What really pisses me off about your comment is that it's coming from a non-native English speaker, and it's better written (and exhibits, of course, better cognitive skills) than most of what I'd hear here at home (in the US).
I know, you've probably been speaking English your entire life, but I'm sure you get my point. I mean, most American's don't even have room in their heads for a single second language (though this is rapidly changing with Spanish and probably Chinese), and even with all that extra RAM, they still hose it up.
So, Mr. Swede, despite significant Norwegian DNA in my blood, I annoyedly thank you for your English. *Sigh* indeed.
Ah, the droning sarcasm. And that's the crux of the matter. It's not that most shabby writers don't know how to communicate clearly, or that they don't know the value of a system that's every bit as complex and nuanced as their pet programming language... it's that they know there is cultural inertia involved, and they choose - deliberately - to show contempt for what they (mistakenly) think of as some restraint on their unique geekiness.
This same behavior is found in the Goth crowd, for example, who in a rebellious fit of not wanting to be like everyone else, are instead exactly like a different large group of people. Or, the whole "sk8t3r" crowd, which isn't nearly as rebellious in their baggy pants uniform as they think they are. Basically, bad spelling and a fashionable disregard for useful grammer is the tongue stud in intelligent communication.
The elegance of a decently composed phrase, made the more readable through appropriate punctuation and a pleasingly wide vocabulary, means you actually give a damn about what you're trying to convey. People in IT frequently complain about the money they (don't) make, and can't understand why people don't take them any more seriously. In my experience, this is what it all comes down to: either laziness in communications, actual inability to communicate, or (and this is the worst) such poor critical thinking skills that the utility in clearly representing what one is thinking doesn't even register.
I'm not talking about abbreviations while IM-ing, either. This problem shows itself even when IT people are trying to compose a thoughtful memo asking for money to buy a router, or in trying to justify a raise or a impact a new policy. Language, and its precise use through the pen/keyboard, are not a chore, or some Corporate Shackle against which to rail. It's a device through which to show the clarity, and horsepower of your cognitive skills. You'd think that most geeks would go to a lot of trouble to be better communicators than the average person.
today's l33t speak is tomorrow's standard english spelling and pronunciation
Not if by using it less information is conveyed, or meaning becomes ambiguous, or the actual form of the language reinforces a culture of deliberate disrespect for the reader. Shakespeare took all sorts of liberty with spelling and form, but his output was more lyrical, and more densely meaningful than pretty much any string of 1334-speak you'll ever encounter.
Well, you're right, of course. Search engines, including MSN and Google, should always operate at a loss, preferrably until they go out of business. And if they do decide to do something as tasteless as run side-bar ads to pay for what everyone uses millions of times a day, they certainly shouldn't use any sort of technology to make those ads actually relevent or attractive to the people that the paying advertisers want to reach. Definately not. I know that the almighty, completely benign Google will surely lead the way in first abandoning any sort of contextual/visitor awareness in their ads, and then stop running them altogether and drain their shareholders' money until it all dries up and goes away.
Wait... I've got an idea. If you don't like MS, don't use their free search engine, and don't patronize the thousands of merchants and other entities that choose to advertise there. Gosh, that was complicated.
Actually, I saw them there just 10 minutes ago (um, and clicked, of course, because I was curious about their fine product - ads can be very helpful in connecting one to important vendors of high tech services, and... never mind).
They've got to know that coverage of their silly suit is going to cause a lot of this sort of traffic, and they've probably set their AdWords daily spending limit low enough that it took them out of circulation for the day already, or put them way down in the bid list so they don't feel so much (well deserved) pain.
Besides, since Ballmer's indicated that they want to "catch Google," they'd better be able to do some very, very clever stuff with ad targeting on the MSN search side. Might as well buy (rather than build) a business unit that already has a jillion-view history, and some people that have waded through all this stuff a million times.
Though, they should take at least a couple of the Gator people out back and wack 'em just on principle.
Well, sure. Or, you could go to Google right now, and search on "click fraud protection" and note the ads on the right. The ClickDefense.com ads are sort of begging for an expensive click, I'd say. All your ad budget is belong to us, etc. The point is, one click each from everyone on slashdot cannot be blocked by these clowns' own software, and that's exactly why their suit is nonsense anyway.
Ergo, they are not universal laws for us to discover
Well, I might even disagree with you there, too.
In short (certainly shorter than my last comment!), I'd say that certain value systems are demonstrably irrational. Thus, any morals that derive from them are irrational at best, or possibly even evil in an absolute sense - because of how it encourages that confused person to act in the presence of other people.
For example, if someone's premise is that the universe is run by magical frogs that insist we all die as soon as possible, and that only therein does life have meaning... well, there you have it. A value system that says life only has meaning in death is, fundamentally, objectively, crazy. I don't have any problem saying that any moral system derived from that world view is inherently, absolutely, objectively bad. Needless to say, that covers a lot of ground, including a lot of organized religions, and thus possibly the majority of the world's population. Of course, when you boil it down to the "life only means something in death" argument, those folks have to insert a magic frog (or an imaginary, feel-good afterlife) in order allow their basically rational to brains explain away a fundamentally flawed premise. At some level, all such people know they're working on a shaky foundation, so there's a bunch of self-denial baggage along for the ride to mask the logical flaws. It's those folks who most loudly trumpet moral relativism (or magic forgiveness) to get them past what their reason keeps trying to whisper to them.
Yes, this even applies to Google. People who like them because they're less Microsofty than Microsoft are still just splitting hairs. They're a company of people that exist to make money for themselves and their investors. They are very smart, and know how to appeal to people like DVD Jon (or how to placate his fans on slashdot), but at the end of the day, they're basing their corporate moral framework on reason. In some ways, corporate morals have the prospect of being more rational than individual ones... mostly because the corporation doesn't have the sure knowledge of its own eventual mortality, and doesn't use magical thinking to invent a lifestyle or mythology that takes away some of that fear. There, now that should get some flames going!
the biggest recipients of Oil Vouchers (which are, well, you know, VOUCHERS, not actual oil, or actual money) were US citizen and corporations.
Of course - the whole point of the oil-for-food system was to actually promote the continuing sale of Iraqi oil so that the proceeds to feed the Iraqi people, despite their glorious leader's bad habit of attacking neighboring countries or local ethnic minorities. Much of that business was done through US companies, just like it was done through companies all over the world (oil is used everywhere, don't you know). The issue is the personal receipt of those vouchers by people who used them in various forms of influence peddling. At least a couple of unscrupulous American oil traders used them for personal profit. I was referring to the receipt of them by officials (say, in France) who either themselves, or through their close associates, were able to loudly proclaim their commitment to using French security council veto power to block any UN sanction of force to remove Saddam. The Russians (another huge recipient, and shady dealer in the vouchers) pretty much said the same thing, only in even more absolute terms). Hell, both countries made regular press releases to that effect. It's one thing for people in the oil business, who trade oil every day, to buy oil vouchers from Iraq. It's quite another to receive them as "gifts" in the same period of time that you're saying Saddam should be left alone in his brutality.
"shooting at the UN-mandated no-fly-zone patrol aircraft every day" care to back that with a link? Can't find one? Yeah, thought so.
"Every day" as in "every day that they could re-assemble the anti-aircraft hardware that UK and US pilots continually destroyed when/wherever they could find it." Usually they found it by tracing the targeting radar signals and fire they were taking from it. On a first page of Google results, here is an example of a typical month or two of Iraqi AA facilities illuminating and/or shooting (once in range, if allowed by the pilots) at patroling aircraft. Or here, where a Washington Post correspondent mentions the hundreds of engagements that started to ramp up after 1998 when Saddam had started to rebuild is AA facilities (with, of course, oil-for-food money). Or here, where CNN mentions Iraq firing SA-2 missiles into Kuwaiti airspace trying to knock down observation planes over the southern no-fly zone. Or here, where pilots mention the hundreds of such encounters that started to increase after 1998. Or, articles like this Soooo, which ethnic groups did saddam target during the "Oil for Food" program
I was referring more to the general subjugation of the Shia majority to the Sunni minority. Goes without saying that the Kurds got the shaft starting way back in the 1970s. Under the northern no-fly zone, though, which also precluded the movement of any Iraqi military hardware in that area, the Kurds actually built up substantially better lives (through trade with their northern neighbors) and were in a much better position to thrive when Saddam was completely taken out of the picture. Under the protection of the no-fly enforcement, the Kurds evolved an independent political entity that defined a de facto state including ministries, a parliament, central banking/currency, and a functional bureaucracy. Knowing they weren't getting attacked by Saddam any longer, they didn't bother waiting for his inevitable demise. The investment in that Kurdish infrastructure only came because of trust in the ongoing protection from the no-fly operations.
First of all: Morals are not absolute. The concept of Evil is not at all easy to define.
I'd have to disagree with you there. But morals only exist when you have already laid down the fundamental premises of your value system. Say, for example, that your value system includes being the sole beneficiary of your own efforts (unless you decide to give or trade them to someone else). Many "morals" can be derived from something as simple as that, and they are absolute and immutable. It's very easy then, within that moral framework, to say that someone who seeks to deprive you of your life (or the things you produce with your life, such as your work) is evil. Morals are the practical behavioral rules that are derived from the premises from which your values derive. People who say there are no objectively right or wrong things tend to be operating with mixed premises (like, "I am master of my own destiny, but I'm also master of yours, because I know better than you" or, "I am no-one's slave, but when two or more people get together to work on something, they should be everyone's slaves"). Evil is that which seeks to undo, or run counter that which is valued. If your values support a rationale for slavery, then certainly anyone fighting against slavery is evil, from your perspective. If your values abhor slavery, then the opposite is true. So there's not much point talking about evil, but there's a lot to be said for talking about the premises upon which value systems are built. I, for example, hold that the only value that meaningfully exists is that which I create. I can trade what I value for that which other people offer, or I can give it freely (in exchange for the pleasure I may feel in the act), but it's from that basic premise that I derive pretty much every good/bad value judgement. For example: if you try to take away what I value (my life, or any of what I've created with it), then you're evil. If I act contrary to my own values (say, doing the same to someone else), then I'm being evil. Of course, there are more subtle examples (such as when I can use force, because someone, through their actions, have abandoned any claim on the rights that non-evilness buys you), but they are no less objectively absolute for being complex in their practicality.
All that being said, the term evil is tossed around on slashdot as a fashionable adjective to describe anyone (or group of anyones) that says or does something unliked. To the extent that, say, a company makes money - some people call them evil. To the extent that other people try to block European researchers from working on practical fusion, they're evil (or vice versa, if you're a Greenpeace brainwashee).
Guys like DVD Jon are a mixed bag. More than anything, he's a traditional hacker - focused on technological challenges as if they were formed in a vacuum. The problem is that most of the challenges he's known for solving revolve around enabling people to alter, after-the-fact, the terms of a contract or transaction. By most objective standards, that would be considered evil. Evil, in the sense of deceitful, or parasitical. One is not "liberating" the creative work of others by altering the means by which the creator secures the work from freeloading. But Jon's moral rudderlessness is apparent when he hacks a bit of open source Google code and changes its behavior to suit his interests. There's no evil there, on the face of it, because of the terms under which he's laid hands on the code. But if he's altering it in a way that allows him to then make use of a service (say, Google video streaming) that is not intended for that sort of use, then he's back on the dark side. By being showy about how quickly he cracks or alters things, he's distracting shallowly-thinking nerds from the moral implications of his acts, and thus obscuring the mixed premises upon which his value system is built. Doesn't mean anything about his technical skills, just means that his motivations are probably contrary to personal interest, whether he'll acknowledge that or not.
Fusion may be better than fusion, but it is by no means a clean technology.
But neither is coal, natural gas, or any other hydrocarbon. Wind and solar won't even come close to powering the 21st century, and fission is definitely loaded with potential safety issues on the supply, operations, and disposal fronts. So why would anyone object to the research this new facility is going to do? It doesn't stop research into other areas, but it has the prospect of developing something that could be a huge offset for the equally risky, and vastly dirtier hydrocarbon approach.
So, bringing up the logistical complications of working on fusion isn't the same as showing it to be unacceptable, or even as bad as using irreplaceable oil/coal. I'm all for geothermal, wave/tide, hydro, biomass, solar, and wind where they can be used to chip away at the overall load. But "chip" is the key word there.
while the US acted unilaterally to horde resources for themselves
Now, how exactly is that taking place? Really. I'm genuinely curious, when I hear that thought expressed, just how the international oil market is being kept from buying Iraqi oil. If the US was actually doing anything at all like you're describing, wouldn't we have kept some influence over how Kuwait is doing business, having saved them from Saddam's earlier invasion? Instead, we're busy competing with huge new purchases from China and India, and watching our oil costs go up. Or, we might invest all of the billions we're pouring into things like infrastructure in Iraq (like the electrical grid, now producing more electricity than it was while Saddam was in power, or the municipal water systems, which we're dragging back from 20 years of neglect) and instead just build a lot more oil pumping facilities and only allow in our tankers... but of course that is not the situation, and you know it. Iraq is free to sell their oil to anyone who's willing to pay the going rate. The biggest problem the US has is not oil supply, it's refining capacity. But if you're so sure we're "hording" resrouces, please point out how you're actually arriving at that conclusion. On the other hand, you used the phrase "should history show," which of course means that you don't know any such thing, but bashing the US makes you feel good, so you thought you'd get off that little jab. At least now, when Iraq sells a barrel of their oil, the proceeds don't go directly to Saddam, his thuggish military, and a minority tribe from Tikrit (and to a few slimy international oil voucher recipients, including officials in France, who went to a great deal of trouble to try to keep Saddam in power, even as he was routinely killing certain ethnic groups, sending cash to Hamas and Hezbollah, and shooting at the UN-mandated no-fly-zone patrol aircraft every day).
There's no irony if you don't actually have the situation described correctly. Only weak rhetoric.
Even the strategy to set up a sham democracy with a political strongman to replace Saddam doesn't look like its going to run now.
Sham? Just because some Sunni leaders talked a lot of their people into not voting (a real blunder, too... they realized later - shocking! - that they weren't going to be represented as they would have been, but the Shia were smart, and appointed some Sunnis to key positions specifically to cool the situation) doesn't make it a sham. Are you suggesting that the votes wheren't counted correctly? Just because some punks killed some people at some polling places doesn't make the election a sham.
And, 'political strongman'? This isn't 1970's Panama. The international media sits in on the legislative sessions, and their constitution is being formed in broad daylight.
but if you truely believe he 'trafficked' with the Taliban you have been sold another big lie
I didn't say that. I said terrorists. For example, his well-advertised payments of $50k to families of suicide bombers who killed in Israel. Or his very busy traffic in weapons through Syria to outfits like Hezbollah and Hamas. Or harboring people like Zarqawi and providing him with medical treatment. These aren't Big Lies(tm), they're just part of the actual picture. The Taliban was trying (and succeeding in some circles) to make retro-fundamentalism popular, and Saddam certainly wasn't above using that undercurrent to gain sympathy from some groups that otherwise loathed his secular ways.
It seems very clear that he never formed alliances with the Taliban or Al Quaeda.
Not with the Taliban, per se, but he certainly had contact with Al Quaeda, at the very least through is intelligence layer, and certainly he was not hostile to their activities in and near his borders. To the extent that the organization was a thorn in our side, he was happy to let them do business in his neighborhood.
No such person exists, and I have as little access to this non-existent person as you.
Right. So, ask a lot of Iraqis. You can form a statistical 'average' Iraqi from there. Of course an ex-Baathist Sunni who's no longer getting blood money from Saddam is going to be a little grumpier than a Kurdish merchant who can finally have a life.
That's why we really have to move on from talking about Baathism and realise the increasingly religious/ethnic dimension of the insurgency.
Yup. But the former Baathists have buddies (and a lot of cash and arms) in places like Syria, and to the extent that the Al Queada-types want help, they're certainly going to leverage that.
Everyone (not just today's insurgents) is just waiting for the US to leave so they can struggle to set up their particular relgious utopia. That's why Bush is right that you can't set a timetable for withdrawal,
Very true...
that's why in fact the US can't withdraw for the forseeable future
... we said the same thing about Japan...
why it was a massive blunder ever to go in in the first place!
Guess we'll have to disagree. I'd much rather have us camped out there, in a democracy, than in Saudi Arabia, which is just getting aroud to elections for dog catcher.
In terms 9/11 and the war on terror, which is what I was responding to, it is clear that the intervention in Iraq has merely fanned the fires of terror, made the US more reviled and boosted the number of terrorists in training.
Actually, I'd say that the elements that are still signing up aren't really that more numerous. The Taliaban had huge recruits back when they had Afghanistan as their hand-chopping-off headquarters, and Al Queada's camps there saw thousands upon thousands of people go through for training and indoctrination. The fact that the 9/11 attacks (and the embassies, and the Cole, etc) didn't see the U.S. curl up and slink away are what have pissed off the extremi
You're certainly right. My reaction, alas, is to their sweeping, knee-jerk (and entirely predictable) condemnation of research like this just because it resonates with the same things they've been protesting for years.
Protesting all things "nuclear" is essentially a religion for these clowns, and they seek to use emotionally high-strung messages to cut off reasonable research, and even reasonable discussion about it.
That doesn't mean that we should just twiddle our fingers while working on bio-fuel, etc. But I certainly won't hesitate to poke my finger in their eye when they're behaving like twits, which they do pretty much non-stop. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, etc.
Way to compare invading a country and killing a bunch of people with building a science project!
Way to assume that's what I was talking about!
By the way... suppose there was a guy who was busy regularly burying thousands and thousands of a particular ethnicity in mass graves, and that funneled money to terrorists, and that had a bad habit of attacking neighboring countries. Or that after signing a UN agreement regarding, among other things, no-fly zones above the areas where he was slaughtering people, still shot at the aircraft securing those areas every week for years. Would stopping someone like that from operating, saving countless lives as a result, and getting to watch those people have actual elections also rate below a "science project?"
Just curious. I not only consider those pursuits not to be mutually exclusive, but I think that we can't really put the resources we should into science until guys like that are less able to poison the world.
But that's all a side-bar discussion. I was referring, of course, to the French attitude about the "unilateral" US position on cheese tariffs. I find them to be hypocritical about that. And about the sale of California wines in France.
This article has nothing to do with french culture or social attitudes
Oh, but it does! That's the point. The facility is going to be located in France largely because of the way that the French worked the politics of the situation.
I'll sure as hell be fascinated to watch what happens with this project, and hope it really goes well. It's just a shame it didn't get started 20 years ago... but it didn't because of petty cultural attitudes. This particular resolution to that bottleneck was not free of those same issues. So, it's done. Let's look forward to the next article that actually talks about the science (the coverage of this didn't really address anyting new at all on that front) or the practical engineering of the facility.
which relies upon a presumption that Greenpeace is against the technology rather than the timings involved in developing it
Or, you could do a little more homework and see that Greenpeace actually does oppose the very technology in question. Here they are quoted as saying that fusion "has all the problems of nuclear power, including producing nuclear waste and the risks of a nuclear accident." This doesn't come across like a position on the timing of the research. Greenpeace holds all sorts of positions that, acted upon, would be mind numbingly expensive. Even they can't think it's an either-or proposition (researching new methods, like fusion, while also making current technologies more efficient). These things aren't mutually exclusive, but Greenpeace's "anything with the the prefix 'nuc' is inherently evil/foolish" mantra is nonsense.
The larger issue, though, to get back to your point (wherein you called me a liar), is that the quote in question, as I presented it, is going to be digested by most casual (and non-scientific) news consumers in pretty much exactly the context in which is was quoted. They're going to hear "this is nuclear, it's bad" no matter how many phrases come before or after it. Greenpeace's frequently simple-minded fan club doesn't really bother with the details, pretty much ever.
But more to the (and back to my original) point: blocking this sort of research doesn't magically make any of Greenpeace's fantasy solutions instantly more achievable or economically viable. But if they can demonstrate to enough people that those things are worth pursuing, that doesn't make important research like this less so. If the people who speak for (or rave about) Greenpeace wanted to sound less shrill, they'd adopt a more rational tone generally. But after all these years, they keep choosing not to, and live in a emotionally inflated, eco-anthropomorphized echo chamber that doesn't actually help develop the tools that would burn less oil. They rely on fear-soaked press releases that, even to the non-savvy are transparently silly, and seem to think that grade-school level dramatics and tantrum-having will solve problems. And to the extent that not everyone involved is like that, those people should be realizing how the whinier majority of their group robs all of them of any credibility whatsoever.
And you Yanks are always accusing everyone of being anti-American, can you not see any hypocrisy?
Actually, if this project had gone to Japan, I don't think you'd see even 1% of the cross-border sniping. There's a reason the French are sort of magnets for the comments you see here - they're notorious for dishing it out themselves. I live in a pretty cosmopolitan area with neighbors from all over the world. People from most every continent. It's funny how almost universally they joke about the French attitude, and complain about how they are treated when traveling there. Not by everyone, but often enough. Then, of course, there are my neighbors from Africa, who have an abiding loathing of the French, and a surprising affection for German culture.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that no, I don't see hypocrisy in the way you're characterizing it. I see the French getting some of the social backlash that they seem to go to so much trouble to generate. That being said, I wish that the US was smarter about electricity generation, and had as high a ratio of fission plants as the French do. Being smart (about some things, like nukes, wine, cheese and some clothing lines) and being smug (about, well, most everything) aren't mutually exclusive. I wish the project well, and hope that the wider EU participation, especially to the extent that more of the eastern countries participate, will get the French to relax their Frenchness juste un peu.
We should invest those billions of dollars into proven wind power generators right now
But then you've got another bunch of protesters complaining about the windfarms ruining the appearance of the habitat, killing birds, killing bats, making noise, and requiring thousands of miles of new cables to be stretched across the countryside. It's not whether they work, they just get a completely different group of protesters in court complaining about a different set of issues.
Are there any international rules against what France did?
I'm really not talking about that. I'm just referring to the fun that French politicians have referring to what they see as US arrogance on all sorts of subjects, when they themselves (see their policies in Africa, or much of what they seek to do with trade/tarrifs, etc) are actually quite willing to say that other countries or organizations aren't worth listening to.
Neither do I. My point is that the French complain sometimes, very loudly, when other countries (like the US) do things unilaterally, or suggest that maybe some partners aren't worth having. Then, they do the very same thing. But again, nice wine, cheese, and Greenpeace boat sinking. So, I somewhat forgive them that little bit of hypocrisy.
France had to threaten unilateral action to get this thing the way they wanted it. The Japanese participation was going to hinge on spending less money, given the location the French wanted. The French said they'd just build a group of participants who did see it their way and do it without those that were objecting because they knew it was the right thing to do, and it had to get started... um... huh. This sounds so oddly familiar. But I just know the French would only use such rhetoric if they didn't mind other people doing the same.
Still, as much as I like to rib the French, I'll cut them some slack just because they're so good at pissing off Greenpeace.
Slashdot Mirror
What really pisses me off about your comment is that it's coming from a non-native English speaker, and it's better written (and exhibits, of course, better cognitive skills) than most of what I'd hear here at home (in the US).
I know, you've probably been speaking English your entire life, but I'm sure you get my point. I mean, most American's don't even have room in their heads for a single second language (though this is rapidly changing with Spanish and probably Chinese), and even with all that extra RAM, they still hose it up.
So, Mr. Swede, despite significant Norwegian DNA in my blood, I annoyedly thank you for your English. *Sigh* indeed.
whatever
Ah, the droning sarcasm. And that's the crux of the matter. It's not that most shabby writers don't know how to communicate clearly, or that they don't know the value of a system that's every bit as complex and nuanced as their pet programming language... it's that they know there is cultural inertia involved, and they choose - deliberately - to show contempt for what they (mistakenly) think of as some restraint on their unique geekiness.
This same behavior is found in the Goth crowd, for example, who in a rebellious fit of not wanting to be like everyone else, are instead exactly like a different large group of people. Or, the whole "sk8t3r" crowd, which isn't nearly as rebellious in their baggy pants uniform as they think they are. Basically, bad spelling and a fashionable disregard for useful grammer is the tongue stud in intelligent communication.
The elegance of a decently composed phrase, made the more readable through appropriate punctuation and a pleasingly wide vocabulary, means you actually give a damn about what you're trying to convey. People in IT frequently complain about the money they (don't) make, and can't understand why people don't take them any more seriously. In my experience, this is what it all comes down to: either laziness in communications, actual inability to communicate, or (and this is the worst) such poor critical thinking skills that the utility in clearly representing what one is thinking doesn't even register.
I'm not talking about abbreviations while IM-ing, either. This problem shows itself even when IT people are trying to compose a thoughtful memo asking for money to buy a router, or in trying to justify a raise or a impact a new policy. Language, and its precise use through the pen/keyboard, are not a chore, or some Corporate Shackle against which to rail. It's a device through which to show the clarity, and horsepower of your cognitive skills. You'd think that most geeks would go to a lot of trouble to be better communicators than the average person.
today's l33t speak is tomorrow's standard english spelling and pronunciation
Not if by using it less information is conveyed, or meaning becomes ambiguous, or the actual form of the language reinforces a culture of deliberate disrespect for the reader. Shakespeare took all sorts of liberty with spelling and form, but his output was more lyrical, and more densely meaningful than pretty much any string of 1334-speak you'll ever encounter.
Well, you're right, of course. Search engines, including MSN and Google, should always operate at a loss, preferrably until they go out of business. And if they do decide to do something as tasteless as run side-bar ads to pay for what everyone uses millions of times a day, they certainly shouldn't use any sort of technology to make those ads actually relevent or attractive to the people that the paying advertisers want to reach. Definately not. I know that the almighty, completely benign Google will surely lead the way in first abandoning any sort of contextual/visitor awareness in their ads, and then stop running them altogether and drain their shareholders' money until it all dries up and goes away.
Wait... I've got an idea. If you don't like MS, don't use their free search engine, and don't patronize the thousands of merchants and other entities that choose to advertise there. Gosh, that was complicated.
Actually, I saw them there just 10 minutes ago (um, and clicked, of course, because I was curious about their fine product - ads can be very helpful in connecting one to important vendors of high tech services, and... never mind).
They've got to know that coverage of their silly suit is going to cause a lot of this sort of traffic, and they've probably set their AdWords daily spending limit low enough that it took them out of circulation for the day already, or put them way down in the bid list so they don't feel so much (well deserved) pain.
Besides, since Ballmer's indicated that they want to "catch Google," they'd better be able to do some very, very clever stuff with ad targeting on the MSN search side. Might as well buy (rather than build) a business unit that already has a jillion-view history, and some people that have waded through all this stuff a million times.
Though, they should take at least a couple of the Gator people out back and wack 'em just on principle.
Well, sure. Or, you could go to Google right now, and search on "click fraud protection" and note the ads on the right. The ClickDefense.com ads are sort of begging for an expensive click, I'd say. All your ad budget is belong to us, etc. The point is, one click each from everyone on slashdot cannot be blocked by these clowns' own software, and that's exactly why their suit is nonsense anyway.
Ergo, they are not universal laws for us to discover
Well, I might even disagree with you there, too.
In short (certainly shorter than my last comment!), I'd say that certain value systems are demonstrably irrational. Thus, any morals that derive from them are irrational at best, or possibly even evil in an absolute sense - because of how it encourages that confused person to act in the presence of other people.
For example, if someone's premise is that the universe is run by magical frogs that insist we all die as soon as possible, and that only therein does life have meaning... well, there you have it. A value system that says life only has meaning in death is, fundamentally, objectively, crazy. I don't have any problem saying that any moral system derived from that world view is inherently, absolutely, objectively bad. Needless to say, that covers a lot of ground, including a lot of organized religions, and thus possibly the majority of the world's population. Of course, when you boil it down to the "life only means something in death" argument, those folks have to insert a magic frog (or an imaginary, feel-good afterlife) in order allow their basically rational to brains explain away a fundamentally flawed premise. At some level, all such people know they're working on a shaky foundation, so there's a bunch of self-denial baggage along for the ride to mask the logical flaws. It's those folks who most loudly trumpet moral relativism (or magic forgiveness) to get them past what their reason keeps trying to whisper to them.
Yes, this even applies to Google. People who like them because they're less Microsofty than Microsoft are still just splitting hairs. They're a company of people that exist to make money for themselves and their investors. They are very smart, and know how to appeal to people like DVD Jon (or how to placate his fans on slashdot), but at the end of the day, they're basing their corporate moral framework on reason. In some ways, corporate morals have the prospect of being more rational than individual ones... mostly because the corporation doesn't have the sure knowledge of its own eventual mortality, and doesn't use magical thinking to invent a lifestyle or mythology that takes away some of that fear. There, now that should get some flames going!
Or maybe Count Obama?
Somehow "Master Kennedy" just doesn't have the same ring to it. And "Darth Delay" is only slightly better than "General Grievous"
the biggest recipients of Oil Vouchers (which are, well, you know, VOUCHERS, not actual oil, or actual money) were US citizen and corporations.
Of course - the whole point of the oil-for-food system was to actually promote the continuing sale of Iraqi oil so that the proceeds to feed the Iraqi people, despite their glorious leader's bad habit of attacking neighboring countries or local ethnic minorities. Much of that business was done through US companies, just like it was done through companies all over the world (oil is used everywhere, don't you know). The issue is the personal receipt of those vouchers by people who used them in various forms of influence peddling. At least a couple of unscrupulous American oil traders used them for personal profit. I was referring to the receipt of them by officials (say, in France) who either themselves, or through their close associates, were able to loudly proclaim their commitment to using French security council veto power to block any UN sanction of force to remove Saddam. The Russians (another huge recipient, and shady dealer in the vouchers) pretty much said the same thing, only in even more absolute terms). Hell, both countries made regular press releases to that effect. It's one thing for people in the oil business, who trade oil every day, to buy oil vouchers from Iraq. It's quite another to receive them as "gifts" in the same period of time that you're saying Saddam should be left alone in his brutality.
"shooting at the UN-mandated no-fly-zone patrol aircraft every day" care to back that with a link? Can't find one? Yeah, thought so.
"Every day" as in "every day that they could re-assemble the anti-aircraft hardware that UK and US pilots continually destroyed when/wherever they could find it." Usually they found it by tracing the targeting radar signals and fire they were taking from it. On a first page of Google results, here is an example of a typical month or two of Iraqi AA facilities illuminating and/or shooting (once in range, if allowed by the pilots) at patroling aircraft. Or here, where a Washington Post correspondent mentions the hundreds of engagements that started to ramp up after 1998 when Saddam had started to rebuild is AA facilities (with, of course, oil-for-food money). Or here, where CNN mentions Iraq firing SA-2 missiles into Kuwaiti airspace trying to knock down observation planes over the southern no-fly zone. Or here, where pilots mention the hundreds of such encounters that started to increase after 1998. Or, articles like this
Soooo, which ethnic groups did saddam target during the "Oil for Food" program
I was referring more to the general subjugation of the Shia majority to the Sunni minority. Goes without saying that the Kurds got the shaft starting way back in the 1970s. Under the northern no-fly zone, though, which also precluded the movement of any Iraqi military hardware in that area, the Kurds actually built up substantially better lives (through trade with their northern neighbors) and were in a much better position to thrive when Saddam was completely taken out of the picture. Under the protection of the no-fly enforcement, the Kurds evolved an independent political entity that defined a de facto state including ministries, a parliament, central banking/currency, and a functional bureaucracy. Knowing they weren't getting attacked by Saddam any longer, they didn't bother waiting for his inevitable demise. The investment in that Kurdish infrastructure only came because of trust in the ongoing protection from the no-fly operations.
First of all: Morals are not absolute. The concept of Evil is not at all easy to define.
I'd have to disagree with you there. But morals only exist when you have already laid down the fundamental premises of your value system. Say, for example, that your value system includes being the sole beneficiary of your own efforts (unless you decide to give or trade them to someone else). Many "morals" can be derived from something as simple as that, and they are absolute and immutable. It's very easy then, within that moral framework, to say that someone who seeks to deprive you of your life (or the things you produce with your life, such as your work) is evil. Morals are the practical behavioral rules that are derived from the premises from which your values derive. People who say there are no objectively right or wrong things tend to be operating with mixed premises (like, "I am master of my own destiny, but I'm also master of yours, because I know better than you" or, "I am no-one's slave, but when two or more people get together to work on something, they should be everyone's slaves"). Evil is that which seeks to undo, or run counter that which is valued. If your values support a rationale for slavery, then certainly anyone fighting against slavery is evil, from your perspective. If your values abhor slavery, then the opposite is true. So there's not much point talking about evil, but there's a lot to be said for talking about the premises upon which value systems are built. I, for example, hold that the only value that meaningfully exists is that which I create. I can trade what I value for that which other people offer, or I can give it freely (in exchange for the pleasure I may feel in the act), but it's from that basic premise that I derive pretty much every good/bad value judgement. For example: if you try to take away what I value (my life, or any of what I've created with it), then you're evil. If I act contrary to my own values (say, doing the same to someone else), then I'm being evil. Of course, there are more subtle examples (such as when I can use force, because someone, through their actions, have abandoned any claim on the rights that non-evilness buys you), but they are no less objectively absolute for being complex in their practicality.
All that being said, the term evil is tossed around on slashdot as a fashionable adjective to describe anyone (or group of anyones) that says or does something unliked. To the extent that, say, a company makes money - some people call them evil. To the extent that other people try to block European researchers from working on practical fusion, they're evil (or vice versa, if you're a Greenpeace brainwashee).
Guys like DVD Jon are a mixed bag. More than anything, he's a traditional hacker - focused on technological challenges as if they were formed in a vacuum. The problem is that most of the challenges he's known for solving revolve around enabling people to alter, after-the-fact, the terms of a contract or transaction. By most objective standards, that would be considered evil. Evil, in the sense of deceitful, or parasitical. One is not "liberating" the creative work of others by altering the means by which the creator secures the work from freeloading. But Jon's moral rudderlessness is apparent when he hacks a bit of open source Google code and changes its behavior to suit his interests. There's no evil there, on the face of it, because of the terms under which he's laid hands on the code. But if he's altering it in a way that allows him to then make use of a service (say, Google video streaming) that is not intended for that sort of use, then he's back on the dark side. By being showy about how quickly he cracks or alters things, he's distracting shallowly-thinking nerds from the moral implications of his acts, and thus obscuring the mixed premises upon which his value system is built. Doesn't mean anything about his technical skills, just means that his motivations are probably contrary to personal interest, whether he'll acknowledge that or not.
Fusion may be better than fusion, but it is by no means a clean technology.
But neither is coal, natural gas, or any other hydrocarbon. Wind and solar won't even come close to powering the 21st century, and fission is definitely loaded with potential safety issues on the supply, operations, and disposal fronts. So why would anyone object to the research this new facility is going to do? It doesn't stop research into other areas, but it has the prospect of developing something that could be a huge offset for the equally risky, and vastly dirtier hydrocarbon approach.
So, bringing up the logistical complications of working on fusion isn't the same as showing it to be unacceptable, or even as bad as using irreplaceable oil/coal. I'm all for geothermal, wave/tide, hydro, biomass, solar, and wind where they can be used to chip away at the overall load. But "chip" is the key word there.
while the US acted unilaterally to horde resources for themselves
Now, how exactly is that taking place? Really. I'm genuinely curious, when I hear that thought expressed, just how the international oil market is being kept from buying Iraqi oil. If the US was actually doing anything at all like you're describing, wouldn't we have kept some influence over how Kuwait is doing business, having saved them from Saddam's earlier invasion? Instead, we're busy competing with huge new purchases from China and India, and watching our oil costs go up. Or, we might invest all of the billions we're pouring into things like infrastructure in Iraq (like the electrical grid, now producing more electricity than it was while Saddam was in power, or the municipal water systems, which we're dragging back from 20 years of neglect) and instead just build a lot more oil pumping facilities and only allow in our tankers... but of course that is not the situation, and you know it. Iraq is free to sell their oil to anyone who's willing to pay the going rate. The biggest problem the US has is not oil supply, it's refining capacity. But if you're so sure we're "hording" resrouces, please point out how you're actually arriving at that conclusion. On the other hand, you used the phrase "should history show," which of course means that you don't know any such thing, but bashing the US makes you feel good, so you thought you'd get off that little jab. At least now, when Iraq sells a barrel of their oil, the proceeds don't go directly to Saddam, his thuggish military, and a minority tribe from Tikrit (and to a few slimy international oil voucher recipients, including officials in France, who went to a great deal of trouble to try to keep Saddam in power, even as he was routinely killing certain ethnic groups, sending cash to Hamas and Hezbollah, and shooting at the UN-mandated no-fly-zone patrol aircraft every day).
There's no irony if you don't actually have the situation described correctly. Only weak rhetoric.
Even the strategy to set up a sham democracy with a political strongman to replace Saddam doesn't look like its going to run now.
... we said the same thing about Japan ...
Sham? Just because some Sunni leaders talked a lot of their people into not voting (a real blunder, too... they realized later - shocking! - that they weren't going to be represented as they would have been, but the Shia were smart, and appointed some Sunnis to key positions specifically to cool the situation) doesn't make it a sham. Are you suggesting that the votes wheren't counted correctly? Just because some punks killed some people at some polling places doesn't make the election a sham.
And, 'political strongman'? This isn't 1970's Panama. The international media sits in on the legislative sessions, and their constitution is being formed in broad daylight.
but if you truely believe he 'trafficked' with the Taliban you have been sold another big lie
I didn't say that. I said terrorists. For example, his well-advertised payments of $50k to families of suicide bombers who killed in Israel. Or his very busy traffic in weapons through Syria to outfits like Hezbollah and Hamas. Or harboring people like Zarqawi and providing him with medical treatment. These aren't Big Lies(tm), they're just part of the actual picture. The Taliban was trying (and succeeding in some circles) to make retro-fundamentalism popular, and Saddam certainly wasn't above using that undercurrent to gain sympathy from some groups that otherwise loathed his secular ways.
It seems very clear that he never formed alliances with the Taliban or Al Quaeda.
Not with the Taliban, per se, but he certainly had contact with Al Quaeda, at the very least through is intelligence layer, and certainly he was not hostile to their activities in and near his borders. To the extent that the organization was a thorn in our side, he was happy to let them do business in his neighborhood.
No such person exists, and I have as little access to this non-existent person as you.
Right. So, ask a lot of Iraqis. You can form a statistical 'average' Iraqi from there. Of course an ex-Baathist Sunni who's no longer getting blood money from Saddam is going to be a little grumpier than a Kurdish merchant who can finally have a life. That's why we really have to move on from talking about Baathism and realise the increasingly religious/ethnic dimension of the insurgency.
Yup. But the former Baathists have buddies (and a lot of cash and arms) in places like Syria, and to the extent that the Al Queada-types want help, they're certainly going to leverage that.
Everyone (not just today's insurgents) is just waiting for the US to leave so they can struggle to set up their particular relgious utopia. That's why Bush is right that you can't set a timetable for withdrawal,
Very true...
that's why in fact the US can't withdraw for the forseeable future
why it was a massive blunder ever to go in in the first place!
Guess we'll have to disagree. I'd much rather have us camped out there, in a democracy, than in Saudi Arabia, which is just getting aroud to elections for dog catcher.
In terms 9/11 and the war on terror, which is what I was responding to, it is clear that the intervention in Iraq has merely fanned the fires of terror, made the US more reviled and boosted the number of terrorists in training.
Actually, I'd say that the elements that are still signing up aren't really that more numerous. The Taliaban had huge recruits back when they had Afghanistan as their hand-chopping-off headquarters, and Al Queada's camps there saw thousands upon thousands of people go through for training and indoctrination. The fact that the 9/11 attacks (and the embassies, and the Cole, etc) didn't see the U.S. curl up and slink away are what have pissed off the extremi
You're certainly right. My reaction, alas, is to their sweeping, knee-jerk (and entirely predictable) condemnation of research like this just because it resonates with the same things they've been protesting for years.
Protesting all things "nuclear" is essentially a religion for these clowns, and they seek to use emotionally high-strung messages to cut off reasonable research, and even reasonable discussion about it.
That doesn't mean that we should just twiddle our fingers while working on bio-fuel, etc. But I certainly won't hesitate to poke my finger in their eye when they're behaving like twits, which they do pretty much non-stop. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, etc.
And... using that expression "coalition of the willing"
Actually, it was Reuters that used that phrase. Read the orginally linked-to article.
Way to compare invading a country and killing a bunch of people with building a science project!
Way to assume that's what I was talking about!
By the way... suppose there was a guy who was busy regularly burying thousands and thousands of a particular ethnicity in mass graves, and that funneled money to terrorists, and that had a bad habit of attacking neighboring countries. Or that after signing a UN agreement regarding, among other things, no-fly zones above the areas where he was slaughtering people, still shot at the aircraft securing those areas every week for years. Would stopping someone like that from operating, saving countless lives as a result, and getting to watch those people have actual elections also rate below a "science project?"
Just curious. I not only consider those pursuits not to be mutually exclusive, but I think that we can't really put the resources we should into science until guys like that are less able to poison the world.
But that's all a side-bar discussion. I was referring, of course, to the French attitude about the "unilateral" US position on cheese tariffs. I find them to be hypocritical about that. And about the sale of California wines in France.
This article has nothing to do with french culture or social attitudes
Oh, but it does! That's the point. The facility is going to be located in France largely because of the way that the French worked the politics of the situation.
I'll sure as hell be fascinated to watch what happens with this project, and hope it really goes well. It's just a shame it didn't get started 20 years ago... but it didn't because of petty cultural attitudes. This particular resolution to that bottleneck was not free of those same issues. So, it's done. Let's look forward to the next article that actually talks about the science (the coverage of this didn't really address anyting new at all on that front) or the practical engineering of the facility.
which relies upon a presumption that Greenpeace is against the technology rather than the timings involved in developing it
Or, you could do a little more homework and see that Greenpeace actually does oppose the very technology in question. Here they are quoted as saying that fusion "has all the problems of nuclear power, including producing nuclear waste and the risks of a nuclear accident." This doesn't come across like a position on the timing of the research. Greenpeace holds all sorts of positions that, acted upon, would be mind numbingly expensive. Even they can't think it's an either-or proposition (researching new methods, like fusion, while also making current technologies more efficient). These things aren't mutually exclusive, but Greenpeace's "anything with the the prefix 'nuc' is inherently evil/foolish" mantra is nonsense.
The larger issue, though, to get back to your point (wherein you called me a liar), is that the quote in question, as I presented it, is going to be digested by most casual (and non-scientific) news consumers in pretty much exactly the context in which is was quoted. They're going to hear "this is nuclear, it's bad" no matter how many phrases come before or after it. Greenpeace's frequently simple-minded fan club doesn't really bother with the details, pretty much ever.
But more to the (and back to my original) point: blocking this sort of research doesn't magically make any of Greenpeace's fantasy solutions instantly more achievable or economically viable. But if they can demonstrate to enough people that those things are worth pursuing, that doesn't make important research like this less so. If the people who speak for (or rave about) Greenpeace wanted to sound less shrill, they'd adopt a more rational tone generally. But after all these years, they keep choosing not to, and live in a emotionally inflated, eco-anthropomorphized echo chamber that doesn't actually help develop the tools that would burn less oil. They rely on fear-soaked press releases that, even to the non-savvy are transparently silly, and seem to think that grade-school level dramatics and tantrum-having will solve problems. And to the extent that not everyone involved is like that, those people should be realizing how the whinier majority of their group robs all of them of any credibility whatsoever.
And you Yanks are always accusing everyone of being anti-American, can you not see any hypocrisy?
Actually, if this project had gone to Japan, I don't think you'd see even 1% of the cross-border sniping. There's a reason the French are sort of magnets for the comments you see here - they're notorious for dishing it out themselves. I live in a pretty cosmopolitan area with neighbors from all over the world. People from most every continent. It's funny how almost universally they joke about the French attitude, and complain about how they are treated when traveling there. Not by everyone, but often enough. Then, of course, there are my neighbors from Africa, who have an abiding loathing of the French, and a surprising affection for German culture.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that no, I don't see hypocrisy in the way you're characterizing it. I see the French getting some of the social backlash that they seem to go to so much trouble to generate. That being said, I wish that the US was smarter about electricity generation, and had as high a ratio of fission plants as the French do. Being smart (about some things, like nukes, wine, cheese and some clothing lines) and being smug (about, well, most everything) aren't mutually exclusive. I wish the project well, and hope that the wider EU participation, especially to the extent that more of the eastern countries participate, will get the French to relax their Frenchness juste un peu.
We should invest those billions of dollars into proven wind power generators right now
But then you've got another bunch of protesters complaining about the windfarms ruining the appearance of the habitat, killing birds, killing bats, making noise, and requiring thousands of miles of new cables to be stretched across the countryside. It's not whether they work, they just get a completely different group of protesters in court complaining about a different set of issues.
Are there any international rules against what France did?
I'm really not talking about that. I'm just referring to the fun that French politicians have referring to what they see as US arrogance on all sorts of subjects, when they themselves (see their policies in Africa, or much of what they seek to do with trade/tarrifs, etc) are actually quite willing to say that other countries or organizations aren't worth listening to.
Also, IIRC Greenpeace grudgingly supports nuclear technology because it's the lesser evil.
Actually, the word they use in reference to this particular project is "madness." Here is an article discussing their condemnation of this project.
care to source that "real quote"?
I'm guessing you don't consider Reuters to be trustworthy? Well, anyway: here's a run of the article as seen on Yahoo where you can read the quote verbatim.
I don't see Japan as really a loser here
Neither do I. My point is that the French complain sometimes, very loudly, when other countries (like the US) do things unilaterally, or suggest that maybe some partners aren't worth having. Then, they do the very same thing. But again, nice wine, cheese, and Greenpeace boat sinking. So, I somewhat forgive them that little bit of hypocrisy.
France had to threaten unilateral action to get this thing the way they wanted it. The Japanese participation was going to hinge on spending less money, given the location the French wanted. The French said they'd just build a group of participants who did see it their way and do it without those that were objecting because they knew it was the right thing to do, and it had to get started... um... huh. This sounds so oddly familiar. But I just know the French would only use such rhetoric if they didn't mind other people doing the same.
Still, as much as I like to rib the French, I'll cut them some slack just because they're so good at pissing off Greenpeace.