The engineers had a cool idea and the asked the sales guys. And the sales guys said "Dude that's fucking awesome! What are you waiting for? Stick it on the web?"
I'm not opposed to that. I am opposed to this dumb, dimwitted, look-how-well-it-worked-for-Iraq argument that everyone needs democracy and capitalism right now. Real-life change simply doesn't work like that.
My argument is that we must try to manoeuvre China toward democracy over the medium term, not invade and force it on them now. This would be good for the Chinese and would also reduce the risk of a war between China and the US. It would also ensure Taiwan and Japan's long term security, which is pretty important.
In case you forgot, the introduction of democracy into a country not having the cultural or economic background to sustain it is what created WW2.
How do you figure that? Japan and Germany were more or less democratic before WWII, WWII happened when democracy failed in those countries. The rise of anti democratic ideologies like Communism and Fascism is really what caused WWII, couple with the US's policy of isolationism.
The death toll of the French Revolution is estimated at a million. France has 1/20th the population of China. If you really support the potential death of 20 million people in the name of liberty, democracy and capitalism, then in my book you're a monster.
Chairman Mao's policies killed a lot more than 20 million people. So if you're opposed to China being a democracy you must be a monster too.
Moving to democracy does not necessarily involve violence - in fact Zhao Ziyang the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre wanted to move China to a multi party system. Unfortunately hardliners like Li Peng deposed him and run the students over with tanks. If Zhao had stayed in power China would have avoided the violence and ended up free.
In fact the same year the Tiananmen Square massacre happened there was another student movement for democracy in a Chinese speaking country - against the KMT regime in Taiwan. President Lee Teng Hui had just been elected by a parliament which had sat since the end of the Chinese civil war without elections. Lee invited the students into the Presidential palace and said he agreed with their demands and proceeded to end martial law and censorship. He won the first free election for the Presidency in Taiwan's history after which he left due to term limits he had himself put in place. No one needed to be run over by tanks. And Taiwan is as mentioned much richer than China. It's also been spared the horrors of mass famine and hundreds of thousands of outbreaks of serious violence that have plagued the Communist Party's rule in China. Even now there are tens of thousands of mass incidents in China each year - lethal riots against corrupt and abusive local officials.
The report said that if this trend continues, then 2009 would break all previous records with over 230,000 'mass incidents', compared to 120,000 in 2008 and 90,000 in 2006.
The numbers of mass incidents have been growing for some time too - many of these are very serious - mobs burn down the local secret police head quarters killing everyone inside before being dispersed by paramilitary police firing live ammunition. Then the authorities round people up around the area of the demonstration - they have a quota - and execute them after a dubious political process to try to intimidate the local population against doing it again for a while. Of course the root of the problem - corrupt officials stealing from people is never really solved.
There is a direct relationship between declines in wealth, and declines in consumption and business investment, which along with government spending represent the economic engine. Between June 2007 and November 2008, Americans lost an estimated average of more than a quarter of their collective net worth. By early November 2008, a broad U.S. stock index the S&P 500, was down 45 percent from its 2007 high. Housing prices had dropped 20% from their 2006 peak, with futures markets signaling a 30-35% potential drop. Total home equity in the United States, which was valued at $13 trillion at its peak in 2006, had dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and was still falling in late 2008. Total retirement assets, Americans' second-largest household asset, dropped by 22 percent, from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008. During the same period, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion and pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. Taken together, these losses total a staggering $8.3 trillion. Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth is down $14 trillion
Like it or not, the current government has lifted a billion people out of horrible poverty. Some are still poor, some are doing ok, but all of them are a lot better off than their parents or grandparents were. Even the definition of "poor" has changed. The "poor" chinese of today would have been considered well-off less than a hundred years ago.
And idealism aside, hunger trumps liberty.
That would be a good argument if the PRC government had outperformed other more liberal governments at wealth creation since its founding. Actually China the PRC government's policies stopped China getting rich for ages. When they abandoned most of Communist planning the PRC did start to grow fast, but that's mostly because it started from from a very low level compared to Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong, none of which had Communism. All are still richer, not just freer.
In fact Taiwan is an excellent model for what China should have been. It has a GDP per capita of $30,912 and democracy. China has $5,970 - it is ~ 5x poorer. Also the richer China gets the more corrupt and unequal it becomes - the very rich pay off the local party boss and then get away with pretty much anything.
Finally given the opaque nature of the Chinese system current growth rates are almost certainly exaggerated.
Maybe terrorism is an attempt by the CIA to stress people a bit and give them the sense of perspective and appreciation for the simple things life like Dad's moonshine and Mom's Possum Pie that imminent nuclear annihilation did in the good old 1950's. If so I'd say it is mighty public spirited of them.
And here I was thinking it was just vaccines. Now I can blame a nationality, a race, and parties!
Ladies and Gentlemen! I have just signed the legislation that will abolish scourge of autism forever. The GOP is banned as of five minutes ago. Any questions? Not from you, Mr Hannity.
Well maybe I've just worked with some awful programmers. Don't get me wrong - a minority of people do do things properly. Another minority will stubbornly stick with an awful solution. Most lie somewhere in between, but they are too loaded with work to do much in the way of analysis.
He has got a point that Computer Science graduates do value logic and reason (or less charitably bullshit) over evidence and observation.
In fact one of the best CS books I've ever read was "Computer Architecture. A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy and Patterson precisely because all the rules of thumb in it were backed up by measurements.
Then again most CS types have realised that with a bit of Google assisted cherry picking of the statistics they can pretty much prove any of their preconceptions to be true, i.e. their favourite ultra high level language just happens to be "potentially just as fast or faster than C++, the problem is that most people don't have the skills to do it". Sigh. It's one thing to say you like a language subjectively and are more productive in it, quite another to claim it is fast when most measurements say it is just isn't.
What would happen if some technological change meant that thieves could break the password protection and get to your private data? I guess you'd have no problem with that, right? Your social security and credit card numbers are just numbers after all.
How is making a copy "stealing?" You are failing to meet a key criterion by not depriving the person from whom you made the copy of whatever you copied. Stealing would be walking into my house and taking my hard drive.
So if I came to your house, copied all your data and went through it for credit card, social security numbers and so on that would be fine with you?
Slashdot Mirror
It takes a while for the hive mind to digest the summary. Then its finely honed insight will amaze and scare you.
Spellink Nahtzee! Spellink Nahtzee! Spellink Nahtzee!
The engineers had a cool idea and the asked the sales guys. And the sales guys said "Dude that's fucking awesome! What are you waiting for? Stick it on the web?"
I'm not opposed to that. I am opposed to this dumb, dimwitted, look-how-well-it-worked-for-Iraq argument that everyone needs democracy and capitalism right now. Real-life change simply doesn't work like that.
My argument is that we must try to manoeuvre China toward democracy over the medium term, not invade and force it on them now. This would be good for the Chinese and would also reduce the risk of a war between China and the US. It would also ensure Taiwan and Japan's long term security, which is pretty important.
In case you forgot, the introduction of democracy into a country not having the cultural or economic background to sustain it is what created WW2.
How do you figure that? Japan and Germany were more or less democratic before WWII, WWII happened when democracy failed in those countries. The rise of anti democratic ideologies like Communism and Fascism is really what caused WWII, couple with the US's policy of isolationism.
What's a more polite way to say, "be more like Vimeo"?
Please be more like Vimeo
It will launch them into space, it will just turn them into jelly in the process. Still not interested?
"He wants you, Jew, Malachi!"
The death toll of the French Revolution is estimated at a million. France has 1/20th the population of China. If you really support the potential death of 20 million people in the name of liberty, democracy and capitalism, then in my book you're a monster.
Chairman Mao's policies killed a lot more than 20 million people. So if you're opposed to China being a democracy you must be a monster too.
Moving to democracy does not necessarily involve violence - in fact Zhao Ziyang the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre wanted to move China to a multi party system. Unfortunately hardliners like Li Peng deposed him and run the students over with tanks. If Zhao had stayed in power China would have avoided the violence and ended up free.
In fact the same year the Tiananmen Square massacre happened there was another student movement for democracy in a Chinese speaking country - against the KMT regime in Taiwan. President Lee Teng Hui had just been elected by a parliament which had sat since the end of the Chinese civil war without elections. Lee invited the students into the Presidential palace and said he agreed with their demands and proceeded to end martial law and censorship. He won the first free election for the Presidency in Taiwan's history after which he left due to term limits he had himself put in place. No one needed to be run over by tanks. And Taiwan is as mentioned much richer than China. It's also been spared the horrors of mass famine and hundreds of thousands of outbreaks of serious violence that have plagued the Communist Party's rule in China. Even now there are tens of thousands of mass incidents in China each year - lethal riots against corrupt and abusive local officials.
http://libcom.org/news/58000-mass-incidents-china-first-quarter-unrest-grows-largest-ever-recorded-06052009
The report said that if this trend continues, then 2009 would break all previous records with over 230,000 'mass incidents', compared to 120,000 in 2008 and 90,000 in 2006.
The numbers of mass incidents have been growing for some time too - many of these are very serious - mobs burn down the local secret police head quarters killing everyone inside before being dispersed by paramilitary police firing live ammunition. Then the authorities round people up around the area of the demonstration - they have a quota - and execute them after a dubious political process to try to intimidate the local population against doing it again for a while. Of course the root of the problem - corrupt officials stealing from people is never really solved.
It's
http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl?word=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6&searchtype=chinese&where=whole&audio=on
liu4 si4 - 6 4 i.e June 4th
shi4 jian4 - incident
It's officially Tiananmen in Pinyin
http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/charlook.pl?searchmode=standard&printtype=utf8&chartype=all&ordering=frequency&display=char&display=radstroke&display=strokes&display=pinyin&display=english&display=variants&display=unicode&english=&pinyin=&cantonese=&enctype=utf8&whatchar=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%96%80&searchchar=Search+by+Character&lowerb=&upperb=
About $800 Billion
http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt
Less than the cost of the Iraq War, or the bailout. Far more money evaporated in the current crash.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007–2010#Wealth_effects
There is a direct relationship between declines in wealth, and declines in consumption and business investment, which along with government spending represent the economic engine. Between June 2007 and November 2008, Americans lost an estimated average of more than a quarter of their collective net worth. By early November 2008, a broad U.S. stock index the S&P 500, was down 45 percent from its 2007 high. Housing prices had dropped 20% from their 2006 peak, with futures markets signaling a 30-35% potential drop. Total home equity in the United States, which was valued at $13 trillion at its peak in 2006, had dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and was still falling in late 2008. Total retirement assets, Americans' second-largest household asset, dropped by 22 percent, from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008. During the same period, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion and pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. Taken together, these losses total a staggering $8.3 trillion. Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth is down $14 trillion
Like it or not, the current government has lifted a billion people out of horrible poverty. Some are still poor, some are doing ok, but all of them are a lot better off than their parents or grandparents were. Even the definition of "poor" has changed. The "poor" chinese of today would have been considered well-off less than a hundred years ago.
And idealism aside, hunger trumps liberty.
That would be a good argument if the PRC government had outperformed other more liberal governments at wealth creation since its founding. Actually China the PRC government's policies stopped China getting rich for ages. When they abandoned most of Communist planning the PRC did start to grow fast, but that's mostly because it started from from a very low level compared to Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong, none of which had Communism. All are still richer, not just freer.
In fact Taiwan is an excellent model for what China should have been. It has a GDP per capita of $30,912 and democracy. China has $5,970 - it is ~ 5x poorer. Also the richer China gets the more corrupt and unequal it becomes - the very rich pay off the local party boss and then get away with pretty much anything.
Finally given the opaque nature of the Chinese system current growth rates are almost certainly exaggerated.
Maybe they buried it in the Pet Cemetery.
After the end of the world predicted by the Mayans? Great.
Maybe terrorism is an attempt by the CIA to stress people a bit and give them the sense of perspective and appreciation for the simple things life like Dad's moonshine and Mom's Possum Pie that imminent nuclear annihilation did in the good old 1950's. If so I'd say it is mighty public spirited of them.
The name Atari is now owned by The French. I think it would have been kinder to take the name out back and shoot it rather than let that happen.
I sell FUD insurance. It's not clear now if you need it, but it would be very bad if you do turn out need it and don't have it.
I wonder how many people who answer yes to this question would be outraged if people judged them based on their clothes or car.
And here I was thinking it was just vaccines. Now I can blame a nationality, a race, and parties!
Ladies and Gentlemen! I have just signed the legislation that will abolish scourge of autism forever. The GOP is banned as of five minutes ago. Any questions? Not from you, Mr Hannity.
> 4.6 billion years ago
I like the way it's just a bit bigger than 2^32 to stop you using 32 bit variables for the year.
Well maybe I've just worked with some awful programmers. Don't get me wrong - a minority of people do do things properly. Another minority will stubbornly stick with an awful solution. Most lie somewhere in between, but they are too loaded with work to do much in the way of analysis.
He has got a point that Computer Science graduates do value logic and reason (or less charitably bullshit) over evidence and observation.
In fact one of the best CS books I've ever read was "Computer Architecture. A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy and Patterson precisely because all the rules of thumb in it were backed up by measurements.
Then again most CS types have realised that with a bit of Google assisted cherry picking of the statistics they can pretty much prove any of their preconceptions to be true, i.e. their favourite ultra high level language just happens to be "potentially just as fast or faster than C++, the problem is that most people don't have the skills to do it". Sigh. It's one thing to say you like a language subjectively and are more productive in it, quite another to claim it is fast when most measurements say it is just isn't.
The private stuff is password protected.
What would happen if some technological change meant that thieves could break the password protection and get to your private data? I guess you'd have no problem with that, right? Your social security and credit card numbers are just numbers after all.
So if I came to your house, copied all your data and went through it for credit card, social security numbers and so on that would be fine with you?
Google has greater popularity according to Google than the North Korean Worker's Party does according to North Korean media.