Err, I'm not talking about specieation, you dumb ass. Don't change the topic. Science cannot answer the question where the original specie, the one without the ancestor, came from.
The only difference with 20-lines gibberish and 20-lines elegant code is the fact that you can prove that the elegant code does what it's supposed to do, i.e. show the reasoning of it. If you can show the reasoning, might as well write it as comments to benefit people who have to "touch" your code later. Chances are there will be the need to touch your code at some point. Design and specs are always changing.
You don't need to start working at a real job to realize that code isn't like a piece of art, that the artist is the only person who has the artistic sense and privilege to alter his/her own work. GPL'd software is built on the principle that anybody will touch your code at will and let the world know how they did it. That's what made GPL'd software so great.
Tried LyX lately? It does what you just described---you type your type, you type your equations, and LyX takes care of most of the other drudgery for you---and allows you to insert TeX code should you need to do the low-level stuff. LyX then outputs a.tex file and uses LaTeX for typesetting.
Before we can define what logic is, we need to define a calculus, which describes what well-formed formulas are. From that, there are two ways to assign semantics to these formulas. You can either define rules that reduce a well-formed formula to another well-formed formula (operational semantics), or model your well-formed formulas after something else that is well-understood (denotational semantics).
What is commonly understood as "Boolean logic" is just a calculus. They way you typically learn its semantics is by truth table, which is the denotational approach. Modus ponens for intuitionistic logic is the operational approach to define semantics.
A logic is a collection of well-formed formulas under a calculus. A logic being "consistent" is defined by not being able to prove a well-formed formula and its negation. A paradox is a special case of inconsistent logic, where if you hold a formula true, you can prove it's false; but if you hold it false, you can prove it's true.
An axiom in logic is a well-formed formula initially admitted to the logic system without needing a proof. Once after admitting some axioms, you can then prove additional formulas that will be bootstrapped into the logic's collection of formulas.
If religion is a logic, then faith is an axiom. You are admitting it without requiring to prove it. Those who find faults with a religious faith are helping the religion to refine its axioms to make the logic consistent.
The only difference between science and religion is that, science is a special kind of logic such that the logical consequences must be observable *and* deterministically reproducible (meaning: you always get the same result under controlled situation). If it is not, it ain't science, and whatever it is cannot be differentiated from religion.
That said, although many aspects of evolution---such as mutation, natural selection, and viral DNA traces---are observable, but the claim about origin of species is only an interpretation of what's being observed. There is no meaningful consequence out of that interpretation, so it's only a philosophy, not science.
For example, I have another interpretation. I disagree with the common ancestor conjecture that life evolved from a single-cellular life form. My theory is that there used to be much more diverse spread of species in a spectrum. Many of the species that are close on the spectrum scale can cross-breed, so there is no common ancestor. However, natural selection narrows down the spectrum into small pockets of bands, so that species can no longer breed across band. This theory can be nudged to work well with mutation, natural selection, and viral DNA traces. It just doesn't answer the question, "where do species come from." This is the kind of question that science is not supposed to answer because, whatever the answer is, it can't be reproduced.
The shops should be raising their privacy expectation. There are many ways to test burning a DVD without plowing through customer's files. Why not just plug in an external drive with a test image and burn that instead? Child pornography or not, I see this as the tech shop's hypocritical attempt to justify amoral business privacy practice.
Yes, but I thought XHTML was designed to separate content and presentation. We have established that XHTML by itself isn't enough, and then we just found out that XHTML plus XSLT still requires presentation information to be encoded in the original document. As I said, it's a fairytale.
Mac OS X contains many third-party open source software packages. The bugs are found through source code auditing. These bugs may or may not become exploitable depends on how the code is used.
Just take a quick look at the bugs list. Most of them are found in third-party code like PCRE library. These are labeled "highly critical" without a demonstrable proof that it can be exploited. The software using PCRE is vulnerable to malformed regular expression strings, but I've never seen any software accepting arbitrary regular expression strings from another machine. (A web browser interprets JavaScript code from another machine, which may contain regular expressions, but JavaScript regular expression definitely isn't Perl compatible, so that's not PCRE.) Those same bugs also affect Linux. If you use Cygwin on Windows, these bugs also affect you, so they can be Windows bugs too.
On the other hand, since we can't audit proprietary Windows code, we only find bugs that are actually exploitable, in contrast to the open source bugs that are only potentially exploitable. Therefore, the severity of Windows bugs are vastly underrated compared to open source bugs. And there are more potentially exploitable bugs in Windows that we don't find, which aren't being counted.
That said, if you rely on bug counts and decide that Windows is more secure for you, I'd call you crazy.
Finally, why would Adobe Flash player bugs be counted as a Mac OS X bug?
Just try to view what you just wrote on a 128x160 screen and you'll see what I mean. A paragraph doesn't have to be very long to make browsing experience horrible.
Can't you carry on a discussion without cussing from your rotten mouth?
I knew some witty person would mention XSLT at some point, so I've already prepared a question for you. Is there an elegant method to XSLT a large page into several smaller pages? Suppose you would have two XSL stylesheets that want to do the page breaking differently. The "desktop" version breaks the content up to fewer and larger pages than the "mobile" version.
Surely, if your content is structured into nodes, you could adjust the granularity of page breaks by node depth. But for most content out there, you just have a sequence of paragraphs. I doubt if XSLT can break in the middle of a very long paragraph where it could be desired for mobile display.
Support for multiple devices...
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From the conclusion of TFA:
If you're more interested in XHTML V1.1 than HTML V4, looking for an elegant approach to create documents accessible from multiple devices, you are likely to appreciate the advantages of XHTML V2.
The author apparently has no experience with rendering XHTML on mobile devices. First of all, since the screen is smaller, it's not just about restyling things in a minimalist theme. It's about prioritizing information and remove the unnecessary one so more important information becomes more accessible in limited display real-estate.
For example, anyone who accessed Slashdot homepage on their mobile phone knows the pain of having the scroll down past the left and right columns before reaching the stories. You can simulate this experience by turning off page style and narrowing your browser window to 480 pixels wide. The story summaries are less accessible because they're further down a very long narrow page.
Another problem is the memory. Even if you style the unnecessary page elements to "no display", they're still downloaded and parsed by the mobile browser as part of the page. Mobile devices have limited memory, and I get "out of memory" error on some sites. For reading long articles on mobile devices, it is better to break content into more pages than you would on a desktop display, both for presentation and memory footprint reasons.
For these two reasons, a site designer generally has to design a new layout for each type of device. The dream of "one page (and several style sheets) to rule them all" is a fairytale.
the report on NPR, where it trace the "how" of various attacks -- noted that "virus codes were injected" into victim computers. this is the first aspect that has to end. no running of un-authorized programs. this means all executables will have to be signed with a PGP signature authorized by a Certificate Authority.
Requiring authenticate signature before a program is allowed to run would only take care of the users who promiscuously open things they download from the web. In this case, a browser that simply refuses to save things downloaded from the web is just as good. It could work like a popup blocker showing messages like "Firefox is preventing this site from saving a file to your local hard drive, which may be harmful to your computer" and give user the ability to override it.
I'm pretty sure it's been widely known that the RIAA types have inflated their statistics for some time now, what with their formula of x number of pirated copies = x number of sales lost and then x sales lost * y unreasonable charge == z unrealistic losses.
That's the formula they use for PR to make them look sheepish. The formula they use in court is z unrealistic losses + c counts of infringement * s statutory damage = d claimed damage. However, since z / d is very close to 0, you can consider the actual formula to just be c * s = d. You're welcome to settle at 2% of claimed damage, but that's still several magnitudes higher than z unrealistic damage.
Speaking of which, I really hope they maintain some consistency in the editor through Blogspot, Google Pages, Google Document, etc. Right now the behaviors for newline conversion, handling of preformatted text, and things you can insert like images and tables are different in all Google apps. I think it's a user experience nightmare. It also shows how little the different teams talk to each other. I also hope that Blogspot becomes integrated with Google Pages so some of the site can be blog and I can use Google Pages for other static pages.
Now they gain a wiki engine, what about the option to publish a blog in wiki syntax?
I swear Apple used a snapshot-capable version of HFS+ to implement time machine in the manner I described, but they went back in time to change it. I can prove this.
I see time machine more as a version control system than a backup. Backup provides redundancy, but time machine doesn't do that. If your file system becomes corrupted, time machine will just lose everything. The reason why time machine only works on local disk is because, in order to avoid hard linking every single files, it uses directory hard link to make snapshot of unchanged directories, an operation that a network file system highly unlikely supports.
Dude, you ought to pay LESS attention to the nonsense. You've been brainwashed by too many b-grade science-fiction movies with giant radioactively mutated spiders/scorpions/bats.
Don't forget about those damn turtles who do ninja.
You will never know as much as your teacher in his subject after leaving him. That is a given.
That depends. Being able to stand on a great teacher's shoulders can make you achieve further. You learn in a few years what he learned in a few decades. You can apply your fresh perspective on the matter and get more gain. However, that's only possible if you're able to stand on his shoulders. Students with the attitude "I know more than my professors" or "my professors know nothing" can't do that.
I successfully converted my mom to use a Mac Mini this summer. One time she mistakenly hid the dock. She panicked and called me, but she didn't know what it's called. All she said was "the icons disappeared."
I ssh'd into her computer and ran OSXvnc server (now Vine server) tunneled over ssh. I noticed the problem and fixed it for her on the phone while she watched what I was doing. The most difficult part was to figure out what her IP address was in the first place.
She didn't have to learn any new icons. Both Skype and Firefox icons look the same. She uses Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, so she didn't have to learn anything new.
Oh yes, you're definitely right. I'm glad to see someone on slashdot who actually knows the windows operating system!
There are several consequences for treating executables and DLLs as page files and use them for swapping:
You can't delete executables or DLLs when the program is running. That's why uninstallation always has to restart the computer. The uninstaller adds the list of files it can't delete to the registry, and Windows takes care of them at the next boot-up.
Paging is very slow because it has to go to various locations on disk to fetch the little executable and DLL "page files" in order to page in. Page file is often a continuous chunk on disk for performance reason. I don't know if Windows XP has improved on that. The last time I looked at Windows seriously was Windows 2000. I guess they can always cache a copy of the executables in the page file, doubling page file usage reported by Task Manager and make some people cringe more.
The virtual memory manager becomes overly complicated. Code section of the executables must be read-only, otherwise run-time code patching technique in memory would alter the image on disk. However, data section that stores global variables must be made copy-on-write.
In constrast, in Unix, you load the whole binary in memory, and the memory manager doesn't really care about the memory layout of your program. You only need to flip on the copy-on-write bit when a process forks.
Despite these, I can't claim Linux is better because user's perception of system responsiveness (i.e. "fast") is more than that.
I never went to MIT, but by reading your comment, I think I now understand why MIT professors have a reputation of being very hard on the students. That's their way of making the students, who are inevitably so smart and full of ego, to respect them. You can argue there are better ways, but without taming the students one way or another, there is no way to teach them, and most of them would just flunk out of class. At least, if the professor is tough, then even flunking a class worths something. If the students respect you, then they may actually be learning a thing or two. If you don't know how to teach, then at least the students would blame themselves if they respect you. The best-case scenario, where a professor is both knowledgeable and articulate, is rare.
It goes to show how difficult it is to earn respect from a total stranger, someone who doesn't understand your qualifications. They should make all professors take a psychology course or two on how to convince people. Most of the professors I know are kind of introvert, but they're the smartest beings if you know them by the papers they write.
If by saying "I knew more than my professors" you mean "I knew something they didn't" I would believe you. However, "I learned nothing from them" is quite another thing. It means you really didn't know what they knew, or their knowledge proves to have little value to you. Knowledge can't be quantified on a scale.
At any rate, this condescending "I knew more than my professors" attitude won't help you get the most out of your education. It's a shame you were only able to come up with "so that's what you call what I have been doing" and not "I know a better way to do this; here's how."
Copyright infringement is illegal? Yes, because that's written as a law, and China entered the WIPO treaty. Is it unethical? That's questionable. Law != ethics. This is what you have problem understanding. There have always been people disagreeing with law on ethical ground and there always will be. I am one of those who disagree with some statutes of copyright law on ethical ground. You can challenge my ethics, but you're not doing a good job with your "infringement is stealing" argument. No it's not. Just search on Slashdot for whatever story tagged with "mafiaa" and you'll find some lengthy refute against that argument which I will not reproduce here.
Or maybe I totally misunderstood people's understanding of copyright infringement. It is okay to infringe upon the work of RIAA or MPAA because they're the bad guys and their copyrighted work sucks anyways. However, it is not okay for Chinks to infringe upon *us* because they're the bad guys and *we* are the good guys doing good creative work. Double standard?
I basically just want to understand what the hell is going on when a middle-class middle-aged Chinese woman thinks it's ok to cheat me out of a buck or shove me out of the way in line. I just don't see that in the U.S. except among young punks...
If you deal on the streets, make sure you know the street rules. In the U.S. you probably don't spend that much time on the streets (unless you routinely take public transportation or walk) because most Americans drive. But rudeness and unethical behavior shows in driving as well.
I was almost hit by a taxi in New York City. It was a red light, and the taxi just swooshed right by me at 50 mph, and I was only an inch away. A bald obese white middle-aged man on the sidewalk laughed at me and pointed me out to his friends, "he must be from Jersey." I think you would agree that reckless driving is unethical.
I was visiting friends in Milpitas, CA, and we were in the parking lot of a shopping plaza waiting for a parking space. We waited patiently for some car backing out. Before we could go in, a white guy drove his pick-up truck right in to the space we were watching. It took several eye witnesses and a few Chinese (surprise!) to convince that guy he did not deserve that parking space.
You probably don't get cheated or shoved out of line in the U.S. because you don't interact people at home the way you do in China. These anecdotes don't prove anything about Chinese in general.
Most people do follow "where the sun is in the sky relative to me right now," and that forms an intricate web of daily routine dependency in a society. For the vast majority of average people, "it's time to do something" is the only way to get things done. The reason why 12-hour clock works so well is because you can look at an image of the clock, and it reminds you "it's time to do something." You reuse the same image when the clock strikes the same time to remind you the recurrence. This reuse effect cannot be achieved if you replace a 12-hour clock with a digital clock showing the Unix time. Nobody is going to remember a 10 digit long number all the times.
The computer keeps the time using an integer. Humans keep time using what makes sense to them. This is the status quo and it works. What is broken here?
Slashdot Mirror
Err, I'm not talking about specieation, you dumb ass. Don't change the topic. Science cannot answer the question where the original specie, the one without the ancestor, came from.
The only difference with 20-lines gibberish and 20-lines elegant code is the fact that you can prove that the elegant code does what it's supposed to do, i.e. show the reasoning of it. If you can show the reasoning, might as well write it as comments to benefit people who have to "touch" your code later. Chances are there will be the need to touch your code at some point. Design and specs are always changing.
You don't need to start working at a real job to realize that code isn't like a piece of art, that the artist is the only person who has the artistic sense and privilege to alter his/her own work. GPL'd software is built on the principle that anybody will touch your code at will and let the world know how they did it. That's what made GPL'd software so great.
Tried LyX lately? It does what you just described---you type your type, you type your equations, and LyX takes care of most of the other drudgery for you---and allows you to insert TeX code should you need to do the low-level stuff. LyX then outputs a .tex file and uses LaTeX for typesetting.
You should take a course in logic.
Before we can define what logic is, we need to define a calculus, which describes what well-formed formulas are. From that, there are two ways to assign semantics to these formulas. You can either define rules that reduce a well-formed formula to another well-formed formula (operational semantics), or model your well-formed formulas after something else that is well-understood (denotational semantics).
What is commonly understood as "Boolean logic" is just a calculus. They way you typically learn its semantics is by truth table, which is the denotational approach. Modus ponens for intuitionistic logic is the operational approach to define semantics.
A logic is a collection of well-formed formulas under a calculus. A logic being "consistent" is defined by not being able to prove a well-formed formula and its negation. A paradox is a special case of inconsistent logic, where if you hold a formula true, you can prove it's false; but if you hold it false, you can prove it's true.
An axiom in logic is a well-formed formula initially admitted to the logic system without needing a proof. Once after admitting some axioms, you can then prove additional formulas that will be bootstrapped into the logic's collection of formulas.
If religion is a logic, then faith is an axiom. You are admitting it without requiring to prove it. Those who find faults with a religious faith are helping the religion to refine its axioms to make the logic consistent.
The only difference between science and religion is that, science is a special kind of logic such that the logical consequences must be observable *and* deterministically reproducible (meaning: you always get the same result under controlled situation). If it is not, it ain't science, and whatever it is cannot be differentiated from religion.
That said, although many aspects of evolution---such as mutation, natural selection, and viral DNA traces---are observable, but the claim about origin of species is only an interpretation of what's being observed. There is no meaningful consequence out of that interpretation, so it's only a philosophy, not science.
For example, I have another interpretation. I disagree with the common ancestor conjecture that life evolved from a single-cellular life form. My theory is that there used to be much more diverse spread of species in a spectrum. Many of the species that are close on the spectrum scale can cross-breed, so there is no common ancestor. However, natural selection narrows down the spectrum into small pockets of bands, so that species can no longer breed across band. This theory can be nudged to work well with mutation, natural selection, and viral DNA traces. It just doesn't answer the question, "where do species come from." This is the kind of question that science is not supposed to answer because, whatever the answer is, it can't be reproduced.
The shops should be raising their privacy expectation. There are many ways to test burning a DVD without plowing through customer's files. Why not just plug in an external drive with a test image and burn that instead? Child pornography or not, I see this as the tech shop's hypocritical attempt to justify amoral business privacy practice.
Yes, but I thought XHTML was designed to separate content and presentation. We have established that XHTML by itself isn't enough, and then we just found out that XHTML plus XSLT still requires presentation information to be encoded in the original document. As I said, it's a fairytale.
Mac OS X contains many third-party open source software packages. The bugs are found through source code auditing. These bugs may or may not become exploitable depends on how the code is used.
Just take a quick look at the bugs list. Most of them are found in third-party code like PCRE library. These are labeled "highly critical" without a demonstrable proof that it can be exploited. The software using PCRE is vulnerable to malformed regular expression strings, but I've never seen any software accepting arbitrary regular expression strings from another machine. (A web browser interprets JavaScript code from another machine, which may contain regular expressions, but JavaScript regular expression definitely isn't Perl compatible, so that's not PCRE.) Those same bugs also affect Linux. If you use Cygwin on Windows, these bugs also affect you, so they can be Windows bugs too.
On the other hand, since we can't audit proprietary Windows code, we only find bugs that are actually exploitable, in contrast to the open source bugs that are only potentially exploitable. Therefore, the severity of Windows bugs are vastly underrated compared to open source bugs. And there are more potentially exploitable bugs in Windows that we don't find, which aren't being counted.
That said, if you rely on bug counts and decide that Windows is more secure for you, I'd call you crazy.
Finally, why would Adobe Flash player bugs be counted as a Mac OS X bug?
Just try to view what you just wrote on a 128x160 screen and you'll see what I mean. A paragraph doesn't have to be very long to make browsing experience horrible.
Can't you carry on a discussion without cussing from your rotten mouth?
I knew some witty person would mention XSLT at some point, so I've already prepared a question for you. Is there an elegant method to XSLT a large page into several smaller pages? Suppose you would have two XSL stylesheets that want to do the page breaking differently. The "desktop" version breaks the content up to fewer and larger pages than the "mobile" version.
Surely, if your content is structured into nodes, you could adjust the granularity of page breaks by node depth. But for most content out there, you just have a sequence of paragraphs. I doubt if XSLT can break in the middle of a very long paragraph where it could be desired for mobile display.
The author apparently has no experience with rendering XHTML on mobile devices. First of all, since the screen is smaller, it's not just about restyling things in a minimalist theme. It's about prioritizing information and remove the unnecessary one so more important information becomes more accessible in limited display real-estate.
For example, anyone who accessed Slashdot homepage on their mobile phone knows the pain of having the scroll down past the left and right columns before reaching the stories. You can simulate this experience by turning off page style and narrowing your browser window to 480 pixels wide. The story summaries are less accessible because they're further down a very long narrow page.
Another problem is the memory. Even if you style the unnecessary page elements to "no display", they're still downloaded and parsed by the mobile browser as part of the page. Mobile devices have limited memory, and I get "out of memory" error on some sites. For reading long articles on mobile devices, it is better to break content into more pages than you would on a desktop display, both for presentation and memory footprint reasons.
For these two reasons, a site designer generally has to design a new layout for each type of device. The dream of "one page (and several style sheets) to rule them all" is a fairytale.
Requiring authenticate signature before a program is allowed to run would only take care of the users who promiscuously open things they download from the web. In this case, a browser that simply refuses to save things downloaded from the web is just as good. It could work like a popup blocker showing messages like "Firefox is preventing this site from saving a file to your local hard drive, which may be harmful to your computer" and give user the ability to override it.
Then can you please tell Bank of America not to install any more Diebold ATM machines?
Speaking of which, I really hope they maintain some consistency in the editor through Blogspot, Google Pages, Google Document, etc. Right now the behaviors for newline conversion, handling of preformatted text, and things you can insert like images and tables are different in all Google apps. I think it's a user experience nightmare. It also shows how little the different teams talk to each other. I also hope that Blogspot becomes integrated with Google Pages so some of the site can be blog and I can use Google Pages for other static pages.
Now they gain a wiki engine, what about the option to publish a blog in wiki syntax?
I swear Apple used a snapshot-capable version of HFS+ to implement time machine in the manner I described, but they went back in time to change it. I can prove this.
I see time machine more as a version control system than a backup. Backup provides redundancy, but time machine doesn't do that. If your file system becomes corrupted, time machine will just lose everything. The reason why time machine only works on local disk is because, in order to avoid hard linking every single files, it uses directory hard link to make snapshot of unchanged directories, an operation that a network file system highly unlikely supports.
That depends. Being able to stand on a great teacher's shoulders can make you achieve further. You learn in a few years what he learned in a few decades. You can apply your fresh perspective on the matter and get more gain. However, that's only possible if you're able to stand on his shoulders. Students with the attitude "I know more than my professors" or "my professors know nothing" can't do that.
I successfully converted my mom to use a Mac Mini this summer. One time she mistakenly hid the dock. She panicked and called me, but she didn't know what it's called. All she said was "the icons disappeared."
I ssh'd into her computer and ran OSXvnc server (now Vine server) tunneled over ssh. I noticed the problem and fixed it for her on the phone while she watched what I was doing. The most difficult part was to figure out what her IP address was in the first place.
She didn't have to learn any new icons. Both Skype and Firefox icons look the same. She uses Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, so she didn't have to learn anything new.
Oh yes, you're definitely right. I'm glad to see someone on slashdot who actually knows the windows operating system!
There are several consequences for treating executables and DLLs as page files and use them for swapping:
The virtual memory manager becomes overly complicated. Code section of the executables must be read-only, otherwise run-time code patching technique in memory would alter the image on disk. However, data section that stores global variables must be made copy-on-write.
In constrast, in Unix, you load the whole binary in memory, and the memory manager doesn't really care about the memory layout of your program. You only need to flip on the copy-on-write bit when a process forks.
Despite these, I can't claim Linux is better because user's perception of system responsiveness (i.e. "fast") is more than that.
I never went to MIT, but by reading your comment, I think I now understand why MIT professors have a reputation of being very hard on the students. That's their way of making the students, who are inevitably so smart and full of ego, to respect them. You can argue there are better ways, but without taming the students one way or another, there is no way to teach them, and most of them would just flunk out of class. At least, if the professor is tough, then even flunking a class worths something. If the students respect you, then they may actually be learning a thing or two. If you don't know how to teach, then at least the students would blame themselves if they respect you. The best-case scenario, where a professor is both knowledgeable and articulate, is rare.
It goes to show how difficult it is to earn respect from a total stranger, someone who doesn't understand your qualifications. They should make all professors take a psychology course or two on how to convince people. Most of the professors I know are kind of introvert, but they're the smartest beings if you know them by the papers they write.
If by saying "I knew more than my professors" you mean "I knew something they didn't" I would believe you. However, "I learned nothing from them" is quite another thing. It means you really didn't know what they knew, or their knowledge proves to have little value to you. Knowledge can't be quantified on a scale.
At any rate, this condescending "I knew more than my professors" attitude won't help you get the most out of your education. It's a shame you were only able to come up with "so that's what you call what I have been doing" and not "I know a better way to do this; here's how."
Copyright infringement is illegal? Yes, because that's written as a law, and China entered the WIPO treaty. Is it unethical? That's questionable. Law != ethics. This is what you have problem understanding. There have always been people disagreeing with law on ethical ground and there always will be. I am one of those who disagree with some statutes of copyright law on ethical ground. You can challenge my ethics, but you're not doing a good job with your "infringement is stealing" argument. No it's not. Just search on Slashdot for whatever story tagged with "mafiaa" and you'll find some lengthy refute against that argument which I will not reproduce here.
Or maybe I totally misunderstood people's understanding of copyright infringement. It is okay to infringe upon the work of RIAA or MPAA because they're the bad guys and their copyrighted work sucks anyways. However, it is not okay for Chinks to infringe upon *us* because they're the bad guys and *we* are the good guys doing good creative work. Double standard?
If you deal on the streets, make sure you know the street rules. In the U.S. you probably don't spend that much time on the streets (unless you routinely take public transportation or walk) because most Americans drive. But rudeness and unethical behavior shows in driving as well.
I was almost hit by a taxi in New York City. It was a red light, and the taxi just swooshed right by me at 50 mph, and I was only an inch away. A bald obese white middle-aged man on the sidewalk laughed at me and pointed me out to his friends, "he must be from Jersey." I think you would agree that reckless driving is unethical.
I was visiting friends in Milpitas, CA, and we were in the parking lot of a shopping plaza waiting for a parking space. We waited patiently for some car backing out. Before we could go in, a white guy drove his pick-up truck right in to the space we were watching. It took several eye witnesses and a few Chinese (surprise!) to convince that guy he did not deserve that parking space.
You probably don't get cheated or shoved out of line in the U.S. because you don't interact people at home the way you do in China. These anecdotes don't prove anything about Chinese in general.
Most people do follow "where the sun is in the sky relative to me right now," and that forms an intricate web of daily routine dependency in a society. For the vast majority of average people, "it's time to do something" is the only way to get things done. The reason why 12-hour clock works so well is because you can look at an image of the clock, and it reminds you "it's time to do something." You reuse the same image when the clock strikes the same time to remind you the recurrence. This reuse effect cannot be achieved if you replace a 12-hour clock with a digital clock showing the Unix time. Nobody is going to remember a 10 digit long number all the times.
The computer keeps the time using an integer. Humans keep time using what makes sense to them. This is the status quo and it works. What is broken here?