> My suggestion was based on the idea that you would have a small cable connecting this device to your stereo and you can then use your phone as if it were a remote control, except in this case it is the actual source too.
I see what you mean, but these things are designed to be headsets. So they have batteries which need to be charged. Actually you've got a point though, I could imagine a widget that listens on Bluetooth and has a 3.5mm jack plug that could drive a normal set of speakers. Still I want something which is designed to run off an AC adaptor permanently.
Actually in an odd sort of way it would make sense to have a bluetooth receiver inside a DVD player. Then I could use that as my "Bluetooth to 3.5mm adaptor". I think something like Wireles USB would be great for this - it should be cheap and widely supported and it has the bandwidth for video as well as audio.
I don't see the point to those things. My laptop and phone both have 3.5mm audio jacks and I've got loads of headphones if I wanted to do that. Actually I want sound to come out of a pair of speakers on the other side of the room without having cables plugged into anything.
Actually I could imagine a solution using Wireless USB or some other UWB based technology to get video and audio out of the device and keystrokes in.
Hell I'd buy A2DP Bluetooth speakers for my laptop at home now if I could find some that were less crappy than the very crappy speakers it already has.
Actually I wonder if Microsoft doesn't have a strategic goal here.
I read that back when Apple was in trouble Microsoft bought shares in the company and guaranteed to keep supporting Office on the Macintosh. The idea was that Apple would never be able to kill Windows but if Apple died there might be anti trust issues or another more dangerous competitor might take its place. Or maybe it was just to stop look and feel lawsuits.
Now Symbian is in trouble it seems like they are doing the same thing. I guess it is because they worry about Android. Not that Android is exactly taking the world by storm.
Still I think porting Office is one of those decisions that are taken mostly for strategic reasons.
You have a US English keyboard and enter the sound of the characters.
Even if you use something other than Hanyu Pinyin you can still do it on a keyboard with the same number of keys. Here in Taiwan people can type using much faster than they can write using Zhuhin Fuhao which represents Chinese using a phonetic but non latin script.
In both cases you type the characters to represent the sounds and pick the right character in a drop box if there is ambiguity. But IMEs have got very smart over the years and usually guess right.
I dunno. I've written code to collect data for bug reports. Basically anything I could find I chucked in. This was a while back and it was an POS system which didn't know very much if anything about the user, but I can quite imagine someone including taking a back trace and adding as much information as they could find without thinking about privacy.
Sucks if you were one of those people that went out of your to buy a machine without a TPM because you read on the internets that it had "teh evil drms and palladiums in it"
I pay 165 Taiwan Dollars per month or about US$5. That includes 165 TWD worth of calls. Intra network calls cost 0.08 TWD per second or about US$0.02. My company has a VPN service so most calls are intra network.
Intel and NVidia have a complex relationship. On the one hand Intel and NVidia are jointly a natural alternative to AMD now it has bought ATI.
Right now of course Intel sell vast numbers of low end GPUs and rely on NVidia for the low volume high end stuff - i.e. SLI for gamers. So Intel pretty much has to support SLI.
On the other they are both hinting they will compete directly. Intel has been talking about CPU/GPU hybrids (i.e. Larrabee) for ages and there have been persistent rumours NVidia will launch an x86 compatible processor. My guess is that any Intel GPU will be low performance and thus not compete with NVidia's flagship products. I also think an NVidia x86 will be low end and aimed at netbooks - i.e. they'll buy Via which has an x86 license and use the Via Nano cores with NVidia graphics rather than trying to challenge Intel's high end stuff with a core that will compete with Core i7/i5.
I've always wondered if intelligence might not ended up moving from individuals into society as a whole. Essentially the rules in society would be simple and we'd be like cellular automata dumbly following them.
The best example is lawsuits. Companies will go to great lengths to protect stupid customers because they are scared of getting sued. Rather than individuals protecting themselves from harm it's like the system 'knows' not to expose them to it. Still neither the customers, or the lawyers or even the engineers could or would do this if they were acting as individuals.
However the society as a whole has the collective intelligence to prevent it.
But one of the users would install all sorts of malware and viruses. My highly trained (MSCE A+) technician tells me it's impossible to build an operating system which is immune to infection. He also told me Ubuntu had a higher total cost of ownership than Microsoft Vista XP 7 and doesn't support industry standards properly.
The Bible would have performance targets - e.g. colonise the moon and so on. Once those were achieved I'd just change them retroactively so humans thought they had to do say the moon and mars. Basically every time anyone picked the book up it would tell them that God thinks that as a species we're a day late and a dollar short and he's sick of it. I'd also explain that the dinosaurs didn't meet their targets either and even humans should be able to deduce the consequences of that.
Mao essentially tore down the legal system in the name of Marxism, declaring law a tool of oppression by the bourgeoisie. It was after Deng took power that the legal system, and hence the law courts were re-established, and thus your long quote does is not really illustrative of what the courts do nowadays.
"Deng had always stood out among the party elders as the one who emphasised the means of dictatorship. He often reminded people about its usefulness"
I read the book and Deng was particularly opposed to the concept of checks and balances. I he was a believer in order who wanted to stop the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. However once in power he wanted to be above the law just like Mao was. In fact Zhao pointed out that his sacking and house arrest were not constitutional - it literally never occured to Deng or his minions that they had to follow a procedure to get rid of Zhao.
Now Deng may have been a tyrant like Mao in that he believed that he was above the law, but he was a sane one. Mao seemed to have an agenda which to me is still completely mysterious - the PRC before the cultural revolution had a well defined process to stop dissent. Mao sabotaged that process from the top and that resulted in the Cultural Revolution. Most tyrants would have just let the system stop the Red Guards. Mao seemed to glory in the chaos and bloodshed.
Of course once you understand this you can see why Deng sent tanks in Tiananmen - students protesting in the West would be interpreted as a peaceful movement for reform. Zhao saw them that way too. Deng would have been reminded of the Red Guards that broke his brother's back and confined him to wheelchair, humilated him for years and killed most of his colleagues. Hence the violence of the crackdown.
Not to say that your main point is invalid -- the PRC constitution basically is a declaration of (self proclaimed) intention by the Chinese Communist Party rather than a set of legal documents to be enforced. Which means they can declare that China has democracy, free speech, etc, and apply their "unconventional" interpretation to these ideas. The purpose of the PRC constitution is really entirely different than the purpose of constitution in most modern western democratic countries.
It's funny how people are very quick to lecture on how the US doesn't necessarily work the way the US Constitution says it should but assume the People's Republic of China works the way the Constitution says it does.
During the 1940s and 1950s, People's Courts were village meetings in which peasants would complain about their landlords. This was known as 'Speak Bitterness' and was set up by the Communists for the denunciation of landlords.
The "Speak Bitterness" Meetings, as they were called, came after The Agrarian Reform Law (June 30, 1950). This law being introduced not too long after Chairman Mao Zedong gained control in 1949, gained control of all of China's land for the new government, and allowed them to use and distribute the land as needed. With this new distribution of land, the wealthy or 'rich' population in China (specifically farm owning/ landlords,) had parts of their land taken from them and given to "poor" peasants. This certainly caused the peasants to benefit from this law, and those who already already owned the land to grief from it, however this concern for land-owners was soon distracted by the "Speak Bitterness" trials. Because the vast majority of China was lower class, they more than likely had been under the employment or have suffered from a Land-owning person, and so the Communist party members encouraged the peasants to go to these meetings and 'speak bitterness' about their grief and those who may have caused that grief.
In addition, the vast majority of peasants in China had little to no education, they had no reason to think that this would cause draw backs or repercussions to the economy and themselves. These meetings along with the newly given land distracted peasants from the fact that they had no equipment, wealth or money to cultivate the land given to them, and focused their anger and contempt towards their previous land owners, or even those who they simply did not like. China became something similar to the Salem Witch trials or old Soviet Russia in the peasant areas under Stalin, in which people were turning on each other simply because they could. Communist party members actually encouraged it, so the peasants pointed the finger of blame on who ever they wanted with the intention that they would benefit from it, and simply hope that they were not pointed at or seen as having unjustly pointed their finger. Any one could be a target, even some one who was previously in the CCP. That having been said, some peasants began to accuse people who used to or were in the CCP, this could be because they did not like the person or just because they were associated with the CCP, as well as the fact that they could not do so before. The CCP managed to distract the population by turning the lower class against the upper class and caused the upper class to be too worried about their fate to blame the CCP. This benefits the CCP themselves for having control over the population, and in turn benefit anyone else who could gain from CCP control.
So the People's Court was not really about the presumption of innocence.
More to the point the Constitution in China grants rights like freedom of speech, freedom of association and son which Chinese people demonstrably don't enjoy - consider Tiananmen. In fact lawyers in China have been arrested merely for trying to enforce these rights
I wish you people would read the damn book. The world of 1984 did not result from a slippery slope erosion of civil liberties - there was a revolution and a civil war. The Party took over and presumably members of all other parties were imprisoned and killed.
In fact the world of 1984 can't result from a slippery slope - the Party needed to be in power for a long time to destroy first its opponents, then civil society, and finally history and language. Next on the agenda is the family, the orgasm and the sex instinct - anything that distracts people from their love of Big Brother and Ingsoc. The point of 1984 is that things have already gone far enough that the system is permanent, they will go much farther and result in a society which is no longer recognisably human with no art, science or literature. In the world of 1984 there are no free societies left it is implied that this will happen to all humans.
In our world there were certainly attempts to build a society like that in 1984. Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc. Hitler's regime was destroyed militarily. Stalin and Mao killed millions and did enormous and lasting damage to society but because they were competing militarily with other free societies it prevented them going this far - Orwell set up his world purposely so that this wouldn't happen. Note that the mere existance of free societies as competition is enough to prevent a 1984 style world where scientifc progress comes to a halt because 1984 style societies are awful at science and hence technology.
You can see this with North Korea now, perhaps the closest thing to 1984 that ever existed. The NK regime has been obsessed with weapons for since its foundation - oddly enough the NK regime dates back to 1948, the year Orwell published 1984. However process has been very slow. The US and USSR had ICBMs in the and nukes in 1950s. NK has apparently spent a huge percentage of its budget on research and a quick visit to South Korea tells you that Koreans are excellent engineers. Still NK has managed only recently demonstrate nukes and still no viable ICBM. Basically they are stuck in 50's.
The issue at hand is the guy is forcing the students to troll, and to troll with philosophy that isn't shared by all Christians, possibly not even by the students themselves.
"The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future." - George Orwell.
The reason it's creepy is because if these regimes had ended up ruling the whole world, 1984 style, no one would even know they had ever done anything wrong. History would be whatever the party says it is, language would be meaningless cliche and so on. In fact if that had happened, I'm not even sure we could have this conversation because the history and concepts we're discussing would have been erased.
Slashdot Mirror
> My suggestion was based on the idea that you would have a small cable connecting this device to your stereo and you can then use your phone as if it were a remote control, except in this case it is the actual source too.
I see what you mean, but these things are designed to be headsets. So they have batteries which need to be charged. Actually you've got a point though, I could imagine a widget that listens on Bluetooth and has a 3.5mm jack plug that could drive a normal set of speakers. Still I want something which is designed to run off an AC adaptor permanently.
Actually in an odd sort of way it would make sense to have a bluetooth receiver inside a DVD player. Then I could use that as my "Bluetooth to 3.5mm adaptor". I think something like Wireles USB would be great for this - it should be cheap and widely supported and it has the bandwidth for video as well as audio.
I don't see the point to those things. My laptop and phone both have 3.5mm audio jacks and I've got loads of headphones if I wanted to do that. Actually I want sound to come out of a pair of speakers on the other side of the room without having cables plugged into anything.
Actually I could imagine a solution using Wireless USB or some other UWB based technology to get video and audio out of the device and keystrokes in.
Hell I'd buy A2DP Bluetooth speakers for my laptop at home now if I could find some that were less crappy than the very crappy speakers it already has.
Windows Mobile is very popular in Asia. Far more so that Symbian.
Actually I wonder if Microsoft doesn't have a strategic goal here.
I read that back when Apple was in trouble Microsoft bought shares in the company and guaranteed to keep supporting Office on the Macintosh. The idea was that Apple would never be able to kill Windows but if Apple died there might be anti trust issues or another more dangerous competitor might take its place. Or maybe it was just to stop look and feel lawsuits.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/
Now Symbian is in trouble it seems like they are doing the same thing. I guess it is because they worry about Android. Not that Android is exactly taking the world by storm.
Still I think porting Office is one of those decisions that are taken mostly for strategic reasons.
Yeah, because Chinese keyboards are so different
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#China
You have a US English keyboard and enter the sound of the characters.
Even if you use something other than Hanyu Pinyin you can still do it on a keyboard with the same number of keys. Here in Taiwan people can type using much faster than they can write using Zhuhin Fuhao which represents Chinese using a phonetic but non latin script.
In both cases you type the characters to represent the sounds and pick the right character in a drop box if there is ambiguity. But IMEs have got very smart over the years and usually guess right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin_fuhao
> Uterii and because blue is a beautiful colour
Fixed that for you.
I dunno. I've written code to collect data for bug reports. Basically anything I could find I chucked in. This was a while back and it was an POS system which didn't know very much if anything about the user, but I can quite imagine someone including taking a back trace and adding as much information as they could find without thinking about privacy.
> I'll get back to you if I can think of one.
Microsoft reduced my TCO and enhanced my usability. Aero makes computing fun. And they pay me to shill for them.
http://bluwiki.com/go/BoycottWikipedia
> Things like grass lawns and vacations also used to be the exclusive playthings of the elderly.
Fixed that for you. Now get off my lawn.
Sucks if you were one of those people that went out of your to buy a machine without a TPM because you read on the internets that it had "teh evil drms and palladiums in it"
I pay 165 Taiwan Dollars per month or about US$5. That includes 165 TWD worth of calls. Intra network calls cost 0.08 TWD per second or about US$0.02. My company has a VPN service so most calls are intra network.
Intel and NVidia have a complex relationship. On the one hand Intel and NVidia are jointly a natural alternative to AMD now it has bought ATI.
Right now of course Intel sell vast numbers of low end GPUs and rely on NVidia for the low volume high end stuff - i.e. SLI for gamers. So Intel pretty much has to support SLI.
On the other they are both hinting they will compete directly. Intel has been talking about CPU/GPU hybrids (i.e. Larrabee) for ages and there have been persistent rumours NVidia will launch an x86 compatible processor. My guess is that any Intel GPU will be low performance and thus not compete with NVidia's flagship products. I also think an NVidia x86 will be low end and aimed at netbooks - i.e. they'll buy Via which has an x86 license and use the Via Nano cores with NVidia graphics rather than trying to challenge Intel's high end stuff with a core that will compete with Core i7/i5.
I've always wondered if intelligence might not ended up moving from individuals into society as a whole. Essentially the rules in society would be simple and we'd be like cellular automata dumbly following them.
The best example is lawsuits. Companies will go to great lengths to protect stupid customers because they are scared of getting sued. Rather than individuals protecting themselves from harm it's like the system 'knows' not to expose them to it. Still neither the customers, or the lawyers or even the engineers could or would do this if they were acting as individuals.
However the society as a whole has the collective intelligence to prevent it.
But one of the users would install all sorts of malware and viruses. My highly trained (MSCE A+) technician tells me it's impossible to build an operating system which is immune to infection. He also told me Ubuntu had a higher total cost of ownership than Microsoft Vista XP 7 and doesn't support industry standards properly.
95% of cockroaches vote Republican, so I'm not worried.
If I was God here's how I'd do things
The Bible would have performance targets - e.g. colonise the moon and so on. Once those were achieved I'd just change them retroactively so humans thought they had to do say the moon and mars. Basically every time anyone picked the book up it would tell them that God thinks that as a species we're a day late and a dollar short and he's sick of it. I'd also explain that the dinosaurs didn't meet their targets either and even humans should be able to deduce the consequences of that.
Oh and by the way, FORE!
Mao essentially tore down the legal system in the name of Marxism, declaring law a tool of oppression by the bourgeoisie. It was after Deng took power that the legal system, and hence the law courts were re-established, and thus your long quote does is not really illustrative of what the courts do nowadays.
I dunno about Deng either. Zhao Ziyang said
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=22812310
"Deng had always stood out among the party elders as the one who emphasised the means of dictatorship. He often reminded people about its usefulness"
I read the book and Deng was particularly opposed to the concept of checks and balances. I he was a believer in order who wanted to stop the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. However once in power he wanted to be above the law just like Mao was. In fact Zhao pointed out that his sacking and house arrest were not constitutional - it literally never occured to Deng or his minions that they had to follow a procedure to get rid of Zhao.
Now Deng may have been a tyrant like Mao in that he believed that he was above the law, but he was a sane one. Mao seemed to have an agenda which to me is still completely mysterious - the PRC before the cultural revolution had a well defined process to stop dissent. Mao sabotaged that process from the top and that resulted in the Cultural Revolution. Most tyrants would have just let the system stop the Red Guards. Mao seemed to glory in the chaos and bloodshed.
Of course once you understand this you can see why Deng sent tanks in Tiananmen - students protesting in the West would be interpreted as a peaceful movement for reform. Zhao saw them that way too. Deng would have been reminded of the Red Guards that broke his brother's back and confined him to wheelchair, humilated him for years and killed most of his colleagues. Hence the violence of the crackdown.
Not to say that your main point is invalid -- the PRC constitution basically is a declaration of (self proclaimed) intention by the Chinese Communist Party rather than a set of legal documents to be enforced. Which means they can declare that China has democracy, free speech, etc, and apply their "unconventional" interpretation to these ideas. The purpose of the PRC constitution is really entirely different than the purpose of constitution in most modern western democratic countries.
Well I couldn't agree more with this.
It's funny how people are very quick to lecture on how the US doesn't necessarily work the way the US Constitution says it should but assume the People's Republic of China works the way the Constitution says it does.
Actually if you read the wiki article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_people's_court_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China
During the 1940s and 1950s, People's Courts were village meetings in which peasants would complain about their landlords. This was known as 'Speak Bitterness' and was set up by the Communists for the denunciation of landlords.
Hmm, more Googling finds this
http://hilly2007-8.wikispaces.com/Speak+Bitterness+Meetings
The "Speak Bitterness" Meetings, as they were called, came after The Agrarian Reform Law (June 30, 1950). This law being introduced not too long after Chairman Mao Zedong gained control in 1949, gained control of all of China's land for the new government, and allowed them to use and distribute the land as needed. With this new distribution of land, the wealthy or 'rich' population in China (specifically farm owning/ landlords,) had parts of their land taken from them and given to "poor" peasants. This certainly caused the peasants to benefit from this law, and those who already already owned the land to grief from it, however this concern for land-owners was soon distracted by the "Speak Bitterness" trials. Because the vast majority of China was lower class, they more than likely had been under the employment or have suffered from a Land-owning person, and so the Communist party members encouraged the peasants to go to these meetings and 'speak bitterness' about their grief and those who may have caused that grief.
In addition, the vast majority of peasants in China had little to no education, they had no reason to think that this would cause draw backs or repercussions to the economy and themselves. These meetings along with the newly given land distracted peasants from the fact that they had no equipment, wealth or money to cultivate the land given to them, and focused their anger and contempt towards their previous land owners, or even those who they simply did not like. China became something similar to the Salem Witch trials or old Soviet Russia in the peasant areas under Stalin, in which people were turning on each other simply because they could. Communist party members actually encouraged it, so the peasants pointed the finger of blame on who ever they wanted with the intention that they would benefit from it, and simply hope that they were not pointed at or seen as having unjustly pointed their finger. Any one could be a target, even some one who was previously in the CCP. That having been said, some peasants began to accuse people who used to or were in the CCP, this could be because they did not like the person or just because they were associated with the CCP, as well as the fact that they could not do so before.
The CCP managed to distract the population by turning the lower class against the upper class and caused the upper class to be too worried about their fate to blame the CCP. This benefits the CCP themselves for having control over the population, and in turn benefit anyone else who could gain from CCP control.
So the People's Court was not really about the presumption of innocence.
More to the point the Constitution in China grants rights like freedom of speech, freedom of association and son which Chinese people demonstrably don't enjoy - consider Tiananmen. In fact lawyers in China have been arrested merely for trying to enforce these rights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative
Well if you can't prove someone is guilty you shouldn't call them it.
I wish you people would read the damn book. The world of 1984 did not result from a slippery slope erosion of civil liberties - there was a revolution and a civil war. The Party took over and presumably members of all other parties were imprisoned and killed.
In fact the world of 1984 can't result from a slippery slope - the Party needed to be in power for a long time to destroy first its opponents, then civil society, and finally history and language. Next on the agenda is the family, the orgasm and the sex instinct - anything that distracts people from their love of Big Brother and Ingsoc. The point of 1984 is that things have already gone far enough that the system is permanent, they will go much farther and result in a society which is no longer recognisably human with no art, science or literature. In the world of 1984 there are no free societies left it is implied that this will happen to all humans.
In our world there were certainly attempts to build a society like that in 1984. Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc. Hitler's regime was destroyed militarily. Stalin and Mao killed millions and did enormous and lasting damage to society but because they were competing militarily with other free societies it prevented them going this far - Orwell set up his world purposely so that this wouldn't happen. Note that the mere existance of free societies as competition is enough to prevent a 1984 style world where scientifc progress comes to a halt because 1984 style societies are awful at science and hence technology.
You can see this with North Korea now, perhaps the closest thing to 1984 that ever existed. The NK regime has been obsessed with weapons for since its foundation - oddly enough the NK regime dates back to 1948, the year Orwell published 1984. However process has been very slow. The US and USSR had ICBMs in the and nukes in 1950s. NK has apparently spent a huge percentage of its budget on research and a quick visit to South Korea tells you that Koreans are excellent engineers. Still NK has managed only recently demonstrate nukes and still no viable ICBM. Basically they are stuck in 50's.
The issue at hand is the guy is forcing the students to troll, and to troll with philosophy that isn't shared by all Christians, possibly not even by the students themselves.
When you troll you are doing the Lord's work.
If people can argue whether or not they're living in the world similar to Orwell's 1984, they aren't.
"The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future."
- George Orwell.
The reason it's creepy is because if these regimes had ended up ruling the whole world, 1984 style, no one would even know they had ever done anything wrong. History would be whatever the party says it is, language would be meaningless cliche and so on. In fact if that had happened, I'm not even sure we could have this conversation because the history and concepts we're discussing would have been erased.