Word. I recently taught some BASIC to my sister, who wanted to learn about programming. She was 24 at the time. I've already gotten horrified looks about this, but as we saw it, she has neither the time nor the inclination to code anything actually useful. And if that somehow changes, I'll fix her bad habits personally.
I chose BASIC because it's a great playpen. It made it easy for her to spot
cause and effect, tweak the code and see the consequences, and try out new ideas. What's more, it was easy for her to parse, and she did not have to hunt down a single missing semi-colon, nor care about the semantic difference between = and ==. Again, those would no doubt give her much more expressive power. We were more concerned with such concepts as control flow, loops, and variables. (Oh, how proud I was when I saw the shock of sudden understanding as she learned about variables.)
Python probably has many of the same advantages. I stuck with BASIC because it was easier for her to set up and I knew its basics better - it's what I was first taught. That said, when she went to look for some further instructions, she ended up doing a Javascript tutorial.
No, that's the dark underbelly of having huge-ass volcanoes around. As long as there's no solution to that, possibly involving enormous straws, folks are pretty much stuck with it. Volcanic geothermal power is a fully positive method with painful prerequisites.
Yup, but the captain of an oil tanker can be reasonably expected to be aware of the possible consequences of his deeds. I'm not at all sure if one person with a spade can anticipate the possibility of cutting a neighboring country off the Internet, much less ignore it.
I expect that 9/11 is becoming less of a tragedy and more of an unit of measurement. As in, traffic accidents kill roughly one 9/11 worth of Americans every thirty-three days, while obesity kills roughly one 9/11 worth of Americans every four days. It should come in handy: the only other such unit we've had was "megadeath," and that's really cumbersome on smaller scales.
Some people will take issue with this, but it won't cost the event any of its dignity. All the dignity it could lose was lost when it was linked to Saddam Hussein.
I expect they could require that all they wanted, and it still wouldn't happen.
If my usability manuals are to be believed, people have neglected the safeties of nuclear reactors because those things are a chore and do nothing anyway. If you don't want your users to do something, then you design your system so that they never get the option.
Parish unions which, I hope, have equivalents to boards and councils, because I can't keep any more of this straight right now... and yes, I have had Monty Python's The Bishop running in my head for the last hour.
The church holds parish elections, parish being the basic territorial and administrative unit, every four years. All members ages 16 and up (18 and up until just recently) are eligible to vote, and all members ages 18 and up are eligible to run. Each parish elects a parish board, its decision-making body, which is in charge of such things as the budget. The parish boards also elects a parish council, its executive body in charge of such things as hiring most employees, every two years. One person can serve on both the board and the council. A parish council is headed by a priest, though, who's known as a vicar.
Parishes are grouped into nine dioceses, each of which is led by a bishop and has the two additional decision-making bodies of a diocese council (14 laymen, 7 priests, led by a layman) and a cathedral chapter (seven people, including the bishop, the vicar of the parish with a cathedral, and one layman). The chapter appoints parish priests and selects three candidates for vicar elections. All members of a parish ages 16/18 and up are eligible to vote for vicars, and write-in candidates are possible. Apparently a decision to turn vicar elections over to parish councils is on the table, to clear this mess up a bit.
Bishops are elected by a diocese's priests, lecturers (an aging priest-without-the-frills position, I believe) and an equal number of laymen, whom parish boards select from their ranks. Ten voters can nominate a priest to run. A similar process elects the archbishop, the head honcho and general spokesman. The archbishop can only be bishopy to the oldest diocese, but heads the synod, the church's highest decision-making body that decides where the church stands (64 laymen elected by the parishes for four years, 32 priests, the bishops and a few hangers-on like the leader of the military chaplains) and the church government, the executive body (kirkkohallitus, the archbishop, two bishops and nine laymen, one from every diocese and elected by the synod, also known as those feet-dragging bastards at my folks' so clearly they have some say).
Sorry to gab your ear off, but proper answers take time and this was surprisingly interesting. I'm pretty sure I was careful, though I had to translate some of this on the fly and of course don't know how the internal politics work. Larger cities have parish unions, which, have equivalents to boards and councils. This seems rather democratic to my untrained eye. A parish election is actually coming up next month, an archbishop was elected in the summer, and the new bishop of the capital city is a woman. There was an inspiring campaign where she and the other leading candidate, a man, both told people to ignore gender.
Dubious brilliance in one tiny area of the (I.T.) world leads them to believe that they'd be logical experts in wholly different fields.
Logic can be applied to any field. And IT folks are typically very logical. If we didn't work with computers, we would probably be mechanics, doctors, or lawyers.
That's what makes us qualified to comment in those fields? Having the right mindset makes up for the lack of relevant knowledge and training? I suppose it could, if that mindset was objectively and accurately analysing vast tracts of information.
Unfortunately, spending several years in an environment where just about everything is reducible to ones and zeroes is not going to cause that kind of clarity. ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: Just recently I came across colleagues who were talking about how we ought to bring back eugenics. Why? Apparently because of engineer logic at its purest: The tech is good, it's just the users who are stupid.
I recently interviewed a Save the Children organization's representative over child pornography. She pointed out that the ample psychological harm caused by kid rape is compounded by the victim's awareness that depictions of the act are being spread and "enjoyed." What's your take on this?
She had previously mentioned a gateway theory, ie. that less access to child porn results in fewer child molesters, but I'd have to see the numbers before coming to conclusion.
This sounds like a reasonable difference of interpretation. What you dislike, I both dislike and am sick of.
And in the interests of geekery: the story's badness (to me) may not be its property as much as the result of a complex and partially random chain reaction. Consider: If I had been in a different mood, less attentive or placed emphasis on different words, would the introduction of Lewis have put me on my guard? If it hadn't, would I have ignored the story's resemblance to those three horrid tropes or taken them to be excusable? If I had been less disillusioned, would saving lives by bombing Westminster Abbey have seemed reasonable instead of mean-spirited, and would I have had suspended my disbelief over the near-psychotic protagonist not only entertaining the thought of time travel but deducing it immediately? There's some fascinating interplay and self-reinforcing loops at work here. A pity that I study another field entirely.
The impression remains that Greg Egan saw that he was holding all the cards, reached over, and kicked his opponent in the groin.
I had a look and narcistically figure that you might be interested in my take - mine, mind, with no attempt to make general statements.
The story started with a hoot. Egan's prose is pleasant, and moreover he shows familiarity with integrating it with his non-prose: the jailbreak somehow manages to retain momentum even when it digresses, at length, into physics. Maybe I'm just geeky enough. What with my recent experience with Mary Sues, the woman with incredible powers and complete self-assurance that's never ever contradicted was a tad annoying, despite the reasons for those traits.
C.S. Lewis is then introduced reading a disturbing letter about ****ing up kids, and he reads it with growing satisfaction and a sense of vindication. He then muses on planting the seed of faith in children's minds. For a writer who goes into the applications of quantum gravity theory in the middle of a jailbreak, this carries a shade of having Lewis twirl his moustache and go "mwahahahaha!" I skipped forward some, and found a debate scene that consists of a smug yet clearly inferior argument and of the protagonist striking it down, an innocent victim who shows who the bad guys are by suffering because of their convictions, and finally a scene where the unfalteringly serene messenger of truth suffers the increasingly irrational ravings of the fool who refuses to face reality. I put the story down. All three of these are familiar tropes from works from Jack Chick's to Eragon, and they weren't any more palatable now than they were then. I find "raving fool vs serene messenger" the most annoying of the three - which may be beause of my previous encounters more than this one, I can't tell - though the innocent victim is distinguished by her sheer unnecessity. Some works just have the villain kick a dog.
When the same happened in Finland, the Ministry of Communications announced that ISPs are free to refuse as long as they don't. If the results of voluntary ISP participation were found to be unsatisfactory, mandatory measures would be taken.
Come to think of it, there was no way the results could've been satisfactory. A 2% accuracy rate, DNS censoring that takes seconds to get through, trying to do this at all... Fortunately, a couple of big ISPs dropped out in spring 2008, when there was a bit of a backlash, and the Ministry hasn't had the opportunity to grab further state control.
I'm in the same situation as you and long considered Twitter an utter waste of time. That was until a journalist covering a demonstration in Egypt managed to do this and was released without charge while his photographer disappeared. I can't deny that Twitter can be used to do good. We're by and large unaware of the potential of our new tools, so this kind of experimentation may reveal valuable new things or at least get rid of the nagging feeling that they might be here.
This is the dawn of the Information Age. We do things. Occasionally they even work.
Whether this is on Slashdot for more reasons than being sneered at is a more difficult question.
Good point. I'd hazard a guess that people from the demographics that have the most trouble with new technology were the most likely to have trouble with electronic voting.
Where the HELL do you get your ballots? Finnish ballots have a circle. You take a pencil and write a number in the circle. That's it, you're done. Voting is held for one issue at a time. The failure rate of this electronic voting system is several times higher than that of traditional ballots.
Traditional Finnish ballots fail because of unavoidable human stupidity, but here failures are due to technical problems and incompetent design that allows human stupidity to be expressed. The machines apparently allow removing the slotted card used before registering the vote - was there no defensive design at all? The Finns have not gone through the catastrophes you USAns have, and still think that every vote counts. Anything else is a mockery of democracy.
We are far indeed from knowing the extents of the Internet's potential, but know it's large enough to make the largest reference work in human history spring up out of nowhere. There's hardly a better time to experiment. If this goes wrong, the Britannica staff if anyone should be able to tell and they have an encyclopedia-wide revision to fall back on.
The rebellious air of Wikipedia's earlier years has dissipated, and editors no longer (widely) see the site as a competitor to Britannica. Both are used to provide information (yes, yes, Power Rangers Pokemon hur hur.) If one of them invents a way to do so better, hooray! Everybody wins.
Citation needed. What Church, and how exactly? The Catholic Church already has a state. It could conceivably hold a secret conspiracy to take over other nations, but they could never build the kind of secret underground tunnel network required. The Roman soil is far too crowded. If you mean the Protestants, the guy behind the movement - Martin Luther - was rather clear on that matter with his "doctrine of the two kingdoms," that is, the separation of humans' civil rule and divine spiritual rule; the latter cannot be legislated or enforced.
If you mean the Orthodox, you might be right. I don't know, but those guys are creepy.
"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."
Citation needed. Wasn't the whole infuriating problem with the filter the claim that it does not work, a claim that filter proponents never even challenged while going THINK OF THE CHILDRAAAAANNN one one one?
As much as I hate Finland's Internet censorship, we can't have our cake (it doesn't hinder pedophiles) and eat it too (its hindrance of pedophiles has unintended consequences). This needs more data.
I'm a Finnish tech student and have been following this for a good long time now. Let me give a run-down of what's going on. Afterwards I have a very important question to ask - I'll add that as a reply.
Finland is one of those modern first-world democracies that accords its citizens more freedom than the United States and is smug about it. Like many such states, Finland's government has been taking steps to change that. Case in point: From January 1st, 2008 onward, Finland's Federal Bureau has had the right to list child born websites for ISPs to block. This has been accused of being a sterotypical power grab (and some representatives are openly salivating at the prospect of expanding censorship), but more likely it's just stereotypical gross populism. There was no chance of defeating the bill that had a stated purpose of fighting child porn.
Finland's geek population is united against censorship for a simple reason. It does not and cannot work. This has not been disputed - everyone and their mother has been trying to tell the lawmakers that, including the Federal Bureau before the law came to force. Effective Internet censorship is not possible without an effort on China's or Saudi Arabia's level, and even then Saudi Arabia's leaks like a sieve. I can think of four ways of circumventing Finland's without specialist knowledge, and I got a 1/5 out of my single network course. In fact everything about this is permeated by bureaucratic incompetence to the point that accusing W3C of child porn is not disproportionate. Not only does the censorship only target web pages, which I'm told make up a very small percentage of online child porn, there's no oversight, no way to appeal, and in several publicized cases, no effort to remove the material from the Internet.
Matti Nikki is both a devoted proponent of online freedom and kind of a dick. He published a list of censored sites to prove that censorship makes them much easier to catch with an automated webcrawler without restricting access in any meaningful way. (Later examinations of this list suggest that it has a 2% accuracy rate, but happens to feature the first Google search results for "gay porn.") When Nikki converted the list into links, his site was censored. That is to say, a domestic text-only website was censored using a law that legalized the censorship of foreign child porn. BOOM! Organized resistance!
Censorship made the evening news a couple of times, appeared in some newspapers and talk shows, and sparked one large geek demonstration back in March. "Google is a browser! Google is a browser!" we chanted, quoting the Bureau's chief on why Google has not been censored despite making child porn available as much as Nikki. We had no effect whatsoever. Okay, some ISPs have made censorship an opt-out system and maybe the Parliament will be wary about expanding it. Aside from that, I feel like the biggest achievement involved was me pissing off a bodyguard of the Minister of Communications with my taped-over mouth. Everything about the issue seems to be mired in its morass of utter incompetence that makes it meaningful debate impossible. For instance, the spokesman of a usually benign children-saving organization appeared in a debate and went on for minutes about the way censorship is a valuable statement of principles (as if making child porn strictly illegal wasn't enough) without ever addressing her opponent's statement that censorship does not work, cannot work, and does more harm than good to its cause. That debate sums up this whole sordid mess.
Nowadays Finland's tech-savvy population is quietly simmering, and the local IT building's basement has had a poster of the Minister of Communications in a Nazi uniform since February with no complaints from the staff.
I've been copying a box of those great big things to 3 1/2 floppy disks and then on to modern storage media. They're about 18-20 years old and so far have worked wonderfully. Only one in three dozen or so has given data errors.
How the hell does criticism of imperfect America lead to Sharia law, either logically or practically?
Specifically, are the United States in imminent danger of being overthrown or converted, or is a political faction about to be able to gain the power to institute it? Those are the only options I can see from my limited perspective, which is why I'm asking.
And - to paraphrase someone wiser than me - it's usually* better to build things that seldom break, and do so gently, than it is to build things that cannot possibly break. That's because when one of the latter does break, it's painful and near impossible to fix.
It's been mentioned above that the ISS crew is not short of time to spend, either. Anyone know how they recreate? Does space affect the things you read? Does anyone fulfill the stereotype and spend hours Earthwatching?
--- *: I said "usually" about space exploration. You're allowed to hurt me now.
This is nothing we haven't seen before and nothing we won't be seeing again. The Chinese government will go to great lengths for its powerlust and especially to protect itself from the people, and every year the march of technology hands them more power. So what can we do about it? Making brooding, cynical posts is the usual M.O. and the generated online badwill has no doubt brough them to their knees. How can we do what little we can to end this obscenity?
Run Tor?
Join Amnesty International and buy some of their nifty hoodies?
Hold a public protest?
Boycott Chinese goods (yeah, right)?
Organize a fuck-off massive online attack and hammer on the Great Firewall? ("one of the most important projects for ensuring its political power..." indeed.)
Before someone calls an only-in-America terrorist threat on an obvious video game recreation? Last year, complete with the bomb squad you requested and a police chief telling the press how he's incredulous at the way instructions for making cardboard boxes are publicly available online.
Aren't you sorry you asked?
(Don't start fuming over this - instead, make some yourself. They're awesome.)
Slashdot Mirror
Word. I recently taught some BASIC to my sister, who wanted to learn about programming. She was 24 at the time. I've already gotten horrified looks about this, but as we saw it, she has neither the time nor the inclination to code anything actually useful. And if that somehow changes, I'll fix her bad habits personally.
I chose BASIC because it's a great playpen. It made it easy for her to spot cause and effect, tweak the code and see the consequences, and try out new ideas. What's more, it was easy for her to parse, and she did not have to hunt down a single missing semi-colon, nor care about the semantic difference between = and ==. Again, those would no doubt give her much more expressive power. We were more concerned with such concepts as control flow, loops, and variables. (Oh, how proud I was when I saw the shock of sudden understanding as she learned about variables.)
Python probably has many of the same advantages. I stuck with BASIC because it was easier for her to set up and I knew its basics better - it's what I was first taught. That said, when she went to look for some further instructions, she ended up doing a Javascript tutorial.
No, that's the dark underbelly of having huge-ass volcanoes around. As long as there's no solution to that, possibly involving enormous straws, folks are pretty much stuck with it. Volcanic geothermal power is a fully positive method with painful prerequisites.
Thanks for the pictures, though.
Yup, but the captain of an oil tanker can be reasonably expected to be aware of the possible consequences of his deeds. I'm not at all sure if one person with a spade can anticipate the possibility of cutting a neighboring country off the Internet, much less ignore it.
I expect that 9/11 is becoming less of a tragedy and more of an unit of measurement. As in, traffic accidents kill roughly one 9/11 worth of Americans every thirty-three days, while obesity kills roughly one 9/11 worth of Americans every four days. It should come in handy: the only other such unit we've had was "megadeath," and that's really cumbersome on smaller scales.
Some people will take issue with this, but it won't cost the event any of its dignity. All the dignity it could lose was lost when it was linked to Saddam Hussein.
I hope you have a good new year.
I expect they could require that all they wanted, and it still wouldn't happen.
If my usability manuals are to be believed, people have neglected the safeties of nuclear reactors because those things are a chore and do nothing anyway. If you don't want your users to do something, then you design your system so that they never get the option.
Parish unions which, I hope, have equivalents to boards and councils, because I can't keep any more of this straight right now... and yes, I have had Monty Python's The Bishop running in my head for the last hour.
The church holds parish elections, parish being the basic territorial and administrative unit, every four years. All members ages 16 and up (18 and up until just recently) are eligible to vote, and all members ages 18 and up are eligible to run. Each parish elects a parish board, its decision-making body, which is in charge of such things as the budget. The parish boards also elects a parish council, its executive body in charge of such things as hiring most employees, every two years. One person can serve on both the board and the council. A parish council is headed by a priest, though, who's known as a vicar.
Parishes are grouped into nine dioceses, each of which is led by a bishop and has the two additional decision-making bodies of a diocese council (14 laymen, 7 priests, led by a layman) and a cathedral chapter (seven people, including the bishop, the vicar of the parish with a cathedral, and one layman). The chapter appoints parish priests and selects three candidates for vicar elections. All members of a parish ages 16/18 and up are eligible to vote for vicars, and write-in candidates are possible. Apparently a decision to turn vicar elections over to parish councils is on the table, to clear this mess up a bit.
Bishops are elected by a diocese's priests, lecturers (an aging priest-without-the-frills position, I believe) and an equal number of laymen, whom parish boards select from their ranks. Ten voters can nominate a priest to run. A similar process elects the archbishop, the head honcho and general spokesman. The archbishop can only be bishopy to the oldest diocese, but heads the synod, the church's highest decision-making body that decides where the church stands (64 laymen elected by the parishes for four years, 32 priests, the bishops and a few hangers-on like the leader of the military chaplains) and the church government, the executive body (kirkkohallitus, the archbishop, two bishops and nine laymen, one from every diocese and elected by the synod, also known as those feet-dragging bastards at my folks' so clearly they have some say).
Sorry to gab your ear off, but proper answers take time and this was surprisingly interesting. I'm pretty sure I was careful, though I had to translate some of this on the fly and of course don't know how the internal politics work. Larger cities have parish unions, which, have equivalents to boards and councils. This seems rather democratic to my untrained eye. A parish election is actually coming up next month, an archbishop was elected in the summer, and the new bishop of the capital city is a woman. There was an inspiring campaign where she and the other leading candidate, a man, both told people to ignore gender.
How does this compare?
Dubious brilliance in one tiny area of the (I.T.) world leads them to believe that they'd be logical experts in wholly different fields.
Logic can be applied to any field. And IT folks are typically very logical. If we didn't work with computers, we would probably be mechanics, doctors, or lawyers.
That's what makes us qualified to comment in those fields? Having the right mindset makes up for the lack of relevant knowledge and training? I suppose it could, if that mindset was objectively and accurately analysing vast tracts of information.
Unfortunately, spending several years in an environment where just about everything is reducible to ones and zeroes is not going to cause that kind of clarity. ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: Just recently I came across colleagues who were talking about how we ought to bring back eugenics. Why? Apparently because of engineer logic at its purest: The tech is good, it's just the users who are stupid.
I recently interviewed a Save the Children organization's representative over child pornography. She pointed out that the ample psychological harm caused by kid rape is compounded by the victim's awareness that depictions of the act are being spread and "enjoyed." What's your take on this? She had previously mentioned a gateway theory, ie. that less access to child porn results in fewer child molesters, but I'd have to see the numbers before coming to conclusion.
This sounds like a reasonable difference of interpretation. What you dislike, I both dislike and am sick of.
And in the interests of geekery: the story's badness (to me) may not be its property as much as the result of a complex and partially random chain reaction. Consider: If I had been in a different mood, less attentive or placed emphasis on different words, would the introduction of Lewis have put me on my guard? If it hadn't, would I have ignored the story's resemblance to those three horrid tropes or taken them to be excusable? If I had been less disillusioned, would saving lives by bombing Westminster Abbey have seemed reasonable instead of mean-spirited, and would I have had suspended my disbelief over the near-psychotic protagonist not only entertaining the thought of time travel but deducing it immediately? There's some fascinating interplay and self-reinforcing loops at work here. A pity that I study another field entirely.
The impression remains that Greg Egan saw that he was holding all the cards, reached over, and kicked his opponent in the groin.
I had a look and narcistically figure that you might be interested in my take - mine, mind, with no attempt to make general statements.
The story started with a hoot. Egan's prose is pleasant, and moreover he shows familiarity with integrating it with his non-prose: the jailbreak somehow manages to retain momentum even when it digresses, at length, into physics. Maybe I'm just geeky enough. What with my recent experience with Mary Sues, the woman with incredible powers and complete self-assurance that's never ever contradicted was a tad annoying, despite the reasons for those traits.
C.S. Lewis is then introduced reading a disturbing letter about ****ing up kids, and he reads it with growing satisfaction and a sense of vindication. He then muses on planting the seed of faith in children's minds. For a writer who goes into the applications of quantum gravity theory in the middle of a jailbreak, this carries a shade of having Lewis twirl his moustache and go "mwahahahaha!" I skipped forward some, and found a debate scene that consists of a smug yet clearly inferior argument and of the protagonist striking it down, an innocent victim who shows who the bad guys are by suffering because of their convictions, and finally a scene where the unfalteringly serene messenger of truth suffers the increasingly irrational ravings of the fool who refuses to face reality. I put the story down. All three of these are familiar tropes from works from Jack Chick's to Eragon, and they weren't any more palatable now than they were then. I find "raving fool vs serene messenger" the most annoying of the three - which may be beause of my previous encounters more than this one, I can't tell - though the innocent victim is distinguished by her sheer unnecessity. Some works just have the villain kick a dog.
When the same happened in Finland, the Ministry of Communications announced that ISPs are free to refuse as long as they don't. If the results of voluntary ISP participation were found to be unsatisfactory, mandatory measures would be taken.
Come to think of it, there was no way the results could've been satisfactory. A 2% accuracy rate, DNS censoring that takes seconds to get through, trying to do this at all... Fortunately, a couple of big ISPs dropped out in spring 2008, when there was a bit of a backlash, and the Ministry hasn't had the opportunity to grab further state control.
I'm in the same situation as you and long considered Twitter an utter waste of time. That was until a journalist covering a demonstration in Egypt managed to do this and was released without charge while his photographer disappeared. I can't deny that Twitter can be used to do good. We're by and large unaware of the potential of our new tools, so this kind of experimentation may reveal valuable new things or at least get rid of the nagging feeling that they might be here.
This is the dawn of the Information Age. We do things. Occasionally they even work.
Whether this is on Slashdot for more reasons than being sneered at is a more difficult question.
Good point. I'd hazard a guess that people from the demographics that have the most trouble with new technology were the most likely to have trouble with electronic voting.
Selective.
Where the HELL do you get your ballots? Finnish ballots have a circle. You take a pencil and write a number in the circle. That's it, you're done. Voting is held for one issue at a time. The failure rate of this electronic voting system is several times higher than that of traditional ballots.
Traditional Finnish ballots fail because of unavoidable human stupidity, but here failures are due to technical problems and incompetent design that allows human stupidity to be expressed. The machines apparently allow removing the slotted card used before registering the vote - was there no defensive design at all? The Finns have not gone through the catastrophes you USAns have, and still think that every vote counts. Anything else is a mockery of democracy.
We are far indeed from knowing the extents of the Internet's potential, but know it's large enough to make the largest reference work in human history spring up out of nowhere. There's hardly a better time to experiment. If this goes wrong, the Britannica staff if anyone should be able to tell and they have an encyclopedia-wide revision to fall back on.
The rebellious air of Wikipedia's earlier years has dissipated, and editors no longer (widely) see the site as a competitor to Britannica. Both are used to provide information (yes, yes, Power Rangers Pokemon hur hur.) If one of them invents a way to do so better, hooray! Everybody wins.
Give the Nordic Countries some credit. It was two months.
Citation needed. What Church, and how exactly? The Catholic Church already has a state. It could conceivably hold a secret conspiracy to take over other nations, but they could never build the kind of secret underground tunnel network required. The Roman soil is far too crowded. If you mean the Protestants, the guy behind the movement - Martin Luther - was rather clear on that matter with his "doctrine of the two kingdoms," that is, the separation of humans' civil rule and divine spiritual rule; the latter cannot be legislated or enforced.
If you mean the Orthodox, you might be right. I don't know, but those guys are creepy.
"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."
Citation needed. Wasn't the whole infuriating problem with the filter the claim that it does not work, a claim that filter proponents never even challenged while going THINK OF THE CHILDRAAAAANNN one one one?
As much as I hate Finland's Internet censorship, we can't have our cake (it doesn't hinder pedophiles) and eat it too (its hindrance of pedophiles has unintended consequences). This needs more data.
I'm a Finnish tech student and have been following this for a good long time now. Let me give a run-down of what's going on. Afterwards I have a very important question to ask - I'll add that as a reply.
Finland is one of those modern first-world democracies that accords its citizens more freedom than the United States and is smug about it. Like many such states, Finland's government has been taking steps to change that. Case in point: From January 1st, 2008 onward, Finland's Federal Bureau has had the right to list child born websites for ISPs to block. This has been accused of being a sterotypical power grab (and some representatives are openly salivating at the prospect of expanding censorship), but more likely it's just stereotypical gross populism. There was no chance of defeating the bill that had a stated purpose of fighting child porn.
Finland's geek population is united against censorship for a simple reason. It does not and cannot work. This has not been disputed - everyone and their mother has been trying to tell the lawmakers that, including the Federal Bureau before the law came to force. Effective Internet censorship is not possible without an effort on China's or Saudi Arabia's level, and even then Saudi Arabia's leaks like a sieve. I can think of four ways of circumventing Finland's without specialist knowledge, and I got a 1/5 out of my single network course. In fact everything about this is permeated by bureaucratic incompetence to the point that accusing W3C of child porn is not disproportionate. Not only does the censorship only target web pages, which I'm told make up a very small percentage of online child porn, there's no oversight, no way to appeal, and in several publicized cases, no effort to remove the material from the Internet.
Matti Nikki is both a devoted proponent of online freedom and kind of a dick. He published a list of censored sites to prove that censorship makes them much easier to catch with an automated webcrawler without restricting access in any meaningful way. (Later examinations of this list suggest that it has a 2% accuracy rate, but happens to feature the first Google search results for "gay porn.") When Nikki converted the list into links, his site was censored. That is to say, a domestic text-only website was censored using a law that legalized the censorship of foreign child porn. BOOM! Organized resistance!
Censorship made the evening news a couple of times, appeared in some newspapers and talk shows, and sparked one large geek demonstration back in March. "Google is a browser! Google is a browser!" we chanted, quoting the Bureau's chief on why Google has not been censored despite making child porn available as much as Nikki. We had no effect whatsoever. Okay, some ISPs have made censorship an opt-out system and maybe the Parliament will be wary about expanding it. Aside from that, I feel like the biggest achievement involved was me pissing off a bodyguard of the Minister of Communications with my taped-over mouth. Everything about the issue seems to be mired in its morass of utter incompetence that makes it meaningful debate impossible. For instance, the spokesman of a usually benign children-saving organization appeared in a debate and went on for minutes about the way censorship is a valuable statement of principles (as if making child porn strictly illegal wasn't enough) without ever addressing her opponent's statement that censorship does not work, cannot work, and does more harm than good to its cause. That debate sums up this whole sordid mess.
Nowadays Finland's tech-savvy population is quietly simmering, and the local IT building's basement has had a poster of the Minister of Communications in a Nazi uniform since February with no complaints from the staff.
I've been copying a box of those great big things to 3 1/2 floppy disks and then on to modern storage media. They're about 18-20 years old and so far have worked wonderfully. Only one in three dozen or so has given data errors.
How the hell does criticism of imperfect America lead to Sharia law, either logically or practically?
Specifically, are the United States in imminent danger of being overthrown or converted, or is a political faction about to be able to gain the power to institute it? Those are the only options I can see from my limited perspective, which is why I'm asking.
And - to paraphrase someone wiser than me - it's usually* better to build things that seldom break, and do so gently, than it is to build things that cannot possibly break. That's because when one of the latter does break, it's painful and near impossible to fix.
It's been mentioned above that the ISS crew is not short of time to spend, either. Anyone know how they recreate? Does space affect the things you read? Does anyone fulfill the stereotype and spend hours Earthwatching?
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*: I said "usually" about space exploration. You're allowed to hurt me now.
This is nothing we haven't seen before and nothing we won't be seeing again. The Chinese government will go to great lengths for its powerlust and especially to protect itself from the people, and every year the march of technology hands them more power. So what can we do about it? Making brooding, cynical posts is the usual M.O. and the generated online badwill has no doubt brough them to their knees. How can we do what little we can to end this obscenity?
Run Tor?
Join Amnesty International and buy some of their nifty hoodies?
Hold a public protest?
Boycott Chinese goods (yeah, right)?
Organize a fuck-off massive online attack and hammer on the Great Firewall? ("one of the most important projects for ensuring its political power..." indeed.)
Help me out here.
Before someone calls an only-in-America terrorist threat on an obvious video game recreation? Last year, complete with the bomb squad you requested and a police chief telling the press how he's incredulous at the way instructions for making cardboard boxes are publicly available online.
Aren't you sorry you asked?
(Don't start fuming over this - instead, make some yourself. They're awesome.)