"continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications"
Well, if you'd look around, you could see that a _lot_ of those researchers didn't learn in the US during those years that the mentioned standardized tests are scoring. And I mean a lot. Don't misunderstand: what I'd like to point at is that the number of publications is not the best (to put it mildly) measure of kids' generic education quality. The quality of general science education should be measured among those kids who have learnt in the US education system from the beginning. Now, whether the test itself is good or not, I don't know about that, since no test is perfect, ever. The only thing they could do is keep the difficulty level of those tests constant for e.g. a decade, and evaluate current results w.r.t. previous ones. But if they change the difficulty or the scoring system, than there's not much use for it.
"similar to the way utilities charge for electricity. By switching to this model, the cable companies can increase their profitibility"
This sounds like ignorant idiotism at its peaks. Most of you here will remember (some might still live it...) the modem days, pricing per kilobyte, browsing web pages with ads, images and everything disabled, replying to e-mails offline and sending in batch, no online video, no streaming radios, and sometimes still ridiculously high bills at the end of the month.
That's where you're headed, and they will call it progress.
You people recently seem to try to make those people's decisions increasingly easier who consider moving to the US.
Like, consider regular flat rate dsl prices. There were times when we were looking from central europa with awe towards the cheapness over the pond. Today, a 1.5mbit dsl in PST costs almost exactly what we pay for a 5mbit dsl in CET. And now they're "evolving" you back to usage-based fees. Nice.
Google's competitors want to do exactly this. They are at the core concerned that google search gives users such information so easily, and want to use european regulators to put a stop to this to get traffic to their crappier services.
I agree. This whole issue is a they-were-here-first but I-want-profits-too scenario. If Bing can't deliver similar quality search results and/or "experience" (some do like that word in this context:)) than the only thing they can do is force them to change through 3rd parties.
While I don't like everything Google does, generally I really don't mind that they are so good in scraping together so much information in a way that makes my life easier when I'm looking for something. I also don't mind Google putting their services first, since if I'd be in a similar situation, I also would put the advertisement of my own services above others.
Just think about it, you provide search results for queries using the freely available Internet information as a basis, ranking them based on your own view (i.e. algorithm). This is a service that you provide, when someone comes along and says you have to do a worse job, since their similar service can't keep up. You'd say screw them in a heartbeat.
"and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable"
Well, I - and a lot of others - in turn find the publication prices of open access journals unpayable. And some people keep forgetting that if major journals - lots of which are US-based - would switch to open access publication models, the wide majority of non-US researchers would simply not be able to afford publishing in those journals. Well, it would reduce competition in high impact journals, that's for sure, some might enjoy that scenario. And an issue most of these advocates don't seem to care much about is that if such model would go through, there would be cases when you'd need to pay even when their papers don't get published (i.e. comes with switching all costs onto the authors).
While I don't like the prices some publishing houses use, and surely it could be improved, I don't think a simple switch to these open access models could be a quick fix. And, as I said before, if the high impact journals don't switch, and all at once (which won't happen anytime soon), then there would be no point in the whole thing anyway.
I would never allow any patent to go through which describes something obvious and/or being already done before just beause it involves implementatin on mobile devices. Why? Because they are just that, re-implementations on another device. It doesn't matter how much extra lines of codes it needs, it's nothing new involved besides a few technicalitiries. I know pro-software patent people will not agree, but hey, you already got your ever lasting christmas when sw patents became possible, with that you've exhausted all your wishes for this lifetime, plus eventually sentencing the sw ecosystem to death, good job there geniuses.
It's (should not be) just about what these - and other - icons look like, but more about what they represent and mean. It shouldn't matter that some of the objects/concepts depicted are not fashionable or used that much anymore, the only thing that should matter is that computer using people know what functionality they represent. And I've yet to meet people who don't know that.
It's pretty hard to find pictograms that are ageless. And since we still use a variety of devices and OSes (thank god, but who knows how long will it stay this way), and such fundamental changes would need to be accepted and used by all of them, otherwise you could indeed end up in a situation where people wouldn't know what functionality an icon represents on another OS. It would all become a mess.
I prefer to think of this - using historical pictorams in icons - as being reminded of computing history, and I don't really see any real reason in changing e.g. the save icon, or the copy/paste icons, etc. It would make absolutely no sense to change the floppy to an sdcard or something, because these technologies fade out faster than they appear. And you don't want to create an environment where icon pictograms need to be changed every 1-2 years to follow device and storage developments. I'm sorry but that would be simply insane.
Going for text menus only or going for the Ubuntu HUD is also a bit retarded, since while sometimes can be somewhat cool, most of the times is just a hindrance of real work and reduces your effectivity.
"Bittorrent is a great protocol, but it can be improved in many ways."
The only thing that needs fixing is to make BT more robust against such kinds of attacks. These guys are good in that they might show some ways the current implementation is vulnerable, so BT devs can work on those issues.
"Solving" their "piracy" problems should not be a way that involves attacking others' services. IANAL, but I suppose there are places where such behavior might be even against the law.
âoeWe just donâ(TM)t teach enough science,â he said. âoeIn elementary school, science education is often just an hour a week. In California, eighth-grade students are only taught in physical science, not in Earth or space sciences â" another reason why they would
If you see the problem, then hell, do something about it. Forget about wars and stuff, teach the kids, there's not much being more important than that. Ever.
I didn't grow up in the US. When I was 6 grader, I had 2 chemistry, 2 physics, 4 math, 1 biology class each week (among all the other stuff). I have 2 universiy degrees and a phd. Another 4 of my 8th grade-classmates also have phd degrees. Go figure.
Well, that would be the day when I'd stick such badges up in the originator's behind and leave for greaner pastures.
This is not gamification, it's introduction of idiotic, ignorant and almost always unncessary extra race factors, with the negative aspect over all others that this type only motivates the idiots at your company and the rest will feel as being considered a child.
Some managers just need to be kicked out when they are stupid, not all their ideas are great, understood? Good. Now get back to work.
It's long been true that a top reason to go to academic conferences isn't only for the paper presentations, but rather for the hallway/dinner/bar conversations about those papers.
There is nothing similar between researchers talking with each other at a conference, and average commenters posting comments on a blog. Some will hate me for this but I have to say this is the same thing as comparing journalism with blogging (oh my, how many long and idiotic quarrels about this are out there). It is absolutely relevant, who participates in the discussion and who leaves the comments.
This line of thought inthe article in the parent comment seem very similar to thoughts some people are preaching about how scientific publications should be evaluated and judged by the wide public in a wiki/blog-like format. Both suggest the originators' ignorance about research, researchers and science in general.
Either you get free air travel, or you publish somewhere insane, or can't do math.
Thanks:)
Even nature and Science offer open access for about 2k. That is only 6k. You can do a 12 conferences for 6k? The registration fees alone can cost more than that.
Oh, you mean everyone who matters publishes in Nature and Science? Right. In my field most journals that matter and have good impact do not offer pre-paid "open access" publication options. Journals that do, they don't matter, don't have impact, and fees are around 2-4kEuros. Thanks, but no thanks. Going with those numbers 12 is probably a bit unrealistic, but 5-6 could fit nicely (with 600Eur reg. fee, 1000-1200Eur travel, 500Eur accomodations).
On a sidenote, groklaw says the judge has asked the parties to reflect upon the EU court's decision on APIs being non-copyrightable. Should be a nice exercise:)
and anyway, the cost of paying up front tends to be pretty low vs a normal research budget.
You might (I don't know) refer to US research projects, but we have to think global here. Let's just take a 3 year project, let it be a one man project, in which you publish 3 journal articles and go to 12 conferences. The 3 "open access" journal publications would cost more than 12 overseas conferences, which no sane funder would accept. And if you take into consideration that those journals don't have any impact factor, you won't be taken seriously by your fellow reseachers either.
And if you think of a 3 year research project with 10 consortium members (I've just finished such one), where publication numbers can go up exponentially, it quickly become unreasonable to calculate with 2-4000 Euro per-publication costs. It's just crazy.
Until ALL the respected high impact journals switch to a pre-paid open access model, and funders start funding such publication costs, this is all a real and unconditional no-go.
Maybe "Open access" should not be understood as "anyone submits anything, Wikipedia-style", but more "anyone can read any approved publication"?
Yeah, that understanding is already there, problem is that if you suddenyl change the model from "publish for free, subscribe to read" into "publish for 4000USD, read for free", then most researchers (at least the most of whom I know) will just stop publishing. Sad but true.
One, there is no funding agency at the moment who would fund you thousands of dollars/euros per publication. Two, most of serious researchers don't (yet?) consider these "open access" publications to be quality ones, and most of them don't even have IF, and they won't until they can really prove that they're not just about pay-to-publish money sinkholes.
Not being able to use the code as the reader pleases is equivalent to not being able to reproduce the results.
I'm sorry but this is stupid. Research is not free software charity work. Most of software developed for research - unless we're talking software research strictly of course - is proof-of-concept code to underline an idea, and the results are what matter, not the implementation. Most researchers wouldn't even have time to create publishable quality code, because it's not the goal, it's just a tool. But all is not lost, since most sincere researchers will run their algorithms on your data if you ask, and a lot of researchers provide at least some libraries or binaries to test their stuff.
But saying that without software the results are irreproducible, is not true. The papers are all about describing the methods - sometimes a bit vagualey, true, but then again, if you want to patent and protect something, you can't always be totally clear. It's just how this game is played.
Reproducing an algorithm from descriptions in a paper is usually a student's job, sometimes as an entry-level filter when they want to work on something more serious. If you fail to understand and implement algorithms, you've got not much to look for in research. Implementing algorithms is a basic thing that you need to be able to do. Otherwise you're just a curious citizen.
frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions
Yeah, sounds like a "solution". Shift fees from the University budget (i.e. library) of subscribing for journals unto the researchers and labs paying the open access publication fees from their own research budgets (we're talking thousands of dollars per publication here).
I am a researcher, and I also hate the unfair fees publishers require for journal subscriptions, but I will never submit an article to an "open access" journal.
I mean users must have the right to examine, compile, run and modify the code for any purpose (emphasis mine): really? I know it's "science" and "open", but come on, realism needs to kick in at some point.
I'll take wading through search results any day over any ultra intelligent electronic agents' supposedly "intelligent" suggestions for me. First, there's nothing "intelligent" in it, they also are search engines, which use some natural language processing to formulate the queries, and then filter the results so you see what its algorithm picks for you. Which I don't always want, in fact most of the time I don't want that. I don't say these agents are not useful sometimes, they can be, but replacing regular searches is a long way off.
Why do we have to go over similar issues every time some "new" tech comes along and some "smart" chit-chatters start to preach all other related tech's failure, doom and death? It's stupid.
while Apple's iOS remained free of malware, despite owning 30% of the mobile smartphone market in the U.S.
Really? That number in that question? Do you think malware takes the US market share into consideration? Don't you think the global market share would be the only relevant number if citing share percentage numbers related to global malware proliferation? Or malware is only written and distribute themselves in the US? If so tell us, so we can disconnect the rest of the world, just to be on the safe side.
And oh, yes, please don't leave iOS's superiority out of the paragraph either, since it's so quite obvious that is must be its superiority, since it's so... superior and all.
Most people coming to the USA on holiday to see Mickey Mouse won't care
It's not about who doesn't care at the moment.
It's about: if things are going in this direction now, what will we have in 10-20-30 years? See, now that's what's scary
Now, my feeling is that all this data collection can hurt much more the average traveller, than the bad guys. Think of people who fly a lot here and there (including me, lot inside the EU and quite frequently to the US), and suddenly this automated tracking system they have pops their names up for one or the other reason (e.g. fly too frequently, spend too little time in one place or the other, god forbid they happened to go to some "suspicious" country, and so on) and from then on their lives will be miserable if they want to go to the US.
As always, thjis won't bother the bad guys, because they can probably do the necessary precautions, as always. But those hundreds or thousands of average people who can get hassled because of some algorithm with 0.x percentage error rate, now that won't be fun.
We should just fire all the EU's p*sy poiliticians who won't even consider applying the same standards towards other countries and their citizens that they are being subjected to.
Slashdot Mirror
"continued to lead the world in scientific journal publications"
Well, if you'd look around, you could see that a _lot_ of those researchers didn't learn in the US during those years that the mentioned standardized tests are scoring. And I mean a lot. Don't misunderstand: what I'd like to point at is that the number of publications is not the best (to put it mildly) measure of kids' generic education quality. The quality of general science education should be measured among those kids who have learnt in the US education system from the beginning. Now, whether the test itself is good or not, I don't know about that, since no test is perfect, ever. The only thing they could do is keep the difficulty level of those tests constant for e.g. a decade, and evaluate current results w.r.t. previous ones. But if they change the difficulty or the scoring system, than there's not much use for it.
"Microsoft added artificial restrictions to Silverlight"
Uhm, what do we say now... let's try: We told you so!
How many endless debates in forums back in the day when Mono development started, all in vain.
What about Internet2 (internet2.edu)?
"unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post"
:) Nice wording there, senator.
The definition of an anonymous poster
Eradication of whistle blowers, opinions and free speech in general? Nice move.
And if it is embedded into your skull or in one of your other critical organs?
Well, then suddenly a lot of people will change careers to being farmers on subtropical islands.
"similar to the way utilities charge for electricity. By switching to this model, the cable companies can increase their profitibility"
This sounds like ignorant idiotism at its peaks. Most of you here will remember (some might still live it...) the modem days, pricing per kilobyte, browsing web pages with ads, images and everything disabled, replying to e-mails offline and sending in batch, no online video, no streaming radios, and sometimes still ridiculously high bills at the end of the month.
That's where you're headed, and they will call it progress.
You people recently seem to try to make those people's decisions increasingly easier who consider moving to the US.
Like, consider regular flat rate dsl prices. There were times when we were looking from central europa with awe towards the cheapness over the pond. Today, a 1.5mbit dsl in PST costs almost exactly what we pay for a 5mbit dsl in CET. And now they're "evolving" you back to usage-based fees. Nice.
Google's competitors want to do exactly this. They are at the core concerned that google search gives users such information so easily, and want to use european regulators to put a stop to this to get traffic to their crappier services.
:)) than the only thing they can do is force them to change through 3rd parties.
I agree. This whole issue is a they-were-here-first but I-want-profits-too scenario. If Bing can't deliver similar quality search results and/or "experience" (some do like that word in this context
While I don't like everything Google does, generally I really don't mind that they are so good in scraping together so much information in a way that makes my life easier when I'm looking for something. I also don't mind Google putting their services first, since if I'd be in a similar situation, I also would put the advertisement of my own services above others.
Just think about it, you provide search results for queries using the freely available Internet information as a basis, ranking them based on your own view (i.e. algorithm). This is a service that you provide, when someone comes along and says you have to do a worse job, since their similar service can't keep up. You'd say screw them in a heartbeat.
"and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable"
Well, I - and a lot of others - in turn find the publication prices of open access journals unpayable. And some people keep forgetting that if major journals - lots of which are US-based - would switch to open access publication models, the wide majority of non-US researchers would simply not be able to afford publishing in those journals. Well, it would reduce competition in high impact journals, that's for sure, some might enjoy that scenario. And an issue most of these advocates don't seem to care much about is that if such model would go through, there would be cases when you'd need to pay even when their papers don't get published (i.e. comes with switching all costs onto the authors).
While I don't like the prices some publishing houses use, and surely it could be improved, I don't think a simple switch to these open access models could be a quick fix. And, as I said before, if the high impact journals don't switch, and all at once (which won't happen anytime soon), then there would be no point in the whole thing anyway.
I would never allow any patent to go through which describes something obvious and/or being already done before just beause it involves implementatin on mobile devices. Why? Because they are just that, re-implementations on another device. It doesn't matter how much extra lines of codes it needs, it's nothing new involved besides a few technicalitiries. I know pro-software patent people will not agree, but hey, you already got your ever lasting christmas when sw patents became possible, with that you've exhausted all your wishes for this lifetime, plus eventually sentencing the sw ecosystem to death, good job there geniuses.
It's (should not be) just about what these - and other - icons look like, but more about what they represent and mean. It shouldn't matter that some of the objects/concepts depicted are not fashionable or used that much anymore, the only thing that should matter is that computer using people know what functionality they represent. And I've yet to meet people who don't know that.
It's pretty hard to find pictograms that are ageless. And since we still use a variety of devices and OSes (thank god, but who knows how long will it stay this way), and such fundamental changes would need to be accepted and used by all of them, otherwise you could indeed end up in a situation where people wouldn't know what functionality an icon represents on another OS. It would all become a mess.
I prefer to think of this - using historical pictorams in icons - as being reminded of computing history, and I don't really see any real reason in changing e.g. the save icon, or the copy/paste icons, etc. It would make absolutely no sense to change the floppy to an sdcard or something, because these technologies fade out faster than they appear. And you don't want to create an environment where icon pictograms need to be changed every 1-2 years to follow device and storage developments. I'm sorry but that would be simply insane.
Going for text menus only or going for the Ubuntu HUD is also a bit retarded, since while sometimes can be somewhat cool, most of the times is just a hindrance of real work and reduces your effectivity.
"Bittorrent is a great protocol, but it can be improved in many ways."
The only thing that needs fixing is to make BT more robust against such kinds of attacks. These guys are good in that they might show some ways the current implementation is vulnerable, so BT devs can work on those issues.
"Solving" their "piracy" problems should not be a way that involves attacking others' services. IANAL, but I suppose there are places where such behavior might be even against the law.
âoeWe just donâ(TM)t teach enough science,â he said. âoeIn elementary school, science education is often just an hour a week.
In California, eighth-grade students are only taught in physical science, not in Earth or space sciences â" another reason why they would
If you see the problem, then hell, do something about it. Forget about wars and stuff, teach the kids, there's not much being more important than that. Ever.
I didn't grow up in the US. When I was 6 grader, I had 2 chemistry, 2 physics, 4 math, 1 biology class each week (among all the other stuff). I have 2 universiy degrees and a phd. Another 4 of my 8th grade-classmates also have phd degrees. Go figure.
One example would be assigning badges
Well, that would be the day when I'd stick such badges up in the originator's behind and leave for greaner pastures.
This is not gamification, it's introduction of idiotic, ignorant and almost always unncessary extra race factors, with the negative aspect over all others that this type only motivates the idiots at your company and the rest will feel as being considered a child.
Some managers just need to be kicked out when they are stupid, not all their ideas are great, understood? Good. Now get back to work.
It's long been true that a top reason to go to academic conferences isn't only for the paper presentations, but rather for the hallway/dinner/bar conversations about those papers.
There is nothing similar between researchers talking with each other at a conference, and average commenters posting comments on a blog. Some will hate me for this but I have to say this is the same thing as comparing journalism with blogging (oh my, how many long and idiotic quarrels about this are out there). It is absolutely relevant, who participates in the discussion and who leaves the comments.
This line of thought inthe article in the parent comment seem very similar to thoughts some people are preaching about how scientific publications should be evaluated and judged by the wide public in a wiki/blog-like format. Both suggest the originators' ignorance about research, researchers and science in general.
Either you get free air travel, or you publish somewhere insane, or can't do math.
:)
Thanks
Even nature and Science offer open access for about 2k. That is only 6k. You can do a 12 conferences for 6k? The registration fees alone can cost more than that.
Oh, you mean everyone who matters publishes in Nature and Science? Right. In my field most journals that matter and have good impact do not offer pre-paid "open access" publication options. Journals that do, they don't matter, don't have impact, and fees are around 2-4kEuros. Thanks, but no thanks. Going with those numbers 12 is probably a bit unrealistic, but 5-6 could fit nicely (with 600Eur reg. fee, 1000-1200Eur travel, 500Eur accomodations).
"bad news for developers"
:)
In the U.S.A., that is.
On a sidenote, groklaw says the judge has asked the parties to reflect upon the EU court's decision on APIs being non-copyrightable. Should be a nice exercise
and anyway, the cost of paying up front tends to be pretty low vs a normal research budget.
You might (I don't know) refer to US research projects, but we have to think global here. Let's just take a 3 year project, let it be a one man project, in which you publish 3 journal articles and go to 12 conferences. The 3 "open access" journal publications would cost more than 12 overseas conferences, which no sane funder would accept. And if you take into consideration that those journals don't have any impact factor, you won't be taken seriously by your fellow reseachers either.
And if you think of a 3 year research project with 10 consortium members (I've just finished such one), where publication numbers can go up exponentially, it quickly become unreasonable to calculate with 2-4000 Euro per-publication costs. It's just crazy.
Until ALL the respected high impact journals switch to a pre-paid open access model, and funders start funding such publication costs, this is all a real and unconditional no-go.
Maybe "Open access" should not be understood as "anyone submits anything, Wikipedia-style", but more "anyone can read any approved publication"?
Yeah, that understanding is already there, problem is that if you suddenyl change the model from "publish for free, subscribe to read" into "publish for 4000USD, read for free", then most researchers (at least the most of whom I know) will just stop publishing. Sad but true.
One, there is no funding agency at the moment who would fund you thousands of dollars/euros per publication. Two, most of serious researchers don't (yet?) consider these "open access" publications to be quality ones, and most of them don't even have IF, and they won't until they can really prove that they're not just about pay-to-publish money sinkholes.
Not being able to use the code as the reader pleases is equivalent to not being able to reproduce the results.
I'm sorry but this is stupid. Research is not free software charity work. Most of software developed for research - unless we're talking software research strictly of course - is proof-of-concept code to underline an idea, and the results are what matter, not the implementation. Most researchers wouldn't even have time to create publishable quality code, because it's not the goal, it's just a tool. But all is not lost, since most sincere researchers will run their algorithms on your data if you ask, and a lot of researchers provide at least some libraries or binaries to test their stuff.
But saying that without software the results are irreproducible, is not true. The papers are all about describing the methods - sometimes a bit vagualey, true, but then again, if you want to patent and protect something, you can't always be totally clear. It's just how this game is played.
Reproducing an algorithm from descriptions in a paper is usually a student's job, sometimes as an entry-level filter when they want to work on something more serious. If you fail to understand and implement algorithms, you've got not much to look for in research. Implementing algorithms is a basic thing that you need to be able to do. Otherwise you're just a curious citizen.
frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions
Yeah, sounds like a "solution". Shift fees from the University budget (i.e. library) of subscribing for journals unto the researchers and labs paying the open access publication fees from their own research budgets (we're talking thousands of dollars per publication here).
I am a researcher, and I also hate the unfair fees publishers require for journal subscriptions, but I will never submit an article to an "open access" journal.
No wonder.
I mean users must have the right to examine, compile, run and modify the code for any purpose (emphasis mine): really? I know it's "science" and "open", but come on, realism needs to kick in at some point.
I'll take wading through search results any day over any ultra intelligent electronic agents' supposedly "intelligent" suggestions for me. First, there's nothing "intelligent" in it, they also are search engines, which use some natural language processing to formulate the queries, and then filter the results so you see what its algorithm picks for you. Which I don't always want, in fact most of the time I don't want that. I don't say these agents are not useful sometimes, they can be, but replacing regular searches is a long way off.
Why do we have to go over similar issues every time some "new" tech comes along and some "smart" chit-chatters start to preach all other related tech's failure, doom and death? It's stupid.
It could place providers in the position of requiring warrants for all law enforcement requests
All I can say is: Duhh! Halleluiah!
while Apple's iOS remained free of malware, despite owning 30% of the mobile smartphone market in the U.S.
Really? That number in that question? Do you think malware takes the US market share into consideration? Don't you think the global market share would be the only relevant number if citing share percentage numbers related to global malware proliferation? Or malware is only written and distribute themselves in the US? If so tell us, so we can disconnect the rest of the world, just to be on the safe side.
And oh, yes, please don't leave iOS's superiority out of the paragraph either, since it's so quite obvious that is must be its superiority, since it's so... superior and all.
Most people coming to the USA on holiday to see Mickey Mouse won't care
It's not about who doesn't care at the moment.
It's about: if things are going in this direction now, what will we have in 10-20-30 years? See, now that's what's scary
Now, my feeling is that all this data collection can hurt much more the average traveller, than the bad guys. Think of people who fly a lot here and there (including me, lot inside the EU and quite frequently to the US), and suddenly this automated tracking system they have pops their names up for one or the other reason (e.g. fly too frequently, spend too little time in one place or the other, god forbid they happened to go to some "suspicious" country, and so on) and from then on their lives will be miserable if they want to go to the US.
As always, thjis won't bother the bad guys, because they can probably do the necessary precautions, as always. But those hundreds or thousands of average people who can get hassled because of some algorithm with 0.x percentage error rate, now that won't be fun.
We should just fire all the EU's p*sy poiliticians who won't even consider applying the same standards towards other countries and their citizens that they are being subjected to.