Technology isn't just adding new terms to the language, it's also changing, and in some cases erasing, idioms that already exist. Take for example the phrase, "you sound like a broken record". How many people under the age of 25 even know what a broken record sounds like? As time goes on I expect that phrase to become increasingly rare, and to be replaced by a similar phrase, thus completing the circle of life:P
I think language is more arbitrary and unpredictable than that.
We still 'dial' a number, and our phones still 'ring', even though the actual dials and bells haven't been around for a generation. We still drop someone a line, even though operated-assisted calling hasn't been necessary for longer than this old grey-hair has been alive. We still go full steam ahead even though ships haven't burned coal for over a century. And people are still POSH centuries after 'Port Outward, Starboard Home' lost its original meaning.
Some phrases do drop out of currency, but others, for reasons too complex to fathom, seem to endure for centuries. Envy, for example, has been 'green' since Elizabethan times. Beautiful women have been compared to the sun since the Italian Renaissance. And ass-kissing has been around since Chaucer's time.
Well, that technology's history now and the language has gone with it.
Yes, because things like "LOL" and "WTF" have disappeared from the lexicon.
On wait, no they haven't. Turns out this guy is wrong on all counts. The technology is still here, and has in fact spread, and the language it has inspired is not gone, and has in fact spread.
Agreed. Only a luddite or linguistic saboteur would insist that technological change has no enduring impact on the English language. I'd suggest they'd gone completely off the rails and that they should shift gears and accept that technological jargon is always on the linguistic radar. Perhaps a mental reboot is called for....
Strangely, they banned both root words and modifiers of root words... like calling out ass AND ass clown, ass banger, etc. It's like they don't know how filtering, or words, work.
Kind of a shame they didn't use regex-based word subsbreastutions, though perhaps they didn't feel enbreastled to make any bumumptions.
Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.
Or you could get together with 87,834 of your closest friends and call them.
It's good to see people mobilisation en masse to oppose this bill, but as others have said, it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.
The big danger that I see is how dangerously regressive and backward-looking attitudes on the Hill are.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people there, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.
Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.
I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:
1) Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.
2) US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)
The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.
There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression. Not, at least, in the same way that many American developers do - that is, at the axiomatic level, rather than as a conscious overlay to their world view.
I don't like what we are doing either, but if you think you have the right to tell another sovereign nation what they can and cant do like this, you can simply go to hell.
Given that SOPA is an attempt to apply American law to websites and Internet services across the globe, I find your comment hilarious.
This is why NO key element in the Internet Backbone should belong to any individual corporation or any individual country. The backlash against the UN owning them was, I think, a serious mistake by geeks.
You contradict yourself. UN ownership is, effectively, license for individual nations to do as they see fit within their own borders, and to legitimise arbitrary control of core elements of the Internet.
That in itself doesn't represent a significant change from the state of things today, except that it provides a framework to drag the entire network down to a lower common denominator where freedom is concerned.
The track record of IT-related UN agencies is decidedly mixed. WIPO has accepted as gospel numerous conceptions about so-called Intellectual Property that are anathema to most people here on Slashdot. Perhaps the most egregious example is of the chair of the organisation suggesting that the World Wide Web should have been patented and licensed. Cory Doctorow rightly calls this statement "a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence."
The ITU, which is responsible for many telecoms and radio-related standards, fares somewhat better. They render a useful service and have been instrumental in ensuring that telcos world-wide don't end up locking their respective markets away from others. Nonetheless, when some functionaries at the UN-sponsored World Summit on Internet Society suggested in 2004 that the ITU could take ICANN's place, the idea was rejected wholesale.
ICANN sucks in important ways, but it is at least a technical body (influenced, admittedly, more than it should be by Verisign and co.). The imposition of a UN mandate over the Internet almost certainly implies a lot more legislation and regulation than most geeks would want to see.
Well said. I think the mesh networks would work fine for communications in small dribs and drabs, but I just don't see how that many hops will be feasible for (acceptable) voice communications. Emergency, nextel and TXT style communication? Heck yeah.
Again, I won't take issue with your argument, but I guess I just take a glass-half-full kind of approach to engineering. While you're right that latency would build up pretty quickly, I would counter with the argument that:
1) all else being equal, latency's not intolerable, even up to a second in duration. I know - I live in a country that has only satellite access to the outside world.
2) People -especially in the developing world- will put up with a lot in order to save a few cents. If the alternative to laggy, free calls is no call at all, then door number one starts to look attractive.
So yeah, I don't see this kind of approach taking off in the States; I think there's just too much invested in the status quo. But in vast areas of the rest of the world, the communications revolution is only starting. That's where I see a place for crazy ideas like this.
'Sound' in the sense that we've solved some of the key problems that kept this idea in the realm of the impossible. Now, it's merely improbably difficult. 8^)
If I need to make a call, I need to make sure someone else is in the area with their cell phone turned on and willing to let me drain their battery?
Agreed. Which makes it problematical for a lot of the continental US. But it's not so impractical in Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Egypt - countless other locales. Which, not coincidentally, represent the largest area of growth in wireless networks right now.
The battery issue is another kettle of fish. I can only hand-wave at the moment and assume that improvements in power storage and efficiency will continue for at least a decade, which would render this issue manageable, even if it doesn't solve it entirely.
How do you do long distance?
Assuming a data-only network (i.e. VOIP as the sole means of voice communication), you don't even think about it.
But I think what you're really asking is: How do I communicate with people on other networks; and how do I handle billing for inter-carrier calls (which is an astoundingly ugly and byzantine process)?
The short answer is: You don't.
The slightly longer answer becomes clear when you phrase the question thusly: How do I send email to someone who's on another Internet? Back in the days of AOL, Compuserve, Delphi and co. this used to be a real issue. Once the Internet asserted itself, however, the whole thing just sorted itself out.
To sum up, operating a carrier-less network allows you to dispose of a lot of the structures that the carriers have built into their data networks.
But notwithstanding what I've just writting, your point still holds that there are significant -show-stopping- issues that still need to be addressed. I don't deny that. I do, however, feel that these are finite technical problems, difficult but not insurmountable.
With enough devices on the market, altogether with advances in Ad-hoc networks, this may be possible (I think there are still tweaks to the routing protocols, which I think are pure madness).
I posted something about this just this morning, linking to an older article I wrote. In a nutshell, between advances in wireless networking protocols and approaches, improvements in mesh networking and new developments in end-to-end voice and data encryption, we can reasonably begin thinking about creating telco-less networks.
However, I see two main groups against such thing:
1. The carriers, that may lose a big chunk of customers that don't mind no having complete availability.
2. But most importantly, the government, which, besides of opposing to this, may also be worried about not being able to track users so easily and tap on conversations, as they do now.
So more than "technically", I think is politically unfeasible.
I reposted the article because of the SOPA fiasco currently playing itself out in the US Congress. Network ownership (or, more precisely, the affiliation between network owners and so-called content owners) is one of the main obstacles to the continued development of the Internet as we know it. The only way around the draconian content restrictions being proposed by media and tech companies is to operate a network that doesn't rely on their good graces.
I don't have any illusions whatsoever that a Jobs-inspired Apple network would have been a Free Information playground. Quite the contrary. It would most likely have resembled a digital Disneyland, with cutesy characters allowing you to do anything you like, as long as it's what they intended you to do in the first place.
Nonetheless, the idea of a Network Of Devices is sound. I just wish someone with both the necessary resources and a sane understanding of freedom were in a position to begin creating it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure such a creature exists....
This would explain the massive proliferation of governments whose sole purpose is murdering innocent civilians, right? Governments are made up of people - often the same people they govern, and who live right alongside citizens of that government.
Here's the major difference between what I said about corporations, and the s/corporation/government/g twist: governments, by their very nature, are established with the sole legal right, authority, and sanction to do violence on behalf of its citizenry.
Oh, you poor, naive young thing.
Did it never occur to you to wonder why the government's monopoly on punishment came about? It's because that power used to rest in the hands of the companies, and countless people suffered as a result.
Of the two (granting government more power, or granting corporations more power), neither is a "good" thing, but I've at least got a chance with the unarmed con man... not so much with the guy pointing a pistol at my head.
The private sector is just as capable of holding a gun to your head as the government. Moreso, even, if you hamstring the government and give all the power back to the corporations.
Thing is, the "cheap" model works when you keep your labor in China. Once Chinese companies start having to hire workers and build infrastructure in the US their costs will quickly rise to the level of US providers.
Not necessarily:
Because they're not publicly traded, they can strategise and execute their business plan based on much longer time periods;
They are almost certainly willing to accept lower profit margins than US telcos;
When building out their infrastructure, they can quite likely benefit from sweetheart deals with 'cousin' companies like Hua Wei;
They can outsource a very large portion of their operation back home to China;
They don't have a thick layer of vastly over-compensated managers draining the coffers with expectations of fat bonuses, corporate jets and such....
The Chinese may not offer the best quality in the world when it comes to goods and services, but they compete ferociously and, in my experience, fairly[*]. They simply cut your throat on price and wait for you to bleed to death. American consumers shouldn't assume this is entirely a bad thing.
------------
[*] Of course, 'fair' is an interesting term. I mean to say they don't tend to lie to you. If they say, 'I'm going to cut your mother's throat and kidnap your children', that's exactly what they intend to do. Contrast this with the polished, smiling American exec who mouths buzzword-laden platitudes while he deploys the straight razor, then gets offended when you won't meet him for golf on Sunday.
In effect, the editorial was stating that we should oppose the WTO because it creates local employment.
I think that's a simplistic view of it. The WTO could yet harm you.
I'm not disputing the latter. What I'm saying is that people are using arguments for the WTO to argue against it. And nobody seems to notice.
My post wasn't about the WTO (which surely deserves careful consideration). My post was about the inanity and absolute lack of reason in the local debate. Letters to the editor have included warnings about accession being a harbinger of the Apocalypse (seriously), that it will destroy local industries which, inconveniently, don't even exist, that it will cause trade imbalances in goods we don't trade in, etc. etc.
The WTO will have an impact on the local economy. But in their zeal to oppose it, people are latching onto any argument they can find, as opposed to the ones that are actually valid and meaningful.
It's not that people are stupid, it's that people may not have a complete education in given subjects.
No, often it really is just stupidity. People are happy to clamour for something without even thinking it through. They are happy to argue to the death for something based on knee-jerk reactions. That's not a lack of domain knowledge, that's just stupidity.
Indeed. I live in a developing country that's about to accede to the WTO, against significant opposition from the grass roots. In today's paper was an article about how the WTO is bad for the US because jobs suddenly become globalised. Yeah, they move into developing countries like ours.
In effect, the editorial was stating that we should oppose the WTO because it creates local employment.
We can then ask the empirical question: is there evidence to support the suggestion that the Universe has free will, can think, can observe, can change, can experience time's entropy-driven arrow, and thus or still be God. The answer there is totally obvious. There is no evidence for a single one of these claims.
How can there be any such evidence? All of the weapons of science are limited to "the particular space-time continuum in which we appear to reside". We can no more detect evidence of God than Spock could detect evidence of Gene Roddenberry.
*sigh*
Perhaps, but the body of scientific theory we've amassed allows us to conceive of a model of the universe that does not require a God in order to exist. Occam's Razor leads us therefore to leave God out of scientific theory.
Adding a God back into scientific theory requires evidence, of which there currently is none. Layering God on top of scientific theory is not Science. It is -quite literally- make believe.
Your post was unintelligible because public school didn't help you enough. Please learn to spell and punctuate properly before posting again, so that the rest of us can successfully parse your intended meaning.
This has been a public service announcement, as well as an ad-hominem attack.
No, that was not an ad hominem attack. No attempt was made to sully the person or their character; only their language skills were criticised.
Please learn to reason before posting again, so that the rest of us no longer need to correct your logic.
This has been a public service announcement, as well as a satirical reminder that taking a holier-than-thou tone often redounds against the author.
(I humbly await the next installment in this series....)
My point was that it sounded (To me) as if you tried to attack Bott solely on the basis of being praised by Florian Mueller.
It's not that important, just a note that such an attack can be used against anyone pretty effectively and is usually by itself.
While it's true that guilt by association is a logical fallacy, experience teaches us that people's reputation is rightly affected by the company they keep.
If Rob Enderle, Maureen O'Gara, Dan Lyons, Ed Bott and a total stranger all agree on the same thing, I am naturally inclined to disbelieve (and distrust) the total stranger too, because anyone who is either too stupid or too dishonest to see the blatant falsity of their claims isn't worth paying attention to. Not on that topic, anyway.
Now, if they later redeem themselves, or if they prove to be expert and reliable on unrelated topics, then there's every chance I'll begin to give them the benefit of the doubt on all topics.
Trust isn't a boolean value. It is never absolute. Being associated with known deceivers, though, casts my opinion of a person in a deeper shade of doubt. They'll have to work harder to come back into the light.
One can't help but wonder why they would ever have opened up these channels of communication. What did they expect to get as concerns? Technically the Executive has no power to do anything about any of this, so why bother with the dialogue? Every issue has to be resolved in the other two branches, so what did they hope to accomplish?
Christ, the cynicism and hopelessness in American society these days is appalling.
Maybe what they hoped to accomplish was to offer some concrete information to voters about how the patent system came to be the way it is, and to provide some pointers about how to go about effecting change...?
People in the US are so quick to whine about the emptiness of the promise to change, but they never lift a finger to change things. Either the politicians are too corrupt, or the party system sucks, or third parties are a waste of time, or the corporation own everything already, or the people are sheep....
Jesus Christ, people! It's all true because you -yes, you- allowed it to happen!
All my life, when I opposed something, I opposed it. I signed petitions, I marched, I got arrested when I felt it was necessary. I voted. I actually spoke to my candidates. I spoke to my neighbours. I still do. I don't always win; most of the time I don't. But at least I get off my ass from time to time and do something.
It's not the government that's fucked. It's the people.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology isn't just adding new terms to the language, it's also changing, and in some cases erasing, idioms that already exist. Take for example the phrase, "you sound like a broken record". How many people under the age of 25 even know what a broken record sounds like? As time goes on I expect that phrase to become increasingly rare, and to be replaced by a similar phrase, thus completing the circle of life :P
I think language is more arbitrary and unpredictable than that.
We still 'dial' a number, and our phones still 'ring', even though the actual dials and bells haven't been around for a generation. We still drop someone a line, even though operated-assisted calling hasn't been necessary for longer than this old grey-hair has been alive. We still go full steam ahead even though ships haven't burned coal for over a century. And people are still POSH centuries after 'Port Outward, Starboard Home' lost its original meaning.
Some phrases do drop out of currency, but others, for reasons too complex to fathom, seem to endure for centuries. Envy, for example, has been 'green' since Elizabethan times. Beautiful women have been compared to the sun since the Italian Renaissance. And ass-kissing has been around since Chaucer's time.
Well, that technology's history now and the language has gone with it.
Yes, because things like "LOL" and "WTF" have disappeared from the lexicon.
On wait, no they haven't. Turns out this guy is wrong on all counts. The technology is still here, and has in fact spread, and the language it has inspired is not gone, and has in fact spread.
Agreed. Only a luddite or linguistic saboteur would insist that technological change has no enduring impact on the English language. I'd suggest they'd gone completely off the rails and that they should shift gears and accept that technological jargon is always on the linguistic radar. Perhaps a mental reboot is called for....
Had you lived 150 years ago, you would have said the same about telegraphese
*dot* *dash* *dot* *dot*
*dash* *dash* *dash*
*dot* *dash* *dot* *dot*
You've totally misunderstood him. Full stop.
Strangely, they banned both root words and modifiers of root words... like calling out ass AND ass clown, ass banger, etc. It's like they don't know how filtering, or words, work.
Kind of a shame they didn't use regex-based word subsbreastutions, though perhaps they didn't feel enbreastled to make any bumumptions.
Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.
Or you could get together with 87,834 of your closest friends and call them.
It's good to see people mobilisation en masse to oppose this bill, but as others have said, it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.
The big danger that I see is how dangerously regressive and backward-looking attitudes on the Hill are.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people there, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.
Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.
I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:
The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.
There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression. Not, at least, in the same way that many American developers do - that is, at the axiomatic level, rather than as a conscious overlay to their world view.
I don't like what we are doing either, but if you think you have the right to tell another sovereign nation what they can and cant do like this, you can simply go to hell.
Given that SOPA is an attempt to apply American law to websites and Internet services across the globe, I find your comment hilarious.
You contradict yourself. UN ownership is, effectively, license for individual nations to do as they see fit within their own borders, and to legitimise arbitrary control of core elements of the Internet.
That in itself doesn't represent a significant change from the state of things today, except that it provides a framework to drag the entire network down to a lower common denominator where freedom is concerned.
The track record of IT-related UN agencies is decidedly mixed. WIPO has accepted as gospel numerous conceptions about so-called Intellectual Property that are anathema to most people here on Slashdot. Perhaps the most egregious example is of the chair of the organisation suggesting that the World Wide Web should have been patented and licensed. Cory Doctorow rightly calls this statement "a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence."
The ITU, which is responsible for many telecoms and radio-related standards, fares somewhat better. They render a useful service and have been instrumental in ensuring that telcos world-wide don't end up locking their respective markets away from others. Nonetheless, when some functionaries at the UN-sponsored World Summit on Internet Society suggested in 2004 that the ITU could take ICANN's place, the idea was rejected wholesale.
ICANN sucks in important ways, but it is at least a technical body (influenced, admittedly, more than it should be by Verisign and co.). The imposition of a UN mandate over the Internet almost certainly implies a lot more legislation and regulation than most geeks would want to see.
Well said. I think the mesh networks would work fine for communications in small dribs and drabs, but I just don't see how that many hops will be feasible for (acceptable) voice communications. Emergency, nextel and TXT style communication? Heck yeah.
Again, I won't take issue with your argument, but I guess I just take a glass-half-full kind of approach to engineering. While you're right that latency would build up pretty quickly, I would counter with the argument that:
So yeah, I don't see this kind of approach taking off in the States; I think there's just too much invested in the status quo. But in vast areas of the rest of the world, the communications revolution is only starting. That's where I see a place for crazy ideas like this.
How is it sound, exactly?
'Sound' in the sense that we've solved some of the key problems that kept this idea in the realm of the impossible. Now, it's merely improbably difficult. 8^)
If I need to make a call, I need to make sure someone else is in the area with their cell phone turned on and willing to let me drain their battery?
Agreed. Which makes it problematical for a lot of the continental US. But it's not so impractical in Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Egypt - countless other locales. Which, not coincidentally, represent the largest area of growth in wireless networks right now.
The battery issue is another kettle of fish. I can only hand-wave at the moment and assume that improvements in power storage and efficiency will continue for at least a decade, which would render this issue manageable, even if it doesn't solve it entirely.
How do you do long distance?
Assuming a data-only network (i.e. VOIP as the sole means of voice communication), you don't even think about it.
But I think what you're really asking is: How do I communicate with people on other networks; and how do I handle billing for inter-carrier calls (which is an astoundingly ugly and byzantine process)?
The short answer is: You don't.
The slightly longer answer becomes clear when you phrase the question thusly: How do I send email to someone who's on another Internet? Back in the days of AOL, Compuserve, Delphi and co. this used to be a real issue. Once the Internet asserted itself, however, the whole thing just sorted itself out.
To sum up, operating a carrier-less network allows you to dispose of a lot of the structures that the carriers have built into their data networks.
But notwithstanding what I've just writting, your point still holds that there are significant -show-stopping- issues that still need to be addressed. I don't deny that. I do, however, feel that these are finite technical problems, difficult but not insurmountable.
With enough devices on the market, altogether with advances in Ad-hoc networks, this may be possible (I think there are still tweaks to the routing protocols, which I think are pure madness).
I posted something about this just this morning, linking to an older article I wrote. In a nutshell, between advances in wireless networking protocols and approaches, improvements in mesh networking and new developments in end-to-end voice and data encryption, we can reasonably begin thinking about creating telco-less networks.
However, I see two main groups against such thing:
1. The carriers, that may lose a big chunk of customers that don't mind no having complete availability.
2. But most importantly, the government, which, besides of opposing to this, may also be worried about not being able to track users so easily and tap on conversations, as they do now.
So more than "technically", I think is politically unfeasible.
I reposted the article because of the SOPA fiasco currently playing itself out in the US Congress. Network ownership (or, more precisely, the affiliation between network owners and so-called content owners) is one of the main obstacles to the continued development of the Internet as we know it. The only way around the draconian content restrictions being proposed by media and tech companies is to operate a network that doesn't rely on their good graces.
I don't have any illusions whatsoever that a Jobs-inspired Apple network would have been a Free Information playground. Quite the contrary. It would most likely have resembled a digital Disneyland, with cutesy characters allowing you to do anything you like, as long as it's what they intended you to do in the first place.
Nonetheless, the idea of a Network Of Devices is sound. I just wish someone with both the necessary resources and a sane understanding of freedom were in a position to begin creating it. Unfortunately, I'm not sure such a creature exists....
Original submitter here. Amusingly, my slashdot nick is a mis-spelling of Graham Crumb, my non de plume. Flaky indeed.
Yeah, I can see it now:
slashdot.xxx IN CNAME goatse.xxx
Here's the major difference between what I said about corporations, and the s/corporation/government/g twist: governments, by their very nature, are established with the sole legal right, authority, and sanction to do violence on behalf of its citizenry.
Oh, you poor, naive young thing.
Did it never occur to you to wonder why the government's monopoly on punishment came about? It's because that power used to rest in the hands of the companies, and countless people suffered as a result.
Of the two (granting government more power, or granting corporations more power), neither is a "good" thing, but I've at least got a chance with the unarmed con man... not so much with the guy pointing a pistol at my head.
The private sector is just as capable of holding a gun to your head as the government. Moreso, even, if you hamstring the government and give all the power back to the corporations.
Thing is, the "cheap" model works when you keep your labor in China. Once Chinese companies start having to hire workers and build infrastructure in the US their costs will quickly rise to the level of US providers.
Not necessarily:
The Chinese may not offer the best quality in the world when it comes to goods and services, but they compete ferociously and, in my experience, fairly[*]. They simply cut your throat on price and wait for you to bleed to death. American consumers shouldn't assume this is entirely a bad thing.
------------
[*] Of course, 'fair' is an interesting term. I mean to say they don't tend to lie to you. If they say, 'I'm going to cut your mother's throat and kidnap your children', that's exactly what they intend to do. Contrast this with the polished, smiling American exec who mouths buzzword-laden platitudes while he deploys the straight razor, then gets offended when you won't meet him for golf on Sunday.
Actually, there's already an Android version based on this, named Fro Yo Ma.
In effect, the editorial was stating that we should oppose the WTO because it creates local employment.
I think that's a simplistic view of it. The WTO could yet harm you.
I'm not disputing the latter. What I'm saying is that people are using arguments for the WTO to argue against it. And nobody seems to notice.
My post wasn't about the WTO (which surely deserves careful consideration). My post was about the inanity and absolute lack of reason in the local debate. Letters to the editor have included warnings about accession being a harbinger of the Apocalypse (seriously), that it will destroy local industries which, inconveniently, don't even exist, that it will cause trade imbalances in goods we don't trade in, etc. etc.
The WTO will have an impact on the local economy. But in their zeal to oppose it, people are latching onto any argument they can find, as opposed to the ones that are actually valid and meaningful.
The main reason being that people in general are stupid.
Generally people are stupid, and well meaning. I'll take my chances with stupid and well meaning over devious and self-serving any day.
The first kind burned "witches", the second kind will just steal from you.
No, it's not an either/or situation. In most cases, the devious and self-serving are the ones who decide who the witches are.
No, often it really is just stupidity. People are happy to clamour for something without even thinking it through. They are happy to argue to the death for something based on knee-jerk reactions. That's not a lack of domain knowledge, that's just stupidity.
Indeed. I live in a developing country that's about to accede to the WTO, against significant opposition from the grass roots. In today's paper was an article about how the WTO is bad for the US because jobs suddenly become globalised. Yeah, they move into developing countries like ours.
In effect, the editorial was stating that we should oppose the WTO because it creates local employment.
Shit, I actually got first post. I guess I get downmodded now, right? :(
No, but you owe us $9.00.
sincerely,
The Slashdot App Store.
It's not so much that that laws were tuned to support life, but that life formed where the laws happened to be suitable.
Or more to the point, it tuned itself to the local conditions.
... At least, that's what Darwin would have us believe.
We can then ask the empirical question: is there evidence to support the suggestion that the Universe has free will, can think, can observe, can change, can experience time's entropy-driven arrow, and thus or still be God. The answer there is totally obvious. There is no evidence for a single one of these claims.
How can there be any such evidence? All of the weapons of science are limited to "the particular space-time continuum in which we appear to reside". We can no more detect evidence of God than Spock could detect evidence of Gene Roddenberry.
*sigh*
Perhaps, but the body of scientific theory we've amassed allows us to conceive of a model of the universe that does not require a God in order to exist. Occam's Razor leads us therefore to leave God out of scientific theory.
Adding a God back into scientific theory requires evidence, of which there currently is none. Layering God on top of scientific theory is not Science. It is -quite literally- make believe.
Your post was unintelligible because public school didn't help you enough. Please learn to spell and punctuate properly before posting again, so that the rest of us can successfully parse your intended meaning.
This has been a public service announcement, as well as an ad-hominem attack.
No, that was not an ad hominem attack. No attempt was made to sully the person or their character; only their language skills were criticised.
Please learn to reason before posting again, so that the rest of us no longer need to correct your logic.
This has been a public service announcement, as well as a satirical reminder that taking a holier-than-thou tone often redounds against the author.
(I humbly await the next installment in this series....)
That's like asking for a car that's pink. She picks the lightest weight one. And it turns out it's something on the quality level of a Yugo.
Well, I say she's smart - smart enough to choose a laptop that nobody will ever (EVER!) steal from her....
My point was that it sounded (To me) as if you tried to attack Bott solely on the basis of being praised by Florian Mueller.
It's not that important, just a note that such an attack can be used against anyone pretty effectively and is usually by itself.
While it's true that guilt by association is a logical fallacy, experience teaches us that people's reputation is rightly affected by the company they keep.
If Rob Enderle, Maureen O'Gara, Dan Lyons, Ed Bott and a total stranger all agree on the same thing, I am naturally inclined to disbelieve (and distrust) the total stranger too, because anyone who is either too stupid or too dishonest to see the blatant falsity of their claims isn't worth paying attention to. Not on that topic, anyway.
Now, if they later redeem themselves, or if they prove to be expert and reliable on unrelated topics, then there's every chance I'll begin to give them the benefit of the doubt on all topics.
Trust isn't a boolean value. It is never absolute. Being associated with known deceivers, though, casts my opinion of a person in a deeper shade of doubt. They'll have to work harder to come back into the light.
One can't help but wonder why they would ever have opened up these channels of communication. What did they expect to get as concerns? Technically the Executive has no power to do anything about any of this, so why bother with the dialogue? Every issue has to be resolved in the other two branches, so what did they hope to accomplish?
Christ, the cynicism and hopelessness in American society these days is appalling.
Maybe what they hoped to accomplish was to offer some concrete information to voters about how the patent system came to be the way it is, and to provide some pointers about how to go about effecting change...?
People in the US are so quick to whine about the emptiness of the promise to change, but they never lift a finger to change things. Either the politicians are too corrupt, or the party system sucks, or third parties are a waste of time, or the corporation own everything already, or the people are sheep....
Jesus Christ, people! It's all true because you -yes, you- allowed it to happen!
All my life, when I opposed something, I opposed it. I signed petitions, I marched, I got arrested when I felt it was necessary. I voted. I actually spoke to my candidates. I spoke to my neighbours. I still do. I don't always win; most of the time I don't. But at least I get off my ass from time to time and do something.
It's not the government that's fucked. It's the people.