The political system in China is for all intents and purposes a democracy, though only the communist party has any power.
A single party state is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship, albiet one in which the dictator is no longer a single figurehead, but rather a single organisation, in this case the communist party. Voting in China is only a cynical rubber stamp on a rigged process.
The citizens of China obey the laws that the government enacted, but without the complicity of the citizens, the government itself couldn't continue existing.
A dictatorship does require that people be complancant, in the sense that they do not rebel for fear of reprisal. But, it does not require them to consent to its rule. This is key. The consent of the people of China has never been given for the communist party to rule.
It is not by the will of the people that they govern, only by the fear of the people. That's not a democracy no matter how anyone spins it.
We can sit back and bask in our freedoms, but as we can see from our current situation, we will languish economically. Is the rate of growth of China's economy sustainable and is there anything we can learn from them in regards to our own economy?
I personally believe that instead of the West exporting democracy to China, we will end up importing their "dynamic, productive new social paradigms", and gradually our free societies will become dictatorships as well. Perhaps democracy was only a temporary blip on the radar of history, and humanity's natural state is under the boot of the tyrant?
I for one, would not like to be Ms Hu Yingying when the revolution comes. Sure, she might have a sob story, needs the cash, sick grandfather, all the usual. Bottom line, she's an "Informer". Same as Stazi agents, same as party spies, same as every type of sleeper agent who sells out their neighbours to dictators for a piece of the pie. Money, power, prestiege. Maybe they've got something over her.
But it doesn't matter. When the revolution comes, the people whos necks have been stamped on one too many times won't be too sympathetic and Ms Hu and her ilk are going to get their heads blown clean off, and I have no sympathy whatsoever. I condemn capital punishment, but when you've sold your fellow human beings up the bloody river as you skip joyfully about the heels of tyrants, I'm not exactly going to weep at your passing.
People like this are essentially traitors. They betray their countrymen by colluding with the illigitimate power currently in control. Treason is a weighty offense, and doing it by pointing and clicking doesn't make it any less grave.
So that people the world over are subject to US law? So that people excercising their civil rights in their home countries can be dragged off to the US, be given a fair trial and hanged, because they offended the moral sensiblities of the mighty nation of manifest-destians? Like Dmitry Sklyarov, who was held accountable for simply excercising his rights in his own home country?
I for one would rather not be dragged off to the US to be judged and condenmed for excercising my rights in my home nation. Over here, people can drink after they're 18. Should they be dragged off for infringements of the oh so higher and purer US statutes on alcohol consumption?
You might consider that trollish, but it just amazes me how arrogant some americans can be in their attitudes towards other countries and their judicial systems, paticularly in these days of Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay. Your country is not exactly a shining example of enlighted jurisprudence.
No he was in Britain when the crime was committed. The crime occurred in both countries.
Negative. Jurisdictions do not overlap. If the same crime was comitted in two jurisdictions, then you open the way for double jeopardy extraordinare.
McKinnon was in the UK as he knowingly broke US law, just as say, USians are in say, the US, as they knowingly break Saudi law when they critisise the House of Saud.
Here's the bottom line in this paticular case. US considers itself the priemiere country in the world. US law is considered by US courts to apply everywhere, and anyone infriging on US laws or the rights of US entities, evern if the infrigement is outside the US, is condiered accountable. Essentially, every non US citizen is still deemed to be de factor under US law by the United States, and such vassals are subject to summons, inspection and approval by their masters in washington.
Think that's a bit far fetched? Go ask Manuel Noriega and the Panamanian government about the extra long arm of US law.
Oh, no wait, that's right. They were all found guilty, even though they are all extremely wealthy.
They were private citizens, not private companies. They could not command a fraction of the resources a companiy would have at its disposal. Those lawsuits werte brough against individuals, not corperations.
Quite honestly, I really can't code at all without syntax highlighting. I need at least functions and routines highlighted if the code is to make any sense to me. Emacs is still king in this regard, which is a shame, because more apps could do with highlighting these days.
Tanenbaum's research is correct, in that a Microkernel architecture is more secure, easier to maintain, and just all around better.
I'm very skeptical of this. It would seem to me, at a fundamental level, that a microkernel architecture is simply a heavily reduced kernel with most accepted kernel functions now delegated to external "programs", and a high level of trust is now placed in each and every one of these programs. I can't see how this is good for security.
In a sense, most OSes are "microkerneled" anyway. Most functionality is implemented by programs running on top of the kernel, which pass messages back and forth between themselves and the kernel. Perhaps my view on this is a little naive, but I don't see too much of a difference between a microkernel module and any other process on the machine.
Right. Restrictive IP laws are what made Europe irrelevent. Those two world wars really didn't do much to shape European culture. IP law, however, stamped its mark on the face of the continent forever.
After the second World War, in lieu of the more converntional wars reparations demanded of Germany by France, Britian and Russia such as cash repayments, industrial production curtailments, etc, America chose instead that its war reparations be paid for in the transferral of patents held by german holders, to american companies.
The spoils of war were not sent to the treasury, but rather to the USPTO.
"Hey gys!!!1 gess wat?! 2day the kops clled ovr & sweeped my howse!!!!! thts so kewl!! im so hppy to fell protexed! anwy i tld thm ted wuz reedng thowz buks & now they gona RAYD HIM!!1 HAWHAW!!1 did u gys regster fur goin owt 2nite?"
I wasn't just talking about mplayer.c . There's a whole respotory in there as well. Here's a wonderful snippet I worked on. This from "vf.c"
vf_instance_t* vf_add_before_vo(vf_instance_t **vf, char *name, char **args) {
vf_instance_t *vo, *prev = NULL, *new;// Find the last filter (should be vf_vo)
for (vo = *vf; vo->next; vo = vo->next)
prev = vo;
new = vf_open_filter(vo, name, args);
if (prev)
prev->next = new;
else
*vf = new;
return new; }
Here's an example of the hacking in c to support OO I was talking about. Please note the void function pointers. This from "vf.h"
typedef struct vf_instance_s {
vf_info_t* info;// funcs:
int (*config)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,
int width, int height, int d_width, int d_height,
unsigned int flags, unsigned int outfmt);
int (*control)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,
int request, void* data);
int (*query_format)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,
unsigned int fmt);
void (*get_image)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,mp_image_t *mpi);
int (*put_image)(struct vf_instance_s* vf, mp_image_t *mpi);
void (*start_slice)(struct vf_instance_s* vf, mp_image_t *mpi);
void (*draw_slice)(struct vf_instance_s* vf, unsigned char** src, int* stride, int w,int h, int x, int y);
void (*uninit)(struct vf_instance_s* vf);// caps:
unsigned int default_caps;// used by default query_format()
unsigned int default_reqs;// used by default config()// data:
int w, h;
vf_image_context_t imgctx;
vf_format_context_t fmt;
struct vf_instance_s* next;
mp_image_t *dmpi;
struct vf_priv_s* priv; } vf_instance_t;
I'm not surprised. I hacked mplayer once. And I do mean hacked, not programmed.
For starters, mplayer.c is 4000 lines long. Apparently only one man really knows what's going on in there, and he's not taking a look at it. Making sense of it was beyond what my cursory overview of the code could muster. Near as I could tell most of it was written to deal with bugs.
The main developers are from eastern europe, I think. They have a pechant for three letter variables, and not a character over. Terse and unreadable code is also preferred. I remember being asked why I dond't compress a three line, readable piece of code into a once liner, line noise version. Comments have long since passed into myth. I sometimes wondered if their compilers supported them.
The mplayer system is based on plugins. Written in c code that is hacked to the limit to introduce, insofar as it is possible, object orientation into c. Void pointers abound, and are probably the most common datatype in the respository.
The main mplayer "filter chain", works backwards, with each filter pointing to the previous one in the chain. It's method completely escaped me, but it did support adding filters on the fly... sort of.
All that said, the program is fantastic. I've rarely encountered many bugs, and its abilites are amazing. I've yet to encounter a video, audio or subtitle stream it cannot handle, and mencoder can write to a multitude of formats. Once you grok the command line syntax, there is no better tool for video manipulation, period. Just don't expect to be able to make custom modifications at a moments notice.
The moment of ephiphany for me was during, of all things, the Lewinsky sex scandal. The irish language anchors were required to say, in Irish, that the US president had engaged in acts of oral sex, on live television.
The problem, in a nutshell, was that there was no known translation in Irish for "oral sex".
Now these were top men in RTE(the national broadcaster). They knew the language inside out. And yet, when it came down to it, they could not, despite all their years of expierience, come up with the irish translation of "blowjob".
There is no way of saying "blowjob" in modern Irish. Just let that sink in for a moment.
Eventually, after many flustered calls, meetings and contacts, they hackneyed together a solution in the form of "gneas beal" (lit. "mouth sex"), but it couldn't hide the truth. After 80 years under the custodianship of the Irish State, the first national language had declined to such a degree that it was no long possible to say something most human languages decribe before they invent writing.
The Irish language debaucle is the perfect example of how not to preserve a language. The language is not so much dead as it is completely sterile. Censored to oblivion by conservative governments and taught like a frigid version of secondary school latin, is it any wonder most people in Ireland never speak it. After 14 years of Irish language study I can safely say that I don't know a single Irish swearword.
Some might consider this argument rather trite, but I think it cuts to the heart if the matter. Language exists so we can express ourselves with it, and a censored language is hardly worth speaking at all. I'd wager the Welsh have done a better job at preserving more of their national language's vitality than successive Governments in this country.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith's invisible hand works almost everywhere, and frequently when it doesn't, it's failure is because of government, not big business.
Mix them up, and you piss people off. It's a bit like mixing up California with the USA with North America.
That's pretty much exactly what it's like. There's been so much convergence between the populations in the UK that is would be quite difficult for an outsider, or even and insider, to tell them apart. Out of the four main ethnic groups you mention, only the Welsh have a clearly punctuated and distinguishable difference in the form of spoken Welsh.
The difference between Californians and Texans would be very analagous to the difference between peoples in the UK.
Amen. May the GIMP suffer the horrible, slow agonising decline into obscurity that it so richly deserves. Personally I think it's only a matter of time before the main Linux distros drop the GIMP like the republicans dropped McCarthy. I'm sick of its sub standard interface. Nothing is intuitive. Nothing.
I'm tired of the same tired excuses. "Just use keyboard shortcuts!", "Change your outlook!", "It's not made for you anyway!". Meanwhile Adobe willfully ensures Photoshop is the most pirated piece of software on the planet so that it maintains its mindshare.
The GIMP is a tradgedy. A courageous hero, with a crippling character flaw that destroys it. That flaw is the development teams sheer dogmatic refusal to make the interface better, and to a lesser extent, the GIMP users unyielding support for this position.
If GIMP users won't stop making excuses for their program, then users will excuse themselves from it.
Slashdot Mirror
The political system in China is for all intents and purposes a democracy, though only the communist party has any power.
A single party state is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship, albiet one in which the dictator is no longer a single figurehead, but rather a single organisation, in this case the communist party. Voting in China is only a cynical rubber stamp on a rigged process.
The citizens of China obey the laws that the government enacted, but without the complicity of the citizens, the government itself couldn't continue existing.
A dictatorship does require that people be complancant, in the sense that they do not rebel for fear of reprisal. But, it does not require them to consent to its rule. This is key. The consent of the people of China has never been given for the communist party to rule.
It is not by the will of the people that they govern, only by the fear of the people. That's not a democracy no matter how anyone spins it.
We can sit back and bask in our freedoms, but as we can see from our current situation, we will languish economically. Is the rate of growth of China's economy sustainable and is there anything we can learn from them in regards to our own economy?
I personally believe that instead of the West exporting democracy to China, we will end up importing their "dynamic, productive new social paradigms", and gradually our free societies will become dictatorships as well. Perhaps democracy was only a temporary blip on the radar of history, and humanity's natural state is under the boot of the tyrant?
I for one, would not like to be Ms Hu Yingying when the revolution comes. Sure, she might have a sob story, needs the cash, sick grandfather, all the usual. Bottom line, she's an "Informer". Same as Stazi agents, same as party spies, same as every type of sleeper agent who sells out their neighbours to dictators for a piece of the pie. Money, power, prestiege. Maybe they've got something over her.
But it doesn't matter. When the revolution comes, the people whos necks have been stamped on one too many times won't be too sympathetic and Ms Hu and her ilk are going to get their heads blown clean off, and I have no sympathy whatsoever . I condemn capital punishment, but when you've sold your fellow human beings up the bloody river as you skip joyfully about the heels of tyrants, I'm not exactly going to weep at your passing.
People like this are essentially traitors. They betray their countrymen by colluding with the illigitimate power currently in control. Treason is a weighty offense, and doing it by pointing and clicking doesn't make it any less grave.
So that people the world over are subject to US law? So that people excercising their civil rights in their home countries can be dragged off to the US, be given a fair trial and hanged, because they offended the moral sensiblities of the mighty nation of manifest-destians? Like Dmitry Sklyarov, who was held accountable for simply excercising his rights in his own home country?
I for one would rather not be dragged off to the US to be judged and condenmed for excercising my rights in my home nation. Over here, people can drink after they're 18. Should they be dragged off for infringements of the oh so higher and purer US statutes on alcohol consumption?
You might consider that trollish, but it just amazes me how arrogant some americans can be in their attitudes towards other countries and their judicial systems, paticularly in these days of Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay. Your country is not exactly a shining example of enlighted jurisprudence.
No he was in Britain when the crime was committed. The crime occurred in both countries.
Negative. Jurisdictions do not overlap. If the same crime was comitted in two jurisdictions, then you open the way for double jeopardy extraordinare.
McKinnon was in the UK as he knowingly broke US law, just as say, USians are in say, the US, as they knowingly break Saudi law when they critisise the House of Saud.
Here's the bottom line in this paticular case. US considers itself the priemiere country in the world. US law is considered by US courts to apply everywhere, and anyone infriging on US laws or the rights of US entities, evern if the infrigement is outside the US, is condiered accountable. Essentially, every non US citizen is still deemed to be de factor under US law by the United States, and such vassals are subject to summons, inspection and approval by their masters in washington.
Think that's a bit far fetched? Go ask Manuel Noriega and the Panamanian government about the extra long arm of US law.
Oh, no wait, that's right. They were all found guilty, even though they are all extremely wealthy.
They were private citizens, not private companies. They could not command a fraction of the resources a companiy would have at its disposal. Those lawsuits werte brough against individuals, not corperations.
I think Wal-mart is full of shit here...
That may be true, but they're also full of money, the thing that really counts in the court system.
They are not copyrighting the smiley - they are trademarking it. These are very different things.
Yes. Like the difference between a gun pointed at your head and one pointing at your heart.
Quite honestly, I really can't code at all without syntax highlighting. I need at least functions and routines highlighted if the code is to make any sense to me. Emacs is still king in this regard, which is a shame, because more apps could do with highlighting these days.
Tanenbaum's research is correct, in that a Microkernel architecture is more secure, easier to maintain, and just all around better.
I'm very skeptical of this. It would seem to me, at a fundamental level, that a microkernel architecture is simply a heavily reduced kernel with most accepted kernel functions now delegated to external "programs", and a high level of trust is now placed in each and every one of these programs. I can't see how this is good for security.
In a sense, most OSes are "microkerneled" anyway. Most functionality is implemented by programs running on top of the kernel, which pass messages back and forth between themselves and the kernel. Perhaps my view on this is a little naive, but I don't see too much of a difference between a microkernel module and any other process on the machine.
"I thought the mother of the internet was Al Gore's Mom??? "
No it was Al Gore's wife you sick, sick, twisted individual.
If they're fighting out of uniform then they're illegal combatants.
Trouble is, most of the people in Guantanamo, weren't actually fighting at all.
Right. Restrictive IP laws are what made Europe irrelevent. Those two world wars really didn't do much to shape European culture. IP law, however, stamped its mark on the face of the continent forever.
After the second World War, in lieu of the more converntional wars reparations demanded of Germany by France, Britian and Russia such as cash repayments, industrial production curtailments, etc, America chose instead that its war reparations be paid for in the transferral of patents held by german holders, to american companies.
The spoils of war were not sent to the treasury, but rather to the USPTO.
If you want to prevent war you make your enemies your trading partners.
Germany and England were each the others largest trading partner in 1914, or virtually right on it.
Damn. Its like MySpace, only even creepier!
"Hey gys!!!1 gess wat?! 2day the kops clled ovr & sweeped my howse!!!!! thts so kewl!! im so hppy to fell protexed! anwy i tld thm ted wuz reedng thowz buks & now they gona RAYD HIM!!1 HAWHAW!!1 did u gys regster fur goin owt 2nite?"
I wasn't just talking about mplayer.c . There's a whole respotory in there as well. Here's a wonderful snippet I worked on. This from "vf.c"
// Find the last filter (should be vf_vo)
// funcs: // caps: // used by default query_format() // used by default config() // data:
vf_instance_t* vf_add_before_vo(vf_instance_t **vf, char *name, char **args) {
vf_instance_t *vo, *prev = NULL, *new;
for (vo = *vf; vo->next; vo = vo->next)
prev = vo;
new = vf_open_filter(vo, name, args);
if (prev)
prev->next = new;
else
*vf = new;
return new;
}
Here's an example of the hacking in c to support OO I was talking about. Please note the void function pointers. This from "vf.h"
typedef struct vf_instance_s {
vf_info_t* info;
int (*config)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,
int width, int height, int d_width, int d_height,
unsigned int flags, unsigned int outfmt);
int (*control)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,
int request, void* data);
int (*query_format)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,
unsigned int fmt);
void (*get_image)(struct vf_instance_s* vf,mp_image_t *mpi);
int (*put_image)(struct vf_instance_s* vf, mp_image_t *mpi);
void (*start_slice)(struct vf_instance_s* vf, mp_image_t *mpi);
void (*draw_slice)(struct vf_instance_s* vf, unsigned char** src, int* stride, int w,int h, int x, int y);
void (*uninit)(struct vf_instance_s* vf);
unsigned int default_caps;
unsigned int default_reqs;
int w, h;
vf_image_context_t imgctx;
vf_format_context_t fmt;
struct vf_instance_s* next;
mp_image_t *dmpi;
struct vf_priv_s* priv;
} vf_instance_t;
The codebase isn't pretty, but it does compile.
I'm constantly running into segfaults in mplayer.
I'm not surprised. I hacked mplayer once. And I do mean hacked, not programmed.
For starters, mplayer.c is 4000 lines long. Apparently only one man really knows what's going on in there, and he's not taking a look at it. Making sense of it was beyond what my cursory overview of the code could muster. Near as I could tell most of it was written to deal with bugs.
The main developers are from eastern europe, I think. They have a pechant for three letter variables, and not a character over. Terse and unreadable code is also preferred. I remember being asked why I dond't compress a three line, readable piece of code into a once liner, line noise version. Comments have long since passed into myth. I sometimes wondered if their compilers supported them.
The mplayer system is based on plugins. Written in c code that is hacked to the limit to introduce, insofar as it is possible, object orientation into c. Void pointers abound, and are probably the most common datatype in the respository.
The main mplayer "filter chain", works backwards, with each filter pointing to the previous one in the chain. It's method completely escaped me, but it did support adding filters on the fly... sort of.
All that said, the program is fantastic. I've rarely encountered many bugs, and its abilites are amazing. I've yet to encounter a video, audio or subtitle stream it cannot handle, and mencoder can write to a multitude of formats. Once you grok the command line syntax, there is no better tool for video manipulation, period. Just don't expect to be able to make custom modifications at a moments notice.
The Office UI is 100% different form every previous Office version. 16 years of training - down the Toilet!
People need training?! To use Office?!
Wow... just wow.
An bhfuil? Agus cean sort teanga e seo?
A sterile one.
The moment of ephiphany for me was during, of all things, the Lewinsky sex scandal. The irish language anchors were required to say, in Irish, that the US president had engaged in acts of oral sex, on live television.
The problem, in a nutshell, was that there was no known translation in Irish for "oral sex".
Now these were top men in RTE(the national broadcaster). They knew the language inside out. And yet, when it came down to it, they could not, despite all their years of expierience, come up with the irish translation of "blowjob".
There is no way of saying "blowjob" in modern Irish. Just let that sink in for a moment.
Eventually, after many flustered calls, meetings and contacts, they hackneyed together a solution in the form of "gneas beal" (lit. "mouth sex"), but it couldn't hide the truth. After 80 years under the custodianship of the Irish State, the first national language had declined to such a degree that it was no long possible to say something most human languages decribe before they invent writing.
The Irish language debaucle is the perfect example of how not to preserve a language. The language is not so much dead as it is completely sterile. Censored to oblivion by conservative governments and taught like a frigid version of secondary school latin, is it any wonder most people in Ireland never speak it. After 14 years of Irish language study I can safely say that I don't know a single Irish swearword.
Some might consider this argument rather trite, but I think it cuts to the heart if the matter. Language exists so we can express ourselves with it, and a censored language is hardly worth speaking at all. I'd wager the Welsh have done a better job at preserving more of their national language's vitality than successive Governments in this country.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith's invisible hand works almost everywhere, and frequently when it doesn't, it's failure is because of government, not big business.
Can you say "tulips"?
Mix them up, and you piss people off. It's a bit like mixing up California with the USA with North America.
That's pretty much exactly what it's like. There's been so much convergence between the populations in the UK that is would be quite difficult for an outsider, or even and insider, to tell them apart. Out of the four main ethnic groups you mention, only the Welsh have a clearly punctuated and distinguishable difference in the form of spoken Welsh.
The difference between Californians and Texans would be very analagous to the difference between peoples in the UK.
Without cash or hard drugs in those envelopes, you might as well send nothing at all.
Amen. May the GIMP suffer the horrible, slow agonising decline into obscurity that it so richly deserves. Personally I think it's only a matter of time before the main Linux distros drop the GIMP like the republicans dropped McCarthy. I'm sick of its sub standard interface. Nothing is intuitive. Nothing.
I'm tired of the same tired excuses. "Just use keyboard shortcuts!", "Change your outlook!", "It's not made for you anyway!". Meanwhile Adobe willfully ensures Photoshop is the most pirated piece of software on the planet so that it maintains its mindshare.
The GIMP is a tradgedy. A courageous hero, with a crippling character flaw that destroys it. That flaw is the development teams sheer dogmatic refusal to make the interface better, and to a lesser extent, the GIMP users unyielding support for this position.
If GIMP users won't stop making excuses for their program, then users will excuse themselves from it.
Then it should be easy to answer the following question:
When you have a good estimate of the answer, be sure to let the Pentagon know about it too. They're dying to find out.
Gentlemen, Please!
As geeks, you should know how to consuct your disagreements in a civilised manner.