I know this is a joke, but if any girlfriend of mine ever had the balls to read my e-mail, she'd be out the door.
There isn't anything that I wouldn't want her to see in there, either. It's the principle of the thing. Relationships are based on trust, and when someone is reading your personal correspondence behind your back, trust is lacking.
I'm a pretty laid back guy, but I don't play games with my privacy.
All things considered, alphas and sparcs are not all that different in price. I used to run OpenVMS on my Alpha (which granted was an old model, but still).
Trusted Solaris is a good stab at UNIX security -- I'm not sure it's truly much more secure than OpenBSD or SELinux, that remains to be seen -- but so far, no UNIX-like OS has come close to VMS's security.
With respect, all of your examples are designed to make what is in reality complex look simple. In actuality:
The Japanese youth of today, having never experienced the Shintoist military state that was pre-WW2 Japan, are ill-qualified to answer your question. Further, elderly Japanese people who remember pre-WW2 typically remember a powerful nation and days of glory, humiliated and humbled in a war they lost. Are you so sure they would agree that their nation today is better off because we won WW2? I understand that from your perspective, of course democracy is better than an "emperor-cult" theocracy. But the Japanese who were defeated in WW2, well, they might not agree. Even now, Japanese president Koizumi frequently visits the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo to pay his respects to Japan's WW2 fallen, many of whom were directly responsible for such atrocities as the Rape of Nanjing.
Similarly, despite your assumption that Russians prefer their current government to the soviet one, the Communist party remains popular in Russia, winning elections, interestingly enough. Yeltsin's main opponents in his re-election campaign were the communists, and he nearly lost. Putin is a strong candidate, of course, and he isn't as easily challenged, but they continue to show strongly in local elections. For a nation that no longer has any reason to support them, the Russian communist party are not seen by the Russians as being the evil you presume them to be. I wonder why that is?
I will concede the German point -- Germans are so overcome by guilt over the holocaust that they see their time under Hitler as having had no redeeming characteristics. I'm not sure how much of that is due to our (as in, the occupiers of West Germany) efforts to educate them on how inhumane their actions during WW2 were, and how much of it is just common sense once you've been presented with the facts. But the fact remains that I know no German that would say anything good about those times, and so I'm forced to concede your point.
My point, which you seem to have completely missed, is that irrespective of whether or not our way of life is or is not better, the people that we force it on may not agree with us or our motives. Even now.
Let me make one thing clear, though, lest you misunderstand: I am not suggesting that I believe that communism, facism, or "emperor-cult theocracies" are better than the democracies that now exist (or mostly exist) in the countries you've indirectly mentioned. What I am pointing out is that the jury, especially in the countries in question, is very much still out, and that we, the USA, have acted unilaterally and in our best interests in much of the world.
Even if we accept, on the face of it, that our acts during WW2 and later the cold war resulted in a better life for the people of the countries whose goverments we toppled, there are many other examples of our meddling that have not turned out so well -- Latin America being a prominent example. My argument is with your assertion that we use our military for good, rather than to our own ends. I argue that we as a nation are primarily motivated by our own best interests, and that in certain cases, our own best interests have resulted in a better life for the people that we've decided to use. We (and the other Allies, minus the USSR) changed West Germany from occupied enemy nation into Ally because they were the front line in the Cold War. We helped them develop economically instead of keeping them crippled to serve our own ends, and they benefited from this, certainly.
Japan, too, was initially seen as a country we needed to occupy, lest they start their bloody rampage again. It was only because of their proximity to Korea that we began truly considering them an ally -- their convenient location and educated population made them an ideal place to build the military presence we would need to defeat -- or at least, stop -- Kim Il Sung in a proxy war with the USSR.
The fact that our military might and economic influence have propagated the spread of our language and culture is seen as righteous and just by you, an English speaker, is hardly surprising.
The question you should be asking yourself is, do the cultures, languages and peoples we've displaced or otherwised influenced with our own benefit in mind benefit in the same way that you have? Would the people from those cultures who speak those languages agree?
The world has been and continues to be forcibly America-fied. As Americans, we naturally see nothing wrong with this, but perhaps we ought to look at ourselves a little more critically. Why, in the long run, is English being spoken by most of the world any better or different than Japanese or Russian? After all, the speakers of all these languages have commited horrible acts. Is one better than the other, really?
I'm not sure the world is as simple as you think it is.
It's already been pointed out that your numbers aren't totally correct, but as someone who lives in China and works with Chinese, I too have noticed that, in this case at least, the Chinese aren't particularly eager to give. My company did a fundraising drive (among our employees) for donations and pretty much no one gave, which we considered to be in pretty poor form. Asking around, I was surprised to find that many of the locals here are actually not very fond of Indonesia. Apparently they have a history of mistreating (in the eyes of the people here) their substantial ethnically Chinese minority.
The Chinese consider being Chinese to be a blood thing, not a matter of legal citizenship or passport, or even connection with Chinese culture. Therefore, an ABC who has lived in California for 4 generations and knows little or nothing about China and the Chinese is considered Chinese. This extends to all overseas Chinese communities.
Anyway, my view is that this isn't a good excuse. We Americans also disagree with much of Indonesia's political activities, both past and present. Don't forget, though, that we initially pledged only 35 million USD, and are much more wealthy.
The Chinese could definitely give more (in fact, everyone could). But maybe this bit of background information explains a little bit about why the people are responding the way they are.
Unfortunately, an informed post or two on Slashdot can do little to reverse what amounts to essentially, in the case of most Slashdotters, more than a decade of cold war propaganda.
While most of us wear our tin foil hats most of the time, for some reason we are extremely reticent when it comes to admitting to ourselves that our government has been (and in fact continues) to deliberately deceive us when it comes to world politics and affairs. This is an extremely uncomfortable realization for Americans in particular, who are taught from birth that theirs is the best nation in all respects, followed by Europe (although we're quick to point out that they were a continent of fascists before we liberated them in WWII). All other nations are either wallowing in poverty or being actively repressed by dictatorial communist sympathisers.
Consider, for example, that most Americans believe that the Chinese carry around Mao's little red book, and that the Chinese people live in a world that has no concept of freedom or individualism.
This view was most true more than three decades ago, and even then was -- as any reasonable person would expect, in a country with a population like China's -- prone to rather large regional variation, and the direct result of a power struggle between Mao Zi Dong and reform-oriented members of the CCP (the Red Army and the Cultural Revolution were, by in large, a direct result of Mao attempting to solidify power by building a cult of personality.)
The moment he died, Deng Xiao Ping pretty much went ahead and set China on the path that would transform it from a Maoist (not communist -- it was never that) dictatorship into a capitalist power likely to become the economic superpower of the 21st century.
When it comes down to it, Americans would prefer not to see the China of today. It's not surprising -- it's scary. America is begining to lose its edge. We at one point benefited from the sort of manufacturing boom that the Chinese are experiencing now -- Europe moved most of its manufacturing base to the US at one time, because it was cheaper -- and look what happened to the then thought to be unending empires that sat on the old continent: they took second seat to us.
We fear the same will happen with China. It is growing at a rate that we cannot hope to match. It is not hard to imagine, when you're in China, that they will be the next United States. This is very, very frightening.
So instead, we remain ignorant, as best we can.
Only actually going there can remove that willful ignorance. Which is why most Slashdotters will never bother.
I am American; I have lived and worked in the PRC for the better part of three years now.
Ah, but the day before Yom Kippur is absolutely bad ass. Have a bacon cheeseburger for lunch, get completely toasted in the evening, go to a brothel, snort coke, have sex with a sheep... and the next day, atone for it.
I appreciate your pointer, but you probably ought to have read what I wrote a little bit more carefully.
But I definitely don't want this service enabled -- when I need it, I want to launch it manually. My using update-rc.d to remove the rc.d links to the init.d file are not seen as a configuration change by my debian system and it will reinstate them, and it will start dhcpd when I install a new version of it, even if I don't have it running.
So as you can see, I'm quite aware of update-rc.d's existance. It just doesn't work particularly well. It's an improvement on manually removing links, of course. It forces me to remember the runlevels of the service in order to re-enable it, which is lame. What I most generally end up doing is editing the init script directly to avoid this mess. It shouldn't be such a pain.
When I first heard this idea, I was like, "duh!" Why haven't the powers that be done this yet? It's so obvious!
But then I thought about it a little bit. Remember, we're not making just one show -- we're making a whole series. The problem here is that while Klingons are among the most loved and explored (in terms of character qualities) non-human races in the Star Trek universe, they are still, at the base of it, very two dimensional.
Think about it. Ok, they value honour, war, and being barbaric. We know this about them. They kick ass and kill people with their hands or scary looking edged weapons when any pussy human would use a phaser. We know this, too. But haven't you noticed? Every klingon (and in fact every member of every non-human race in ST) is the same damn character. The exception is Worf. Worf was raised by humans, for one, and interacts with humans all the time, for another. Much of his apparent depth is as a result of his struggle to understand humans -- he serves to comment on our society from an outside, alien perspective.
Or take Spock, who's character was different from other Vulcans because he was half human and again, hung out on the Enterprise with Kirk. Other than that crazy Vulcan in Star Trek V, every damn vulcan has been exactly the same, too. Logic, etc.
This isn't so much the fault of ST. In sci-fi, alien species are normally a means by which the author explores certain aspects of our own culture. Ferengis represent our capitalistic profit motive, taken to an extreme, so that we can poke fun at it. Vulcans our rationality, again taken to an extreme, so we can poke fun at it. Klingons our war-mongering, pride-filled selves. All of these races are appealing because they represent, in a caricatured way, aspects of humanity.
Now, when you take the humans out of the picture, this one-sidedness becomes extremely apparent. I'm not saying that Klingons aren't rockingly cool -- they are -- but just that if all you had were Klingons, how would you distinguish them?
The writers would really have to explore Klingon culture to a much greater depth than they have. How would they create the necessary diversity without making Klingons seem like humans with battle armor and a ridged forehead? Think about it. Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see this formula working for more than a season, if even that.
Just FYI, an acronym is, by definition, a shortened form of a longer phrase meant to be pronounced as a single word.. Examples include SCUBA, LASER, RADAR, and GROSS (the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club). So you are actually suggesting that GNU is not an acronym, but rather an initialism.
Initialisms include the NSA, CIA, WTO, WHO, and many other three letter organisations.
This distinction, of course, is only maintained by pedants, but I thought maybe you'd like to know anyway.
In fact, I always encourage the graphic designers I know to contribute to my favorite OSS projects, although none have so far. I'll try again, but everyone else out there, please do the same... engineers and programmers are generally not good at user interface design.
Nor, for that matter, are graphic designers.
You probably meant to say that engineers and progammers aren't particularly good, on average, at generating nice looking interfaces, but that's not at all the same as what you actually said (although what you actually said, FWIW, is also true -- it's just that you implied that graphic designers might be good at UI design, which is demonstratably false).
GNOME's default theme is boring looking, but it is also extremely easy to use -- so far, I haven't met a single person, no matter how computer illeterate, that can't use my Debian laptop's gnome-enabled guest user (I personally don't use GNOME).
Similarly, the early MacOS (I'm talking pre system 7 here) was very easy to use, but not at all good looking, either -- it just seemed that way at the time because the alternative, for most of us, was DOS. But go back and take a look at it now.
MacOS X, on the other hand, is beautiful -- but nowhere near as consistant and easy to use as early MacOS was. In general, stuff like per-application skinning, the co-existance of multiple GUI widget sets with different stated priorities, etc, produce an unpredictable user experience. It may be a pretty one, but it is nonetheless unpredictable, as the user is forced to learn different visual cues and modes of operation to perform basic tasks.
This is the most evident on modern Linux desktops, which mix KDE, GNOME, Lesstif, Athena, and countless other "non-standard kits" (like the one used by OOo). But stuff like the "brushed metal" theme on Mac OS X is more of the same. Winamp, XMMS and the Beep Media Player, great apps all of them, are just more examples of what happens when you let a graphic designer do UI work. Hell, pretty much any media player (xine comes to mind, as well as most Windows DVD players) forgo the desktop widget set and instead waste their time drawing dvd player or stereo look alikes on the screen.
Now, you may like how this looks -- no accounting for taste -- but to take that a step further and take it to be good UI design is another thing. I use xterms, emacs and pwm for my daily hacking -- I wouldn't have it any other way, in fact. But I wouldn't suggest that any of these programs represent good or intuitive UI design. I'm just used to them.
GNOME is simple, straightforward, and customizable enough that you can make it look like pretty much whatever you want. But out of the box, it has a very intuitive, standard UI, and it's only getting better. I wouldn't use it, but my mom or girlfriend could.
I too find svc to be extremely annoying. However, replacing SYSV style inits with something else is not, on the face of it, a bad idea.
Consider that for the vast majority of init scripts, a process is started, stopped, or restarted. Lots of UNIX systems (including debian) provide a special utility that starts and stops daemons in a standardized way, and virtually all startup scripts just call that program.
Consider that everytime you run a startup script, you're loading a shell interpreter into memory, parsing an interpreted language (shell) and then freeing said memory (this is slow).
Consider that to enable or disable services (a fairly frequent task, unfortunately) you need to muck with symbolic links from rc directories (sometimes hard links). A pain in the butt for a simple task.
Consider that sysv init provides no dependency information, forcing the computer to abandon parallelisation methods (this short coming of SYSV and BSD style inits has been treated extensively in the past, but no interesting solutions have gained widespread acceptance).
I think that svc has a few good ideas, but I don't think they're being used properly. One, the addition of svc enable and svc disable makes enabling and disabling services very, very simple. Currently, when I install a service on my debian box, it usually is enabled right away -- but in some cases, this may not be what I want at all. For example, my laptop has dhcpd on it, because I occasionally use it to network boot windows systems into Linux. But I definitely don't want this service enabled -- when I need it, I want to launch it manually. My using update-rc.d to remove the rc.d links to the init.d file are not seen as a configuration change by my debian system and it will reinstate them, and it will start dhcpd when I install a new version of it, even if I don't have it running.
Having an "enabled" and "disabled" state for services is thus a very good idea.
Furthermore, given that virtually all services do exactly the same thing -- start, kill, restart (and occasionally reload) a process, running a different script for every service seems a bit silly. Sun's idea of having a series of XML files describing how to start, restart and kill processes isn't bad. It would be trivially easy to extend this to include dependency information, allowing services to be started in parallel. And distributions could flag these as configuration files, allowing you to hack them and have them be updated sanely, instead of relying on filesystem characteristics (links).
All in all, I think that there are some good ideas there. Perhaps XML is overkill... but open standards aren't a bad thing, and XML is as simple as you make it (Sun's svc XML, alas, is not very simple).
I didn't know they generated binary crap at boottime -- kind of stupid, that.
Anyway, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Re:The web speaks of 4 kinds of searchers...
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To those of you that don't get why this is funny, it's a play on the four sons (sometimes four daughters or children in the reform schule) that are part of the Jewish passover tradition. "Why is this night different from any other night?"
Google undoubtedly has more information if you're curious.
If you don't understand something, how much weight should your disagreement with it carry?
How can you be sure that you actually disagree with it, if you don't understand it?
Case in point; the vast majority of people commenting on this story in favor of creationism are repeating ID/Creationist "talking points" which are often, at their core, based on misinformation, or at least a (hopefully unintentional) misunderstanding of some core principle or other.
This is because evolution, not unlike calculus, requires a fair amount of effort to understand. But when a laymen asks what Calculus is good for, he'll be told something like, "It provides the mathematical machinery needed to study rates of change, which allows people who have studied it to apply it to widely diverse fields like economics, finance, and physics." And he'll think, "Oh, that doesn't sound too bad. I want my kid to understand that."
But with evolution, he's told "It explains the process whereby one species becomes another species, and under what circumstances those changes occur," and he thinks, "What does that mean? What spieces becomes another species?" and he's then told, good naturedly, something like, "Oh, you know, like monkeys evolving into men."
Which clashes with his religious understanding, and so he rejects it. He doesn't understand it -- he doesn't understand the evidence for it. Furthermore, he doesn't want to. Do you know what this would do to his safe, secure world view? Science is scary in this respect -- dogma is never supported for long. Just look at the luminiferous aether. Michaelson and Morely both never truly accepted the results of their now famous experiment. But the rest of the world did, science required it.
That kind of stuff is scary.
But so is women's lib, and anti-segregation, and all that. You can't let an uneducated group, even an uneducated majority, make decisions in education, at least not public education. Private education, well, that's a different story.
Irreducible complexity, while typically parrotted by Intelligent Design proponents as Evolution's great failure, is actually mostly based on a flawed understanding the mechanics of evolution. Here's a pretty in-depth article on it: Irreducible Complexity Demystified.
It doesn't include the bit about the eye, but the eye isn't all that complex, actually (as evidenced by it being one of the only senses whose mechanics, at the chemical level, we completely understand.) This example of so-called irreducible complexity was actually first contemplated by Darwin (iirc) and has been treated pretty extensively. Nowadays, most ID proponents don't even bring it up, prefering more exotic and less easily refuted examples, like bacterial flagella.
Lord almighty, I hope to god you're trolling. You're on Slashdot, for crying out loud! It's perfectly ok for you to disagree with or not believe in evolution (at least, it's ok with me), but at least make a token effort to actually educate yourself as to what it is. Your whole sand and pentium 4 analogy demonstrates that you have a seriously misguided understanding of the mechanics of evolution, and what is required for it to take place (hint -- inert, non-reproducing materials like sand, lacking the need to compete for scarce resources, will not evolve).
The spontaneous generation of life from non-life (not actually so spontaneous), is not evolution, but rather a process called abiogenesis. The mechanics of this are still heavily disputed. But evolution, which presupposes the existance of life and deals with concepts like speciation and its ilk, has little to do with abiogenesis.
As for not having a soul, well... that's pretty much a function of your definition of soul, isn't it? Science is a pedantic thing. Christianity tends supply relatively vague (but nonetheless meaningful to christians) definition. Just what is a soul? If you can't even really explain it in a scientifically testable way, then science has nothing to say about it. Including that it doesn't exist.
As for permanent lack of consciousness, well, no one is making any claims one way or another. At least, I believe it, but it's a belief, and it's not any better or worse than any other belief, including belief in an after-life. There's no proof, either way. So science doesn't get in the way of this, either.
The biggest issue I take though is with your stance on morality. Are you suggesting that without religion, without a fear of reprisal or punishment, people wouldn't be moral? I'm a moral person, even by the standards of my religious friends, but I don't do it because I'm afraid to go to hell, because I don't believe in hell. I just do it because I feel it's the right thing to do. Your indirect implication that religious people are moral only because of their religious beliefs, and not simply because they're intrinsically good people, bothers me some.
There have been, lest we forget, some incredibly immoral people in our past, and many of them were religious (Hitler, for example) and many were not (Stalin). I don't see religion as having been a guiding force for good or evil, particularly -- people that want to be immoral will find ways to convince themselves that their religious or moral code condones their behaviour, regardless of what faith they attribute to themselves.
Anyway, your suggestion about putting a new sticker on the books is silly, because it would simply have the same effect as the original sticker, an effect ruled unconstitutional in a US court of law. Some other posters have suggested that this may be appealed and overturned anyway (and have presented good arguments to that effect).
I have a better idea. Just get a Hitachi Magic Wand. Honestly.
It's great that some tools can be used in novel ways for which they weren't intended, but with all the weird colored drool that ends up on my electric toothbrush (you ever drink coffee and then go brush your tongue?) I don't know if I'd want to put it anywhere near a vagina.
Vibrators are great, inexpensive, and will give your girl an orgasm no man can give her whenever she wants it (or give you an orgasm, if you're a girl). Check out this awesome site for more information: How to use a vibrator by Betty Dodson (not explicit).
I completely agree. However, as I see it, we the people shouldn't be the ones to test out this new technology. Let the military and police use it for a bit, to make sure it actually works. All we need are some anti-gun lobbyists getting legislation passed that puts only guns that don't work reliably in the hands of citizens, while police and the military continue to use the older, more reliable variety (as, invariably, will criminals).
If the police and military use them exclusively, then I'm willing to bet the technology is mature.
As for preventing a weapon from being used by anyone but you or people in your unit, frankly I don't see the point of fancy scanning technology. Soldiers and police officers wear uniforms anyway; having them wear a ring (say) with a microchip in it that the gun scans would likely be much, much more reliable than attempting to scan people's palm prints -- not to mention that it would be easier to do stuff like say, let a whole group of people (say soldiers) use the same weapon.
For citizens, you could just wear your "gun ring" like a normal ring at all times. It could even be made in various "normal" looking styles. Then you would never have to worry about your gun not working.
One of the best ways to invalidate a law is to ignore it on a wide scale. If no one pays attention to it, and furthermore, no one manages to enforce it, it becomes just another anti-sodomy law that no one takes seriously.
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He failed to mention that his nerds are from the Wellesley LUG.
Besides being far more ferocious, girl geeks have the added advantage not being susceptible to the "hot girl" exploit.
I know this is a joke, but if any girlfriend of mine ever had the balls to read my e-mail, she'd be out the door.
There isn't anything that I wouldn't want her to see in there, either. It's the principle of the thing. Relationships are based on trust, and when someone is reading your personal correspondence behind your back, trust is lacking.
I'm a pretty laid back guy, but I don't play games with my privacy.
All things considered, alphas and sparcs are not all that different in price. I used to run OpenVMS on my Alpha (which granted was an old model, but still).
Trusted Solaris is a good stab at UNIX security -- I'm not sure it's truly much more secure than OpenBSD or SELinux, that remains to be seen -- but so far, no UNIX-like OS has come close to VMS's security.
VMS is seriously hardcore.
Of course, a sucky admin can screw anything up.
I've heard it's a stinger.
With respect, all of your examples are designed to make what is in reality complex look simple. In actuality:
The Japanese youth of today, having never experienced the Shintoist military state that was pre-WW2 Japan, are ill-qualified to answer your question. Further, elderly Japanese people who remember pre-WW2 typically remember a powerful nation and days of glory, humiliated and humbled in a war they lost. Are you so sure they would agree that their nation today is better off because we won WW2? I understand that from your perspective, of course democracy is better than an "emperor-cult" theocracy. But the Japanese who were defeated in WW2, well, they might not agree. Even now, Japanese president Koizumi frequently visits the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo to pay his respects to Japan's WW2 fallen, many of whom were directly responsible for such atrocities as the Rape of Nanjing.
Similarly, despite your assumption that Russians prefer their current government to the soviet one, the Communist party remains popular in Russia, winning elections, interestingly enough. Yeltsin's main opponents in his re-election campaign were the communists, and he nearly lost. Putin is a strong candidate, of course, and he isn't as easily challenged, but they continue to show strongly in local elections. For a nation that no longer has any reason to support them, the Russian communist party are not seen by the Russians as being the evil you presume them to be. I wonder why that is?
I will concede the German point -- Germans are so overcome by guilt over the holocaust that they see their time under Hitler as having had no redeeming characteristics. I'm not sure how much of that is due to our (as in, the occupiers of West Germany) efforts to educate them on how inhumane their actions during WW2 were, and how much of it is just common sense once you've been presented with the facts. But the fact remains that I know no German that would say anything good about those times, and so I'm forced to concede your point.
My point, which you seem to have completely missed, is that irrespective of whether or not our way of life is or is not better, the people that we force it on may not agree with us or our motives. Even now.
Let me make one thing clear, though, lest you misunderstand: I am not suggesting that I believe that communism, facism, or "emperor-cult theocracies" are better than the democracies that now exist (or mostly exist) in the countries you've indirectly mentioned. What I am pointing out is that the jury, especially in the countries in question, is very much still out, and that we, the USA, have acted unilaterally and in our best interests in much of the world.
Even if we accept, on the face of it, that our acts during WW2 and later the cold war resulted in a better life for the people of the countries whose goverments we toppled, there are many other examples of our meddling that have not turned out so well -- Latin America being a prominent example. My argument is with your assertion that we use our military for good, rather than to our own ends. I argue that we as a nation are primarily motivated by our own best interests, and that in certain cases, our own best interests have resulted in a better life for the people that we've decided to use. We (and the other Allies, minus the USSR) changed West Germany from occupied enemy nation into Ally because they were the front line in the Cold War. We helped them develop economically instead of keeping them crippled to serve our own ends, and they benefited from this, certainly.
Japan, too, was initially seen as a country we needed to occupy, lest they start their bloody rampage again. It was only because of their proximity to Korea that we began truly considering them an ally -- their convenient location and educated population made them an ideal place to build the military presence we would need to defeat -- or at least, stop -- Kim Il Sung in a proxy war with the USSR.
The fact that our military might and economic influence have propagated the spread of our language and culture is seen as righteous and just by you, an English speaker, is hardly surprising.
The question you should be asking yourself is, do the cultures, languages and peoples we've displaced or otherwised influenced with our own benefit in mind benefit in the same way that you have? Would the people from those cultures who speak those languages agree?
The world has been and continues to be forcibly America-fied. As Americans, we naturally see nothing wrong with this, but perhaps we ought to look at ourselves a little more critically. Why, in the long run, is English being spoken by most of the world any better or different than Japanese or Russian? After all, the speakers of all these languages have commited horrible acts. Is one better than the other, really?
I'm not sure the world is as simple as you think it is.
It's already been pointed out that your numbers aren't totally correct, but as someone who lives in China and works with Chinese, I too have noticed that, in this case at least, the Chinese aren't particularly eager to give. My company did a fundraising drive (among our employees) for donations and pretty much no one gave, which we considered to be in pretty poor form. Asking around, I was surprised to find that many of the locals here are actually not very fond of Indonesia. Apparently they have a history of mistreating (in the eyes of the people here) their substantial ethnically Chinese minority.
The Chinese consider being Chinese to be a blood thing, not a matter of legal citizenship or passport, or even connection with Chinese culture. Therefore, an ABC who has lived in California for 4 generations and knows little or nothing about China and the Chinese is considered Chinese. This extends to all overseas Chinese communities.
Anyway, my view is that this isn't a good excuse. We Americans also disagree with much of Indonesia's political activities, both past and present. Don't forget, though, that we initially pledged only 35 million USD, and are much more wealthy.
The Chinese could definitely give more (in fact, everyone could). But maybe this bit of background information explains a little bit about why the people are responding the way they are.
Unfortunately, an informed post or two on Slashdot can do little to reverse what amounts to essentially, in the case of most Slashdotters, more than a decade of cold war propaganda.
While most of us wear our tin foil hats most of the time, for some reason we are extremely reticent when it comes to admitting to ourselves that our government has been (and in fact continues) to deliberately deceive us when it comes to world politics and affairs. This is an extremely uncomfortable realization for Americans in particular, who are taught from birth that theirs is the best nation in all respects, followed by Europe (although we're quick to point out that they were a continent of fascists before we liberated them in WWII). All other nations are either wallowing in poverty or being actively repressed by dictatorial communist sympathisers.
Consider, for example, that most Americans believe that the Chinese carry around Mao's little red book, and that the Chinese people live in a world that has no concept of freedom or individualism.
This view was most true more than three decades ago, and even then was -- as any reasonable person would expect, in a country with a population like China's -- prone to rather large regional variation, and the direct result of a power struggle between Mao Zi Dong and reform-oriented members of the CCP (the Red Army and the Cultural Revolution were, by in large, a direct result of Mao attempting to solidify power by building a cult of personality.)
The moment he died, Deng Xiao Ping pretty much went ahead and set China on the path that would transform it from a Maoist (not communist -- it was never that) dictatorship into a capitalist power likely to become the economic superpower of the 21st century.
When it comes down to it, Americans would prefer not to see the China of today. It's not surprising -- it's scary. America is begining to lose its edge. We at one point benefited from the sort of manufacturing boom that the Chinese are experiencing now -- Europe moved most of its manufacturing base to the US at one time, because it was cheaper -- and look what happened to the then thought to be unending empires that sat on the old continent: they took second seat to us.
We fear the same will happen with China. It is growing at a rate that we cannot hope to match. It is not hard to imagine, when you're in China, that they will be the next United States. This is very, very frightening.
So instead, we remain ignorant, as best we can.
Only actually going there can remove that willful ignorance. Which is why most Slashdotters will never bother.
I am American; I have lived and worked in the PRC for the better part of three years now.
Ah, but the day before Yom Kippur is absolutely bad ass. Have a bacon cheeseburger for lunch, get completely toasted in the evening, go to a brothel, snort coke, have sex with a sheep... and the next day, atone for it.
Bliss, I tell you.
I appreciate your pointer, but you probably ought to have read what I wrote a little bit more carefully.
So as you can see, I'm quite aware of update-rc.d's existance. It just doesn't work particularly well. It's an improvement on manually removing links, of course. It forces me to remember the runlevels of the service in order to re-enable it, which is lame. What I most generally end up doing is editing the init script directly to avoid this mess. It shouldn't be such a pain.
When I first heard this idea, I was like, "duh!" Why haven't the powers that be done this yet? It's so obvious!
But then I thought about it a little bit. Remember, we're not making just one show -- we're making a whole series. The problem here is that while Klingons are among the most loved and explored (in terms of character qualities) non-human races in the Star Trek universe, they are still, at the base of it, very two dimensional.
Think about it. Ok, they value honour, war, and being barbaric. We know this about them. They kick ass and kill people with their hands or scary looking edged weapons when any pussy human would use a phaser. We know this, too. But haven't you noticed? Every klingon (and in fact every member of every non-human race in ST) is the same damn character. The exception is Worf. Worf was raised by humans, for one, and interacts with humans all the time, for another. Much of his apparent depth is as a result of his struggle to understand humans -- he serves to comment on our society from an outside, alien perspective.
Or take Spock, who's character was different from other Vulcans because he was half human and again, hung out on the Enterprise with Kirk. Other than that crazy Vulcan in Star Trek V, every damn vulcan has been exactly the same, too. Logic, etc.
This isn't so much the fault of ST. In sci-fi, alien species are normally a means by which the author explores certain aspects of our own culture. Ferengis represent our capitalistic profit motive, taken to an extreme, so that we can poke fun at it. Vulcans our rationality, again taken to an extreme, so we can poke fun at it. Klingons our war-mongering, pride-filled selves. All of these races are appealing because they represent, in a caricatured way, aspects of humanity.
Now, when you take the humans out of the picture, this one-sidedness becomes extremely apparent. I'm not saying that Klingons aren't rockingly cool -- they are -- but just that if all you had were Klingons, how would you distinguish them?
The writers would really have to explore Klingon culture to a much greater depth than they have. How would they create the necessary diversity without making Klingons seem like humans with battle armor and a ridged forehead? Think about it. Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I don't see this formula working for more than a season, if even that.
It could make a cool miniseries, though.
It's a reference to Calvin & Hobbes, dumbass :)
That's a good point, thanks.
Just FYI, an acronym is, by definition, a shortened form of a longer phrase meant to be pronounced as a single word.. Examples include SCUBA, LASER, RADAR, and GROSS (the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club). So you are actually suggesting that GNU is not an acronym, but rather an initialism.
Initialisms include the NSA, CIA, WTO, WHO, and many other three letter organisations.
This distinction, of course, is only maintained by pedants, but I thought maybe you'd like to know anyway.
That said, I pronounce GNU as RMS does.
Nor, for that matter, are graphic designers.
You probably meant to say that engineers and progammers aren't particularly good, on average, at generating nice looking interfaces, but that's not at all the same as what you actually said (although what you actually said, FWIW, is also true -- it's just that you implied that graphic designers might be good at UI design, which is demonstratably false).
GNOME's default theme is boring looking, but it is also extremely easy to use -- so far, I haven't met a single person, no matter how computer illeterate, that can't use my Debian laptop's gnome-enabled guest user (I personally don't use GNOME).
Similarly, the early MacOS (I'm talking pre system 7 here) was very easy to use, but not at all good looking, either -- it just seemed that way at the time because the alternative, for most of us, was DOS. But go back and take a look at it now.
MacOS X, on the other hand, is beautiful -- but nowhere near as consistant and easy to use as early MacOS was. In general, stuff like per-application skinning, the co-existance of multiple GUI widget sets with different stated priorities, etc, produce an unpredictable user experience. It may be a pretty one, but it is nonetheless unpredictable, as the user is forced to learn different visual cues and modes of operation to perform basic tasks.
This is the most evident on modern Linux desktops, which mix KDE, GNOME, Lesstif, Athena, and countless other "non-standard kits" (like the one used by OOo). But stuff like the "brushed metal" theme on Mac OS X is more of the same. Winamp, XMMS and the Beep Media Player, great apps all of them, are just more examples of what happens when you let a graphic designer do UI work. Hell, pretty much any media player (xine comes to mind, as well as most Windows DVD players) forgo the desktop widget set and instead waste their time drawing dvd player or stereo look alikes on the screen.
Now, you may like how this looks -- no accounting for taste -- but to take that a step further and take it to be good UI design is another thing. I use xterms, emacs and pwm for my daily hacking -- I wouldn't have it any other way, in fact. But I wouldn't suggest that any of these programs represent good or intuitive UI design. I'm just used to them.
GNOME is simple, straightforward, and customizable enough that you can make it look like pretty much whatever you want. But out of the box, it has a very intuitive, standard UI, and it's only getting better. I wouldn't use it, but my mom or girlfriend could.
I too find svc to be extremely annoying. However, replacing SYSV style inits with something else is not, on the face of it, a bad idea.
Consider that for the vast majority of init scripts, a process is started, stopped, or restarted. Lots of UNIX systems (including debian) provide a special utility that starts and stops daemons in a standardized way, and virtually all startup scripts just call that program.
Consider that everytime you run a startup script, you're loading a shell interpreter into memory, parsing an interpreted language (shell) and then freeing said memory (this is slow).
Consider that to enable or disable services (a fairly frequent task, unfortunately) you need to muck with symbolic links from rc directories (sometimes hard links). A pain in the butt for a simple task.
Consider that sysv init provides no dependency information, forcing the computer to abandon parallelisation methods (this short coming of SYSV and BSD style inits has been treated extensively in the past, but no interesting solutions have gained widespread acceptance).
I think that svc has a few good ideas, but I don't think they're being used properly. One, the addition of svc enable and svc disable makes enabling and disabling services very, very simple. Currently, when I install a service on my debian box, it usually is enabled right away -- but in some cases, this may not be what I want at all. For example, my laptop has dhcpd on it, because I occasionally use it to network boot windows systems into Linux. But I definitely don't want this service enabled -- when I need it, I want to launch it manually. My using update-rc.d to remove the rc.d links to the init.d file are not seen as a configuration change by my debian system and it will reinstate them, and it will start dhcpd when I install a new version of it, even if I don't have it running.
Having an "enabled" and "disabled" state for services is thus a very good idea.
Furthermore, given that virtually all services do exactly the same thing -- start, kill, restart (and occasionally reload) a process, running a different script for every service seems a bit silly. Sun's idea of having a series of XML files describing how to start, restart and kill processes isn't bad. It would be trivially easy to extend this to include dependency information, allowing services to be started in parallel. And distributions could flag these as configuration files, allowing you to hack them and have them be updated sanely, instead of relying on filesystem characteristics (links).
All in all, I think that there are some good ideas there. Perhaps XML is overkill... but open standards aren't a bad thing, and XML is as simple as you make it (Sun's svc XML, alas, is not very simple).
I didn't know they generated binary crap at boottime -- kind of stupid, that.
Anyway, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
To those of you that don't get why this is funny, it's a play on the four sons (sometimes four daughters or children in the reform schule) that are part of the Jewish passover tradition. "Why is this night different from any other night?"
Google undoubtedly has more information if you're curious.
I'm down with entropy! (Yeah you know me!)
If you don't understand something, how much weight should your disagreement with it carry?
How can you be sure that you actually disagree with it, if you don't understand it?
Case in point; the vast majority of people commenting on this story in favor of creationism are repeating ID/Creationist "talking points" which are often, at their core, based on misinformation, or at least a (hopefully unintentional) misunderstanding of some core principle or other.
This is because evolution, not unlike calculus, requires a fair amount of effort to understand. But when a laymen asks what Calculus is good for, he'll be told something like, "It provides the mathematical machinery needed to study rates of change, which allows people who have studied it to apply it to widely diverse fields like economics, finance, and physics." And he'll think, "Oh, that doesn't sound too bad. I want my kid to understand that."
But with evolution, he's told "It explains the process whereby one species becomes another species, and under what circumstances those changes occur," and he thinks, "What does that mean? What spieces becomes another species?" and he's then told, good naturedly, something like, "Oh, you know, like monkeys evolving into men."
Which clashes with his religious understanding, and so he rejects it. He doesn't understand it -- he doesn't understand the evidence for it. Furthermore, he doesn't want to. Do you know what this would do to his safe, secure world view? Science is scary in this respect -- dogma is never supported for long. Just look at the luminiferous aether. Michaelson and Morely both never truly accepted the results of their now famous experiment. But the rest of the world did, science required it.
That kind of stuff is scary.
But so is women's lib, and anti-segregation, and all that. You can't let an uneducated group, even an uneducated majority, make decisions in education, at least not public education. Private education, well, that's a different story.
Irreducible complexity, while typically parrotted by Intelligent Design proponents as Evolution's great failure, is actually mostly based on a flawed understanding the mechanics of evolution. Here's a pretty in-depth article on it: Irreducible Complexity Demystified.
It doesn't include the bit about the eye, but the eye isn't all that complex, actually (as evidenced by it being one of the only senses whose mechanics, at the chemical level, we completely understand.) This example of so-called irreducible complexity was actually first contemplated by Darwin (iirc) and has been treated pretty extensively. Nowadays, most ID proponents don't even bring it up, prefering more exotic and less easily refuted examples, like bacterial flagella.
Anyway, it's a good read.
Lord almighty, I hope to god you're trolling. You're on Slashdot, for crying out loud! It's perfectly ok for you to disagree with or not believe in evolution (at least, it's ok with me), but at least make a token effort to actually educate yourself as to what it is. Your whole sand and pentium 4 analogy demonstrates that you have a seriously misguided understanding of the mechanics of evolution, and what is required for it to take place (hint -- inert, non-reproducing materials like sand, lacking the need to compete for scarce resources, will not evolve).
The spontaneous generation of life from non-life (not actually so spontaneous), is not evolution, but rather a process called abiogenesis. The mechanics of this are still heavily disputed. But evolution, which presupposes the existance of life and deals with concepts like speciation and its ilk, has little to do with abiogenesis.
As for not having a soul, well... that's pretty much a function of your definition of soul, isn't it? Science is a pedantic thing. Christianity tends supply relatively vague (but nonetheless meaningful to christians) definition. Just what is a soul? If you can't even really explain it in a scientifically testable way, then science has nothing to say about it. Including that it doesn't exist.
As for permanent lack of consciousness, well, no one is making any claims one way or another. At least, I believe it, but it's a belief, and it's not any better or worse than any other belief, including belief in an after-life. There's no proof, either way. So science doesn't get in the way of this, either.
The biggest issue I take though is with your stance on morality. Are you suggesting that without religion, without a fear of reprisal or punishment, people wouldn't be moral? I'm a moral person, even by the standards of my religious friends, but I don't do it because I'm afraid to go to hell, because I don't believe in hell. I just do it because I feel it's the right thing to do. Your indirect implication that religious people are moral only because of their religious beliefs, and not simply because they're intrinsically good people, bothers me some.
There have been, lest we forget, some incredibly immoral people in our past, and many of them were religious (Hitler, for example) and many were not (Stalin). I don't see religion as having been a guiding force for good or evil, particularly -- people that want to be immoral will find ways to convince themselves that their religious or moral code condones their behaviour, regardless of what faith they attribute to themselves.
Anyway, your suggestion about putting a new sticker on the books is silly, because it would simply have the same effect as the original sticker, an effect ruled unconstitutional in a US court of law. Some other posters have suggested that this may be appealed and overturned anyway (and have presented good arguments to that effect).
I have a better idea. Just get a Hitachi Magic Wand. Honestly.
It's great that some tools can be used in novel ways for which they weren't intended, but with all the weird colored drool that ends up on my electric toothbrush (you ever drink coffee and then go brush your tongue?) I don't know if I'd want to put it anywhere near a vagina.
Vibrators are great, inexpensive, and will give your girl an orgasm no man can give her whenever she wants it (or give you an orgasm, if you're a girl). Check out this awesome site for more information: How to use a vibrator by Betty Dodson (not explicit).
I completely agree. However, as I see it, we the people shouldn't be the ones to test out this new technology. Let the military and police use it for a bit, to make sure it actually works. All we need are some anti-gun lobbyists getting legislation passed that puts only guns that don't work reliably in the hands of citizens, while police and the military continue to use the older, more reliable variety (as, invariably, will criminals).
If the police and military use them exclusively, then I'm willing to bet the technology is mature.
As for preventing a weapon from being used by anyone but you or people in your unit, frankly I don't see the point of fancy scanning technology. Soldiers and police officers wear uniforms anyway; having them wear a ring (say) with a microchip in it that the gun scans would likely be much, much more reliable than attempting to scan people's palm prints -- not to mention that it would be easier to do stuff like say, let a whole group of people (say soldiers) use the same weapon.
For citizens, you could just wear your "gun ring" like a normal ring at all times. It could even be made in various "normal" looking styles. Then you would never have to worry about your gun not working.
But fingerprints and biometrics? Fuck that.
Brazillian players get a lot of plastic surgery?
I guess that explains Ronaldo. Plastic surgery gone wrong.
One of the best ways to invalidate a law is to ignore it on a wide scale. If no one pays attention to it, and furthermore, no one manages to enforce it, it becomes just another anti-sodomy law that no one takes seriously.
We have many of these on the books already.