I looked at them again myself and saw little to get upset about.
Perhaps this is a case of seeing bad edits and edit wars in the past and then forgetting the later results -- the human tendency to focus on the negative.
Perhaps it's pages about things related to these issues (Bush mentioned on pages about tyrants, and the like) that make the issues, and not the pages directly about the issues, stick in the mind.
For the specific cases I mentioned, I shall have to retract. (Though I still dislike the political ideologues that seem to be more devoted to presenting their opinions as facts than to adding to the sum of human knowledge.) It is heartening to see consensus hammered out on heavily-edited pages like these.
A related problem is the inevitable politicization of articles and their writers. If I want to read about George W. Bush, abortion, Christianity, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, etc., etc., I'm not going to trust Wikipedia because the article will be slanted one way now and the other way an hour from now.
That being said, I find Wikipedia to be a wonderful resource for non-controversial pop culture (where there are many interested editors), all kinds of computer-related geekery (where there are interested and extremely capable editors), and simple but hard-to-find facts such as who the Chinese emperor or Pope was in a given year. Even sports-related articles, for which the intersection of internet writers and sports buffs is small, are improving.
How can Wikipedia's biggest problem -- namely that the informed and the uninformed get the same publishing rights -- be solved without changing the nature of Wikipedia? A Slashdot-like karma system where editors with high karma can block those without from editing thei stuff?
I suspect that Wikipedia's ultimate fate will be to abandon the idea of being a complete open encyclopedia. Either the "anyone can edit" ideal will be maintained, but without politically-divisive issues which will shift over to Citizendium or something more rigorous, or the openness will be sacrificed and a Britannica-style group of trusted editors will take the reins. Right now I'd prefer the former -- for all its faults, Wiki is a wonderful compilation of human knowledge. You just have to know what parts are unreliable.
You operate under the illusion that producing a product obligates one to income.
Whether he believes that depends on how the phrase "endangers my right to profit from the fruits of my labor" is read.
If "to profit" is a verb, I agree with you. But if "profit" is a noun, i. e. "endangers my right to [the] profit [which is being taken by someone] from the fruits of my labor", I have no problem with the statement. Given that a profit is being made from someone's labor, the first right to such profit ought to rest with the one doing the labor.
I know this sounds nit-picky, but we need to think like lawyers and consider multiple interpretations and ways of parsing sentences, or the *AAs and their ilk will be taking our rights out from under us.
And what makes you think that when you'll fill that new country's forms you will not be asked for the english equivelent of your name? It is pretty standard here and in european countries i've been (though, granted, as tourist and not a citizen)
This is just one data point, but my bank account in Japan is based on my name in Japanese katakana. I gave them the Roman spelling for the credit card, but that spelling is unofficial (due in part to the multiple romanization methods for Japanese) and is filled in by the cardholder as he/she desires. The local writing of this country has to be the official one for identification.
So you have an eccentric Roman-alphabet spelling that can map to a phonetic rendering in the other writing system, but which can't map back to the original. If your name is Shawn, you're going to get lumped in with the Seans and the Seanns and the Shawons, etc. when you write your name in kana, Cyrillic, Burmese, etc., and it can't be linked back unless a clever human being is sifting through all the records.
This is why, if you want to avoid hassle in your affairs, when abroad you should pick one transliteration of your name and stick with it. But on the other hand, if you don't want credit card companies and online businesses and banks and the rest compiling a giant file on you, you should use as many variants as possible. If Pyotr (or Peter) Tchaikovsky (or Tschaikowskij, or Chaikovski, etc., etc.) lived today and a Big Brother agency in his native Russia wanted to compile data on him, no automated database could even get started if he took precautions to romanize his name a different way every time.
Actually the best way to go off the grid is to expat to another country. If your destination is a place with a non-Roman alphabet, I doubt any databases will be able to link your name to anything without human intervention. Provided that you don't make the $80,000 required to be eligible for US taxes, you'll be able to sign contracts, use credit cards, etc. without the US or its corporations finding anything out. As far as the multinationals are concerned, 'you' are two different people.
Here's a site which contains these characters (see the photo in the lower right; just above the Latin letters "Liqian": http://china-world.info/china28c.htm
Hopefully one or the other of these pages will show the Chinese characters for Liqian correctly. You may have to mess with the encoding on your browser to use Unicode or SJIS.
Not sure how well Slashdot handles Chinese, but the characters are . ("Li" is the 'li' meaning 'beauty' on the right, with the horse radical on the left, and means 'black horse'. "Qian" is the 'gan' meaning 'dry' on the right, with the 'leather' radical on the left. The simplified form is this: .
Given that it's only really the English pronunciation of "legion" that resembles the Chinese word (which is pronounced like English 'li-chien' would be; Wade-Giles romanization is li-ch'ien with aspirated ch), the resemblance is probably a coincidence. Then again, I have no idea how western Chinese people would pronounce those characters, so it may indeed be a corruption of "legion". I hope it is; that would be fascinating!
1) Show all prices after sales tax (if applicable)
This would solve the problem right away.
Stores would start pricing things to the nearest nickel or dime except for small items under a dollar, where differences of under a nickel are significant.
Japan had a similar situation before instituting a 3% consumption tax in 1989. Before that, in general, prices of items over 1000 yen usually ended in a zero, so people didn't have to carry 1 and 5 yen coins around as a matter of course; they were used sparingly.
Then the consumption tax came in and the government found itself having to produce many more of these aluminum and brass coins because of all the odd prices that people were paying.
But very recently they went to tax-inclusive pricing, which has smoothed things out quite a bit. You only really need three significant figures in prices anyway. If you're shopping for a baseball glove or a suit jacket, you can leave the small coins at home.
Sales tax, which creates odd prices, is the real culprit here, not the existence of a small unit of currency. I actually favor the existence of a small unit because little kids buy things with their own money and learn how to manage it. They can't learn these skills if 25c packs of gum and 3c Tootsie Rolls are only sold in bulk (and consequently bought by their parents) because cents aren't in use anymore.
I recognize that tax-inclusive prices would pave the way for "stealth" increases, and shift the preceived burden of consumption tax from the purchaser to the retailer, but it's just smoother. Either this or have retailers set prices that result in round totals after tax, such as charging $5.67 + 6% tax for a $6 item.
I'd really like to convince governments to return to inflation-proof hard currency, or to eliminate consumption taxes, but since that doesn't look very possible, how about a solution more creative than eliminating small coins?
And others of us live in countries with great video rental services, but own computers which are in a different DVD "region".
While they give you five opportunities to change the region, eventually you use them up and are forced to either search for a hack that might damage your computer, or buy a TV plus DVD player just to watch the other region's stuff, or even a second computer in the local region.
Who wants to go through all that? I'd actually prefer to put some money in the producers' pockets, and get the subtitles that come from local rentals, but a wholly-artificial system of incompatibility has made it so that my Region 1 DVD player is in effect a completely different device from a Region 2 player, despite the only difference being a few bytes in the programming.
I would love to give my local video shop plenty of business, but can't realistically do it until computers can play all DVDs.
Keep in mind that before the Library of Congress developed their own system of measurement, a kilo-LoC was 999.999 LoCs. The Dewey Decimal System doesn's have a 1000.000.
There's one more thing that worries me about them asking for the SSN. How about when people who are concerned about leaking personal data, but also don't want to get red-flagged, intentionally give a false-but-believable number (say, their actual one with two digits transposed) with the intention of correcting the "error" when they actually get hired. A corporation searching credit or DMV records will be pulling up data from a different person who never consented to having anything looked at.
The genuine actual real solution is to return to backing currencies with precious metals, so that the value of people's money isn't so closely tied to their own countries' governments.
It is not a coincidence that there has been inflation in almost every single year since the US dollar was divorced from gold or silver.
The very rich can often escape inflation thanks to real estate and stock investments (which, in times of inflation, grow more valuable since they function as a hedge), but the poor do all their dealings in cash and bear the full brunt of currencies losing their value.
I'd much rather have a guarantee that the dollar would have intrinsic value* than any guarantee about stopping the much-more-discussed national ID plans, or CCTV cameras on the streets, or biometric passports.
When your savings has intrinsic value the world over, you're a lot safer from anything your government might try to do to you.
(*: Yes, I know that humans might stop valuing silver or gold, and that thus "intrinsic" is a relative term. But they haven't stopped valuing them at any time in human history so far.)
Considering that the consumption tax on Windows is a ludicrous 17.5% (8.23 / 47.00), I wouldn't be surprised to see the government stepping in and forcing people to pay for Windows just to keep that revenue stream flowing!
Re:It's the all encompassing .com that's the probl
on
Utube Sues YouTube
·
· Score: 1
And how does this system handle multiple languages? Should one have to know the Danish word for "vendors" in order to type the URL of a Danish site that you want to do business with?
You could do a web search for the company's name and the product it sells and hope that it comes up immediately, but, in addition to the unneccessary load on search engine sites, you lose the advantage of being able to type URLs in directly and save time.
This very thing was happening with the traditional media's handling of the Duke lacrosse case a few months ago. Internet bloggers and pundits played a not-insignificant part in blowing holes in the accuser's story and exposing the corruption in the DA's office.
If not for the hundreds of ordinary people, concerned with the possiblity of a false accusation and determined to dig out the truth and pass it on to others, three innocent college students might already be sitting in jail now.
So here in Holland they legalized it: If you pay a reasonable fee (about $0.06 per page), you can have your copy. They appointed an organization to collect those payments. Fine.
While I commend Holland for being a bit more enlightened regarding copies than other countries... six cents per page, with you supplying the media, is a "reasonable" fee? This is much more than the retail price of many books (even considering that an A4 page can hold two or even four pages of a paperback), and retail prices include the media, the printing, the salaries of the bookshop employees, the expenses of shipping it to the bookshops, and the author's share.
Since copying pages of a book infringes only on that last item, six cents per page is extremely steep!
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I think those words ring just as true today as they did 200 years ago.
Re:Dear Land of the Free (Score:3, Informative)
by MrSquirrel (976630)
Kid's a quick learner!
(Seriously, though, Franklin's quote is always deserving of good karma no matter how popular it is. It *needs* to be trotted out regularly.)
Japanese do indeed live longer on average than Americans, but consider also that Japanese women live nearly eight years longer than Japanese men do.
One guess as to which gender is made to work the punishingly-long hours Japanese employees are famous for, and not coincidentally makes up well over 90% of "karoshi" (death from overwork) cases.
Dcavanaugh, minor but important quibble: 5% is only "moderate by historical standards" if "historical" refers only to what came after taking the dollar off the gold standard and the oil shocks.
Consumer prices have quadrupled since the baby boomers were kids, whereas the entire preceding 150 years of American history didn't see such a devaluation.
By *truly historical* standards, 5% inflation is crippling and devastating to savers. That the government has gotten the public to accept such a thing as being something close to normal is a testament to how much evil can be wrought if you just phase it in over a generation or two.
Inflation is only our friend if it's wrecking the purchasing power of our rivals, which in India it seems to be doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Good old Sam has solved all the other problems we are having today and ratings are last remaining vestiges of a cruel world...
Sam? Is that Sam Walton and his low-price superstore empire, or Uncle Sam and his benevolent nanny state?
The fingerprint scan works mostly - but it doesn't work very well if you are cold
Another problem just occurred to me: in winter, people will have to take their gloves off just to make phone calls outdoors!
I realize that people in the US spend a lot of time driving, but people also make a lot of calls when outdoors waiting for people to meet them, etc.
Or will global warming soon become so intense that we won't have to worry about outdoor gloves anymore? ^_^;
You know, you're right!
I looked at them again myself and saw little to get upset about.
Perhaps this is a case of seeing bad edits and edit wars in the past and then forgetting the later results -- the human tendency to focus on the negative.
Perhaps it's pages about things related to these issues (Bush mentioned on pages about tyrants, and the like) that make the issues, and not the pages directly about the issues, stick in the mind.
For the specific cases I mentioned, I shall have to retract. (Though I still dislike the political ideologues that seem to be more devoted to presenting their opinions as facts than to adding to the sum of human knowledge.) It is heartening to see consensus hammered out on heavily-edited pages like these.
A related problem is the inevitable politicization of articles and their writers. If I want to read about George W. Bush, abortion, Christianity, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, etc., etc., I'm not going to trust Wikipedia because the article will be slanted one way now and the other way an hour from now.
That being said, I find Wikipedia to be a wonderful resource for non-controversial pop culture (where there are many interested editors), all kinds of computer-related geekery (where there are interested and extremely capable editors), and simple but hard-to-find facts such as who the Chinese emperor or Pope was in a given year. Even sports-related articles, for which the intersection of internet writers and sports buffs is small, are improving.
How can Wikipedia's biggest problem -- namely that the informed and the uninformed get the same publishing rights -- be solved without changing the nature of Wikipedia? A Slashdot-like karma system where editors with high karma can block those without from editing thei stuff?
I suspect that Wikipedia's ultimate fate will be to abandon the idea of being a complete open encyclopedia. Either the "anyone can edit" ideal will be maintained, but without politically-divisive issues which will shift over to Citizendium or something more rigorous, or the openness will be sacrificed and a Britannica-style group of trusted editors will take the reins. Right now I'd prefer the former -- for all its faults, Wiki is a wonderful compilation of human knowledge. You just have to know what parts are unreliable.
I'd like to patent the keyboard on the right, but garmin seem to have done that one too:
http://www.radar-detector-shop.co.uk/products/ga rm in-quest.htm
The marginal increase in usability for right-handers would be more than offset by its near-total unusability by left-handers.
Some of the "Zaurus" PDAs are like this also. What on earth can makers of products like these be thinking?
You operate under the illusion that producing a product obligates one to income.
Whether he believes that depends on how the phrase "endangers my right to profit from the fruits of my labor" is read.
If "to profit" is a verb, I agree with you. But if "profit" is a noun, i. e. "endangers my right to [the] profit [which is being taken by someone] from the fruits of my labor", I have no problem with the statement. Given that a profit is being made from someone's labor, the first right to such profit ought to rest with the one doing the labor.
I know this sounds nit-picky, but we need to think like lawyers and consider multiple interpretations and ways of parsing sentences, or the *AAs and their ilk will be taking our rights out from under us.
Lamar, thanks for the catch. I hadn't noticed that all three of my links had the traditional characters.
And what makes you think that when you'll fill that new country's forms you will not be asked for the english equivelent of your name? It is pretty standard here and in european countries i've been (though, granted, as tourist and not a citizen)
This is just one data point, but my bank account in Japan is based on my name in Japanese katakana. I gave them the Roman spelling for the credit card, but that spelling is unofficial (due in part to the multiple romanization methods for Japanese) and is filled in by the cardholder as he/she desires. The local writing of this country has to be the official one for identification.
So you have an eccentric Roman-alphabet spelling that can map to a phonetic rendering in the other writing system, but which can't map back to the original. If your name is Shawn, you're going to get lumped in with the Seans and the Seanns and the Shawons, etc. when you write your name in kana, Cyrillic, Burmese, etc., and it can't be linked back unless a clever human being is sifting through all the records.
This is why, if you want to avoid hassle in your affairs, when abroad you should pick one transliteration of your name and stick with it. But on the other hand, if you don't want credit card companies and online businesses and banks and the rest compiling a giant file on you, you should use as many variants as possible. If Pyotr (or Peter) Tchaikovsky (or Tschaikowskij, or Chaikovski, etc., etc.) lived today and a Big Brother agency in his native Russia wanted to compile data on him, no automated database could even get started if he took precautions to romanize his name a different way every time.
Actually the best way to go off the grid is to expat to another country. If your destination is a place with a non-Roman alphabet, I doubt any databases will be able to link your name to anything without human intervention. Provided that you don't make the $80,000 required to be eligible for US taxes, you'll be able to sign contracts, use credit cards, etc. without the US or its corporations finding anything out. As far as the multinationals are concerned, 'you' are two different people.
Obviously the Chinese characters aren't displaying as well as I'd been hoping. (To be even more accurate, on my screen they're not displaying at all.)
Here's a Google search for the characters in Liqian: http://www.google.com/search?q=%E9%A9%AA%E9%9D%AC
Here's a site which contains these characters (see the photo in the lower right; just above the Latin letters "Liqian": http://china-world.info/china28c.htm
You should also be able to see them on this page: http://mujin.parfait.ne.jp/mujins/sanguo/geodic-10 .html#Riken
Hopefully one or the other of these pages will show the Chinese characters for Liqian correctly. You may have to mess with the encoding on your browser to use Unicode or SJIS.
Not sure how well Slashdot handles Chinese, but the characters are . ("Li" is the 'li' meaning 'beauty' on the right, with the horse radical on the left, and means 'black horse'. "Qian" is the 'gan' meaning 'dry' on the right, with the 'leather' radical on the left. The simplified form is this: .
Given that it's only really the English pronunciation of "legion" that resembles the Chinese word (which is pronounced like English 'li-chien' would be; Wade-Giles romanization is li-ch'ien with aspirated ch), the resemblance is probably a coincidence. Then again, I have no idea how western Chinese people would pronounce those characters, so it may indeed be a corruption of "legion". I hope it is; that would be fascinating!
1) Show all prices after sales tax (if applicable)
This would solve the problem right away.
Stores would start pricing things to the nearest nickel or dime except for small items under a dollar, where differences of under a nickel are significant.
Japan had a similar situation before instituting a 3% consumption tax in 1989. Before that, in general, prices of items over 1000 yen usually ended in a zero, so people didn't have to carry 1 and 5 yen coins around as a matter of course; they were used sparingly.
Then the consumption tax came in and the government found itself having to produce many more of these aluminum and brass coins because of all the odd prices that people were paying.
But very recently they went to tax-inclusive pricing, which has smoothed things out quite a bit. You only really need three significant figures in prices anyway. If you're shopping for a baseball glove or a suit jacket, you can leave the small coins at home.
Sales tax, which creates odd prices, is the real culprit here, not the existence of a small unit of currency. I actually favor the existence of a small unit because little kids buy things with their own money and learn how to manage it. They can't learn these skills if 25c packs of gum and 3c Tootsie Rolls are only sold in bulk (and consequently bought by their parents) because cents aren't in use anymore.
I recognize that tax-inclusive prices would pave the way for "stealth" increases, and shift the preceived burden of consumption tax from the purchaser to the retailer, but it's just smoother. Either this or have retailers set prices that result in round totals after tax, such as charging $5.67 + 6% tax for a $6 item.
I'd really like to convince governments to return to inflation-proof hard currency, or to eliminate consumption taxes, but since that doesn't look very possible, how about a solution more creative than eliminating small coins?
And others of us live in countries with great video rental services, but own computers which are in a different DVD "region".
While they give you five opportunities to change the region, eventually you use them up and are forced to either search for a hack that might damage your computer, or buy a TV plus DVD player just to watch the other region's stuff, or even a second computer in the local region.
Who wants to go through all that? I'd actually prefer to put some money in the producers' pockets, and get the subtitles that come from local rentals, but a wholly-artificial system of incompatibility has made it so that my Region 1 DVD player is in effect a completely different device from a Region 2 player, despite the only difference being a few bytes in the programming.
I would love to give my local video shop plenty of business, but can't realistically do it until computers can play all DVDs.
:But I recall someone once saying the "average person" is 5' tall, female, and Chinese.
::Is she single?
:::No, the average girl is already married. :-(
Not anymore! For the first time ever: 51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse
Keep in mind that before the Library of Congress developed their own system of measurement, a kilo-LoC was 999.999 LoCs. The Dewey Decimal System doesn's have a 1000.000.
There's one more thing that worries me about them asking for the SSN. How about when people who are concerned about leaking personal data, but also don't want to get red-flagged, intentionally give a false-but-believable number (say, their actual one with two digits transposed) with the intention of correcting the "error" when they actually get hired. A corporation searching credit or DMV records will be pulling up data from a different person who never consented to having anything looked at.
The genuine actual real solution is to return to backing currencies with precious metals, so that the value of people's money isn't so closely tied to their own countries' governments.
It is not a coincidence that there has been inflation in almost every single year since the US dollar was divorced from gold or silver.
The very rich can often escape inflation thanks to real estate and stock investments (which, in times of inflation, grow more valuable since they function as a hedge), but the poor do all their dealings in cash and bear the full brunt of currencies losing their value.
I'd much rather have a guarantee that the dollar would have intrinsic value* than any guarantee about stopping the much-more-discussed national ID plans, or CCTV cameras on the streets, or biometric passports.
When your savings has intrinsic value the world over, you're a lot safer from anything your government might try to do to you.
(*: Yes, I know that humans might stop valuing silver or gold, and that thus "intrinsic" is a relative term. But they haven't stopped valuing them at any time in human history so far.)
Considering that the consumption tax on Windows is a ludicrous 17.5% (8.23 / 47.00), I wouldn't be surprised to see the government stepping in and forcing people to pay for Windows just to keep that revenue stream flowing!
And how does this system handle multiple languages? Should one have to know the Danish word for "vendors" in order to type the URL of a Danish site that you want to do business with?
You could do a web search for the company's name and the product it sells and hope that it comes up immediately, but, in addition to the unneccessary load on search engine sites, you lose the advantage of being able to type URLs in directly and save time.
This very thing was happening with the traditional media's handling of the Duke lacrosse case a few months ago. Internet bloggers and pundits played a not-insignificant part in blowing holes in the accuser's story and exposing the corruption in the DA's office.
If not for the hundreds of ordinary people, concerned with the possiblity of a false accusation and determined to dig out the truth and pass it on to others, three innocent college students might already be sitting in jail now.
That "online aggression" can go both ways!
So here in Holland they legalized it: If you pay a reasonable fee (about $0.06 per page), you can have your copy. They appointed an organization to collect those payments. Fine.
While I commend Holland for being a bit more enlightened regarding copies than other countries... six cents per page, with you supplying the media, is a "reasonable" fee? This is much more than the retail price of many books (even considering that an A4 page can hold two or even four pages of a paperback), and retail prices include the media, the printing, the salaries of the bookshop employees, the expenses of shipping it to the bookshops, and the author's share.
Since copying pages of a book infringes only on that last item, six cents per page is extremely steep!
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I think those words ring just as true today as they did 200 years ago.
Re:Dear Land of the Free (Score:3, Informative)
by MrSquirrel (976630)
Kid's a quick learner!
(Seriously, though, Franklin's quote is always deserving of good karma no matter how popular it is. It *needs* to be trotted out regularly.)
You're probably thinking of the childcare guru from the same era, Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Japanese do indeed live longer on average than Americans, but consider also that Japanese women live nearly eight years longer than Japanese men do.
One guess as to which gender is made to work the punishingly-long hours Japanese employees are famous for, and not coincidentally makes up well over 90% of "karoshi" (death from overwork) cases.
Dcavanaugh, minor but important quibble: 5% is only "moderate by historical standards" if "historical" refers only to what came after taking the dollar off the gold standard and the oil shocks.
Consumer prices have quadrupled since the baby boomers were kids, whereas the entire preceding 150 years of American history didn't see such a devaluation.
By *truly historical* standards, 5% inflation is crippling and devastating to savers. That the government has gotten the public to accept such a thing as being something close to normal is a testament to how much evil can be wrought if you just phase it in over a generation or two.
Inflation is only our friend if it's wrecking the purchasing power of our rivals, which in India it seems to be doing.