You realize, of course, that Krugman is widely considered to be a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Economics? (Click "current price" to see his relative support.) You can find fault with his political commentary, but he's a first rate mind in the field.
Then you have a poor imagination. He dreamed up the idea in 1960, even before the mouse. Heck, computers weren't really even being used much for word processing then. This was long before "documents" were thought of as malleable, liquid things, distinct from the paper they were printed on.
There was no Xerox PARC or MIT Media Lab (and thus a community of forward-thinking researchers), and barely any programmers. Fortran was still a brand new programming language. Networking was in its infancy. C & TCP/IP were still over 10 years away.
Right, it's not a symbol of racial dominance. I'm sure that had nothing to do with why the Georgia legislature added the Confederate Battle Flag to the state flag back in 1956, during which year the legislature also passed a resolution opposing Brown vs. Board of Education and the governor said "The rest of the nation is looking to Georgia for the lead in segregation."
This was only four years after "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in order to distinguish the US from the godless communists. Both of these -- the addition of the confederate flag and "under God" -- were obviously political acts with strong symbolism.
I grew up in Georgia and still visit there often. It's changed a lot for the better in the last 50 years, but don't whitewash history.
One common argument I used to hear is that the North didn't want the South to continue gaining economic power. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, the South was extremely poor. Then Eli Whitney came along and the South started making boatloads of money. The only problem is that they used slaves to pick the cotton. Without slavery, the economic model is severely undermined. They needed slavery for it to work.
The child may not know about it, but adults certainly do. Just ask them about "6-4" (liu si), which was the date of the event and the shorthand they use for it in Mandarin. Kinda like Americans say "9-11." Contrary to popular perception, people are free to talk about pretty much anything in China just so long as you don't publish it or put in on the radio or TV. Not that that's a good situation, but it's certainly an improvement over 30 years ago.
Not only have I met Chinese people, I am married to one. And I've met lots of them who agree with me, including my brother in law who is a member of the Chinese Communist Party.:)
So on the one hand the military is not part of the normal economy, on the other they won't attack the Taianese because they provide jobs?
Believe it or not, they have civilian control of the military there. Hu Jintao cares very much about jobs.
The difference between now and the era before WWI is we have lots more acronyms now.:) WTO, UN, NATO, ASEAN. Capital is lot more mobile than then too, and while there was a lot of trade between nations, there were not a lot of multi-national corporations. Intel cares very much about the Taiwan/China situation, and takes that into account when deciding to build billion dollar plants there, and the Chinese government is very aware of that. (My brother in law works in the economics ministry.)
Look. I'm not saying an invasion is impossible. But it is undeniably less likely now than in the 60s and 70s, when the people there had nothing to dine on but nationalism and hatred of lao wai (foreigners). That's the current situation in North Korea. IMO they are ten times more likely to destabilize Asia than China/Taiwan.
If they had a decent military, there's far more risk of them getting into a war with the US over Taiwan.
If military strength were the only determining factor, you'd be right. But the fact is that China was much more likely to start a war when it was much weaker under Mao than it is now. Why? Globalization. War with Taiwan would have a catastrophic effect on their economy. Not only would it trigger widespread sanctions from the global community (especially the US), but a large chunk of China's "foreign" investment comes from... Taiwan. You don't attack people who provide your economy with millions of jobs.
Yes, Taiwan has some responsibility as well by avoiding provocative acts. But I think they will hold up their end. The same Taiwanese that invest in China also "invest" in politics.
Also, one interesting thing about the Chinese military is that, unlike in the US, they don't really have a military industrial complex. What I mean is, most R&D and even manufacturing is done by the government, not private contractors. This shows up in a myriad of ways -- for example, universities don't get any defense-related funding for research. (They don't get much research funding for anything at all, for that matter.) While there are lots of things wrong with the MI complex, one positive development is that the results of the research get distributed into the broader economy more quickly, and thus serve as a new base for private innovation. GPS would never have gone commercial if it had been developed by China's military.
The West is getting its just desserts for doing business with a nation which has completely removed the notion of the rule of law over the last century.
This is laughably disproven with two questions:
Since China opened up in the 1970s, are the people there more free, less free, or the same?
Since Nixon and the US started engaging China, are we more likely or less likely to go to war with China?
I know a lot of Chinese people, have spent time in China and am married to a Chinese national, and I'm quite confident that the situation has improved there in every respect even in the last 20 years, let alone the last 100.
I wonder what your "job satisfaction" would be like should you work at a company that relies on "anonymous outsider tips" on their prospective employees. Sounds like they really trust each other there, right?
Well, if you want to work on, say, the Space Shuttle program or stealth technology at Boeing, Raytheon etc, you think maybe "anonymous" tips from the DOD might work against you? Sometimes the work itself is the satisfaction, not your relationship with HR.
Steven Hatfill probably loved his job until t became a nightmare.
I strongly recommend going through Pimsleur before learning writing. It helps you get a better sense for how words & phrases sound. Mandarin characters and pinyin will only slow you down in the early going. I've noticed that people who start learning to read & write from the get-go tend to have poor accents. This is why Paul Pimsleur insisted learners focus on aural & spoken language first.
I did all three Pimsleur courses before learning any writing, and my (native Chinese) wife tells me my accent is as good as any non-native speaker she's ever met
When he says I am routinely asked questions by a variety of people that lead inevitably to Alexa, I'm sure he means advertisers. And in particular, advertisers who don't want to pay as much for an ad here as on Digg or, for that matter, PerezHilton.com. I suspect the point of this rant is to have a convenient url handy for nitwit advertisers to look at who have been conned into thinking Alexa actually matters. So in that sense, this rant has a major point, one this is likely worth hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to Slashdot.
Consider this: maybe if young Muslim males had more access to mates, there wouldn't even be a cause. It'd be too hard to find a steady supply of young, impressionable males to kill themselves and abandon their families.
This article seems to back up your case with a real-world example.
in Iraq the US is fighting a war against the agents of Iran.
Oh you must mean the Shia. Oh wait, we support the Shia in Iraq, and the prime minister of Iraq has spoken out in support of Iran. Hmmm... Maybe it's more complicated than you're making it out.
Before the Iraq invasion, it wasn't necessary for us to fight Iranian-backed groups there because Sadaam was an avowed enemy of Iran. Fortunately it only cost us $300 billion to get stuck in the middle a religious civil war that vastly complicates our options vis a vis Iran. Do you think maybe that $300 billion might have been better spent on containing Iran through more conventional means?
The comparison of Hitler with Amahdinejad makes for great headlines, but it's also uninformed. Iran is a poor country and Amahdinejad doesn't even have direct control of the military. He's very unpopular for his handling of the economy. Germany, though poor between the wars, was part of rich Europe and had major industrial capacity.
This meme of "they say they want to kill us" sounds a lot like "There is no doubt Sadaam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and he intends to use them against us and our allies."
Palmer: Did you love your father?
Ellie: Yes.
Palmer: Prove it.
Given the continuing advances in our understanding of brain chemistry, and the continued improvement of technology like CT scanners, this might be entirely possible within a few years.
I don't speak for all Chinese people by any means, but I speak for my Chinese wife & her friends from China, both those who live there and those living here in the USA.
In general they like the USA a lot, are glad they live here and don't dislike the "American spirt" you mention. (Though they may be a little puzzled by it - to them national pride is as much about duty as plain old good feeling, much as one has a duty to be respectful to elders. Yao Ming has said he didn't really start to enjoy basketball for the love of the game itself -- instead of as an obligation to his country -- until he came to the USA.) And I believe they would say that the average Chinese person admires the USA and the West in general. One need only look at the advertising in Chinae to see this. The typical billboard is dominated with pictures of Western faces. To cite another trivial example, Sex & the City is hugely popular there.
I do agree that they mostly think the US should keep its nose out of their business. Most Chinese I've met believe that the bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo war was intentional, not accidental. This opinion is not limited to the mainland. Practically every Chinese person I've met who lives in the USA believes this as well. Right or wrong (I think they're wrong), they were not coerced into this belief.
> however it's our MORAL responsibility as citizens to realize when we are abusing a service
Funny, I thought that's why a law against spamming was created in the first place. Spammers abuse the Internet's architecture -- and specific mail servers -- to an unconscienable degree. Based on how often that happens EVERY DAY -- likely millions of times in Washington state alone -- Bennet's going after them once every couple weeks in court cannot in any way be judged immoral.
>The real problem here is that it sounds like you sue everybody
It's not like he sues everyone and anyone at the drop of a hat. He goes after assholes who he has definitive proof are filling all our inboxes with dreck.
...most school kids don't know much of the difference between "fact" and "scientific theory." It's simply taught. Here's the chapter on gravity, here's the chapter on evolution. Maybe informative materials should be re-evaluated when the theory itself is re-evaluated.
Um, that's what happens already. Textbooks aren't written just once; they're revised often. Biology textbooks started talking about comet destroyed the dinosaurs theory when I was in high school. Ditto the Big Bang.
Students shouldn't just be taught scientific theories. They should learn the scientific method. hearing that the theory of evolution is, uh, evolving should be no more surprising than hearing that last year's cancer scare is actually good for you. (That great bugaboo coffee is now believed to prevent liver cancer.)
I know some folks that work at DoubleClick. The difference between it and YouTube is that DoubleClick actually makes money. I'm not sure it's worth $2 billion, but it's definitely profitable.
She strikes me as someone who desperately wants attention. But attention has its downsides too.
Here's the deal. I happen to know Kathy Sierra pretty well - she's on the advisory board for my company and until recently lived only a mile away from me.
More disclosure: Chris Locke lives a block away from me. We used to go out for lunch every now and then, though it's been at least a couple years.
IMO Kathy does not "desperately want attention." What she wants is to write about passionate users. How controversial is that? It's not like she's writing about the Iraq War or abortion or the Second Amendment. She writes computer books, for crying out loud. And for that she gets death threats?!
I have no idea if what she says about Chris Locke and others is actually true. But I do know that she 1) believes it to be true and 2) has good evidence to back it up. I know this because she called me Sunday to ask a few questions and shared her reasoning with me.
I've never known Kathy to be scared or unreasonable about anything. Her writing is terrific and she does terrific presentations (she keynoted South by Southwest a couple weeks ago). That carries a lot of weight in my world.
Conversely, Chris Locke has a reputation for being, to put it politely, edgy. It may be that he did something that was misinterpreted. But as others have noted on this thread, it should not shock you that a women might feel more vulnerable than a man when she gets the kind of threats and comments she quoted in her post.
I've been using it for 18 months and never work with code like that. That's simple template code, more suitable for dabblers and graphic designers. Drupal actually has multiple template rendering engines that allow you to make a page look like whatever you want. Here are a few examples:
Slashdot Mirror
You realize, of course, that Krugman is widely considered to be a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Economics? (Click "current price" to see his relative support.) You can find fault with his political commentary, but he's a first rate mind in the field.
"Hypertext" doesn't convince me.
Then you have a poor imagination. He dreamed up the idea in 1960, even before the mouse. Heck, computers weren't really even being used much for word processing then. This was long before "documents" were thought of as malleable, liquid things, distinct from the paper they were printed on.
There was no Xerox PARC or MIT Media Lab (and thus a community of forward-thinking researchers), and barely any programmers. Fortran was still a brand new programming language. Networking was in its infancy. C & TCP/IP were still over 10 years away.
Right, it's not a symbol of racial dominance. I'm sure that had nothing to do with why the Georgia legislature added the Confederate Battle Flag to the state flag back in 1956, during which year the legislature also passed a resolution opposing Brown vs. Board of Education and the governor said "The rest of the nation is looking to Georgia for the lead in segregation."
This was only four years after "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in order to distinguish the US from the godless communists. Both of these -- the addition of the confederate flag and "under God" -- were obviously political acts with strong symbolism.
I grew up in Georgia and still visit there often. It's changed a lot for the better in the last 50 years, but don't whitewash history.
One common argument I used to hear is that the North didn't want the South to continue gaining economic power. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, the South was extremely poor. Then Eli Whitney came along and the South started making boatloads of money. The only problem is that they used slaves to pick the cotton. Without slavery, the economic model is severely undermined. They needed slavery for it to work.
IOW, "states rights" == slavery
The child may not know about it, but adults certainly do. Just ask them about "6-4" (liu si), which was the date of the event and the shorthand they use for it in Mandarin. Kinda like Americans say "9-11." Contrary to popular perception, people are free to talk about pretty much anything in China just so long as you don't publish it or put in on the radio or TV. Not that that's a good situation, but it's certainly an improvement over 30 years ago.
"who was pushing for the sanctions to come off and why"?
Actually, a lot of human rights groups were pushing for that as early as 1996. That's the reason Madeline Albright got hammered for saying the alleged deaths of half a million Iraqi children was worth it.
I think Bush and Bill Kristol both are tools, but this was definitely a hot topic on the left pre-9/11.
Not only have I met Chinese people, I am married to one. And I've met lots of them who agree with me, including my brother in law who is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. :)
So on the one hand the military is not part of the normal economy, on the other they won't attack the Taianese because they provide jobs?
Believe it or not, they have civilian control of the military there. Hu Jintao cares very much about jobs.
The difference between now and the era before WWI is we have lots more acronyms now. :) WTO, UN, NATO, ASEAN. Capital is lot more mobile than then too, and while there was a lot of trade between nations, there were not a lot of multi-national corporations. Intel cares very much about the Taiwan/China situation, and takes that into account when deciding to build billion dollar plants there, and the Chinese government is very aware of that. (My brother in law works in the economics ministry.)
Look. I'm not saying an invasion is impossible. But it is undeniably less likely now than in the 60s and 70s, when the people there had nothing to dine on but nationalism and hatred of lao wai (foreigners). That's the current situation in North Korea. IMO they are ten times more likely to destabilize Asia than China/Taiwan.
If they had a decent military, there's far more risk of them getting into a war with the US over Taiwan.
If military strength were the only determining factor, you'd be right. But the fact is that China was much more likely to start a war when it was much weaker under Mao than it is now. Why? Globalization. War with Taiwan would have a catastrophic effect on their economy. Not only would it trigger widespread sanctions from the global community (especially the US), but a large chunk of China's "foreign" investment comes from... Taiwan. You don't attack people who provide your economy with millions of jobs.
Yes, Taiwan has some responsibility as well by avoiding provocative acts. But I think they will hold up their end. The same Taiwanese that invest in China also "invest" in politics.
Also, one interesting thing about the Chinese military is that, unlike in the US, they don't really have a military industrial complex. What I mean is, most R&D and even manufacturing is done by the government, not private contractors. This shows up in a myriad of ways -- for example, universities don't get any defense-related funding for research. (They don't get much research funding for anything at all, for that matter.) While there are lots of things wrong with the MI complex, one positive development is that the results of the research get distributed into the broader economy more quickly, and thus serve as a new base for private innovation. GPS would never have gone commercial if it had been developed by China's military.
The West is getting its just desserts for doing business with a nation which has completely removed the notion of the rule of law over the last century.
This is laughably disproven with two questions:
Since China opened up in the 1970s, are the people there more free, less free, or the same?
Since Nixon and the US started engaging China, are we more likely or less likely to go to war with China?
I know a lot of Chinese people, have spent time in China and am married to a Chinese national, and I'm quite confident that the situation has improved there in every respect even in the last 20 years, let alone the last 100.
I wonder what your "job satisfaction" would be like should you work at a company that relies on "anonymous outsider tips" on their prospective employees. Sounds like they really trust each other there, right?
Well, if you want to work on, say, the Space Shuttle program or stealth technology at Boeing, Raytheon etc, you think maybe "anonymous" tips from the DOD might work against you? Sometimes the work itself is the satisfaction, not your relationship with HR.
Steven Hatfill probably loved his job until t became a nightmare.
I strongly recommend going through Pimsleur before learning writing. It helps you get a better sense for how words & phrases sound. Mandarin characters and pinyin will only slow you down in the early going. I've noticed that people who start learning to read & write from the get-go tend to have poor accents. This is why Paul Pimsleur insisted learners focus on aural & spoken language first. I did all three Pimsleur courses before learning any writing, and my (native Chinese) wife tells me my accent is as good as any non-native speaker she's ever met
And then the Three Stooges will sue Car Talk! :)
I'm partial to a number I found on a bathroom wall. It's 8675309.
When he says I am routinely asked questions by a variety of people that lead inevitably to Alexa, I'm sure he means advertisers. And in particular, advertisers who don't want to pay as much for an ad here as on Digg or, for that matter, PerezHilton.com. I suspect the point of this rant is to have a convenient url handy for nitwit advertisers to look at who have been conned into thinking Alexa actually matters. So in that sense, this rant has a major point, one this is likely worth hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to Slashdot.
I'm a consultant and I can say with absolute certainty that "it depends."
This article seems to back up your case with a real-world example.
in Iraq the US is fighting a war against the agents of Iran.
Oh you must mean the Shia. Oh wait, we support the Shia in Iraq, and the prime minister of Iraq has spoken out in support of Iran. Hmmm... Maybe it's more complicated than you're making it out.
Before the Iraq invasion, it wasn't necessary for us to fight Iranian-backed groups there because Sadaam was an avowed enemy of Iran. Fortunately it only cost us $300 billion to get stuck in the middle a religious civil war that vastly complicates our options vis a vis Iran. Do you think maybe that $300 billion might have been better spent on containing Iran through more conventional means?
The comparison of Hitler with Amahdinejad makes for great headlines, but it's also uninformed. Iran is a poor country and Amahdinejad doesn't even have direct control of the military. He's very unpopular for his handling of the economy. Germany, though poor between the wars, was part of rich Europe and had major industrial capacity.
This meme of "they say they want to kill us" sounds a lot like "There is no doubt Sadaam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and he intends to use them against us and our allies."
You should've just Googled it. ;)
I don't speak for all Chinese people by any means, but I speak for my Chinese wife & her friends from China, both those who live there and those living here in the USA.
In general they like the USA a lot, are glad they live here and don't dislike the "American spirt" you mention. (Though they may be a little puzzled by it - to them national pride is as much about duty as plain old good feeling, much as one has a duty to be respectful to elders. Yao Ming has said he didn't really start to enjoy basketball for the love of the game itself -- instead of as an obligation to his country -- until he came to the USA.) And I believe they would say that the average Chinese person admires the USA and the West in general. One need only look at the advertising in Chinae to see this. The typical billboard is dominated with pictures of Western faces. To cite another trivial example, Sex & the City is hugely popular there.
I do agree that they mostly think the US should keep its nose out of their business. Most Chinese I've met believe that the bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo war was intentional, not accidental. This opinion is not limited to the mainland. Practically every Chinese person I've met who lives in the USA believes this as well. Right or wrong (I think they're wrong), they were not coerced into this belief.
> however it's our MORAL responsibility as citizens to realize when we are abusing a service
Funny, I thought that's why a law against spamming was created in the first place. Spammers abuse the Internet's architecture -- and specific mail servers -- to an unconscienable degree. Based on how often that happens EVERY DAY -- likely millions of times in Washington state alone -- Bennet's going after them once every couple weeks in court cannot in any way be judged immoral.
>The real problem here is that it sounds like you sue everybody
It's not like he sues everyone and anyone at the drop of a hat. He goes after assholes who he has definitive proof are filling all our inboxes with dreck.
Um, that's what happens already. Textbooks aren't written just once; they're revised often. Biology textbooks started talking about comet destroyed the dinosaurs theory when I was in high school. Ditto the Big Bang.
Students shouldn't just be taught scientific theories. They should learn the scientific method. hearing that the theory of evolution is, uh, evolving should be no more surprising than hearing that last year's cancer scare is actually good for you. (That great bugaboo coffee is now believed to prevent liver cancer.)
I know some folks that work at DoubleClick. The difference between it and YouTube is that DoubleClick actually makes money. I'm not sure it's worth $2 billion, but it's definitely profitable.
She strikes me as someone who desperately wants attention. But attention has its downsides too.
Here's the deal. I happen to know Kathy Sierra pretty well - she's on the advisory board for my company and until recently lived only a mile away from me.
More disclosure: Chris Locke lives a block away from me. We used to go out for lunch every now and then, though it's been at least a couple years.
IMO Kathy does not "desperately want attention." What she wants is to write about passionate users. How controversial is that? It's not like she's writing about the Iraq War or abortion or the Second Amendment. She writes computer books, for crying out loud. And for that she gets death threats?!
I have no idea if what she says about Chris Locke and others is actually true. But I do know that she 1) believes it to be true and 2) has good evidence to back it up. I know this because she called me Sunday to ask a few questions and shared her reasoning with me.
I've never known Kathy to be scared or unreasonable about anything. Her writing is terrific and she does terrific presentations (she keynoted South by Southwest a couple weeks ago). That carries a lot of weight in my world.
Conversely, Chris Locke has a reputation for being, to put it politely, edgy. It may be that he did something that was misinterpreted. But as others have noted on this thread, it should not shock you that a women might feel more vulnerable than a man when she gets the kind of threats and comments she quoted in her post.
I've been using it for 18 months and never work with code like that. That's simple template code, more suitable for dabblers and graphic designers. Drupal actually has multiple template rendering engines that allow you to make a page look like whatever you want. Here are a few examples:
http://www.yourmtb.com/
http://www.yourclimbing.com/
http://www.theonion.com/
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ (yes, really)
Lucky you! I married a Godless Communist Chinese atheist. She doesn't even understand the basic idea of "acting out." ;)