You go to a lot of trouble to deny the fact that context matters. Consider the difference betweeen
"Is it too much to ask that we kidnap someone and prevent him from traveling freely for the rest of his life?"
and
"Is it too much to ask that we kidnap someone and prevent him from traveling freely for the rest of his life if he has been proven to have murdered 25 people?"
If you asked the latter question and I truncated it to the former and then responded "yes" you would surely see the problem.
Well in "real war" you have a very well defined enemy
What a relief to know that those 2500+ people didn't "really die" on September 11. I bet Theo van Gogh will be relieved to learn that he's not "really dead" either.
Free speech is always important, but we always have limits. In a time of war, when we're asking young men and women to risk their right to life, is it too much to ask that we take away the free speech of people who are encouraging the killing of not only those men and women, but of ourselves and our friends?
Can't Youtube voluntarily add something to their guidelines like "Don't post stuff that supports terrorism or undermines the national security of the country where Youtube is located? The global economy is nice, but they're still Americans and those soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are still dying for them, and the Youtube owners are still as much targets of the terrorists as the people in the Twin Towers and the United airplanes were.
The Chinese government objects to maps that depict certain regions as being separate sovereign countries, such as Tibet and Taiwan, which the Chinese government holds are both part of China.
This would be similar to a map being published that showed Alaska as a separate country, or as part of Canada, as opposed to it being part of the USA.
Almost. For Tibet you have it right. For Taiwan it would be more like if Google were to publish a map showing Cuba to be an independent country rather than a part of the USA.
You had time to meet someone from another field in grad school? I'm amazed! I was in grad school at UVa for 6 months before I learned the location of landmarks like "the corner". I knew where the comp sci building was and that was about it.
If you're a guy going into a technical field, realize that once you graduate and find a job, your oppotunities for meeting people of the other gender will drop off tremendously. Go to the liberal arts school. You can always learn things on the job, read books, or take night courses.
If you're a girl, you'll have good odds at the tech school, but it's less important because you'll meet plenty of single guys when you start working.
A lesser consideration should be how far you realistically want to go in the technical field. If you seriously want to be a lecturer/researcher at a top-notch university, then you have to go technical (you won't have time for women for a while anyway). If you want to get your BS, start programming, and perhaps move into management, the liberal arts college will have a lot to offer.
I believe in a strategy of strategic ambiguity. If I tell people I have weapons, I become a target for people who want to steal weapons (they are valuable to criminals). If I tell people I don't have weapons, I become a target for people who want to commit crimes against defenseless people.
So whether you choose to own weapons or now, please don't advertise. No need to give the criminals operational intelligence.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the books and scrolls within the Library of Alexandria survived, and who knows what kind of complex science and engineering was put into those books. The day it burned the world lost the greatest knowledge resource at the time.
Yes, 98% have Chinese ancestry, and a sizable portion of those also have aborigine Taiwanese ancestry. It's a bit like the U.S. were most people have European ancestry from who knows when. The distinction I was referring to was the children and grandchildren of Chinese who came over with Chiang Kai-shek in the 1940s with the idea that they would one day return to China, not the descendants of Chinese who came to stay many generations earlier.
I was planning to tell you to ask the guy where his parents were born, and that I already knew the answer. But then I read this post and of course I had been right, his parents were from China. Amoung people born in Taiwan, I've found that those who call think of people from Taiwan as Taiwanese have family born in Taiwan, while whose who consider from Taiwan as Chinese have ancestors born in China. Recently I met a guy who confused me for a moment. Though born in Taiwan and raised in America, he said people from Taiwan were Chinese. I immediately asked where his parents were born and he said "Taiwan". I was shocked! I started to say how surprised I was and then I realized I was dealing with a new generation, the kid was only in his twenties. So I asked him were his grandparents were born: China, he sheepishly admitted. Of course!
Taiwan is not the same thing as China. They are at war with each-other, so it's unlikely they'd actually hand over any of this to the Chinese.
The problem is that Chiang Kai-shek brought a couple million Chinese with him when he took over after WWII. They and their descendants have long dominated government and military affairs in Taiwan. Further, for some 40 years Chiang's party ran an authoritarian state where it was illegal to say you weren't Chinese and everyone was forced to talk about how wonderful it was to be Chinese.
This gives the US plenty of reason to be concerned that technology transferred to Taiwan may be picked up by traitors and given to China.
"Better" is true relative to nothing at all, but caveat emptor applies far more today than it did in 1968.
The article seems to combine the innovation of a capitalist state with the central planning of a communist state. Capitalism has let us gain the technology for exchanging human-driven cars for a system operated entirely by computers, but you would need communism to force people to do it all at once do the human-drivers wouldn't mess things up.
That level of technology combined with integration and cooperation appears throughout the article, from the way appliances call the repairman for you to the cities with domes and bans on private cars.
With pure communism, you don't get the technological advances, and you don't even truly get the cooperation either. With capitalism, you get the technological advances quickly, but achieving the cooperation takes time.
Specifically on your point article seems to assume a communist state where there is no competition when ordering goods or services.
It is not specific to your generation. Youth of all generations fail to appreciate the benefits of experience and to fail to appreciate that not all a person does or has done to deserve respect is readily apparent. Some generations are worse in this regard than others, but so far I haven't seen any indications that Gen Y is one of those worse generations. In fact my impression has been the opposite, that Gen Y is more respectful than some of the other recent generations.
No respect for older co-workers? Well I'll cop to this in a conditional fashion. I have tremendous respect for some of my older co-workers. The ones that pull their weight, keep up with required knowledge, and appreciate the value of a more junior contributor than themselves.
One common arrogance of youth is to presume one knows enough to adequately judge the qualities of the old. I'm not really old yet, but I've learned as I've left youth behind is that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did, and that I didn't even recognize that I needed to learn much of what I've learned. In fact you should respect older co-workers, not give them a blank check of course, but respect them. You don't know what wisdom they may have.
I wish the Congress would have secret sessions on foreign policy more often. For example, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq congress should have held a secret session to decide what to do. With the open session, members only had two options - vote for invasion or vote for doing nothing. With a secret session, the option of bluffing would have been available. Whether or not that would be a good option in that particular case is debatable, but at least the option would existed.
Secret meetings would be useful in more mundane matters as well. Think about buying a car with your wife (or Mom - this is Slashdot). Do you discuss the price and what you're willing to pay right in front of the salesman? No, you argue in private then present your joint decision. Pretty much anytime the U.S. is dealing with other countries we ought to be able to speak with one voice and our process of making decisions shouldn't be available to those with whom we are negotiating.
Would our congressmen act like scoundrels in these secret sessions? I think they would actually behave better. They are, after all, Americans, and we're talking foreign policy. And the lobbyists who have made their donations wouldn't be able to check their behavior and withhold donations for failure to do as told. Freed to use their wisdom rather than bound by the power of the purse, and freed from the need to grandstand for the public, they might finally do the job they were sent to do.
The MMOs I'm familiar have multiple servers and you get to choose which one you log into when you play. Suppose the game owner were to establish some fraction of those servers as the "pay for stuff" servers where you can buy levels, equipment, etc. using real money. Those who didn't want to play that way could still play on the other servers feeling more confident that those around them didn't buy extra stuff. Which servers do you think would be more popular?
Just how easy is it to think of something truly random? Ask 100 people to pick a random number between 1 and 10 and you will see a pattern. It won't be random because certain numbers will be preferred. Try asking the person to repeatedly pick a random number between 1 and 10 and they won't be able to do it. Throw in other factors they need to consider and being random gets really hard. By using computer pattern matching we have a shot at discovering patterns they don't even know they have, and perhaps patterns psychologists aren't aware of either. The psychologist will make assumptions, and those assumptions might be wrong or limiting. The computer can think outside the human box. It might just find the pattern without being hampered by questions about why the pattern is there.
I did live in a formerly authoritarian country, and discovered an old American dictionary where the offensive parts had very carefully had paper glued over them. Surely that was noticeable. Of course if the American publisher had simply published a version for that country that left out the offensive parts, the censorship wouldn't have been noticeable.
But even if the government had done a better job, there still would be people who travel and other ways of getting access to foreign materials.
Perhaps you were young at the time you were living in South Africa. But even if you weren't, times have changed. China has lots of contact with the outside world; the government can't keep everything out.
But if the government co-opts the outside world into helping tell the same lies, or at least to help in keeping the truth away, what good does globalization do the Chinese people in learning the truth? They can't trust their own government and their own media; where can the learn if they can't trust foreign sources either? If foreign sources are just as dishonest and reinforce the government's lies, why shouldn't the Chinese come to believe them and distrust any foreign sources that disagree?
Sometimes a little truth is better than no truth. You think a state-run search engine would be better for China than a filtered independent one?
If Baidu were the only search engine permitted, then the Chinese people would wonder why and would know not to trust the results. But Google is the same search engine people in the free countries use. Why shouldn't they trust it? After some use even the disclaimer starts to wear thin.
A little information is better than no information when that little bit of information serves to undermine the lies people are hearing, not when that little information is selected to reinforce the lies.
The primary purpose of anything that is owned is to serve the owners. A corporation is owned by shareholders making its purpose to serve the owners. Making money for them is usually the purpose, but not always and not only. Perhaps some owners of Google don't want their company to make money for them if it means helping to prop up a corrupt regime. Google would serve those owners better by finding other ways to make money. There is more to life than money. Even shareholders know that.
Just an observation, but do the admins at Wikipedia allow casual profanity in articles? I haven't seen any. I doubt that they take that lightly. It's probably scrubbed out pretty carefully.
But if you count the good and the bad that science brings us, we're unquestionably much better off because of science. You can't say the same for religion.
How can you say it for science? With science our wars have far more potential to kill people. With science terrorists can do more damage. With science people's lives are far more complex. With science people who do not live in industrialized countries are still poor but also have to put up with environmental pollution the industrialized countries generate. With science we could have destroyed the world by nuclear weapons during the cold war, and still have the capability to do it. With science we may be destroying the world through global warming. Ok, it hasn't happened yet, but if we use our science to destroy the world so there are no humans left (and perhaps no life at all left) will you still contend that we're much better off because of science?
Difficult to know until the oversight gets removed. If oversight were removed who knows what ICANN would try? And if you say the leadership wouldn't try anything too bad, who knows what people would try to replace that leadership because of the things they could try?
US oversight seems good so far. 300 million Americans don't have much interest in doing weird things with ICANN, they just want their internet to work. That makes some issues easy to solve in a practical way. But if ICANN goes international, all kinds of issues of sovereignty will crop up that will be a mess to untangle and whose solutions in general will reflect how strong countries want things to be rather than how things are.
Slashdot Mirror
You go to a lot of trouble to deny the fact that context matters. Consider the difference betweeen
"Is it too much to ask that we kidnap someone and prevent him from traveling freely for the rest of his life?"
and
"Is it too much to ask that we kidnap someone and prevent him from traveling freely for the rest of his life if he has been proven to have murdered 25 people?"
If you asked the latter question and I truncated it to the former and then responded "yes" you would surely see the problem.
..is it too much to ask that we take away the free speech of people...
Yes.
Is it too much to ask that you respond to an entire quote rather than just taking part of it out of context?
Or let me ask it this way and then quote your answer:
Question: Do you still hate your parents and think Tom Cruise is the greatest man on earth?
Your response: Yes.
Well in "real war" you have a very well defined enemy
What a relief to know that those 2500+ people didn't "really die" on September 11. I bet Theo van Gogh will be relieved to learn that he's not "really dead" either.
Wait till the people making these videos get in charge... you haven't begun to see censorship yet.
Sigh, and here I sit without mod points.
The worst part is, the excellent karma this should get will go an anonymous poster!
Free speech is always important, but we always have limits. In a time of war, when we're asking young men and women to risk their right to life, is it too much to ask that we take away the free speech of people who are encouraging the killing of not only those men and women, but of ourselves and our friends?
Can't Youtube voluntarily add something to their guidelines like "Don't post stuff that supports terrorism or undermines the national security of the country where Youtube is located? The global economy is nice, but they're still Americans and those soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are still dying for them, and the Youtube owners are still as much targets of the terrorists as the people in the Twin Towers and the United airplanes were.
The Chinese government objects to maps that depict certain regions as being separate sovereign countries, such as Tibet and Taiwan, which the Chinese government holds are both part of China.
This would be similar to a map being published that showed Alaska as a separate country, or as part of Canada, as opposed to it being part of the USA.
Almost. For Tibet you have it right. For Taiwan it would be more like if Google were to publish a map showing Cuba to be an independent country rather than a part of the USA.
You had time to meet someone from another field in grad school? I'm amazed! I was in grad school at UVa for 6 months before I learned the location of landmarks like "the corner". I knew where the comp sci building was and that was about it.
If you're a guy going into a technical field, realize that once you graduate and find a job, your oppotunities for meeting people of the other gender will drop off tremendously. Go to the liberal arts school. You can always learn things on the job, read books, or take night courses.
If you're a girl, you'll have good odds at the tech school, but it's less important because you'll meet plenty of single guys when you start working.
A lesser consideration should be how far you realistically want to go in the technical field. If you seriously want to be a lecturer/researcher at a top-notch university, then you have to go technical (you won't have time for women for a while anyway). If you want to get your BS, start programming, and perhaps move into management, the liberal arts college will have a lot to offer.
(For the record, I have none of these.)
I believe in a strategy of strategic ambiguity. If I tell people I have weapons, I become a target for people who want to steal weapons (they are valuable to criminals). If I tell people I don't have weapons, I become a target for people who want to commit crimes against defenseless people.
So whether you choose to own weapons or now, please don't advertise. No need to give the criminals operational intelligence.
Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the books and scrolls within the Library of Alexandria survived, and who knows what kind of complex science and engineering was put into those books. The day it burned the world lost the greatest knowledge resource at the time.
Ever wonder how much knowledge was lost when the ancient Chinese burned all their books? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_burn_the_classics_and_to_bury_the_scholars
Yes, 98% have Chinese ancestry, and a sizable portion of those also have aborigine Taiwanese ancestry. It's a bit like the U.S. were most people have European ancestry from who knows when. The distinction I was referring to was the children and grandchildren of Chinese who came over with Chiang Kai-shek in the 1940s with the idea that they would one day return to China, not the descendants of Chinese who came to stay many generations earlier.
I was planning to tell you to ask the guy where his parents were born, and that I already knew the answer. But then I read this post and of course I had been right, his parents were from China. Amoung people born in Taiwan, I've found that those who call think of people from Taiwan as Taiwanese have family born in Taiwan, while whose who consider from Taiwan as Chinese have ancestors born in China. Recently I met a guy who confused me for a moment. Though born in Taiwan and raised in America, he said people from Taiwan were Chinese. I immediately asked where his parents were born and he said "Taiwan". I was shocked! I started to say how surprised I was and then I realized I was dealing with a new generation, the kid was only in his twenties. So I asked him were his grandparents were born: China, he sheepishly admitted. Of course!
Taiwan is not the same thing as China. They are at war with each-other, so it's unlikely they'd actually hand over any of this to the Chinese.
The problem is that Chiang Kai-shek brought a couple million Chinese with him when he took over after WWII. They and their descendants have long dominated government and military affairs in Taiwan. Further, for some 40 years Chiang's party ran an authoritarian state where it was illegal to say you weren't Chinese and everyone was forced to talk about how wonderful it was to be Chinese.
This gives the US plenty of reason to be concerned that technology transferred to Taiwan may be picked up by traitors and given to China.
"Better" is true relative to nothing at all, but caveat emptor applies far more today than it did in 1968.
The article seems to combine the innovation of a capitalist state with the central planning of a communist state. Capitalism has let us gain the technology for exchanging human-driven cars for a system operated entirely by computers, but you would need communism to force people to do it all at once do the human-drivers wouldn't mess things up.
That level of technology combined with integration and cooperation appears throughout the article, from the way appliances call the repairman for you to the cities with domes and bans on private cars.
With pure communism, you don't get the technological advances, and you don't even truly get the cooperation either. With capitalism, you get the technological advances quickly, but achieving the cooperation takes time.
Specifically on your point article seems to assume a communist state where there is no competition when ordering goods or services.
It is not specific to your generation. Youth of all generations fail to appreciate the benefits of experience and to fail to appreciate that not all a person does or has done to deserve respect is readily apparent. Some generations are worse in this regard than others, but so far I haven't seen any indications that Gen Y is one of those worse generations. In fact my impression has been the opposite, that Gen Y is more respectful than some of the other recent generations.
No respect for older co-workers? Well I'll cop to this in a conditional fashion. I have tremendous respect for some of my older co-workers. The ones that pull their weight, keep up with required knowledge, and appreciate the value of a more junior contributor than themselves.
One common arrogance of youth is to presume one knows enough to adequately judge the qualities of the old. I'm not really old yet, but I've learned as I've left youth behind is that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did, and that I didn't even recognize that I needed to learn much of what I've learned. In fact you should respect older co-workers, not give them a blank check of course, but respect them. You don't know what wisdom they may have.
I wish the Congress would have secret sessions on foreign policy more often. For example, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq congress should have held a secret session to decide what to do. With the open session, members only had two options - vote for invasion or vote for doing nothing. With a secret session, the option of bluffing would have been available. Whether or not that would be a good option in that particular case is debatable, but at least the option would existed.
Secret meetings would be useful in more mundane matters as well. Think about buying a car with your wife (or Mom - this is Slashdot). Do you discuss the price and what you're willing to pay right in front of the salesman? No, you argue in private then present your joint decision. Pretty much anytime the U.S. is dealing with other countries we ought to be able to speak with one voice and our process of making decisions shouldn't be available to those with whom we are negotiating.
Would our congressmen act like scoundrels in these secret sessions? I think they would actually behave better. They are, after all, Americans, and we're talking foreign policy. And the lobbyists who have made their donations wouldn't be able to check their behavior and withhold donations for failure to do as told. Freed to use their wisdom rather than bound by the power of the purse, and freed from the need to grandstand for the public, they might finally do the job they were sent to do.
The MMOs I'm familiar have multiple servers and you get to choose which one you log into when you play. Suppose the game owner were to establish some fraction of those servers as the "pay for stuff" servers where you can buy levels, equipment, etc. using real money. Those who didn't want to play that way could still play on the other servers feeling more confident that those around them didn't buy extra stuff. Which servers do you think would be more popular?
Just how easy is it to think of something truly random? Ask 100 people to pick a random number between 1 and 10 and you will see a pattern. It won't be random because certain numbers will be preferred. Try asking the person to repeatedly pick a random number between 1 and 10 and they won't be able to do it. Throw in other factors they need to consider and being random gets really hard. By using computer pattern matching we have a shot at discovering patterns they don't even know they have, and perhaps patterns psychologists aren't aware of either. The psychologist will make assumptions, and those assumptions might be wrong or limiting. The computer can think outside the human box. It might just find the pattern without being hampered by questions about why the pattern is there.
I did live in a formerly authoritarian country, and discovered an old American dictionary where the offensive parts had very carefully had paper glued over them. Surely that was noticeable. Of course if the American publisher had simply published a version for that country that left out the offensive parts, the censorship wouldn't have been noticeable.
But even if the government had done a better job, there still would be people who travel and other ways of getting access to foreign materials.
Perhaps you were young at the time you were living in South Africa. But even if you weren't, times have changed. China has lots of contact with the outside world; the government can't keep everything out.
But if the government co-opts the outside world into helping tell the same lies, or at least to help in keeping the truth away, what good does globalization do the Chinese people in learning the truth? They can't trust their own government and their own media; where can the learn if they can't trust foreign sources either? If foreign sources are just as dishonest and reinforce the government's lies, why shouldn't the Chinese come to believe them and distrust any foreign sources that disagree?
Sometimes a little truth is better than no truth. You think a state-run search engine would be better for China than a filtered independent one?
If Baidu were the only search engine permitted, then the Chinese people would wonder why and would know not to trust the results. But Google is the same search engine people in the free countries use. Why shouldn't they trust it? After some use even the disclaimer starts to wear thin.
A little information is better than no information when that little bit of information serves to undermine the lies people are hearing, not when that little information is selected to reinforce the lies.
The primary purpose of anything that is owned is to serve the owners. A corporation is owned by shareholders making its purpose to serve the owners. Making money for them is usually the purpose, but not always and not only. Perhaps some owners of Google don't want their company to make money for them if it means helping to prop up a corrupt regime. Google would serve those owners better by finding other ways to make money. There is more to life than money. Even shareholders know that.
Just an observation, but do the admins at Wikipedia allow casual profanity in articles? I haven't seen any. I doubt that they take that lightly. It's probably scrubbed out pretty carefully.
Did you try looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity and look for the f word? Apparently when it's topical, it's allowed.
But if you count the good and the bad that science brings us, we're unquestionably much better off because of science. You can't say the same for religion.
How can you say it for science? With science our wars have far more potential to kill people. With science terrorists can do more damage. With science people's lives are far more complex. With science people who do not live in industrialized countries are still poor but also have to put up with environmental pollution the industrialized countries generate. With science we could have destroyed the world by nuclear weapons during the cold war, and still have the capability to do it. With science we may be destroying the world through global warming. Ok, it hasn't happened yet, but if we use our science to destroy the world so there are no humans left (and perhaps no life at all left) will you still contend that we're much better off because of science?
How useful is this oversight?
Difficult to know until the oversight gets removed. If oversight were removed who knows what ICANN would try? And if you say the leadership wouldn't try anything too bad, who knows what people would try to replace that leadership because of the things they could try?
US oversight seems good so far. 300 million Americans don't have much interest in doing weird things with ICANN, they just want their internet to work. That makes some issues easy to solve in a practical way. But if ICANN goes international, all kinds of issues of sovereignty will crop up that will be a mess to untangle and whose solutions in general will reflect how strong countries want things to be rather than how things are.