychopaths who lead most corporations aren't capable of understanding that.
If the workers wouldn't have been made millionaires, that's not his problem.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that it is; if not legally, then simply because options are going to be completely useless as motivators from now on (and also because he runs a serious risk of bodily harm - there are limits to what you can do to someone you see daily and not suffer consequences).
More importantly, why are so many Slashdotters Luddites? It's just weird-- this is a tech site, why are you even reading it if you hate advances in technology so much?
It's a bit like reading about new advances in spam filter circulation: it's not that we hate technology, it's simply that we hate technology that will almost certainly be used to make life worse for us in order to profit some asshole spammer or "legitimate" advertiser.
Marketers are only one step above lawyers in the ranking of invertebrate lifeforms.
Actually, Firefox's killer feature is that you can filter nonsense crap like this out.
No, Firefox's killer feature is extensions, especially GreaseMonkey and Adblock.
All of the older machines with weak CPU + weak GPU probably won't benefit.
I remember the time when Pentium 120 MHz was the cutting edge. In fact I remember the time when 486sx 25 MHz was the average, with higher-end 486dx being the cutting edge and 386 being the weak CPU... and a good GPU meant PCI graphics card.
The point being, you need a supercomputer just to browse the Web nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm afraid it couldn't, not really. A school is supposed to make students "productive members of society", which in our society means that they'll be good employees. Now, an employee works for a living. Sure, a few do enjoy their work, but most would rather do their own thing, and only work because they have to, on pain of starvation.
The key here is understanding that school curriculum is not relevant to most people's personal interests, it's relevant to their future as wage slaves, so learning it is just as much fun as any other utterly pointless forced activity. To make extra sure that students understand this, the teachers constantly emphasize that all of it is for the sake of their future jobs - which, as even an elementary school student knows, are usually hated or at least not enjoyed by those that do them.
How much enthusiasm could you work up to learn something that'll do nothing but make you better at some activity you hate but must do nonetheless, no matter how it's taught? That's right, not bloody much. It's not that the students dislike learning, nor the method of teaching, it's that they dislike the goal of that learning, and would have to be insane not to. There's no getting around that.
Well, in school you get to sit on an uncomfortable seat behind your table memorizing correct answers to test questions while both wither. That's if you're lucky; if you're unlucky, the local bullies realize that you're a captive victim and make you their plaything.
Oh well, I guess it's a learning experience alright, even if the lesson might not be the one you intended.
Learning is fun. Being force-fed irrelevant and often factually incorrect garbage based on a curriculum developed by politicians on the basis of furthering their political goals is mind-numbingly boring.
Do your kids learn in school about the history of some place they've never been to, likely never will, and has no relevance to them whatsoever because it's fun or because their teacher tells them to? And do they learn potentially useful things, like why did things go the way they did and how does that compare to similar happenings elsewhere, or do they get to memorize a bunch of dates and regurgitate them on tests, to be never used again?
Is that really all that surprising? Most people - children and adults alike - make their decisions based on immediate satisfaction, or at the most on the timeline of next paycheck. And why not? Human lives last only 7-8 decades or so; why waste a decade - 1/8th of your total lifetime - to be better able to compete for the privilege to do 60-80 hour weeks to benefit shareholders? Especially when you know that your work could be offshored at any moment, no matter how highly trained you are?
I'd say that kids are pretty smart to enjoy their lives in the present rather than worrying about future, because unless you are both genius and very lucky you're pretty much guaranteed to be screwed, no matter how hard you work - and if you are a lucky genius, you'll do okay anyway. It's wasting your life constantly competing to be on top that's stupid, even insane, and also for the vast majority of those who do it completely pointless, for there can only be one.
Ah, evidence :). Most people are losers and never do anything worthwile. And that's a good thing: society would disintegrate if everyone strived to live up to their potential, rather than finding a niche and being happy or at least content there.
Um, what? I presume you meant Ring 0 with protected mode, and Ring 1 with unprotected. But that has very little to do with anything: the only things which need Ring 0 access are device drivers, and even there only the part that actually communicates with the device. Most things, like filesystem drivers, could be run without these privileges; and even things like graphic drivers could run without them, and use some kind of common PCIe driver to actually communicate with their device.
System call is a call made from userspace program to kernel. I think you meant direct hardware access by that.
True.
Yes, Wikipedia seems to indeed have a category for pedophilia-related articles, describing such things as the Catholic scandal, child grooming, various kidnapping cases and related stuff. I'm a bit unsure what makes this "child pornography" - does Mr. Sanger perhaps become turned on reading about the activities of less savory Catholic priests? Dunno what images he's referring to, either - the only ones I found were photographs of Greek vases. As for "lolicon", AFAIK it's legal in most countries due to it being cartoon not related to real people in any way.
Perhaps this case itself should be reported under pedophile hysteria, or, more cynically, barratry.
Would there be a real separation between userspace and OS in this kind of system? Seems to me that you've described a microkernel system, where interprocess communication is handled through unnamed pipes.
There should be one network IO, one HTML (and image and whatever) parser, one script VM, one rendering and one UI response thread per page. I'm sick and tired of Firefox locking up regularly when browsing the net, even on a 4-core machine. Parallelize everything that can be parallelized, and never ever block or run a heavy computing operation with a lock held.
Javascript should not be able to stop the browser from responding to clicks, even if it enters an eternal loop. This is also a performance matter: if you can guarantee that Javascript never blocks the browser, and a hung script can be killed by other threads, you can JIT compile it without having to insert breakpoints at every iteration of every loop. You can just let pre-emptive multitasking worry about killing it when necessary.
So... Do Japanese newspaper owners disembowel themselves when they're shamed? Or are they only daimyos when that happens to benefit them?
I would also like to add that, in Japanese traditions, a businessman - a member of the merchant class - calling himself a daimyo - a samurai lord - is ridiculous, and likely to end very badly for him.
If (RefererURL is Authorized) then {show content} else { make your site look bad}.
There is simply no point in hardcoding a special exception rather than handling it all in "is Authorized".
Isn't the whole point of capitalism externalizing the costs and internalizing the profits? Why do you hate freedom so much, you commie?
It's ludicrous to expect people to understand the concept of address? Because IP address is simply your address in the Internet. And domain name is simply a kind of phonebook that makes looking them up easier. And, since you can automate a lot of things with a computer, we automated the address lookup thing so you don't have to do it manually, the browser or whatever does it for you.
I pity the fool who tries to use the Internet but is too stupid to understand the above.
Anyway, the reason we use Adblock instead of a custom hosts file is because it's much more convenient to be able to right-click on something and choose to block it from a menu than find the source address and add it to the hosts file by hand.
And, ironically enough, it's making money hand over fist as a result.
But yeah, all those old "cyber-space" things have pretty much been superceded. The one thing we still don't have is faster-than-light travel and nuclear fusion. Two things: FTL travel, nuclear fusion and... Amongst the things we still don't have - I'll come in again. Nobody expects the actual future!
Bullshit. I didn't activate it and it's still on.
Not really, I'm far more interested in the fine drama sites like this offer :). There's nothing like pouring myself a hot cup of coffee early in the morning, sitting in front of the computer, firing up the browser and seeing a story on Slashdot's the front page with a title like "Drug found to cause hallucinations! This proves that there is no afterlife!" and 700+ comments on it.
I love the smell of burning karma and caffeine in the morning.
All the more reason for me to champion these anonymizing networks, so I don't have to depend on sympathy from strangers, now isn't it you peasant?
Not unless all warfare is terrorism. That's certainly a possible position to take, however there's little reason to single out H&N for that.
Um, what feelings?
Of course dropping atomic bombs was militarily justified, being the most effective means available to force Japan to surrender with least casualties to the USA. The question is whether it was morally justified, and to determine that you have to consider more than just what strategy happens to be most convenient.
There is a difference between collective punishment, where causing suffering is the goal in itself, and collateral damage, where suffering is the unfortunate side effect of the means chosen to achieve a goal.
The fact that compassion is an evolved trait strongly suggests it's often the best strategic decision :).
Being superior enough means you don't have to resort to carpet-bombing cities to win. And having less casualties on your side decreases the chances of your own troops taking their anger out on locals on occupied areas, as happened in Vietnam.
Rules of war attempt to codify morality.
100,000 civilians in Hiroshima and 80,000+ in Nagasaki, so it's more like hundreds of thousands.
Tell me, who is responsible for the Germans who died in WWII, Churchill or Hitler? Because the former certainly ordered more bombing raids that killed them than the latter. Yes, US Army dropped the atomic bombs, but it was Japan who pushed things to the point where that was the best available solution.
Neither rape nor massacres are unavoidable. They happen when nihilism and anger win over discipline and moral restraints.
Really, now? And all the reports of Japanese atrocities, told by the very people who suffered them 60 years after the war ended, are they too just propaganda? You know, the atrocities Japanese directed against other asians?
But yes, you are quite correct about ultra-nationalism being the main reason for war, you're simply not associating it with the coun
Your sister didn't have to read it, now did she? She loses absolutely nothing for said sequel existing. On the other hand, the people who did read and enjoy it would lose something had it been prevented from existing.
You have made an argument against, not for, copyright law.
And a lot of people say screnw that and hijack it anyway. Which is okay, because Tolkien also used elements from common cultural heritage - the works of people who became him - to create his works, so why should it be held more sacred than them?
I notice a lot of people haven't objected to Disney ripping off everything from Tarzan to Jungle Book to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves.
People are already just fine with this, as proven by the fact that Tolkien-inspired art doesn't seem to draw a negative response, nor do the orcs and elves in pretty much every fantasy work. In fact, they are constantly creating derivative works from everything imaginable. That's not a new phenomenom either, but has been with us ever since stone-age hunter-gatherers told stories around a campfire.
No, what you have to do is convince politicians that not criminalizing normal human behaviour is more important than bribes from Disney. That's never going to happen, so let's concentrate our efforts on improving various anonymizing networks like Freenet or Tor that make it easier to ignore such laws. That also has the added social benefit of countering censorship in general.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't about punishment, they were about "enough is enough, surrender or DIE". Had the bombs been dropped after Japan surrendered, that had been collective punishment; as it was, it was a military action whose civilian casualties were justified by them being considered (rightly, IMHO) murderous genocidal bastards.
Notice how no mass killing of population took place in Japan after the surrender - in fact, the victors helped rebuild the country - and contrast this to what happened in Japan-occupied territories.
When a country is, for a lack of better word, evil, that doesn't justify collective punishment, but it does justify increasingly brutal methods of taking it down. I view this largely as I view death penalty: I don't support killing people after they've been subdued, since keeping them imprisoned for the rest of their lives is sufficient to keep the rest of the population safe, but I sure do support the right of police to shoot to kill in sufficiently nasty situation - and, at some point of escalation, not even trying to get the perp alive anymore.
Civilian deaths are unavoidable in a war. If you are using weapons en masse, then some of them will inevitable end up killing civilians. If you are superior enough to your enemy, you can go out of your way to try to avoid that, and still win; if you're not, prepare for massive casualties.
People who think that symmetrical warfare can be conducted so it won't kill lots of civilians are fooling themselves. That doesn't mean it justifiable, just that the act of waging war will inevitably have it as a result, and it should be taken into account when considering whether the war itself is justifiable. And besides, most armed forces in such a conflict are consist of conscripted troops; is it really any better to kill someone who's forced to wear a uniform on pain of death than someone who was lucky enough to be allowed to stay at home?
Hirohito was the Emperor of Japan when all this happened. On what grounds should he be absolved of responsibility for Japan's actions, or the results of them? Especially since one of the main reasons Japan kept fighting was to protect Hirohito from being accused of war crimes, so they themselves seem to agree that he had some responsibility there.
Yes, that happened in Vietnam. It has nothing to do with atomic bombings, which were ordered and authorized - in writing, in fact, since the subordinate in question refused to carry out such a thing on verbal orders alone - from the very top. They may or may not have been war crimes, but had nothing to do with things getting out of hand, which you described.
It is rather hard to scrutinize historical actions without considering their historical context. Sure, if the bombings happened today the atrocities Japan committed prior to and during WWII would be weak justification. However, the bombings didn't happen today, they happened right after the events that I pointed to as justifications.
As for nationalism and racism, Imperial Japan was guilty of both, and committed many if not most of its atrocities because of them. Ask any of their neighbours for the details.
I presume you meant "representative".
Nazi Germany was, in fact, representative; they were elected into power, and didn't exactly hide their intents. Japanese government wasn't elected, but it enjoyed the whole-hearted support of its subjects nonetheless.
If it was true, then neither de-nazification or de-imperialization would had been necessary, as both ideologies would had simply disappeared once the governments of Germany and Japan had been eliminated. The whole point of de-nazification was to root out the support the movement enjoyed amongst the lower leves of society.
What propaganda? The grandparent painted USA as villains who massacred two cities of innocent people for fun. I pointed out that the "innocent people" had engaged in decades of atrocity after atrocity, had began the war themselves, and had refused to surrender despite knowing full well they couldn't win.
No; however, living right next to Auswitch and continuing to support a regime that runs it while knowing full well what's going on in there does.
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Ask the (surviving) people of Nanking if Japanese deserved to have a city levelled.
I can just tell my bank to conduct a given electronic money transfer every month, no shell scripts needed. But then again, I live in Finland, not USA :p.
No offence, but for such a large economy, you sure have a primitive money handling system. Who the heck uses checks anymore, just wire the money from yours to the target account.
The real WTF is right here. Why on Earth did you give a third party the ability to withdraw funds from your bank account? What did you think would happen?
If people are able to inform themselves on an issue, they might make a choice that's contrary to your moral stance. This is especially likely if your moral stance can be summarized as "people should suffer greatly for my peace of mind". That's why places like Australia, China, Britain, Finland etc. want to restrict their citizens ability to access information.
I'm pretty sure that stock options come with the expectation that the company will be managed in such a way that their value will be greatest possible. It's certainly implied in the option system, howeve I'm unfamiliar with the laws surrounding this issue. Could someone confirm this either way?
I have noticed a disturbing tendency of corporations demanding loyalty from their workers yet giving none in return. This, in turn, breeds cynicism in said workers and makes things like stealing company assets seem more acceptable to them, perhaps even desirable.
There's a reason why humans developed empathy: it makes groups far more efficient, since their members don't have to waste their energy worrying about getting a dagger in their back. But I guess the psychopaths who lead most corporations aren't capable of understanding that.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that it is; if not legally, then simply because options are going to be completely useless as motivators from now on (and also because he runs a serious risk of bodily harm - there are limits to what you can do to someone you see daily and not suffer consequences).
It's a bit like reading about new advances in spam filter circulation: it's not that we hate technology, it's simply that we hate technology that will almost certainly be used to make life worse for us in order to profit some asshole spammer or "legitimate" advertiser.
Marketers are only one step above lawyers in the ranking of invertebrate lifeforms.
No, Firefox's killer feature is extensions, especially GreaseMonkey and Adblock.
All of the older machines with weak CPU + weak GPU probably won't benefit.
I remember the time when Pentium 120 MHz was the cutting edge. In fact I remember the time when 486sx 25 MHz was the average, with higher-end 486dx being the cutting edge and 386 being the weak CPU... and a good GPU meant PCI graphics card.
The point being, you need a supercomputer just to browse the Web nowadays.