Re:Americans talk about freedom
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Press freedom
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· Score: 5, Informative
Hi. Sorry, my friend. America is a great country, but Europeans have got us on social aid. Let's dissect your points one by one, shall we.
Social Security, Medicare, and Welfare are under constant threat from people right of center; in this case I'm being non-partisan in my evaluation. Democrats, obstensibly the American party of the left, has its share of people who believe in Horatio Alger's myth of the "American Dream". I'll get to that in a minute. First, some facts.
Medicare is divided into two parts, part A and part B. You are only eligible for Medicare if you are 65 or older, have certain (rare) disabilities, or have serious renal (kidney) problems. Medicare does not cover you at all otherwise, which means that for 99% of Slashdotters, for example, Medicare is completely useless. Furthermore, you are only eligible for free part A coverage if you have been paying Medicare taxes for an appropriately long period of time -- this may sound fair, but it means (for example) that it is often not economical for a young immigrant to bring his ailing mother with him to the States because she will not be eligible for medical care.
And then there's part B coverage, which costs $66.50 per month (that's not cheap, dude) and is only available, again, for people eligible for Medicare.
Contrast this to many European countries, where if you get into an accident, you walk into a hospital, and they fix it. Bume. You don't pay anything.
Medicaid, which is the general name for Federal funds given to the states for the purpose of health care, varies from state to state. Medicare is, IIRC, under the "Medicaid" blanket. Most people do not see a dime of this money. That isn't surprising; not much money is given.
What about social security? It's a slush fund that we all pay into that isn't protected at all. The government routinely uses this money for things not related to social security, and it hasn't been putting money back in as fast as it takes it out. Throw an aging baby boomer generation into the mix and you have a system that wasn't really adequate to begin with that is fiscally unsustainable.
Welfare, well, welfare would be a start if it weren't for the fact that all sorts of draconian elligibility requirements weren't in place. Most people on welfare in the US are single mothers. Did you know that in most states, if the state discovers that you have a boyfriend, you can lose welfare eligibility? No joke. Because if you have a man, obviously, you don't need a goverment check. Your man can take care of you. Heh.
Do you know how much money we give people on welfare? Not enough to survive, that's for sure. I know that in middle class America the popular steryotype of a welfare mama is a fat black woman doing nothing all day but having kids for the extra money, but reality is rather far from this. Most women on welfare are working two full time jobs and still can't make ends meet. Who's taking care of their kids while they work? Usually no one, because babysitters cost money. So you end up with latch-key kids. You see, we Americans don't feel that raising children is work that deserves compensation.
It's really easy for women to end up on welfare, you know. The US is also really bad about protecting maternity leave rights. So what happens is, a woman gets pregnant and takes time off to have her child, and while she's gone, she loses her job. Libertarians everywhere applaud. Anyone who's ever had a child knows how much work they are. So what do you do? Hand your kid over to your parents, and get another job, quickly, before the industry moves on and you're not elligible for much more than waiting tables?
Regarding freedoms in other countries, you are right that we have higher standards. In much of Europe, for example, hate speech is illegal; this looks good on the face of things but it is sometimes used with impunity to restrict criticism. An example would be police using French hate speech laws to censor Frenc
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In Fall 2001, the Muslim student population at my Alma Mater had a lot of issues. Lots of Muslim guys were beaten up; a girl was raped; numerous people were spit on.
It got so bad, in fact, that a Muslim student group at my school organized a "green arm band" system, whereby people willing to stand up for the rights of others would wear a green arm band. That way, if Muslim students were feeling threatened, they knew that they would be able to turn to a person wearing a green armband for aid/defense.
The move got a lot of publicity but I was saddened by how few non-Muslims gave their support. I'm proud to say I did. Most of my African-American friends did too. But essentially no one else really bothered.
Sad state of affairs.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't like Bush anymore than you do. But that quote was George H.W. Bush (i.e, Bush Sr), not GWB.
GWB has said some pretty wacky things too. But this particular gem cannot be attributed to him.
Re:U.S. is way to high
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You're looking at this too practically.
Freedom isn't much good, admittedly, if no one bothers to exercise it. What this article measures, however, is not the quality of information provided by the local press; rather, it is the ease with which journalists are able to obtain information in a country without the government interfering.
American journalists don't take much advantage of the US's open nature, because our private media are here to sell news, and Americans culturally just don't care about what's happening in the world. I really don't think there's much of a conspiracy here. The US is a huge country, the most powerful in the world, bordered by another huge country that speaks the same language it does. People in the US just don't care too much about the rest of the world unless it affects their lives directly, and the truth is that as far as US citizens are concerned, what happens in most other countries has little bearing on their daily lives.
This is hard to understand for a lot of Europeans, who mostly come from small countries that don't have the same natural resources the US does. For someone in France or Germany, what happens in Poland, Belgium, the UK, Turkey -- this all can and does affect their daily lives, economic stability, etc, in a way that is evident to the average joe. And so, not surprisingly, these people are better informed than Americans when it comes to world issues.
Now, the press freedom in the US is pretty good. By this I mean that a reporter from Le Monde can go to the US with the intent to write an exposé on American government corruption, for example, and will run into very little static doing it. A New York Post reporter, in a similar way, will have little trouble getting the information he wants in France, even if his piece is called "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys: How a country entirely populated by homosexuals manages to remain adequately populated." This is because both the US and France are very free countries. And while the journalists of other countries may use this to abuse them, they understand that keeping information available is important.
China and North Korea, on the other hand, will want to "approve" what you write before letting you do anything. They may even offer to write it for you.
That's what's meant by press freedom. Not "is the local press open and non-self-censoring" but rather "do journalists have the freedom to ask questions and get them answered without too much interference."
The US scores badly on the first but passably well (although not as well as I, as an American, would like) on the second. This article is about the second, not the first.
At least here in the PRC, Windows comes with CJK fonts. SimSun, NSimSun, SimFang and SimHei for simplified chinese (although these also contain a sizeable number of traditional characters, being GBK), MingLiu, PMingLiu for Traditional Chinese, MS Gothic and MS Mincho for Japanese, and the Batang font family for Korean.
I would imagine that a Taiwanese or HK version of Windows would contain more traditional fonts, and a Japanese version more Japanese fonts, but the fonts included represent both "serif" and "sans-serif" styles (as the W3C interprets those terms for Asian fonts), which means that essentially all pages are browsable.
I use Firefox on Debian GNU/Linux, with these fonts (and others not packaged with Windows) copied from my coworkers' windows machines, and I have never come across a page that doesn't look nice.
A much larger problem (for me) is the fact that FreeType seems unable to create italic, oblique and bold versions of its CJK fonts. I am using the xftt module for X -- it apparently is capable of this -- but I still am unable to see bold fonts, which is a real pain.
But this is not the case in Windows.
A much larger problem than fonts is that the notion of standards compliance, CSS, and the like have not really penetrated the asian web design market -- these guys are doing 1994-style web design, with animated gifs and blink tags and an overuse of bad javascript. Active X is not uncommon. In general, only IE (and usually only IE 6) is tested, which means that everything else breaks.
You see, the production company came of age in another time; in a time of vinyl records and expensive analog recording equipment. The time of our parents. When recording was high-tech. Before the digital age.
Anyone that claims that the production company never deserved its immense slice of the pie is glossing over both history and economics.
The problem, unfortunately, is that the technological landscape of the world we live in has changed very much since the Janis Joplin days, when rebels listened to underground, unregulated FM radio because the AM bands had been reduced to 50s pop drivel.
Technology has outpaced the recording industry. At one point, they were a huge part of the music making process. But the days of needing an expensive recording studio to produce music that sounds good are all but over. Today's small band can take a decent shot at recording their music in the drummer's garage using the profits from their part-time jobs at Starbucks and local cafes. I'm not joking. I have friends who do this.
Now, the sound isn't as professional, or polished, as it would be in a professional recording studio. But the investment cost -- cost of equipment -- is low enough that recording has become a viable hobby for a number of my audiophile friends. Local bands pay these guys pennies on the RIAA's dollar for practically the same service -- and they don't need to sign their lives away to do it.
Now, if your goal is to become the next Britney Spears, raking in millions on tours and TV interviews, the RIAA remains your only venue. But for the vast majority of musicians, music, not fame, is their life's blood. If they get rich or famous, great. But it's playing gigs and selling your CDs to fans that gets you going. A friend of mine recently found someone sharing a song he'd written and his band had performed on KaZaa -- was he upset? The RIAA would have you think so. No, he was thrilled. Because it meant someone liked what he was doing. It meant he was getting exposure.
This is the problem. What 50 years ago could only be done in a recording studio that cost millions of dollars to build, now can be done by a hobbyist with a few computers and some good recording equipment. It's a direct side effect of the computer in our daily lives. It used to be that you needed fancy specialized equipment to do sound editing. Now you just route everything through your computer and do it in software.
It isn't as good, yet, as the specialized equipment, but let me ask you: how long do you think it will be before it is?
The RIAA, in its current incarnation, is fucked. They won't die -- but small time musicians everywhere are learning that signing your life and music away to a recording executive is no longer the only way to get your music heard. And when what you want is exposure, well, that's good news.
There will always be Britney Spears types -- performers -- that are marketed and put on display like a Barbie doll for all to ooo and ahh at. The RIAA will always be there to do this. They will probably not make much money on the recordings of her music, though, but then, most people aren't into Britney or the Backstreet Boys for their music, are they? It's the whole package. It's seeing them live. It's using their fame to draw viewers attention -- think about it. If you're an advertiser aiming at the teen demographic, wouldn't you feel justified in paying more to run your commercials on a show with Britney making a guest appearance?
There's still tons of money to be made here.
Just not as much. The RIAA will have to scale down or diversify. They will have to become the AMIAA (Artist Marketing instead of Recording) Industry. Recorded music will continue to be profitable, but only if prices come down. I live in China, where buying non-pirated CDs represents a real challenge (in other words, it's not really possible). A pirated, digital copy of the original
Now, just so everyone's clear, I think John Kerry is a douchebag.
However, being President of the USA isn't exactly the easiest job in the world. And while Kerry may be a little too prone to flip flopping, I really wouldn't mind seeing a little humility from the current administration regarding some of the rather more egregious errors they've committed in the last four years.
But I guess you can only have it two ways, eh? Either you have a megalomaniacal asshole who continues to insist that decisions made on poor information that resulted in needless loss of American lives, the destabilization of an entire region, and general loss of international goodwill were right, or you have a President who is weak by virtue of exercizing his perogative to change his mind.
Anyway, regarding the Patriot Act, from what I understand almost no one who signed it read it, and not many of its signatories continue to support it in its entirety, regardless of their party affiliations. So faulting John Kerry for this is foolish.
I personally think that a much better reason to distrust John Kerry is that he throws like a girl.
I used to think this too, but then... what about the Atheists? What about the nominally religious who are not part of an organized faith?
And then, what about the rights afforded to spouses? I'm not talking about tax breaks here, I'm talking about stuff like the right to decide to pull the life support plug. Things like that.
We could create "civil unions" that behave exactly like marriage, and allow people to get those instead. But while the laws we pass would undoubtably be careful not to ever refer to such unions as marriage, do you think Atheists, Agnostics, non-organized-faith religious believers, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual people, etc would all start saying "We're getting civil unioned?"
Not a chance. The law might call them civil unions, but everyone (including me) would just end up calling them marriage, because that's what they are. The idea that marriage is solely a religious institution is one that is being retroactively created now; marriage has been handled by the state since the inception of the republic.
This, predictably, would infuriate the religious right, who wishes to keep people from using the term "marriage" when refering to ungodly unions. Furthermore, there are organized faiths now that support gay marriage. They would doubtlessly marry their LGBT parish members.
You see, the religious right doesn't want seperation of church and state on this issue, because they know they would lose. Liberal churches would marry homosexuals, non-religious people (there are many) would call their civil unions marriages out of colloquial habit, etc.
No, their only course of action is to define, legally, marriage as between a man and a woman.
Which is why those of us that support the idea that the government oughtn't to dictate who can get married and who can't must, counterintutively, push for an amendment that specifically defines the institution of marriage in a way that is preserves the civil liberties of both hetero and homosexuals alike.
No matter what your personal feelings about homosexuals and homosexuality may be, ask yourself -- do you want to support the only amendment to the constitution other than prohibition (which, lest we forget, was later repealed) whose sole purpose is to limit the civil rights of other human beings?
I would much rather have the government not get involved in marriage, but unfortunately, after examining the possibilities, it seems that this is one of these situations where you either support the erosion of civil liberties, or you support their protection.
We American males are notoriously conservative and homophobic. I'm not saying this in a way that is meant to criticize. Culturally, we simply aren't very open to male-on-male affection, etc. Most of my friends can't even comfortably hug their fathers. Not all societies are like this, but ours is. As a result, when the religious right talks about "Adam and Steve" getting married and raising a kid, it makes us uncomfortable. It isn't because we hate gays as people -- but our culture just doesn't jive well that way.
This is exactly why the religious right focuses so much on male homosexuality (you hear them say "Adam & Eve, not Adam and Steve!" but never "Adam & Eve, not Sharon and Eve" or whatever). Because they know that American male discomfort with male homosexuality is the way to push this issue through.
This, at its core, is not about homosexuality. At least, it shouldn't be. It should be about civil rights -- even for people we don't like or whose lifestyles make us uncomfortable. Don't let the religious right make this a wedge issue. They're playing on discomfort you have been socialized by American culture to have. It's manipulation. Don't fall for it.
"Vorbii" is not the correct plural of "Vorbis". You see, Vorbis is not a second declension masculine noun as is often assumed, but rather a rare 4th declension neutre. In extant literature it was only used in its singular form -- obviously in the glory days of Rome Vorbis could not have been associated with a popular digital music format, and rather described the feeling that one has when one hears a pleasant sound. Understandably, this noun was uncountable and as such was never seen in the plural.
Therefore, when constructing the plural for this noun, you should use the widely accepted English plural, namely, "Vorbises".
Just wanted to clear that up. Vorbii is a pet peeve of mine.
That's at least 5 genetically different people which should be fairly viable.
Unfortunately, it's not. How many people are needed to create a genetically viable population varies very much on the individuals concerned, but the lowest number I've ever heard is 60 -- 60 completely unrelated individuals.
Everything you have said is true. Unfortunately, it isn't all that applicable. For one thing, the Eve and Adam hypotheses, while named for Adam and Eve, do not postulate the existance of one individual or couple that seeded all of humanity -- they simply suggest that at one point, there weren't many humans. A population of 20 thousand is quite different from one couple. The fact that we are able to note, from mitochondrial DNA, that these sorts of "population bottlenecks" occured in our past doesn't really have any bearing on the plausibility of an Adam and Eve scenario.
Now, your animal examples are interesting but irrelevant, also. How do we know that Wisent Bison are descended from 12 individuals, or that Golden Hamsters are descended from just one litter? Subsequent lack of genetic diversity. Just as we know that the population of Iceland is descended from just a few Norse families that settled there long ago, our DNA provides evidence of genetic diversity or lack thereof. On a whole, we humans are rather diverse, genetically. Not so diverse that we can't interbreed, but diverse enough that our initial "seed" population could not have been just one couple.
So yeah, I think I stand by what I said in my OP. I don't think I'd call it bad science. Your examples are interesting but don't matter because a) they either talk about animals other than humans, or b) suggest that humans could have evolved from a population of around 20k individuals -- rather more than a couple, which is the idea I'm trying to refute, at least in its literal interpretation.
I don't know... there's nothing silly, on the face of it, about unicorns. Why shouldn't there have been a horse with one horn at some point in time? It, like many other things, might just be extinct. Anyway, stranger creatures have walked this earth.
As for the Jessie Jackson bit, that truly is silly. But I think it's a different issue than the existance or non-existance of God, because your scenario serves no purpose. Don't you ever wonder why the universe exists? It all seems so perfect. I see the existance of benevolent white bearded super-being as the willfull creator of the universe as a bit of a stretch, granted. But I guess if someone were able to offer evidence that the universe had been somehow engineered, I wouldn't really be surprised. But I would just replace my "why does the universe exist" question with "why does God exist", which is equivalent. It's the whole "Unmoved mover" thing. My human belief in causality makes me wonder why things are, and anything which exists for no reason confuses me.
To me, "the universe exists for no reason" and "God created the universe for a reason, but God exists for no reason" are equivalently frustrating belief systems.
But I'll stay open-minded. I just wanted to underscore that I'm not against the notion of God in principle. I just don't think it's supportable.
Well, the Adam and Eve issue (as someone else pointed out) is that we don't have enough genetic diversity in one couple to produce all of humanity. Just consider the inbreeding problems that the royalty of Europe had a few hundred years ago due to intermarriage. If you wanted to populate the moon, for example, you could not just send one couple. Within a few generations, inbreeding related problems would be their downfall.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a nice story, and it can be used (like most mythologies) to explain social issues like morality and the like, but interpreted literally it falls rather short given what we know from observation about what happens when humans reproduce with their siblings and cousins for a few generations.
Regarding Noah's Ark, this is actually a reference to a big issue in Darwin's time -- that of biological diversity. Again, Noah's Ark involves the idea of "a pair of every animal species" (which involves the same inbreeding issues as Adam and Eve) but even if you ignore that, there's the problem of the sheer number of species in the world.
See, when the judaic tribes came up with this story, their world was much smaller, and the number of species much more limited. So it seemed reasonable that an ark of a particular size could hold all the animals in the world.
But once naturalists started looking around, they realized that there were more species of animal than could possibly be held in just one ark. Furthermore, there's the issue of positioning. If you don't accept evolution, how did the animals get to their respective positions after the Flood? Did the kangaroo swim to Australia? All animals were created by god in static and unchanging way for some mystical purpose, according to religion, so after the Flood, all those animals needed to get to where the lived. Let's assume the Kangaroo did walk across Asia and then swim to Australia. Why aren't there any Kangaroos between Mt. Ararat and Australia?
How do you explain phenomena like the Wallace Line between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia?
The answer is, you don't. Noah's Ark may have been a localized occurence; there is evidence that suggests that the Mediterranean basin was once a wide and fertile valley and that a number of agricultural civilisations were destroyed as the water level rose. It's entirely possible, then, that some old guy built a boat and took his goats with him. But to extrapolate such a story to the entire world?
I could see, if you believed in evolution -- and thought major speciation could happen in just a few thousand years -- that maybe back then there were just fewer animals, and that they subsequently evolved into their current form. Of course, this isn't consistant with scientific understanding of how evolution works.
Or perhaps God created all those other Animals after the flood. Or maybe, there were many Noahs, in many different cultures, and they all built Arks. No matter how you try to explain it, though, the story as it stands is an explanation that doesn't scale.
But that doesn't mean that it isn't a great story. I enjoyed it a lot as a kid. I'll tell it to my children. But it's a story. It's like the Church saying heliocentricity was bunk. They made a mistake. So what? If your belief in God depends on a literal interpretation of the bible or other religious dogma, it's a tenous faith indeed.
Because, as I pointed out, Science can only replace the mythologies produced by religion, but it will never be able to replace the core reason for the existance of religion -- to explain why things are the way they are. There's no reason to feel threatened about modern evidence falsifying or rendering unlikely stories written by nomadic tribes millenia ago.
You're missing the OP's point. His computer analogy obviously doesn't hold literally; he's trying to explain that causality doesn't have much sway in Modern Physics. While we may be unable to send our entire bodies back in time, particles do it essentially all the time. It seems as though our current understanding of physics (both on the macroscopic general relativity scale and on the microscopic quantum scale) not only allows but actually encourages this kind of bizarre behaviour.
The confusion comes from classical mechanics, where we typically would model real-world behaviour parametrically -- and time was the parameter. So for example, we would explain the movement of a particle as vector function of time. This works fine, most of the time. But it isn't general enough.
Relativity showed that time is not a parameter anymore than classical dimensions could be considered a parameter, it's just that we perceive it that way. Time is actually a quantity much like space. It doesn't behave exactly the same way, but that's a result of the metric of the spacetime continuum (see Lorentz transforms in Special Relativity for an example of this).
So, now we have a particle occupying a position (x,y,z,t) instead of occupying a position (x,y,z) at a particular time t. In the same way that we accept that a particle can retrace its path when moving along the x axis, we must accept that a particle can move backwards on the t axis (it just isn't thermodynamically efficient to do so).
Let's talk about you and your grandfather. Your grandfather is at point (x,y,z,t) and you are at point (x',y',z',t'), presumably with t' > t. You time travel back to time t, and kill him. He ceases to exist at (x,y,z,t).
Now, because time is a positional coordinate, if you will, and not a parameter, you have not "arrested his movement". People like to wrap their heads around this by imagining that in changing the past you have "forked" the universe and that this new forked version will never produce you, but you aren't destroyed because you come from a different version of the future.
The point is that physics doesn't care why you came into being, only that you came into being. You exist; you will not cease to exist just because the thing that "created" you was destroyed. This leads philosophers to suggest that everything exists inherently, and that we just pick our way through a myriad of decision universes. It's a way of making our logic apply to physics. At the moment there's no evidence for it.
The "kill your grandpa" paradox was used in the old days to explain why time travel was impossible; and yet time travel is manifestly possible, even if harnessing it poses an engineering problem. It happens at the particle level all the time (positrons are electrons moving backwards in time, says Feynman). This suggests, then, that our starting principle is flawed (reducto ad absurdum). The "fall guy" in this case is causality. Causality doesn't matter. We hold on to it because we have memory. But cause can follow effect, etc... I mean, it's a bizarre world we live in.
Your question is a good one, but it has no answer. I'd like to explain why. It's a matter of philosophy.
You see, science (especially in popular consciousness) is seen as the discipline which endeavors to answer the question "why?" with respect to various observable phenomena. These questions have been at the center of human thought for well, ever. We created religion in its various forms to answer this very class of questions.
With the advent of science, it seemed as though we finally had a way to truly answer these questions, but unfortunately this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. Science does not try to answer nor can it answer the why. The why has no answer.
Let me explain. Science (and specifically the scientific method) is designed to determine, through experiment and falsifiability of hypothesis, the way the world behaves and to model its behaviour. Because these theories often have far reaching consequences, laymen (and even scientists, unfortunately) often make the mistake of thinking that their theories explain the why. But they do not; they simply explain the how.
Let's explore this a bit. Newton's law of gravity did not explain why gravity exists. Why two bodies fall together is anyone's guess -- why, as a question, demands a reason. There may very well be a reason that two bodies fall together -- a popularly believed one is that some supernatural being designed it that way -- but physics does not, indeed, cannot, conjure up a reason by simply observing and modeling the way those two objects fall together.
An example of this in more human terms: suppose you have a batty friend, and everytime you say foo, he says bar, like clockwork. You would quickly observe this and would, in your mind, be able to construct a hypothesis based on this behaviour -- when the subject hears foo, he says bar. And you could construct a series of experiments that test this hypothesis -- perhaps you would find that in the presence of blondes, he utters baz instead. This knowledge would allow you to predict his behaviour in certain situations, but it would say nothing whatsoever about his reasons for it. Nor could any amount of observation ever explain the reasons.
Now, in physics this is obfuscated by the discipline's drive to isolate core phenomena. That is, it has been noted that often phenomena we observe are caused by smaller, less obvious phenomena. So, for example, attempts to make gravity fit into quantum mechanics have driven physicists to suggest that gravity as a force is mediated by a graviton, or what not. If this were ever demonstrated by experiment and became widely accepted, a laymen might ask, "why does gravity behave the way it does?" and a physicist might explain that it has to do with property xyz of gravitons. But this is not an explanation.
This is simply telling the listener that the macroscopic observable phenomenon of gravity is actually made up of several, less easily observable phenomena. This is all well and good, but you'll notice that it actually explains "how" gravity works. "Why does my house keep out the rain?" "Because it has a roof." It seems logical, but it isn't. Because the roof is how it keeps out the rain -- the reason it keeps out the rain is something much more subtle, like, "Because the designers felt that the house's inhabitants would rather not get wet."
Science answers the how of things, and it does this exceedingly well. It cannot (and for the most part, does not even attempt) to answer the why. But why and how are so muddled in the way people think that lots of folks (scientists included) are deluded into thinking that science will eventually explain the big questions like "why does the universe exist", and "why are we here."
If you've ever asked a scientist the latter question, you may have gotten something along the lines of "We're here as a result of abiogenisis, followed by billions of years of evolution, catelysed by Darwinian na
I think I agree with the gist of your post, and I also agree with the gist of the GP's post; you both make good points.
I would just like to go off on a tangent here for a moment and address a commonly repeated fallacy regarding communism and democracy.
Communism and democracy have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Democracy is a political system, and Communism is an economic system. They are not mutually exclusive or even related, at least not in a causal way.
Unfortunately, during the Truman years, the USA was greatly concerned about rising Soviet influence over the "Third World". I'm using this term in its original (cold war) context: those nations which did not belong to the capitalist west but were not allied with the Soviets, either. The term Third World as used today is mostly pejorative and I favor its retirement, but I digress.
Anyway, throughout the cold war, much effort was made to slander communism as a system. It was therefore decried as being authoritarian in nature, but this was deliberate propaganda. A socialist "welfare" state is not authoritarian by definition, it just so happened that the USSR was.
Communism is a system (which probably can never truly exist, but that's a seperate matter) in which the workers own the means of production. It says nothing whatsoever about authoritarian rule, and doesn't require it -- in fact, Marx in his utopian viewpoint saw a large government as being antithetical to the communist ideal and hoped (unrealistically) that after the worker's revolution the leader of the movement would assume a temporary "benign" dictatorship. To place in this in American terms, it was his hope that a man like George Washington -- heroic and respected -- would be the one to lead the revolution, and then voluntarily step down once the necessary infrastructure were in place. Of course, as has often been noted by American historians, this quality is uncommon and George Washington is one of the few political leaders in history who could have been king but chose not to be in favor of the system.
Anyway, to get back to the point, socialism, the interim economic system which Marx theorized would "bridge" capitalism and communism, does not mandate a dictatorship. Many socialist states (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) are in fact very libertarian in nature. They pay very high taxes and have an extremely high standard of living -- Norway's is the highest in the world, in fact.
Similarly, there are many authoritarian capitalist states. Singapore is an example I frequently use, but it is hardly the only one. The People's Republic of China is increasingly becoming market capitalist -- very little of its communist infrastructure remains -- and yet it remains authoritarian. The US, in its campaign to secure access to Latin American resources, installed a number of capitalist governments that amounted to little more than dictatorships (in some cases against the wishes of the majority, as measured by socialist candidates elected).
Now, while I am politically left leaning, I am socially libertarian -- by this I mean that freedom from oppression and censorship is very important to me. The idea that socialism (and communism, which probably can never exist) is by necessity an authoritarian system is 1950s era propaganda. The USSR was undeniably authoritarian, but this was a result of the decisions of its leaders (especially after Lenin), not a result of its economic system. I do not deny that the rise of soviet-style authoritarian communism was a bad thing for pretty much anyone concerned.
However, I think that now that the cold war is over, and we can look back in a more objective way, we should try not to present communism and democracy as opposites, because they in fact have nothing to do with each other. Civil liberties are perhaps encouraged by a free market, because a free market functions better with little government intervention, but civil liberties are by no means guaranteed by one. Consider the PRC
Your example would unfortunately prove nothing, because unless I were a widespread organizer, the government would rightly see me as mostly non-threatening. It is entirely possible that if I were obnoxious about it, I might be asked not to wear it by someone in a position of authority. If I refused, I would probably unceremoniously be asked to leave the country, as I am not Chinese.
But your point in a certain sense is well taken, because obviously, the USA is a nominally free society whereas the PRC makes no claims of being one. No one in their right mind would literally mean that the governments of the PRC and the USA are similarly repressive; but then that's why my comparison was prefaced with a modifying "sometimes".
In the same way that the slogan, "The USA: better than North Korea" has no substantial value, comparing the state of civic liberties in the PRC to the USA and using the USA's better track record as an indication of superiority is a useless exercise. Of course the USA is better than the PRC where personal freedoms are concerned. This goes without saying.
What is productive is the same comparison made in the other direction. If the PRC fails to meet the USA's standards, no one is surprised; it is when the USA is either the same or inferior to a country like the PRC that we need to begin worrying.
Comparisons of the USA's current state of civic freedoms to the PRC, the DPRK, or Mussolini's Italy are all hyperbole and should be treated as such. The purpose of such comparisons is to underscore the inadvisability of taking such reforms to extremes. Our current erosion of the civil liberties, for example, smacks of totalitarianism. To illustrate the point, I might say that the USA's current standards of something or other are equivalent to the PRC's -- this is meant to alarm you, not instigate a "but the PRC is worse than we are in terms of x, y, and z."
In summary, my point was that the original poster's retort (which essentially was, "The USA is better than the PRC because we don't roll tanks over students") was an oversimplified, propaganda-worthy comparison. It was one of those facile categorizations like, "You're either with us or with the terrorists", or "Things are either good or evil, black or white".
This kind of on/off true/false binary logic demonstratably fails with most real world concepts.
While the Tiananmen square massacre was lamentable, to simply state the USA is better because we have not similarly silenced protesting students is overlooking the huge number of horrible things we have done.
The PRC has many flaws; no one I know denies this -- even the Chinese. But Americans for some reason are wont to deny their own country's significant blunders.
To much of the rest of the world, China did not invade Iraq, or destabilize the entire continent of Latin America for their personal gain, or fight largely hopeless proxy battles with the former USSR in order to stop the spread of communism, because after all, we can't have vassal states choosing their own leaders or system of government. Free elections were never held in South Vietnam because of overwhelming popular support for Ho Chi Minh, etc. We face the same problem now in Iraq -- sure, we can have democracy, but what kind of leaders will the Iraqis elect? Most likely an Islamofacist one.
China's great flaws are these: a poor human rights record and a lack of personal freedoms. Of course, the nation griping the most loudly about the former is one of the few in the developed world that still executes inmates on a regular basis, and is also the one that was responsible for use of torture in Iraq. We may not be in the same league as China in this regard, but to much of the rest of the world, we are seen as a bully criticizing another bully for similar actions.
Regarding its lack of personal freedoms: this mostly means that political speech is not universally protected. Otherwise, you are welcome to sa
No, instead we systematically inacted a widespread "final solution" to the "Indian problem", genocide on such an incredibly wide scale that we're still too embarassed to make much more than a passing reference to it in standard education.
Instead we benefited from legal slavery longer than any other western nation.
Instead, we torched women and children (entire villages, on purpose) during Vietnam.
And while we're on the subject of opening fire on protesters, let's not forget about the incident with Gandhi's followers and the British, on a similarly massive scale. Oh but wait, the British are our allies, so it's ok, right?
None of this makes Tiananmen right, because, as your mom probably told you, two wrongs don't make a right. But as an American living in China, frankly, sometimes I don't see such a huge difference between our governments in practice; only in ideology.
Ideology is definitely worth something. But don't pretend like our shit doesn't stink, but it sure as hell does. To criticize others effectively, we must be receptive to criticism ourselves.
Of course since the modern CCP is really an authoritarian market capitalist party, and was never Marxist/Communist in anything more than name (it was Maoist, which is very different, having the peasants rather than the workers at the center of the movement) I'm not sure your comment is all that insightful.
Funny in a sort of "I grew up during the Cold War and the reds are baaaaaad and Reagan is gooood" kind of "betrays a lack of critical thought" kind of way.
Of course Mandarin Chinese, spoken by essentially all of the PRC, is rich in retroflexes and has a distinctive l sound, which means that Mandarin speakers pronounce the English r very well (better than many Europeans, in fact, with little practice) and certainly distinguish it from the l. Some places where the l is not pronounced as an l but is instead retroflexing (walk) sometimes sound r like, but that's the extent of it.
Oh, I see, you were refering to the Japanese, who have neither an r nor an l and can't easily distinguish them.
But I guess on Slashdot, all rice-eating yellow-heads are the same, eh?
Understand that I don't think there's anything politically incorrect about making fun of the Japanese for their ridiculous pronunciation, or making fun of the Chinese for their shortcomings.
But let's get one thing straight: Japan is not China, any more than Poland and Spain are the same country.
The two languages aren't even in the same macrophylum, for crying out loud. This just makes you look retarded. It's like the guy who doesn't understand why he can't run Safari on his Windows machine. Not funny, just ignorant.
You guys are so funny. I live in China. China is absolutely nothing like "criticize the government and get 10 years in prison." I know that American propaganda is partially at fault for all of this, but for some reasons Americans imagine China hasn't change at all since Mao was chairman or something.
While it's true that freedom of speech is not guaranteed, the press actually has a fair bit of leeway in what it says about the government. Censorship in China isn't preemptive: most Slashdotters seem to think that everything that gets published needs to go to some central bureau of propaganda or something before it can hit the streets. This is not so. Consider that this nation has the largest economic growth rate in the world and will probably pass the US in economic clout in the next decade -- making them the next economic superpower. Communication is necessary for this kind of development -- despite what you may think about China, it's actually very much a market capitalist country and most development is happening in the private sector, so being able to say what you want is pretty important.
Of course, there is censorship in China, it just works in a preventive way. The bureau tells newspapers what sensitive issues should not be discussed. If the ministry of propaganda hasn't told you you can't discuss it, it is nominally free game (within reason, but then it's usually pretty obvious that you shouldn't spend too much time unduly criticizing the very powerful -- although this does happen quite a bit). So for example, the Chinese government position on Taiwan is that Taiwan is part of China, and that the Taiwanese people consider themselves Chinese and want to return to China; that it is the government that is responsible for Taiwanese seperatism, that this view is unpopular with the locals, and that the US keeps those seperatists in power. This, of course, is a massive distortion of the truth, but despite that, you won't find anything that disagrees with it in the press. This is a well known issue.
During SARS we had a similar situation where the Ministry ordered censorship of the extent of infection, attempted to claim that the disease originated in the west, and so on. This decision (mostly traced back to Jiang Zi Min) backfired big time though, and was a major reason that Jiang, who despite no longer officially being president was still extremely influential in Chinese politics at the time (by virtue of his post as "Supreme Commander of the Military") fell out of favor. Hu Jin Tao favors a much more open approach to these things.
It's true that none of this is ideal; censorship sucks. But as an American who reads a lot of foreign news as well as a lot of local news, I must say that the folks back home are getting a rather different picture painted for them by the American media than the rest of the world gets vis a vis world events. Perhaps this isn't government-induced censorship; perhaps it is corporate censorship. But when only a few companies control essentially all the media, you have a situation where it is possible for a small group of very wealthy, powerful people to greatly influence public opinion (and by extension government policy).
Despite what people like to say, China is not a totaletarian dictatorship. It is a one-party system, and this is rather different. Elections are held, just within the party, and they happen at different levels. Anyone can become a member of the CCP just as anyone can become a member of the Democrats or Republicans.
The longer I live here the less difference I see between a two party system and one party system. What makes America great is the constitution, not its politicians. It's amazing that even with such a great document to start from, we still manage to fuck so much stuff up.
Judging by how tremendously profitable MS has been as a result of their OS monopoly, I would say, from a business perspective, it sure as shit looks like it.
While you're right in correcting this common misconception about the GPL, it is worth noting that any copyright license that attempts to govern usage has stepped outside its legal jurisdiction, as it were.
Copyright law governs one thing only: the right to copy. Hence the name. In the same way that I can buy Jerry Falwell's new book and rub it between my butt cheeks after everytime I finish having gay sex, I can do whatever I want with code that I have a license to have.
Jerry Falwell, while disagreeing with my love of buttsex, would be helpless in court to stop me from using his book in this unintended manner. However, if I started to reprint books of his, without his prior permission, in order to spread the joy of buttcumming on his literary works, he would be able to point copyright law in my direction and bitchslap me in court.
Similarly, if an evil large corporation decides to use Linux to, I dunno, kill furry bunnies or build nuclear weapons, there's nothing the GPL can do about it. And any added provision in a license attempting to restrict this sort of use would have no effect.
All that one could do is restrict people from distributing the code to certain people (so you can use copyright to blacklist, or whitelist, if you will) because that's restriction of the right to copy.
Everything else is just confused FUD.
Re:The First Netscape was revolutionary
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You, sir, were obviously not acquainted with Perl.
Yes, early versions of perl were well suited for one thing only (or at least, it was all I used them for). Automatic downloading of porn from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. I would start the thing on my shell account in the early morning, come back in the afternoon and have hundreds of poor quality dirty pictures to look at.
When I heard that some people were putting movies on the internet, I couldn't believe it. Just getting 50 pics took me most of the day to download using zmodem.
I'm not about to vote for Nader, but let's be fair. How much experience does he have being an influential politician? None. I mean, Kerry could have conceivably said something like, "I voted for the PATRIOT act because at the time, in post 9/11 trauma, I really wanted to do what was best for national security, but now, seeing how the powers it granted have been abused, I'm in favor of repealing it" and President Bush might have said, "I really believed that Iraq had WMDs, and I said that frequently on national television, and it's embarassing to admit, but there weren't any; obviously it would be inappropriate for me to stubbornly keep saying that WMDs were an appropriate reason to invade Iraq when there's ample evidence that none existed or posed a threat."
But Nader? I mean, what example could he have given that would have resonated politically with anyone here? The guy is very smart, but lacking political experience, these sorts of "When have you changed your mind" questions are bound to produce an answer of less importance than someone who actually works in politics, as both Senator Kerry and President Bush do.
Let's not forget, either, that of the three, Nader is the only one that actually listened to the question and gave an answer, even if it was a slighly less than serious, mostly metaphorical one. Kerry said the same thing as Nader did, but declined to give an example of changing his mind on an important issue, and Bush declined to say anything at all.
So while the hotdog example is silly (and I had a "WTF?" moment too when I read it), compared to the responses of the other two candidates, it was refreshing, because it actually approximated an answer to the fscking question.
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Hi. Sorry, my friend. America is a great country, but Europeans have got us on social aid. Let's dissect your points one by one, shall we.
Social Security, Medicare, and Welfare are under constant threat from people right of center; in this case I'm being non-partisan in my evaluation. Democrats, obstensibly the American party of the left, has its share of people who believe in Horatio Alger's myth of the "American Dream". I'll get to that in a minute. First, some facts.
Medicare is divided into two parts, part A and part B. You are only eligible for Medicare if you are 65 or older, have certain (rare) disabilities, or have serious renal (kidney) problems. Medicare does not cover you at all otherwise, which means that for 99% of Slashdotters, for example, Medicare is completely useless. Furthermore, you are only eligible for free part A coverage if you have been paying Medicare taxes for an appropriately long period of time -- this may sound fair, but it means (for example) that it is often not economical for a young immigrant to bring his ailing mother with him to the States because she will not be eligible for medical care.
And then there's part B coverage, which costs $66.50 per month (that's not cheap, dude) and is only available, again, for people eligible for Medicare.
Contrast this to many European countries, where if you get into an accident, you walk into a hospital, and they fix it. Bume. You don't pay anything.
Medicaid, which is the general name for Federal funds given to the states for the purpose of health care, varies from state to state. Medicare is, IIRC, under the "Medicaid" blanket. Most people do not see a dime of this money. That isn't surprising; not much money is given.
What about social security? It's a slush fund that we all pay into that isn't protected at all. The government routinely uses this money for things not related to social security, and it hasn't been putting money back in as fast as it takes it out. Throw an aging baby boomer generation into the mix and you have a system that wasn't really adequate to begin with that is fiscally unsustainable.
Welfare, well, welfare would be a start if it weren't for the fact that all sorts of draconian elligibility requirements weren't in place. Most people on welfare in the US are single mothers. Did you know that in most states, if the state discovers that you have a boyfriend, you can lose welfare eligibility? No joke. Because if you have a man, obviously, you don't need a goverment check. Your man can take care of you. Heh.
Do you know how much money we give people on welfare? Not enough to survive, that's for sure. I know that in middle class America the popular steryotype of a welfare mama is a fat black woman doing nothing all day but having kids for the extra money, but reality is rather far from this. Most women on welfare are working two full time jobs and still can't make ends meet. Who's taking care of their kids while they work? Usually no one, because babysitters cost money. So you end up with latch-key kids. You see, we Americans don't feel that raising children is work that deserves compensation.
It's really easy for women to end up on welfare, you know. The US is also really bad about protecting maternity leave rights. So what happens is, a woman gets pregnant and takes time off to have her child, and while she's gone, she loses her job. Libertarians everywhere applaud. Anyone who's ever had a child knows how much work they are. So what do you do? Hand your kid over to your parents, and get another job, quickly, before the industry moves on and you're not elligible for much more than waiting tables?
Regarding freedoms in other countries, you are right that we have higher standards. In much of Europe, for example, hate speech is illegal; this looks good on the face of things but it is sometimes used with impunity to restrict criticism. An example would be police using French hate speech laws to censor Frenc
In Fall 2001, the Muslim student population at my Alma Mater had a lot of issues. Lots of Muslim guys were beaten up; a girl was raped; numerous people were spit on.
It got so bad, in fact, that a Muslim student group at my school organized a "green arm band" system, whereby people willing to stand up for the rights of others would wear a green arm band. That way, if Muslim students were feeling threatened, they knew that they would be able to turn to a person wearing a green armband for aid/defense.
The move got a lot of publicity but I was saddened by how few non-Muslims gave their support. I'm proud to say I did. Most of my African-American friends did too. But essentially no one else really bothered.
Sad state of affairs.
I don't like Bush anymore than you do. But that quote was George H.W. Bush (i.e, Bush Sr), not GWB.
GWB has said some pretty wacky things too. But this particular gem cannot be attributed to him.
You're looking at this too practically.
Freedom isn't much good, admittedly, if no one bothers to exercise it. What this article measures, however, is not the quality of information provided by the local press; rather, it is the ease with which journalists are able to obtain information in a country without the government interfering.
American journalists don't take much advantage of the US's open nature, because our private media are here to sell news, and Americans culturally just don't care about what's happening in the world. I really don't think there's much of a conspiracy here. The US is a huge country, the most powerful in the world, bordered by another huge country that speaks the same language it does. People in the US just don't care too much about the rest of the world unless it affects their lives directly, and the truth is that as far as US citizens are concerned, what happens in most other countries has little bearing on their daily lives.
This is hard to understand for a lot of Europeans, who mostly come from small countries that don't have the same natural resources the US does. For someone in France or Germany, what happens in Poland, Belgium, the UK, Turkey -- this all can and does affect their daily lives, economic stability, etc, in a way that is evident to the average joe. And so, not surprisingly, these people are better informed than Americans when it comes to world issues.
Now, the press freedom in the US is pretty good. By this I mean that a reporter from Le Monde can go to the US with the intent to write an exposé on American government corruption, for example, and will run into very little static doing it. A New York Post reporter, in a similar way, will have little trouble getting the information he wants in France, even if his piece is called "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys: How a country entirely populated by homosexuals manages to remain adequately populated." This is because both the US and France are very free countries. And while the journalists of other countries may use this to abuse them, they understand that keeping information available is important.
China and North Korea, on the other hand, will want to "approve" what you write before letting you do anything. They may even offer to write it for you.
That's what's meant by press freedom. Not "is the local press open and non-self-censoring" but rather "do journalists have the freedom to ask questions and get them answered without too much interference."
The US scores badly on the first but passably well (although not as well as I, as an American, would like) on the second. This article is about the second, not the first.
At least here in the PRC, Windows comes with CJK fonts. SimSun, NSimSun, SimFang and SimHei for simplified chinese (although these also contain a sizeable number of traditional characters, being GBK), MingLiu, PMingLiu for Traditional Chinese, MS Gothic and MS Mincho for Japanese, and the Batang font family for Korean.
I would imagine that a Taiwanese or HK version of Windows would contain more traditional fonts, and a Japanese version more Japanese fonts, but the fonts included represent both "serif" and "sans-serif" styles (as the W3C interprets those terms for Asian fonts), which means that essentially all pages are browsable.
I use Firefox on Debian GNU/Linux, with these fonts (and others not packaged with Windows) copied from my coworkers' windows machines, and I have never come across a page that doesn't look nice.
A much larger problem (for me) is the fact that FreeType seems unable to create italic, oblique and bold versions of its CJK fonts. I am using the xftt module for X -- it apparently is capable of this -- but I still am unable to see bold fonts, which is a real pain.
But this is not the case in Windows.
A much larger problem than fonts is that the notion of standards compliance, CSS, and the like have not really penetrated the asian web design market -- these guys are doing 1994-style web design, with animated gifs and blink tags and an overuse of bad javascript. Active X is not uncommon. In general, only IE (and usually only IE 6) is tested, which means that everything else breaks.
Ah, yes, you've come to the heart of the matter.
You see, the production company came of age in another time; in a time of vinyl records and expensive analog recording equipment. The time of our parents. When recording was high-tech. Before the digital age.
Anyone that claims that the production company never deserved its immense slice of the pie is glossing over both history and economics.
The problem, unfortunately, is that the technological landscape of the world we live in has changed very much since the Janis Joplin days, when rebels listened to underground, unregulated FM radio because the AM bands had been reduced to 50s pop drivel.
Technology has outpaced the recording industry. At one point, they were a huge part of the music making process. But the days of needing an expensive recording studio to produce music that sounds good are all but over. Today's small band can take a decent shot at recording their music in the drummer's garage using the profits from their part-time jobs at Starbucks and local cafes. I'm not joking. I have friends who do this.
Now, the sound isn't as professional, or polished, as it would be in a professional recording studio. But the investment cost -- cost of equipment -- is low enough that recording has become a viable hobby for a number of my audiophile friends. Local bands pay these guys pennies on the RIAA's dollar for practically the same service -- and they don't need to sign their lives away to do it.
Now, if your goal is to become the next Britney Spears, raking in millions on tours and TV interviews, the RIAA remains your only venue. But for the vast majority of musicians, music, not fame, is their life's blood. If they get rich or famous, great. But it's playing gigs and selling your CDs to fans that gets you going. A friend of mine recently found someone sharing a song he'd written and his band had performed on KaZaa -- was he upset? The RIAA would have you think so. No, he was thrilled. Because it meant someone liked what he was doing. It meant he was getting exposure.
This is the problem. What 50 years ago could only be done in a recording studio that cost millions of dollars to build, now can be done by a hobbyist with a few computers and some good recording equipment. It's a direct side effect of the computer in our daily lives. It used to be that you needed fancy specialized equipment to do sound editing. Now you just route everything through your computer and do it in software.
It isn't as good, yet, as the specialized equipment, but let me ask you: how long do you think it will be before it is?
The RIAA, in its current incarnation, is fucked. They won't die -- but small time musicians everywhere are learning that signing your life and music away to a recording executive is no longer the only way to get your music heard. And when what you want is exposure, well, that's good news.
There will always be Britney Spears types -- performers -- that are marketed and put on display like a Barbie doll for all to ooo and ahh at. The RIAA will always be there to do this. They will probably not make much money on the recordings of her music, though, but then, most people aren't into Britney or the Backstreet Boys for their music, are they? It's the whole package. It's seeing them live. It's using their fame to draw viewers attention -- think about it. If you're an advertiser aiming at the teen demographic, wouldn't you feel justified in paying more to run your commercials on a show with Britney making a guest appearance?
There's still tons of money to be made here.
Just not as much. The RIAA will have to scale down or diversify. They will have to become the AMIAA (Artist Marketing instead of Recording) Industry. Recorded music will continue to be profitable, but only if prices come down. I live in China, where buying non-pirated CDs represents a real challenge (in other words, it's not really possible). A pirated, digital copy of the original
Now, just so everyone's clear, I think John Kerry is a douchebag.
However, being President of the USA isn't exactly the easiest job in the world. And while Kerry may be a little too prone to flip flopping, I really wouldn't mind seeing a little humility from the current administration regarding some of the rather more egregious errors they've committed in the last four years.
But I guess you can only have it two ways, eh? Either you have a megalomaniacal asshole who continues to insist that decisions made on poor information that resulted in needless loss of American lives, the destabilization of an entire region, and general loss of international goodwill were right, or you have a President who is weak by virtue of exercizing his perogative to change his mind.
Anyway, regarding the Patriot Act, from what I understand almost no one who signed it read it, and not many of its signatories continue to support it in its entirety, regardless of their party affiliations. So faulting John Kerry for this is foolish.
I personally think that a much better reason to distrust John Kerry is that he throws like a girl.
That's why I'll be voting GWB this November.
I used to think this too, but then... what about the Atheists? What about the nominally religious who are not part of an organized faith?
And then, what about the rights afforded to spouses? I'm not talking about tax breaks here, I'm talking about stuff like the right to decide to pull the life support plug. Things like that.
We could create "civil unions" that behave exactly like marriage, and allow people to get those instead. But while the laws we pass would undoubtably be careful not to ever refer to such unions as marriage, do you think Atheists, Agnostics, non-organized-faith religious believers, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual people, etc would all start saying "We're getting civil unioned?"
Not a chance. The law might call them civil unions, but everyone (including me) would just end up calling them marriage, because that's what they are. The idea that marriage is solely a religious institution is one that is being retroactively created now; marriage has been handled by the state since the inception of the republic.
This, predictably, would infuriate the religious right, who wishes to keep people from using the term "marriage" when refering to ungodly unions. Furthermore, there are organized faiths now that support gay marriage. They would doubtlessly marry their LGBT parish members.
You see, the religious right doesn't want seperation of church and state on this issue, because they know they would lose. Liberal churches would marry homosexuals, non-religious people (there are many) would call their civil unions marriages out of colloquial habit, etc.
No, their only course of action is to define, legally, marriage as between a man and a woman.
Which is why those of us that support the idea that the government oughtn't to dictate who can get married and who can't must, counterintutively, push for an amendment that specifically defines the institution of marriage in a way that is preserves the civil liberties of both hetero and homosexuals alike.
No matter what your personal feelings about homosexuals and homosexuality may be, ask yourself -- do you want to support the only amendment to the constitution other than prohibition (which, lest we forget, was later repealed) whose sole purpose is to limit the civil rights of other human beings?
I would much rather have the government not get involved in marriage, but unfortunately, after examining the possibilities, it seems that this is one of these situations where you either support the erosion of civil liberties, or you support their protection.
We American males are notoriously conservative and homophobic. I'm not saying this in a way that is meant to criticize. Culturally, we simply aren't very open to male-on-male affection, etc. Most of my friends can't even comfortably hug their fathers. Not all societies are like this, but ours is. As a result, when the religious right talks about "Adam and Steve" getting married and raising a kid, it makes us uncomfortable. It isn't because we hate gays as people -- but our culture just doesn't jive well that way.
This is exactly why the religious right focuses so much on male homosexuality (you hear them say "Adam & Eve, not Adam and Steve!" but never "Adam & Eve, not Sharon and Eve" or whatever). Because they know that American male discomfort with male homosexuality is the way to push this issue through.
This, at its core, is not about homosexuality. At least, it shouldn't be. It should be about civil rights -- even for people we don't like or whose lifestyles make us uncomfortable. Don't let the religious right make this a wedge issue. They're playing on discomfort you have been socialized by American culture to have. It's manipulation. Don't fall for it.
"Vorbii" is not the correct plural of "Vorbis". You see, Vorbis is not a second declension masculine noun as is often assumed, but rather a rare 4th declension neutre. In extant literature it was only used in its singular form -- obviously in the glory days of Rome Vorbis could not have been associated with a popular digital music format, and rather described the feeling that one has when one hears a pleasant sound. Understandably, this noun was uncountable and as such was never seen in the plural.
Therefore, when constructing the plural for this noun, you should use the widely accepted English plural, namely, "Vorbises".
Just wanted to clear that up. Vorbii is a pet peeve of mine.
Unfortunately, it's not. How many people are needed to create a genetically viable population varies very much on the individuals concerned, but the lowest number I've ever heard is 60 -- 60 completely unrelated individuals.
Rather more than 5, at least.
Everything you have said is true. Unfortunately, it isn't all that applicable. For one thing, the Eve and Adam hypotheses, while named for Adam and Eve, do not postulate the existance of one individual or couple that seeded all of humanity -- they simply suggest that at one point, there weren't many humans. A population of 20 thousand is quite different from one couple. The fact that we are able to note, from mitochondrial DNA, that these sorts of "population bottlenecks" occured in our past doesn't really have any bearing on the plausibility of an Adam and Eve scenario.
Now, your animal examples are interesting but irrelevant, also. How do we know that Wisent Bison are descended from 12 individuals, or that Golden Hamsters are descended from just one litter? Subsequent lack of genetic diversity. Just as we know that the population of Iceland is descended from just a few Norse families that settled there long ago, our DNA provides evidence of genetic diversity or lack thereof. On a whole, we humans are rather diverse, genetically. Not so diverse that we can't interbreed, but diverse enough that our initial "seed" population could not have been just one couple.
So yeah, I think I stand by what I said in my OP. I don't think I'd call it bad science. Your examples are interesting but don't matter because a) they either talk about animals other than humans, or b) suggest that humans could have evolved from a population of around 20k individuals -- rather more than a couple, which is the idea I'm trying to refute, at least in its literal interpretation.
I don't know... there's nothing silly, on the face of it, about unicorns. Why shouldn't there have been a horse with one horn at some point in time? It, like many other things, might just be extinct. Anyway, stranger creatures have walked this earth.
As for the Jessie Jackson bit, that truly is silly. But I think it's a different issue than the existance or non-existance of God, because your scenario serves no purpose. Don't you ever wonder why the universe exists? It all seems so perfect. I see the existance of benevolent white bearded super-being as the willfull creator of the universe as a bit of a stretch, granted. But I guess if someone were able to offer evidence that the universe had been somehow engineered, I wouldn't really be surprised. But I would just replace my "why does the universe exist" question with "why does God exist", which is equivalent. It's the whole "Unmoved mover" thing. My human belief in causality makes me wonder why things are, and anything which exists for no reason confuses me.
To me, "the universe exists for no reason" and "God created the universe for a reason, but God exists for no reason" are equivalently frustrating belief systems.
But I'll stay open-minded. I just wanted to underscore that I'm not against the notion of God in principle. I just don't think it's supportable.
Well, the Adam and Eve issue (as someone else pointed out) is that we don't have enough genetic diversity in one couple to produce all of humanity. Just consider the inbreeding problems that the royalty of Europe had a few hundred years ago due to intermarriage. If you wanted to populate the moon, for example, you could not just send one couple. Within a few generations, inbreeding related problems would be their downfall.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a nice story, and it can be used (like most mythologies) to explain social issues like morality and the like, but interpreted literally it falls rather short given what we know from observation about what happens when humans reproduce with their siblings and cousins for a few generations.
Regarding Noah's Ark, this is actually a reference to a big issue in Darwin's time -- that of biological diversity. Again, Noah's Ark involves the idea of "a pair of every animal species" (which involves the same inbreeding issues as Adam and Eve) but even if you ignore that, there's the problem of the sheer number of species in the world.
See, when the judaic tribes came up with this story, their world was much smaller, and the number of species much more limited. So it seemed reasonable that an ark of a particular size could hold all the animals in the world.
But once naturalists started looking around, they realized that there were more species of animal than could possibly be held in just one ark. Furthermore, there's the issue of positioning. If you don't accept evolution, how did the animals get to their respective positions after the Flood? Did the kangaroo swim to Australia? All animals were created by god in static and unchanging way for some mystical purpose, according to religion, so after the Flood, all those animals needed to get to where the lived. Let's assume the Kangaroo did walk across Asia and then swim to Australia. Why aren't there any Kangaroos between Mt. Ararat and Australia?
How do you explain phenomena like the Wallace Line between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia?
The answer is, you don't. Noah's Ark may have been a localized occurence; there is evidence that suggests that the Mediterranean basin was once a wide and fertile valley and that a number of agricultural civilisations were destroyed as the water level rose. It's entirely possible, then, that some old guy built a boat and took his goats with him. But to extrapolate such a story to the entire world?
I could see, if you believed in evolution -- and thought major speciation could happen in just a few thousand years -- that maybe back then there were just fewer animals, and that they subsequently evolved into their current form. Of course, this isn't consistant with scientific understanding of how evolution works.
Or perhaps God created all those other Animals after the flood. Or maybe, there were many Noahs, in many different cultures, and they all built Arks. No matter how you try to explain it, though, the story as it stands is an explanation that doesn't scale.
But that doesn't mean that it isn't a great story. I enjoyed it a lot as a kid. I'll tell it to my children. But it's a story. It's like the Church saying heliocentricity was bunk. They made a mistake. So what? If your belief in God depends on a literal interpretation of the bible or other religious dogma, it's a tenous faith indeed.
Because, as I pointed out, Science can only replace the mythologies produced by religion, but it will never be able to replace the core reason for the existance of religion -- to explain why things are the way they are. There's no reason to feel threatened about modern evidence falsifying or rendering unlikely stories written by nomadic tribes millenia ago.
You're missing the OP's point. His computer analogy obviously doesn't hold literally; he's trying to explain that causality doesn't have much sway in Modern Physics. While we may be unable to send our entire bodies back in time, particles do it essentially all the time. It seems as though our current understanding of physics (both on the macroscopic general relativity scale and on the microscopic quantum scale) not only allows but actually encourages this kind of bizarre behaviour.
The confusion comes from classical mechanics, where we typically would model real-world behaviour parametrically -- and time was the parameter. So for example, we would explain the movement of a particle as vector function of time. This works fine, most of the time. But it isn't general enough.
Relativity showed that time is not a parameter anymore than classical dimensions could be considered a parameter, it's just that we perceive it that way. Time is actually a quantity much like space. It doesn't behave exactly the same way, but that's a result of the metric of the spacetime continuum (see Lorentz transforms in Special Relativity for an example of this).
So, now we have a particle occupying a position (x,y,z,t) instead of occupying a position (x,y,z) at a particular time t. In the same way that we accept that a particle can retrace its path when moving along the x axis, we must accept that a particle can move backwards on the t axis (it just isn't thermodynamically efficient to do so).
Let's talk about you and your grandfather. Your grandfather is at point (x,y,z,t) and you are at point (x',y',z',t'), presumably with t' > t. You time travel back to time t, and kill him. He ceases to exist at (x,y,z,t).
Now, because time is a positional coordinate, if you will, and not a parameter, you have not "arrested his movement". People like to wrap their heads around this by imagining that in changing the past you have "forked" the universe and that this new forked version will never produce you, but you aren't destroyed because you come from a different version of the future.
The point is that physics doesn't care why you came into being, only that you came into being. You exist; you will not cease to exist just because the thing that "created" you was destroyed. This leads philosophers to suggest that everything exists inherently, and that we just pick our way through a myriad of decision universes. It's a way of making our logic apply to physics. At the moment there's no evidence for it.
The "kill your grandpa" paradox was used in the old days to explain why time travel was impossible; and yet time travel is manifestly possible, even if harnessing it poses an engineering problem. It happens at the particle level all the time (positrons are electrons moving backwards in time, says Feynman). This suggests, then, that our starting principle is flawed (reducto ad absurdum). The "fall guy" in this case is causality. Causality doesn't matter. We hold on to it because we have memory. But cause can follow effect, etc... I mean, it's a bizarre world we live in.
Your question is a good one, but it has no answer. I'd like to explain why. It's a matter of philosophy.
You see, science (especially in popular consciousness) is seen as the discipline which endeavors to answer the question "why?" with respect to various observable phenomena. These questions have been at the center of human thought for well, ever. We created religion in its various forms to answer this very class of questions.
With the advent of science, it seemed as though we finally had a way to truly answer these questions, but unfortunately this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. Science does not try to answer nor can it answer the why. The why has no answer.
Let me explain. Science (and specifically the scientific method) is designed to determine, through experiment and falsifiability of hypothesis, the way the world behaves and to model its behaviour. Because these theories often have far reaching consequences, laymen (and even scientists, unfortunately) often make the mistake of thinking that their theories explain the why. But they do not; they simply explain the how.
Let's explore this a bit. Newton's law of gravity did not explain why gravity exists. Why two bodies fall together is anyone's guess -- why, as a question, demands a reason. There may very well be a reason that two bodies fall together -- a popularly believed one is that some supernatural being designed it that way -- but physics does not, indeed, cannot, conjure up a reason by simply observing and modeling the way those two objects fall together.
An example of this in more human terms: suppose you have a batty friend, and everytime you say foo, he says bar, like clockwork. You would quickly observe this and would, in your mind, be able to construct a hypothesis based on this behaviour -- when the subject hears foo, he says bar. And you could construct a series of experiments that test this hypothesis -- perhaps you would find that in the presence of blondes, he utters baz instead. This knowledge would allow you to predict his behaviour in certain situations, but it would say nothing whatsoever about his reasons for it. Nor could any amount of observation ever explain the reasons.
Now, in physics this is obfuscated by the discipline's drive to isolate core phenomena. That is, it has been noted that often phenomena we observe are caused by smaller, less obvious phenomena. So, for example, attempts to make gravity fit into quantum mechanics have driven physicists to suggest that gravity as a force is mediated by a graviton, or what not. If this were ever demonstrated by experiment and became widely accepted, a laymen might ask, "why does gravity behave the way it does?" and a physicist might explain that it has to do with property xyz of gravitons. But this is not an explanation.
This is simply telling the listener that the macroscopic observable phenomenon of gravity is actually made up of several, less easily observable phenomena. This is all well and good, but you'll notice that it actually explains "how" gravity works. "Why does my house keep out the rain?" "Because it has a roof." It seems logical, but it isn't. Because the roof is how it keeps out the rain -- the reason it keeps out the rain is something much more subtle, like, "Because the designers felt that the house's inhabitants would rather not get wet."
Science answers the how of things, and it does this exceedingly well. It cannot (and for the most part, does not even attempt) to answer the why. But why and how are so muddled in the way people think that lots of folks (scientists included) are deluded into thinking that science will eventually explain the big questions like "why does the universe exist", and "why are we here."
If you've ever asked a scientist the latter question, you may have gotten something along the lines of "We're here as a result of abiogenisis, followed by billions of years of evolution, catelysed by Darwinian na
I think I agree with the gist of your post, and I also agree with the gist of the GP's post; you both make good points.
I would just like to go off on a tangent here for a moment and address a commonly repeated fallacy regarding communism and democracy.
Communism and democracy have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Democracy is a political system, and Communism is an economic system. They are not mutually exclusive or even related, at least not in a causal way.
Unfortunately, during the Truman years, the USA was greatly concerned about rising Soviet influence over the "Third World". I'm using this term in its original (cold war) context: those nations which did not belong to the capitalist west but were not allied with the Soviets, either. The term Third World as used today is mostly pejorative and I favor its retirement, but I digress.
Anyway, throughout the cold war, much effort was made to slander communism as a system. It was therefore decried as being authoritarian in nature, but this was deliberate propaganda. A socialist "welfare" state is not authoritarian by definition, it just so happened that the USSR was.
Communism is a system (which probably can never truly exist, but that's a seperate matter) in which the workers own the means of production. It says nothing whatsoever about authoritarian rule, and doesn't require it -- in fact, Marx in his utopian viewpoint saw a large government as being antithetical to the communist ideal and hoped (unrealistically) that after the worker's revolution the leader of the movement would assume a temporary "benign" dictatorship. To place in this in American terms, it was his hope that a man like George Washington -- heroic and respected -- would be the one to lead the revolution, and then voluntarily step down once the necessary infrastructure were in place. Of course, as has often been noted by American historians, this quality is uncommon and George Washington is one of the few political leaders in history who could have been king but chose not to be in favor of the system.
Anyway, to get back to the point, socialism, the interim economic system which Marx theorized would "bridge" capitalism and communism, does not mandate a dictatorship. Many socialist states (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) are in fact very libertarian in nature. They pay very high taxes and have an extremely high standard of living -- Norway's is the highest in the world, in fact.
Similarly, there are many authoritarian capitalist states. Singapore is an example I frequently use, but it is hardly the only one. The People's Republic of China is increasingly becoming market capitalist -- very little of its communist infrastructure remains -- and yet it remains authoritarian. The US, in its campaign to secure access to Latin American resources, installed a number of capitalist governments that amounted to little more than dictatorships (in some cases against the wishes of the majority, as measured by socialist candidates elected).
Now, while I am politically left leaning, I am socially libertarian -- by this I mean that freedom from oppression and censorship is very important to me. The idea that socialism (and communism, which probably can never exist) is by necessity an authoritarian system is 1950s era propaganda. The USSR was undeniably authoritarian, but this was a result of the decisions of its leaders (especially after Lenin), not a result of its economic system. I do not deny that the rise of soviet-style authoritarian communism was a bad thing for pretty much anyone concerned.
However, I think that now that the cold war is over, and we can look back in a more objective way, we should try not to present communism and democracy as opposites, because they in fact have nothing to do with each other. Civil liberties are perhaps encouraged by a free market, because a free market functions better with little government intervention, but civil liberties are by no means guaranteed by one. Consider the PRC
Your example would unfortunately prove nothing, because unless I were a widespread organizer, the government would rightly see me as mostly non-threatening. It is entirely possible that if I were obnoxious about it, I might be asked not to wear it by someone in a position of authority. If I refused, I would probably unceremoniously be asked to leave the country, as I am not Chinese.
But your point in a certain sense is well taken, because obviously, the USA is a nominally free society whereas the PRC makes no claims of being one. No one in their right mind would literally mean that the governments of the PRC and the USA are similarly repressive; but then that's why my comparison was prefaced with a modifying "sometimes".
In the same way that the slogan, "The USA: better than North Korea" has no substantial value, comparing the state of civic liberties in the PRC to the USA and using the USA's better track record as an indication of superiority is a useless exercise. Of course the USA is better than the PRC where personal freedoms are concerned. This goes without saying.
What is productive is the same comparison made in the other direction. If the PRC fails to meet the USA's standards, no one is surprised; it is when the USA is either the same or inferior to a country like the PRC that we need to begin worrying.
Comparisons of the USA's current state of civic freedoms to the PRC, the DPRK, or Mussolini's Italy are all hyperbole and should be treated as such. The purpose of such comparisons is to underscore the inadvisability of taking such reforms to extremes. Our current erosion of the civil liberties, for example, smacks of totalitarianism. To illustrate the point, I might say that the USA's current standards of something or other are equivalent to the PRC's -- this is meant to alarm you, not instigate a "but the PRC is worse than we are in terms of x, y, and z."
In summary, my point was that the original poster's retort (which essentially was, "The USA is better than the PRC because we don't roll tanks over students") was an oversimplified, propaganda-worthy comparison. It was one of those facile categorizations like, "You're either with us or with the terrorists", or "Things are either good or evil, black or white".
This kind of on/off true/false binary logic demonstratably fails with most real world concepts.
While the Tiananmen square massacre was lamentable, to simply state the USA is better because we have not similarly silenced protesting students is overlooking the huge number of horrible things we have done.
The PRC has many flaws; no one I know denies this -- even the Chinese. But Americans for some reason are wont to deny their own country's significant blunders.
To much of the rest of the world, China did not invade Iraq, or destabilize the entire continent of Latin America for their personal gain, or fight largely hopeless proxy battles with the former USSR in order to stop the spread of communism, because after all, we can't have vassal states choosing their own leaders or system of government. Free elections were never held in South Vietnam because of overwhelming popular support for Ho Chi Minh, etc. We face the same problem now in Iraq -- sure, we can have democracy, but what kind of leaders will the Iraqis elect? Most likely an Islamofacist one.
China's great flaws are these: a poor human rights record and a lack of personal freedoms. Of course, the nation griping the most loudly about the former is one of the few in the developed world that still executes inmates on a regular basis, and is also the one that was responsible for use of torture in Iraq. We may not be in the same league as China in this regard, but to much of the rest of the world, we are seen as a bully criticizing another bully for similar actions.
Regarding its lack of personal freedoms: this mostly means that political speech is not universally protected. Otherwise, you are welcome to sa
No, instead we systematically inacted a widespread "final solution" to the "Indian problem", genocide on such an incredibly wide scale that we're still too embarassed to make much more than a passing reference to it in standard education.
Instead we benefited from legal slavery longer than any other western nation.
Instead, we torched women and children (entire villages, on purpose) during Vietnam.
And while we're on the subject of opening fire on protesters, let's not forget about the incident with Gandhi's followers and the British, on a similarly massive scale. Oh but wait, the British are our allies, so it's ok, right?
None of this makes Tiananmen right, because, as your mom probably told you, two wrongs don't make a right. But as an American living in China, frankly, sometimes I don't see such a huge difference between our governments in practice; only in ideology.
Ideology is definitely worth something. But don't pretend like our shit doesn't stink, but it sure as hell does. To criticize others effectively, we must be receptive to criticism ourselves.
Of course since the modern CCP is really an authoritarian market capitalist party, and was never Marxist/Communist in anything more than name (it was Maoist, which is very different, having the peasants rather than the workers at the center of the movement) I'm not sure your comment is all that insightful.
Funny in a sort of "I grew up during the Cold War and the reds are baaaaaad and Reagan is gooood" kind of "betrays a lack of critical thought" kind of way.
Of course Mandarin Chinese, spoken by essentially all of the PRC, is rich in retroflexes and has a distinctive l sound, which means that Mandarin speakers pronounce the English r very well (better than many Europeans, in fact, with little practice) and certainly distinguish it from the l. Some places where the l is not pronounced as an l but is instead retroflexing (walk) sometimes sound r like, but that's the extent of it.
Oh, I see, you were refering to the Japanese, who have neither an r nor an l and can't easily distinguish them.
But I guess on Slashdot, all rice-eating yellow-heads are the same, eh?
Understand that I don't think there's anything politically incorrect about making fun of the Japanese for their ridiculous pronunciation, or making fun of the Chinese for their shortcomings.
But let's get one thing straight: Japan is not China, any more than Poland and Spain are the same country.
The two languages aren't even in the same macrophylum, for crying out loud. This just makes you look retarded. It's like the guy who doesn't understand why he can't run Safari on his Windows machine. Not funny, just ignorant.
You guys are so funny. I live in China. China is absolutely nothing like "criticize the government and get 10 years in prison." I know that American propaganda is partially at fault for all of this, but for some reasons Americans imagine China hasn't change at all since Mao was chairman or something.
While it's true that freedom of speech is not guaranteed, the press actually has a fair bit of leeway in what it says about the government. Censorship in China isn't preemptive: most Slashdotters seem to think that everything that gets published needs to go to some central bureau of propaganda or something before it can hit the streets. This is not so. Consider that this nation has the largest economic growth rate in the world and will probably pass the US in economic clout in the next decade -- making them the next economic superpower. Communication is necessary for this kind of development -- despite what you may think about China, it's actually very much a market capitalist country and most development is happening in the private sector, so being able to say what you want is pretty important.
Of course, there is censorship in China, it just works in a preventive way. The bureau tells newspapers what sensitive issues should not be discussed. If the ministry of propaganda hasn't told you you can't discuss it, it is nominally free game (within reason, but then it's usually pretty obvious that you shouldn't spend too much time unduly criticizing the very powerful -- although this does happen quite a bit). So for example, the Chinese government position on Taiwan is that Taiwan is part of China, and that the Taiwanese people consider themselves Chinese and want to return to China; that it is the government that is responsible for Taiwanese seperatism, that this view is unpopular with the locals, and that the US keeps those seperatists in power. This, of course, is a massive distortion of the truth, but despite that, you won't find anything that disagrees with it in the press. This is a well known issue.
During SARS we had a similar situation where the Ministry ordered censorship of the extent of infection, attempted to claim that the disease originated in the west, and so on. This decision (mostly traced back to Jiang Zi Min) backfired big time though, and was a major reason that Jiang, who despite no longer officially being president was still extremely influential in Chinese politics at the time (by virtue of his post as "Supreme Commander of the Military") fell out of favor. Hu Jin Tao favors a much more open approach to these things.
It's true that none of this is ideal; censorship sucks. But as an American who reads a lot of foreign news as well as a lot of local news, I must say that the folks back home are getting a rather different picture painted for them by the American media than the rest of the world gets vis a vis world events. Perhaps this isn't government-induced censorship; perhaps it is corporate censorship. But when only a few companies control essentially all the media, you have a situation where it is possible for a small group of very wealthy, powerful people to greatly influence public opinion (and by extension government policy).
Despite what people like to say, China is not a totaletarian dictatorship. It is a one-party system, and this is rather different. Elections are held, just within the party, and they happen at different levels. Anyone can become a member of the CCP just as anyone can become a member of the Democrats or Republicans.
The longer I live here the less difference I see between a two party system and one party system. What makes America great is the constitution, not its politicians. It's amazing that even with such a great document to start from, we still manage to fuck so much stuff up.
Judging by how tremendously profitable MS has been as a result of their OS monopoly, I would say, from a business perspective, it sure as shit looks like it.
While you're right in correcting this common misconception about the GPL, it is worth noting that any copyright license that attempts to govern usage has stepped outside its legal jurisdiction, as it were.
Copyright law governs one thing only: the right to copy. Hence the name. In the same way that I can buy Jerry Falwell's new book and rub it between my butt cheeks after everytime I finish having gay sex, I can do whatever I want with code that I have a license to have.
Jerry Falwell, while disagreeing with my love of buttsex, would be helpless in court to stop me from using his book in this unintended manner. However, if I started to reprint books of his, without his prior permission, in order to spread the joy of buttcumming on his literary works, he would be able to point copyright law in my direction and bitchslap me in court.
Similarly, if an evil large corporation decides to use Linux to, I dunno, kill furry bunnies or build nuclear weapons, there's nothing the GPL can do about it. And any added provision in a license attempting to restrict this sort of use would have no effect.
All that one could do is restrict people from distributing the code to certain people (so you can use copyright to blacklist, or whitelist, if you will) because that's restriction of the right to copy.
Everything else is just confused FUD.
You, sir, were obviously not acquainted with Perl.
Yes, early versions of perl were well suited for one thing only (or at least, it was all I used them for). Automatic downloading of porn from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. I would start the thing on my shell account in the early morning, come back in the afternoon and have hundreds of poor quality dirty pictures to look at.
When I heard that some people were putting movies on the internet, I couldn't believe it. Just getting 50 pics took me most of the day to download using zmodem.
I'm not about to vote for Nader, but let's be fair. How much experience does he have being an influential politician? None. I mean, Kerry could have conceivably said something like, "I voted for the PATRIOT act because at the time, in post 9/11 trauma, I really wanted to do what was best for national security, but now, seeing how the powers it granted have been abused, I'm in favor of repealing it" and President Bush might have said, "I really believed that Iraq had WMDs, and I said that frequently on national television, and it's embarassing to admit, but there weren't any; obviously it would be inappropriate for me to stubbornly keep saying that WMDs were an appropriate reason to invade Iraq when there's ample evidence that none existed or posed a threat."
But Nader? I mean, what example could he have given that would have resonated politically with anyone here? The guy is very smart, but lacking political experience, these sorts of "When have you changed your mind" questions are bound to produce an answer of less importance than someone who actually works in politics, as both Senator Kerry and President Bush do.
Let's not forget, either, that of the three, Nader is the only one that actually listened to the question and gave an answer, even if it was a slighly less than serious, mostly metaphorical one. Kerry said the same thing as Nader did, but declined to give an example of changing his mind on an important issue, and Bush declined to say anything at all.
So while the hotdog example is silly (and I had a "WTF?" moment too when I read it), compared to the responses of the other two candidates, it was refreshing, because it actually approximated an answer to the fscking question.