"Everybody is agreed that there is only One China. They even agree on its borders."
Not true. The Chinese who took over Taiwan after World War II and the Chinese who remained in China all agree that Taiwan is part of China, but the Taiwanese people who were in Taiwan prior to 1945 are not so sure. After 70 years of Chinese propaganda and forced Sinicization, they are split between those who say Taiwan is part of China those who say Taiwan and China are separate countries.
The typical news report in the western media will say Taiwan and China "split" amid "civil war" in 1949. But they were only together for 4 years from 1945 to 1949.
"being fed a daily stream of anti-Taiwan propaganda"
The most damaging propaganda is probably the lie that most Taiwanese want to "reunite" with China but are held back by stubborn government. In fact the government is more pro-China than the population and is working hard to drag the people toward a union they don't want.
"and it probably didn't help that at one time Taiwan wanted to 'borrow' nuclear weapons from the US, in order to invade China"
Taiwan was under an immigrant Chinese dictatorship at the time (the Chinese who arrived in 1945 took over and forced the population to learn Chinese and to say they were Chinese and to bow to the Chinese dicatator). Taiwan (the Taiwanese people) didn't want to invade China. It was the Chinese who had colonized the place who wanted to invade China.
Calling Taiwan a bastion of free "Chinese" would make the government of China very happy. They want the world to believe that their plans to annext Taiwan are an attempto "reunify" rather than naked aggression. Oddly their strongest ally is the authoritarian ruling party of Taiwan that migrated from China. They are also helped my too many media sources that give a false impression when they say things like "Taiwan separated from China after the communists' victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949".
That's like saying France split from Germany in 1945. While technically true, it leaves out the fact that Taiwan had been joined to China a mere 4 years earlier at the end of World War 2. When the Nationalist Chinese took over Taiwan, they clamped down on freedom of speech and spend the next 70 years forcing everyone to learn Chinese and telling them they were part of China.
CNN has become even more ridiculous saying that "Taiwan began as the remnant of the government that ruled over mainland China until a Communist uprising proved victorious in 1949." Taiwan began long before the Chinese showed up, whether you're talking about the Chinese who took over in 1945 or the Chinese who started migrating in the 1600s (Taiwan has a similar history to South and Central America in that it starting colonized around the same time and unlike the U.S. the native populations were reduced and assimilated rather than nearly eliminated).
This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work.
No, the article describes an experiment that shows that people don't necessarily trust scientists to get things right, and the degree of the trust varies by culture. This is hardly surprising. Scientists are people, and one's opinions about people tends to be a result of your interactions with people around you, most of whom are generally from your own culture. Most of what culture is is the result of such interactions. How could your culture not affect what you expect to see from a group of people?
If we're spraying the ground with bacteria that take away the nitrogen needed by other plant and animal species, would that make the topsoil hard to use for agriculture? And if this bacteria is able to thrive in the area, could it become a larger problem - destroying fertile fields that were already known not to have mines?
More engineering would be nice if re-use were allowed.
From what I understand, many government contracts forbid the contractor from taking code written for one contract and applying it to the development of another contract. This apparently can happen even if the customer is the same for both contracts!
Different approaches for different problems
on
The Duct Tape Programmer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Scenario 1: Your client needs an application that will accept data input for approximately 400 different forms, allow those forms to be validated using some rules that are simple and others that are very complex, and put those forms through a fairly standard work flow.
Scenario 2: Your client needs an application that has 5 different forms used for very different purposes whose data will be processed in very different ways.
In Scenario 1, you had better do some engineering up front to save you from custom coding the parts of those 400 forms that could have been "over-engineered" into templates, base classes, and interfaces.
Also part of the problem with public schools is that people have gutted them, and then used the consequences of that to claim that they are a failure and that they should be further gutted. At least this is true in my state (AZ), which has the worst public education in the country (well, 48-49th worst). This also ignores the fact that they weren't failures for a hundred or so years up until the modern age.
In my comparison to Microsoft I did say that the government has been known to occasionally do some things very well. The question is what to do when the government fails massively. In a free market, when the de facto monopoly becomes inefficient enough, people change to other providers despite the high cost of doing so. When the government becomes inefficient, you're pretty much stuck, and reform can be blocked by entrenched special interests and rent-seekers. I don't want a healthcare system that eventually comes to resemble U.S. public schools.
Taking for granted that your explanation for failing public schools in AZ is correct, what does that say about public health? If the voters of the future are healthier than others, and they decide to gut the healthcare system because they don't see a reason to pay taxes for services they don't use, then you have failing healthcare. This may be a problem for one of the same reasons some schools are being gutted, demographic differences between voters and service-receivers. Voters in Arizona tend to be American. Many of the school kids are children of immigrants, and many of those illegal immigrants. An older American voter may not have the same emotional commitment to local education that he would have if it were his own grandchildren or the grandchildren of other people of similar culture who were attending the schools. How will these younger naturalized immigrant voters feel about paying for the healthcare of older Americans 30 years from now - especially with the divisive effects of a national focus on multi-culturalism as opposed to assimilation?
But regardless of the reason for failing AZ schools, the fact remains that if you want to opt-out of the system, you still have to pay for opting in, and you then you have to pay again for your private instruction. The failing schools never disappear the way private schools with a similar record would.
Sadly, in several hundred years when the history of AI is written, this Edward Boyden will likely be given credit for being the first person to explore the important question of "motivation amplification--the continued desire to build in self-sustaining motivation, as intelligence amplifies". Whether or not his question is completely useless given the current state of technology, the fact that he wasted all of our time writing an article on something we all understood but have the good sense to wait until it had application to address will mean that he gets credit. It's a lot like the modern patent office.
Your sig is rather ironic given your position on this issue.
As for the availability of private insurance and private doctors - we have a similar system in the United States for schools. We have both government schools and private schools. However, whether or not your attend private school, you still pay the same taxes as people who attend the government school. You have have to pay twice. Even though the private schools are widely regarded as far superior, most people send their kids to public school because they can't afford to pay for both government and private schools.
One huge difference is the attitude of the teachers. At the private schools, they tend to want to work with the parents. At the government schools, they tend to have an attitude of closing ranks to cover their butts. At the private schools, they want you to keep sending your kids. At some of the government schools, they know they have your kid and he's more of a hostage so you better not offend the staff.
Could an American please explain to me why the majority of USA seems to oppose public healthcare?
Consider that if the software industry in the form of IBM had been socialized in the 1970s, we would all still be using mainframes - every last one of us. It was great at the time, but it was a free market that allowed other forms of computing to show the IBM leaders that their belief in mainframes as the way of the future was wrong. When the government makes a decision, who can show that it was right or wrong? Everyone must follow it - and so any better ideas are squelched. The U.S. government might be capable of implementing with the best known solution for now, but I also want the new best solutions to be born and thrive rather than being killed in the womb by government regulation. I don't want to be stuck with the best 2009 medical system in 2030.
What is the difference between Microsoft and the Federal Government? Both occasionally do something right. Both have even been known to do something extremely well. But both also have a long history of providing crap that annoy anyone who understands what is being provided, the privacy issues, and the amount of control. Both try to extend their reach into every facet of your experience. So what is the difference?
I can choose Linux. I can choose Mac. I can choose WordPerfect. It will cost me in terms of convenience because almost everyone else uses MS Windows and MS Office standards - but I can choose to be different if I have strong enough reasons for not wanting Microsoft.
When the Federal government makes the decisions for me - I have no choice.
All political power comes from the barrel of a gun - Mao Tse Tung
I can't wait until Prince Namor shows up in a really vengeful mood to claim the Queen Aria who had been promised to him long ago. First the land-lubbers polluted his ocean and then they stole his bride-to-be!
So stick by your guns, and just say no. Else nothing will ever change.
Because that's been so successful in the past! So the 1% of the population that's actually computer literate enough to (a) know about this and (b) care won't buy their game. They won't notice.
That's ok. It doesn't matter so much to me whether everyone else boycotts the games with advertisements. I won't buy games with advertisements simply because I don't want to play them. I see far too many advertisements as it is. I certainly don't want to spend my relaxation time looking at more.
I've often wondered what would have happened if the government hadn't stuck it's nose into the computer business by creating the internet. I imagine Private networks would have grown. Companies like AOL and Prodigy would have created networks for consumers to dial into. These companies would have had a strong financial interest in keeping the networks safe from pests like spammers and viruses. Eventually some of these companies would seen the benefits of offering access to each others' networks to create larger networks. Perhaps some companies would have seen the benefits of making it cheap or even free for people to set up their own servers. Applications for visiting different networks would have been built.
I think we would have ended up with pretty much the same major benefits of the internet but with strong infrastructure based support for preventing viruses and spam.
Necessarily the internet the emerged wouldn't have been the same. And some things, like running your favorite video game on a high bandwidth connection, might have ended up more expensive, but I think overall the web would be a better place.
And who would pay for the upgrades? That wouldn't even be an issue.
Yeah and a long long time ago in a galaxy far away they obviously didn't have such stuff like OSHA.
Or they'd have railings to stop people from falling into pits and other nasties...
Clearly it's a galaxy where they didn't have warning stickers on lightsabers to tell people "This way to enemy", or "Do not point lightsaber at remaining head".
But still...
That's why they were able to develop so much cool technology so long ago. They were thinking with their heads instead of with their lawyers.
The article did not address the questions of definitions. Do we define words like "fear" and "surprise" the same way? Fear and surprise can be related - and where does shock fit in? Perhaps its not just a question of interpreting the emotions differently, but also an issue of applying different words to the same emotion. I see a shocked expression, but I have to assign it a value of "fear" or "surprise" - even if I have a perfect empathy for the emotion expressed in the picture, the word I choose will depend on how I've seen that word used in the past.
Given that the test was given to people from different backgrounds, they likely grew up speaking different languages. Even though presumably the East Asian subjects may have learned English, their understandings of some English words may be based on translations of their native words, and the words may not be exact matches.
One might suggest that this problem can be dodged by asking the subjects for a suggested physical response rather than for a word. Instead of "Is this person feeling 'fear' or 'surprise'" you might ask "Is this person thinking of running away or is this person thinking that he didn't expect what just happened" but even then cultural expectations about behavior would play a heavy role.
It raises the question of whether the researches were using pictures of people who were genuinely angry, surprised, sad, etc., or pictures of people who were pretending to be those things. It also makes me wonder where were the people from who were pictured in the images.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everybody is agreed that there is only One China. They even agree on its borders."
Not true. The Chinese who took over Taiwan after World War II and the Chinese who remained in China all agree that Taiwan is part of China, but the Taiwanese people who were in Taiwan prior to 1945 are not so sure. After 70 years of Chinese propaganda and forced Sinicization, they are split between those who say Taiwan is part of China those who say Taiwan and China are separate countries.
The typical news report in the western media will say Taiwan and China "split" amid "civil war" in 1949. But they were only together for 4 years from 1945 to 1949.
"being fed a daily stream of anti-Taiwan propaganda"
The most damaging propaganda is probably the lie that most Taiwanese want to "reunite" with China but are held back by stubborn government. In fact the government is more pro-China than the population and is working hard to drag the people toward a union they don't want.
"and it probably didn't help that at one time Taiwan wanted to 'borrow' nuclear weapons from the US, in order to invade China"
Taiwan was under an immigrant Chinese dictatorship at the time (the Chinese who arrived in 1945 took over and forced the population to learn Chinese and to say they were Chinese and to bow to the Chinese dicatator). Taiwan (the Taiwanese people) didn't want to invade China. It was the Chinese who had colonized the place who wanted to invade China.
Calling Taiwan a bastion of free "Chinese" would make the government of China very happy. They want the world to believe that their plans to annext Taiwan are an attempto "reunify" rather than naked aggression. Oddly their strongest ally is the authoritarian ruling party of Taiwan that migrated from China. They are also helped my too many media sources that give a false impression when they say things like "Taiwan separated from China after the communists' victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949".
That's like saying France split from Germany in 1945. While technically true, it leaves out the fact that Taiwan had been joined to China a mere 4 years earlier at the end of World War 2. When the Nationalist Chinese took over Taiwan, they clamped down on freedom of speech and spend the next 70 years forcing everyone to learn Chinese and telling them they were part of China.
CNN has become even more ridiculous saying that "Taiwan began as the remnant of the government that ruled over mainland China until a Communist uprising proved victorious in 1949." Taiwan began long before the Chinese showed up, whether you're talking about the Chinese who took over in 1945 or the Chinese who started migrating in the 1600s (Taiwan has a similar history to South and Central America in that it starting colonized around the same time and unlike the U.S. the native populations were reduced and assimilated rather than nearly eliminated).
This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work.
No, the article describes an experiment that shows that people don't necessarily trust scientists to get things right, and the degree of the trust varies by culture. This is hardly surprising. Scientists are people, and one's opinions about people tends to be a result of your interactions with people around you, most of whom are generally from your own culture. Most of what culture is is the result of such interactions. How could your culture not affect what you expect to see from a group of people?
Probably a stupid question but...
If we're spraying the ground with bacteria that take away the nitrogen needed by other plant and animal species, would that make the topsoil hard to use for agriculture? And if this bacteria is able to thrive in the area, could it become a larger problem - destroying fertile fields that were already known not to have mines?
More engineering would be nice if re-use were allowed.
From what I understand, many government contracts forbid the contractor from taking code written for one contract and applying it to the development of another contract. This apparently can happen even if the customer is the same for both contracts!
Scenario 1: Your client needs an application that will accept data input for approximately 400 different forms, allow those forms to be validated using some rules that are simple and others that are very complex, and put those forms through a fairly standard work flow.
Scenario 2: Your client needs an application that has 5 different forms used for very different purposes whose data will be processed in very different ways.
In Scenario 1, you had better do some engineering up front to save you from custom coding the parts of those 400 forms that could have been "over-engineered" into templates, base classes, and interfaces.
In Scenario 2, it makes sense to duct-tape.
Informed jurors are harder to manipulate. It is important to keep them ignorant.
In the case where I sat on the jury, we were allowed to asked for a read back of testimony, but were told it wasn't available.
In my comparison to Microsoft I did say that the government has been known to occasionally do some things very well. The question is what to do when the government fails massively. In a free market, when the de facto monopoly becomes inefficient enough, people change to other providers despite the high cost of doing so. When the government becomes inefficient, you're pretty much stuck, and reform can be blocked by entrenched special interests and rent-seekers. I don't want a healthcare system that eventually comes to resemble U.S. public schools.
Taking for granted that your explanation for failing public schools in AZ is correct, what does that say about public health? If the voters of the future are healthier than others, and they decide to gut the healthcare system because they don't see a reason to pay taxes for services they don't use, then you have failing healthcare. This may be a problem for one of the same reasons some schools are being gutted, demographic differences between voters and service-receivers. Voters in Arizona tend to be American. Many of the school kids are children of immigrants, and many of those illegal immigrants. An older American voter may not have the same emotional commitment to local education that he would have if it were his own grandchildren or the grandchildren of other people of similar culture who were attending the schools. How will these younger naturalized immigrant voters feel about paying for the healthcare of older Americans 30 years from now - especially with the divisive effects of a national focus on multi-culturalism as opposed to assimilation?
But regardless of the reason for failing AZ schools, the fact remains that if you want to opt-out of the system, you still have to pay for opting in, and you then you have to pay again for your private instruction. The failing schools never disappear the way private schools with a similar record would.
Sadly, in several hundred years when the history of AI is written, this Edward Boyden will likely be given credit for being the first person to explore the important question of "motivation amplification--the continued desire to build in self-sustaining motivation, as intelligence amplifies". Whether or not his question is completely useless given the current state of technology, the fact that he wasted all of our time writing an article on something we all understood but have the good sense to wait until it had application to address will mean that he gets credit. It's a lot like the modern patent office.
Your sig is rather ironic given your position on this issue. As for the availability of private insurance and private doctors - we have a similar system in the United States for schools. We have both government schools and private schools. However, whether or not your attend private school, you still pay the same taxes as people who attend the government school. You have have to pay twice. Even though the private schools are widely regarded as far superior, most people send their kids to public school because they can't afford to pay for both government and private schools.
One huge difference is the attitude of the teachers. At the private schools, they tend to want to work with the parents. At the government schools, they tend to have an attitude of closing ranks to cover their butts. At the private schools, they want you to keep sending your kids. At some of the government schools, they know they have your kid and he's more of a hostage so you better not offend the staff.
Consider that if the software industry in the form of IBM had been socialized in the 1970s, we would all still be using mainframes - every last one of us. It was great at the time, but it was a free market that allowed other forms of computing to show the IBM leaders that their belief in mainframes as the way of the future was wrong. When the government makes a decision, who can show that it was right or wrong? Everyone must follow it - and so any better ideas are squelched. The U.S. government might be capable of implementing with the best known solution for now, but I also want the new best solutions to be born and thrive rather than being killed in the womb by government regulation. I don't want to be stuck with the best 2009 medical system in 2030.
What is the difference between Microsoft and the Federal Government? Both occasionally do something right. Both have even been known to do something extremely well. But both also have a long history of providing crap that annoy anyone who understands what is being provided, the privacy issues, and the amount of control. Both try to extend their reach into every facet of your experience. So what is the difference?
I can choose Linux. I can choose Mac. I can choose WordPerfect. It will cost me in terms of convenience because almost everyone else uses MS Windows and MS Office standards - but I can choose to be different if I have strong enough reasons for not wanting Microsoft.
When the Federal government makes the decisions for me - I have no choice.
All political power comes from the barrel of a gun - Mao Tse Tung
I can't wait until Prince Namor shows up in a really vengeful mood to claim the Queen Aria who had been promised to him long ago. First the land-lubbers polluted his ocean and then they stole his bride-to-be!
I'm salivating over the thought of Howard the Duck vs. Scrooge McDuck! Or maybe a team-up with the two of them! Somebody call Don Rosa!
If I had seen anything in the last 50 years that was anywhere close to being as good as Carl Bark's Scrooge McDuck comics, I might take you seriously.
More than 30 years after picking up my first comics I know which ones are worth re-reading and which ones aren't.
That's ok. It doesn't matter so much to me whether everyone else boycotts the games with advertisements. I won't buy games with advertisements simply because I don't want to play them. I see far too many advertisements as it is. I certainly don't want to spend my relaxation time looking at more.
Wait, India has its own moon? and that moon has a satellite? And we now have eight planets instead of nine?
I think the Indians stole something...
You're already modded up to 5, but you deserve a 10.
I've often wondered what would have happened if the government hadn't stuck it's nose into the computer business by creating the internet. I imagine Private networks would have grown. Companies like AOL and Prodigy would have created networks for consumers to dial into. These companies would have had a strong financial interest in keeping the networks safe from pests like spammers and viruses. Eventually some of these companies would seen the benefits of offering access to each others' networks to create larger networks. Perhaps some companies would have seen the benefits of making it cheap or even free for people to set up their own servers. Applications for visiting different networks would have been built.
I think we would have ended up with pretty much the same major benefits of the internet but with strong infrastructure based support for preventing viruses and spam.
Necessarily the internet the emerged wouldn't have been the same. And some things, like running your favorite video game on a high bandwidth connection, might have ended up more expensive, but I think overall the web would be a better place.
And who would pay for the upgrades? That wouldn't even be an issue.
Yeah and a long long time ago in a galaxy far away they obviously didn't have such stuff like OSHA.
Or they'd have railings to stop people from falling into pits and other nasties...
Clearly it's a galaxy where they didn't have warning stickers on lightsabers to tell people "This way to enemy", or "Do not point lightsaber at remaining head".
But still...
That's why they were able to develop so much cool technology so long ago. They were thinking with their heads instead of with their lawyers.
The article did not address the questions of definitions. Do we define words like "fear" and "surprise" the same way? Fear and surprise can be related - and where does shock fit in? Perhaps its not just a question of interpreting the emotions differently, but also an issue of applying different words to the same emotion. I see a shocked expression, but I have to assign it a value of "fear" or "surprise" - even if I have a perfect empathy for the emotion expressed in the picture, the word I choose will depend on how I've seen that word used in the past.
Given that the test was given to people from different backgrounds, they likely grew up speaking different languages. Even though presumably the East Asian subjects may have learned English, their understandings of some English words may be based on translations of their native words, and the words may not be exact matches.
One might suggest that this problem can be dodged by asking the subjects for a suggested physical response rather than for a word. Instead of "Is this person feeling 'fear' or 'surprise'" you might ask "Is this person thinking of running away or is this person thinking that he didn't expect what just happened" but even then cultural expectations about behavior would play a heavy role.
It raises the question of whether the researches were using pictures of people who were genuinely angry, surprised, sad, etc., or pictures of people who were pretending to be those things. It also makes me wonder where were the people from who were pictured in the images.
After all, Hitler was a professed Christian.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/weekinreview/word-for-word-case-against-nazis-hitler-s-forces-planned-destroy-german.html/ "Word for Word/The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity" It's the New York Times, so can take it with grain of salt if you wish.
This looks interesting too: http://www.lawandreligion.com/nurinst1.shtml July 6, 1945 - "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches"