English is my native tongue, but I prefer Latin when it comes to needing an exact and clear meaning. Latin is much more direct, unlike English which is full of amiguity and obsolete words.
English imports so many foreign words, and they all go in and out of fashion, and the strength of the words seem to change like clothing fashion. Latin on the other hand is direct and clear and quick - oh and the verbs are much more elegant in that they denote the possesor of the verb unlike English. Thinking in Latin makes the mind clear and direct I think.
Right, I see that what you are doing is arguing the definitions. Certainly the definitions of fascism and Marxism are very different. So what? That's not the real issue. The real issue is that China is not Marxist. It does not follow Marx's ideas nor does it pursue the goals he set out in his work. It talks about them, sure. But then Bush says he's a Christian while violating everything that Jesus stood for. Who gets to define what Christianity means, Bush or Jesus? Who gets to define what Marxism means, China or Marx?
Well this is purely speculation, but I think Stalin for instance would have approved of China's regime and called it Marxist, and Stalin was indeed a form of Marxism however tyrannical. Marx on the other hand wouldn't have likely been a fan of the PRC, but nonethless I think he would have perhaps thought that the revolution had not been won. Nonethless, I don't think he would have classed China with say for instance the type of class system of England in his time. Most likely he would have seen China as somewhere between capitalism and communist.
It is also changing at the moment but it's certainly not aiming for anything that Marx would approve of.
Agreed, I don't think Marx would have seen China as a worker's paradise whatoever. China does indeed share a great deal of elements with a fasist regime too, absolutely. I'd even conceed that to all intents and purposes, China could be said to be equivalent to a fascist regime, but strictly speaking they are left wing, not right.
In any case, I absolutely agree that China is not a Marxist utopia. I personally think that it's a terrible shame that it's not, because it would be quite good if it was. Nonethless, I'm strictly arguing from a semantic point of view, but I certainly understand your point and agree that from a solely practical sense that one could call China fascist. I tend to use terms in their literal sense of the word, but see what you're getting at.
Foreign words do not always map onto each other, so there's going to be problems with nuance. It's probably redundant in saying this, but many words have no English equivalent - the German unheimlich for instance. Even the French uncanny doesn't quite do it justice.
I hope the English on the dictionary is better than the English on the homepage eg "There will be always the backbone description" and "will lead contributors to translate English words into other language." (mis)
It may call itself a Marxist state but it can call itself the Queen of Sheba but that doesn't make it so. China is a very clear fascist state.
You need to actually understand what facism actually means. There's a lot of political books that explain the difference, but no, there isn't a university on Earth that teaches that China is literally a fascist state. You can call it totalitarian, but a Marxist regime, however harsh, draconian or totalitarian can not be simply fascist. To learn the difference, try Wikipedia for a start (as unreliable as it is). It mentions the problem that many Americans have of not being able to distingusih between Marxism and Facsism too. Stalinisim and Facism have some similarities but there are a great deal of ideological differences. the terms aren't interchangable, but most people use the term fascist as a pejorative term denoting tyrannical rule, and this isn't what fascist actually means.
Almost as much as the terms "communist" and "Marxist" are misused in Chinese official propaganda. But not quite. Agreed.
Which is one of the easiest ways of spotting the fact that China is not Marxist, nor even anything remotely like it. It's not purely Marxist certainly, but neither is it fascist or even remotely right wing - it's clearly a Marxist regime without any stretch of the imagination. Of course, discussing a true Marxist "state" is a much bigger can of worms. Perhaps you could say that it's more along the lines of Stalinist-Marxist or perphaps totalitarian Marxist. It's not fascist like Fascist Italy or Fascist Germany, but more like the former Soviet Union or Communist East Germany. Modern America is much more like a Fasicst Germany or indeed a generic fascist state than China.
That's cheating: you're saying that you'd rather be a Chinese man with a free pick of the whole of China to live in than a black man living in a bad part of America. Would you prefer to be a Chinese man living in a Shanghai slum? Would poverty, disease and crime really be better for having a government which says it doesn't exist?
If I lived in a slum in Shanghai, I'd have more hope than a black man in Harlem, so I'd still choose the same way. The blacks in Harlem are going to die there, or die in jail - without a doubt like they always have. They're just slaves to capitalism now - a more subtly master.
I never believed in it in the first place - I'm not American - so I'm not sure why you mentioned it.
You must be deliberately obtuse or somewhat naive then, to disregard my point regarding the common cliched dialectic of the great American patriot, championing democracy and capitalism over the evils of Marxist countries. The USA and China both use the same methods, in differing ways to maintain power. They both employ torture, propaganda, misinformation and assasination. The USA however is a right wing capitalist country (whether a citizen voted for John Kerry or not), that is moving more towards a fascist state. China resembles a fascist state in some ways, but it is infact a Marxist totalitarian (or police) state. Both countries employ vastly different ideologies, but their methods are similar, merely employed with different emphasisises. That's exactly my point.
See, there's a huge difference between the facist China and the capitalist U.S. Here when you criticize, investigate, and report on the government's activities, you have the right to do so. In China, you get locked up and possibly executed. The Chinese media should be renamed the Chinese propaganda machine. It only reports news that the government deems acceptable.
Once again, China is not a fascist country, and I never said that they don't use brainwashing propaganda - of course they do, just like the good old USA does - "evil doers" "forces of evil" etc - all classic propaganda tecniques and quite well done too. Have you seen Al Jazeera on TV recently? Do you even know what Al Jazeera is? Seen any soldier's coffins arriving back from Iraq and Afghanistan recently? What, that's censored for the good of the American public you say? Hypocrites!
Your country is manipulated to be more concerned with the image of Janet Jackson's tit and the lastest Hollywood gossip, than the image of your dead troops coming home from countrys that your people don't really understand what you're doing in. You're living in Huxley's Brave New World.
Facism is infact the opposite to Marxism, and was developed in opposition to it. America is closer to a fascist state, being right wing and capitalist than a Neo-Marxist country like China. Why don't Americans even understand simple political theory? Is it that you're so sucessfully indoctrinated thant you can't tell left from right wing politics?
Yes, you certainly could theoretically criticise the American government, however it really doesn't happen. The USA censors much more subtly, but really more powerfully. After all, look at the quality of journalism that went on with the war in Iraq. Nobody even dared to even raise doubt about what the Whitehouse was churning out - certainly not a free and independant press by any means. You all have been taught to want censorship so you think that you actually have a choice. And yes, theoetically one would have the right to oppose the government's activities - but most US citizens are too hoodwinked by your government to even know where to begin dissenting. Un-American etc, etc - your country is out of control, and you can't even see it happening around you.
You won't even post your name on Slashdot for fear of being modded down - you've all been brainwashed to censor yourselves - Big Brother is YOU and you don't even see it.
Just look at how those nut case Waco Davidians were given their democratic rights. You country is just as selective to fringe groups when it suits them. Look at the Iraq war misinformation - even worse than the SARS coverup - more people dying, including your own troops. More people die in your country's wars and executions than in China. Most of your jails are full of working class uneducated blacks - and your media and politicians won't discuss it on either side, because put simply, you need to keep most of them in their place, collecting the white man's garbage. God forbid that you show a black man have sex with a white woman on television.
The USA can saber rattle all it likes towards China. The fact is that China is a vastly superior army in numbers, and your country's army would take massive damage. It would be extremely unlikely that you could possibly win. Oh, and China has lots of nukes too, so the USA would end up a as just a glass slag heap.
America isn't the great country that it once was, and it can't take the moral high ground internationally anymore - the American dream is over. Too much blood, too many lies, too many dead, too many poor.
So wave that Star Spangled Banner all you like, your country is bitterly split in two ideologically and on the downward slide towards fascism, and you'll truly understand what it's like to live in a fascist country yourself soon enough. Enjoy it and have a Coke.
Not exactly correct, China is a Marxist state. The term fascist seems to be misused quite often in American media. A Marxist country technically doesn't have a class system. In theory, the members of the ruling party should recieve no better treatment than anyone else.
Fascism is actually in direct opposition to Marxist based political movements like Socialism and Communism. Western democracy on the other hand is capitalistic in nature, thereby by necessity creating social inequality and exploitation. Everyone gets a vote, but the media is bought off to instruct you at every waking moment what exactly you should be thinking (eg Fox News which is aimed at instructing and indoctrinating the uneducated American working class into right wing politics). On the otherhand, you have Michael Moore, who uses the same techniques, but for a different agenda - really more of the same dollar for opinion stuff.
Communism does not in theory aim to exploit the masses whatsoever unlike capitalism, it is designed to do the complete opposite of that.
In fact, your criticisms of a tiny minority exploiting the masses beneath them are more acurately pointed towards capitalist countries, like the US, who create a class division so that they make exploit their underclass. negros, hispanics, unskilled migrants, the uneducated, rednecks, farmers, manual labourers - are all enslaved by the minority American ruling class with their amazing wealth.
So as a result, you have a small group of people like say for instance Paris Hilton who can live like a princess, and who don't need to work, and can do whatever they like like appear in films and tv shows - and on the other hand you have working class people who starve and struggle, who work as prostitutes, gardeners, drug runners and hotel porters etc - all in the same country.
Given the choice, I'd rather be a Chinese man in China than a black American man living in Harlem. Oh, and let's not forget America's 12.1% of the population living below the poverty level too.
In any case, nobody believes in the implicit moral superiority of the USA anymore. It's only a small majority of Americans that still believe in such a ridiculous thing nowadays anyhow, and seems to many that the once great USA is clearly falling apart in many ways, and steadily moving towards a totalitarian and perhaps even fascist state itself.
A day doesn't go by here when I don't see an article ctitical of China.
Has it occured to the writers here that the USA also censors things on a daily basis, bans political organisations, unduly influences the media etc, etc?
Let's see some more articles on the good old USA and the governments efforts to manipulate and censor the public.
This sort of meaningless and biased rhetoric reminds me of the crap that used to come out of the USA against the former Soviet Union on daily basis. I'm not buying it chumps - and neither should you. Arm the workers and burn the churches my friends, the revolution is at hand.
"With all those nasty pro-democracy websites that Google keeps turning up, what's a communist country supposed to do? Well, create their own search engine of course!
Lucky America taking the moral high ground, only in such a consumer paradise could a government buy and sell it's way into office and keep a whole media network paid off.
I guess you must think that state sanctioned censorship is far worse - compared to America's self censorship for patriotic, propaganda and political reasons. Same result - just different methods.
You don't understand because you're dense. It's that simple, just like you.
demographically targeted tripe
on
Doom Movie Update
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sounds like a version of 28 Days Later based on Mars to me."
Funny, it sounds like a market share placed, demographically targeted pile of cliched froth from where I'm siting.
To think that Phillip K Dick never made a cent on his books and died poor before recieving a cent on Bladerunner - and this thin "plot" from a video game makes it to the movies.
The boys at ID will be glad for the money, but it doesn't sound like great sci-fi, let alone art.
This is a bs cop-out. The dimentions of a monitor are very easy for me to grasp. I've listed a counter-point, and you've failed to address it at all. You'd rather pretend that something so simple is beyond my grasp. That kind of an excuse is always a cop-out.
In future please foam at the mouth elsewhere. Your misplaced and disproportionate anger embarasses me, even despite the anomimity that the Internet affords.
Well my Lord Flipper, nonethless, my eyes do seem to tire when reading from monitors but I'm a prolific book reader and have never noticed a problem with print text. I have above 20/20 vision in both eyes, but I still find this to be the case.
Have you always found onscreen displays acceptable or could you perhaps have gotten use to them?
A very interesting story about the water displacement, thanks. How did you get into that line of work? Good luck with it.
You don't actually prefer opinions that make sense, you merely prefer opinions that agree with your own, and mistake another's opinions as nonsence due to lake of examination. People often confuse the two, especially when they're not used to discussing ideas in an academic/intellectual fashion.
Perhaps you should entertain the idea that some things are (at least initially) not within the realm of your understanding. Although you may not agree, you can try to understand the ideas around another's point of view. Therin lies the begining of wisdom.
Why shouldn't monitors use standard dimentions? (16/9 4/3)
The page you're reading at this very moment is a prime example of why - because a web page is not a television program.
You can choose to use whatever fonts you want to use for every page you view,
Indeed, and when the fonts often aren't available, you get an inferior substitue font that regardless of whether it happens to be right or not, renders badly and even with anti-aliasing, still looks inferior to a page printed five hundred years ago.
Why would you want to embed a font in an HTML document? Despite your claim, it certainly would be harmful to many people.
So that pages could be displayed in the font and the layout that the author actually intended. As for being harmful, it would be about as harmful as reading a word/openoffice.org document with the correct fonts and correct layout. Microsoft started doing it with Microsoft Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT) in html a while back but we need an open standard without legal repercusssions, The W3C needs to pull it's finger out and actually do something about it.
The decline of calligraphy would be the cause for such poor penmanship.
In the 14th and 15th century however, there were a great deal of competent calligraphers. the calligraphy revival in the 19th and 20th century helped people's handwriting somewhat too.
E-books are a good idea, but I'm unimpressed with the hardware that displays them compared to the quality of traditional print.
One would think that in this day and age, someone could make a decent book plaque of some sort with a good display that doesn't give you an epileptic fit or a "lucy in the sky with diamonds" strobing effect after a couple of hours use.
It seems absurd that we have so many advances in CPU speed for instance, but essentially very little in the way of text legibility on monitors. It seems absurd that monitors mimic the dimensions of televisions, and yet the internet and computing in general is primarily a text based medium. I've seen some people rotate their TFT monitors for text, which is a great idea however I'd like to see a greater emphasis placed on making text readable.
Oh, and rendering and embeding decent fonts in html/xhtml wouldn't harm anyone either. It seems ludicrous that people in the 1450s had access to better rendered fonts than what we have to put up with on daily basis on our computers.
Thanks for the opinions guys. I'll have to do some more reading on the financials of open source and it's repercussions on the software industry. All your insights are much appreciated.
If it is given away for free, doesn't it then undermine our profesion?
Also, if it is open source, doesn't it then allow others to use or alter it as they see fit, therefore giving programmers no financial incentives whatsoever?
As far as I can see, most open source software is exclusively free. The two seem to go hand in hand.
I just can't help thinking that we're undemining ourselves.
Seriously, this is not a troll - can someone explain to me how open source software doesn't undermine programmers being able to earn a crust. I could be way off, but doesn't it undermine our industry?
I've heard people suggest donations and selling support etc, but are these really viable and warranted? Should someone have to plead for money when they have worked hard on a project? Seems to me like we're doing ourselves out of a job. Please someone, convince me that I'm wrong.
The IT market in Australia is dying already, and never recovered after 9/11 and the dot.com crash. My faculty at Monash university, are downsizing and may even sack senior staff.
So 50% of nothing ain't so bad. I can't even manage to get a job at a help desk. Wages here are dropping too - it looks like we'll be worse off than shop assisants and waiters soon.
I know graduates here with High Distinction averages who can't even get an interview for entry level positions. I don't know about America, but our government couldn't give a flying fuck about Science and Technology.
Slashdot You are on the Internet. A web page is full of text before you. It is Slashdot. The page is a putrid green and there are advertisments for Suicide Girls and nerd toys. Exits are Back, forward and home. There is a menu here.
You hear a computer fan in the distance.
>Go to Journal. No, I'm afraid you can't do that now. Perhaps later.
>Chat up chicks. Surely you are joking.
>Read Slashdot. An hour or two passes. You have achieved nothing.
You hear a computer fan in the distance.
>Post on Slashdot. You manage to post +5 INSIGHTFUL about SCO and how what you'd like to do to Darl McBride. An angry and bored lone gunman moderates you 30% OVERRATED. You manage to post +4 INSIGHTFUL.
You hear a computer fan in the distance. You are hungry.
>Post on Slashdot. You manage to post +3 INSIGHTFUL about your ideas about American Foreign Policy. A disguntled group of Neo-Facists, Trolls, and lowbrows have read your post. You manage to post +1 TROLL. Your karma is terrible. You loose all your friends who thought you really were a Bush supporter.
You hear a computer fan in the distance. You are hungry.
>Get back to unemploymed life Please put on your tin hat. Your final karma is BAD. CowboyNeal thinks you suck. Goodbye.
Do you want to (L)Load a Saved game, (R)Restart or (Q)Quit. >
Most likely blogs will be the future of generating grass roots media spin. They'd be a great way of getting a nice grass roots campaigns going, so I imagine that PR and propagandists will adopt them more so. Journalism is mainly a branch of marketing and PR nowadays of course. A lovely place for anonymous disinformation, propaganda and smear campaigns etc. It'll probably save governments the trouble of having to put their names to propaganda, so perhaps they'll enjoy the anonymity.
For the most part however, they'll likely remain the narcisist and egomaniac paradise. Oh, and the last bastion for the various tin hat brigades - born again Christians, UFOlogists, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
English is my native tongue, but I prefer Latin when it comes to needing an exact and clear meaning. Latin is much more direct, unlike English which is full of amiguity and obsolete words.
English imports so many foreign words, and they all go in and out of fashion, and the strength of the words seem to change like clothing fashion. Latin on the other hand is direct and clear and quick - oh and the verbs are much more elegant in that they denote the possesor of the verb unlike English. Thinking in Latin makes the mind clear and direct I think.
Right, I see that what you are doing is arguing the definitions. Certainly the definitions of fascism and Marxism are very different. So what? That's not the real issue. The real issue is that China is not Marxist. It does not follow Marx's ideas nor does it pursue the goals he set out in his work. It talks about them, sure. But then Bush says he's a Christian while violating everything that Jesus stood for. Who gets to define what Christianity means, Bush or Jesus? Who gets to define what Marxism means, China or Marx?
Well this is purely speculation, but I think Stalin for instance would have approved of China's regime and called it Marxist, and Stalin was indeed a form of Marxism however tyrannical. Marx on the other hand wouldn't have likely been a fan of the PRC, but nonethless I think he would have perhaps thought that the revolution had not been won. Nonethless, I don't think he would have classed China with say for instance the type of class system of England in his time. Most likely he would have seen China as somewhere between capitalism and communist.
It is also changing at the moment but it's certainly not aiming for anything that Marx would approve of.
Agreed, I don't think Marx would have seen China as a worker's paradise whatoever. China does indeed share a great deal of elements with a fasist regime too, absolutely. I'd even conceed that to all intents and purposes, China could be said to be equivalent to a fascist regime, but strictly speaking they are left wing, not right.
In any case, I absolutely agree that China is not a Marxist utopia. I personally think that it's a terrible shame that it's not, because it would be quite good if it was. Nonethless, I'm strictly arguing from a semantic point of view, but I certainly understand your point and agree that from a solely practical sense that one could call China fascist. I tend to use terms in their literal sense of the word, but see what you're getting at.
Ahh yes, you're right, sorry - uncanny originates as a Scottish word, not a French one.
Foreign words do not always map onto each other, so there's going to be problems with nuance. It's probably redundant in saying this, but many words have no English equivalent - the German unheimlich for instance. Even the French uncanny doesn't quite do it justice.
I hope the English on the dictionary is better than the English on the homepage eg "There will be always the backbone description" and "will lead contributors to translate English words into other language." (mis)
It may call itself a Marxist state but it can call itself the Queen of Sheba but that doesn't make it so. China is a very clear fascist state.
You need to actually understand what facism actually means. There's a lot of political books that explain the difference, but no, there isn't a university on Earth that teaches that China is literally a fascist state. You can call it totalitarian, but a Marxist regime, however harsh, draconian or totalitarian can not be simply fascist. To learn the difference, try Wikipedia for a start (as unreliable as it is). It mentions the problem that many Americans have of not being able to distingusih between Marxism and Facsism too. Stalinisim and Facism have some similarities but there are a great deal of ideological differences. the terms aren't interchangable, but most people use the term fascist as a pejorative term denoting tyrannical rule, and this isn't what fascist actually means.
Almost as much as the terms "communist" and "Marxist" are misused in Chinese official propaganda. But not quite.
Agreed.
Which is one of the easiest ways of spotting the fact that China is not Marxist, nor even anything remotely like it.
It's not purely Marxist certainly, but neither is it fascist or even remotely right wing - it's clearly a Marxist regime without any stretch of the imagination. Of course, discussing a true Marxist "state" is a much bigger can of worms. Perhaps you could say that it's more along the lines of Stalinist-Marxist or perphaps totalitarian Marxist. It's not fascist like Fascist Italy or Fascist Germany, but more like the former Soviet Union or Communist East Germany. Modern America is much more like a Fasicst Germany or indeed a generic fascist state than China.
That's cheating: you're saying that you'd rather be a Chinese man with a free pick of the whole of China to live in than a black man living in a bad part of America. Would you prefer to be a Chinese man living in a Shanghai slum? Would poverty, disease and crime really be better for having a government which says it doesn't exist?
If I lived in a slum in Shanghai, I'd have more hope than a black man in Harlem, so I'd still choose the same way. The blacks in Harlem are going to die there, or die in jail - without a doubt like they always have. They're just slaves to capitalism now - a more subtly master.
I never believed in it in the first place - I'm not American - so I'm not sure why you mentioned it.
You must be deliberately obtuse or somewhat naive then, to disregard my point regarding the common cliched dialectic of the great American patriot, championing democracy and capitalism over the evils of Marxist countries. The USA and China both use the same methods, in differing ways to maintain power. They both employ torture, propaganda, misinformation and assasination. The USA however is a right wing capitalist country (whether a citizen voted for John Kerry or not), that is moving more towards a fascist state. China resembles a fascist state in some ways, but it is infact a Marxist totalitarian (or police) state. Both countries employ vastly different ideologies, but their methods are similar, merely employed with different emphasisises. That's exactly my point.
See, there's a huge difference between the facist China and the capitalist U.S. Here when you criticize, investigate, and report on the government's activities, you have the right to do so. In China, you get locked up and possibly executed. The Chinese media should be renamed the Chinese propaganda machine. It only reports news that the government deems acceptable.
Once again, China is not a fascist country, and I never said that they don't use brainwashing propaganda - of course they do, just like the good old USA does - "evil doers" "forces of evil" etc - all classic propaganda tecniques and quite well done too. Have you seen Al Jazeera on TV recently? Do you even know what Al Jazeera is? Seen any soldier's coffins arriving back from Iraq and Afghanistan recently? What, that's censored for the good of the American public you say? Hypocrites!
Your country is manipulated to be more concerned with the image of Janet Jackson's tit and the lastest Hollywood gossip, than the image of your dead troops coming home from countrys that your people don't really understand what you're doing in. You're living in Huxley's Brave New World.
Facism is infact the opposite to Marxism, and was developed in opposition to it. America is closer to a fascist state, being right wing and capitalist than a Neo-Marxist country like China. Why don't Americans even understand simple political theory? Is it that you're so sucessfully indoctrinated thant you can't tell left from right wing politics?
Yes, you certainly could theoretically criticise the American government, however it really doesn't happen. The USA censors much more subtly, but really more powerfully. After all, look at the quality of journalism that went on with the war in Iraq. Nobody even dared to even raise doubt about what the Whitehouse was churning out - certainly not a free and independant press by any means. You all have been taught to want censorship so you think that you actually have a choice. And yes, theoetically one would have the right to oppose the government's activities - but most US citizens are too hoodwinked by your government to even know where to begin dissenting. Un-American etc, etc - your country is out of control, and you can't even see it happening around you.
You won't even post your name on Slashdot for fear of being modded down - you've all been brainwashed to censor yourselves - Big Brother is YOU and you don't even see it.
Just look at how those nut case Waco Davidians were given their democratic rights. You country is just as selective to fringe groups when it suits them. Look at the Iraq war misinformation - even worse than the SARS coverup - more people dying, including your own troops. More people die in your country's wars and executions than in China. Most of your jails are full of working class uneducated blacks - and your media and politicians won't discuss it on either side, because put simply, you need to keep most of them in their place, collecting the white man's garbage. God forbid that you show a black man have sex with a white woman on television.
The USA can saber rattle all it likes towards China. The fact is that China is a vastly superior army in numbers, and your country's army would take massive damage. It would be extremely unlikely that you could possibly win. Oh, and China has lots of nukes too, so the USA would end up a as just a glass slag heap.
America isn't the great country that it once was, and it can't take the moral high ground internationally anymore - the American dream is over. Too much blood, too many lies, too many dead, too many poor.
So wave that Star Spangled Banner all you like, your country is bitterly split in two ideologically and on the downward slide towards fascism, and you'll truly understand what it's like to live in a fascist country yourself soon enough. Enjoy it and have a Coke.
Not exactly correct, China is a Marxist state. The term fascist seems to be misused quite often in American media. A Marxist country technically doesn't have a class system. In theory, the members of the ruling party should recieve no better treatment than anyone else.
Fascism is actually in direct opposition to Marxist based political movements like Socialism and Communism. Western democracy on the other hand is capitalistic in nature, thereby by necessity creating social inequality and exploitation. Everyone gets a vote, but the media is bought off to instruct you at every waking moment what exactly you should be thinking (eg Fox News which is aimed at instructing and indoctrinating the uneducated American working class into right wing politics). On the otherhand, you have Michael Moore, who uses the same techniques, but for a different agenda - really more of the same dollar for opinion stuff.
Communism does not in theory aim to exploit the masses whatsoever unlike capitalism, it is designed to do the complete opposite of that.
In fact, your criticisms of a tiny minority exploiting the masses beneath them are more acurately pointed towards capitalist countries, like the US, who create a class division so that they make exploit their underclass. negros, hispanics, unskilled migrants, the uneducated, rednecks, farmers, manual labourers - are all enslaved by the minority American ruling class with their amazing wealth.
So as a result, you have a small group of people like say for instance Paris Hilton who can live like a princess, and who don't need to work, and can do whatever they like like appear in films and tv shows - and on the other hand you have working class people who starve and struggle, who work as prostitutes, gardeners, drug runners and hotel porters etc - all in the same country.
Given the choice, I'd rather be a Chinese man in China than a black American man living in Harlem. Oh, and let's not forget America's 12.1% of the population living below the poverty level too.
In any case, nobody believes in the implicit moral superiority of the USA anymore. It's only a small majority of Americans that still believe in such a ridiculous thing nowadays anyhow, and seems to many that the once great USA is clearly falling apart in many ways, and steadily moving towards a totalitarian and perhaps even fascist state itself.
A day doesn't go by here when I don't see an article ctitical of China.
Has it occured to the writers here that the USA also censors things on a daily basis, bans political organisations, unduly influences the media etc, etc?
Let's see some more articles on the good old USA and the governments efforts to manipulate and censor the public.
This sort of meaningless and biased rhetoric reminds me of the crap that used to come out of the USA against the former Soviet Union on daily basis. I'm not buying it chumps - and neither should you. Arm the workers and burn the churches my friends, the revolution is at hand.
"With all those nasty pro-democracy websites that Google keeps turning up, what's a communist country supposed to do? Well, create their own search engine of course!
Lucky America taking the moral high ground, only in such a consumer paradise could a government buy and sell it's way into office and keep a whole media network paid off.
I guess you must think that state sanctioned censorship is far worse - compared to America's self censorship for patriotic, propaganda and political reasons. Same result - just different methods.
Wise up sucker.
You don't understand because you're dense. It's that simple, just like you.
Sounds like a version of 28 Days Later based on Mars to me."
Funny, it sounds like a market share placed, demographically targeted pile of cliched froth from where I'm siting.
To think that Phillip K Dick never made a cent on his books and died poor before recieving a cent on Bladerunner - and this thin "plot" from a video game makes it to the movies.
The boys at ID will be glad for the money, but it doesn't sound like great sci-fi, let alone art.
This is a bs cop-out. The dimentions of a monitor are very easy for me to grasp. I've listed a counter-point, and you've failed to address it at all. You'd rather pretend that something so simple is beyond my grasp. That kind of an excuse is always a cop-out.
In future please foam at the mouth elsewhere. Your misplaced and disproportionate anger embarasses me, even despite the anomimity that the Internet affords.
Well my Lord Flipper, nonethless, my eyes do seem to tire when reading from monitors but I'm a prolific book reader and have never noticed a problem with print text. I have above 20/20 vision in both eyes, but I still find this to be the case.
Have you always found onscreen displays acceptable or could you perhaps have gotten use to them?
A very interesting story about the water displacement, thanks. How did you get into that line of work? Good luck with it.
You don't actually prefer opinions that make sense, you merely prefer opinions that agree with your own, and mistake another's opinions as nonsence due to lake of examination. People often confuse the two, especially when they're not used to discussing ideas in an academic/intellectual fashion.
Perhaps you should entertain the idea that some things are (at least initially) not within the realm of your understanding. Although you may not agree, you can try to understand the ideas around another's point of view. Therin lies the begining of wisdom.
Why shouldn't monitors use standard dimentions? (16/9 4/3)
The page you're reading at this very moment is a prime example of why - because a web page is not a television program.
You can choose to use whatever fonts you want to use for every page you view,
Indeed, and when the fonts often aren't available, you get an inferior substitue font that regardless of whether it happens to be right or not, renders badly and even with anti-aliasing, still looks inferior to a page printed five hundred years ago.
Why would you want to embed a font in an HTML document? Despite your claim, it certainly would be harmful to many people.
So that pages could be displayed in the font and the layout that the author actually intended. As for being harmful, it would be about as harmful as reading a word/openoffice.org document with the correct fonts and correct layout. Microsoft started doing it with Microsoft Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT) in html a while back but we need an open standard without legal repercusssions, The W3C needs to pull it's finger out and actually do something about it.
The decline of calligraphy would be the cause for such poor penmanship.
In the 14th and 15th century however, there were a great deal of competent calligraphers. the calligraphy revival in the 19th and 20th century helped people's handwriting somewhat too.
E-books are a good idea, but I'm unimpressed with the hardware that displays them compared to the quality of traditional print.
One would think that in this day and age, someone could make a decent book plaque of some sort with a good display that doesn't give you an epileptic fit or a "lucy in the sky with diamonds" strobing effect after a couple of hours use.
It seems absurd that we have so many advances in CPU speed for instance, but essentially very little in the way of text legibility on monitors. It seems absurd that monitors mimic the dimensions of televisions, and yet the internet and computing in general is primarily a text based medium. I've seen some people rotate their TFT monitors for text, which is a great idea however I'd like to see a greater emphasis placed on making text readable.
Oh, and rendering and embeding decent fonts in html/xhtml wouldn't harm anyone either. It seems ludicrous that people in the 1450s had access to better rendered fonts than what we have to put up with on daily basis on our computers.
Nobody's forking out to hear your insubstantial opinions, so I guess by your own argument, your supply has no demand and you should shut your trap.
Three cheers for Economics!
Thanks for the opinions guys. I'll have to do some more reading on the financials of open source and it's repercussions on the software industry. All your insights are much appreciated.
If it is given away for free, doesn't it then undermine our profesion?
Also, if it is open source, doesn't it then allow others to use or alter it as they see fit, therefore giving programmers no financial incentives whatsoever?
As far as I can see, most open source software is exclusively free. The two seem to go hand in hand.
I just can't help thinking that we're undemining ourselves.
Seriously, this is not a troll - can someone explain to me how open source software doesn't undermine programmers being able to earn a crust. I could be way off, but doesn't it undermine our industry?
I've heard people suggest donations and selling support etc, but are these really viable and warranted? Should someone have to plead for money when they have worked hard on a project? Seems to me like we're doing ourselves out of a job. Please someone, convince me that I'm wrong.
The IT market in Australia is dying already, and never recovered after 9/11 and the dot.com crash. My faculty at Monash university, are downsizing and may even sack senior staff.
So 50% of nothing ain't so bad. I can't even manage to get a job at a help desk. Wages here are dropping too - it looks like we'll be worse off than shop assisants and waiters soon.
I know graduates here with High Distinction averages who can't even get an interview for entry level positions. I don't know about America, but our government couldn't give a flying fuck about Science and Technology.
I'm glad you like it.
Oh, and you have still achieved nothing.
Most likely blogs will be the future of generating grass roots media spin. They'd be a great way of getting a nice grass roots campaigns going, so I imagine that PR and propagandists will adopt them more so. Journalism is mainly a branch of marketing and PR nowadays of course. A lovely place for anonymous disinformation, propaganda and smear campaigns etc. It'll probably save governments the trouble of having to put their names to propaganda, so perhaps they'll enjoy the anonymity.
For the most part however, they'll likely remain the narcisist and egomaniac paradise. Oh, and the last bastion for the various tin hat brigades - born again Christians, UFOlogists, etc.