How familiar are you with how China deals with its dissident groups, like, say, Falun Gong?
But it's all okay as long as there are actual laws on the books about how to deal with groups like Falun Gong. I mean, nothing's bad as long as it's lawful and properly approved by the authorities. Especially if the authorities invoke social stability and national security as the reasons for the laws. After all, country above all!
Before you make even more of a fool of yourself by making rash assumptions about people you don't know, I'll point out that my experience with countries is far closer to yours than you think. Something about being a European in the US with some unusual language skills and all that. Now that that's out of the way, let's deal with your poorly presented points.
1) Americans have perpetrated one of the largest genocides in human history.
True. No argument from me here. I wasn't even aware that this was the topic. I thought we were talking about China? Let's stick to one problem at a time. Otherwise, you will degenerate into Fox News style expulcations about how other places are worse.
2) Falun Gong is a sect, not a political organization.
Possible. Even somewhat plausible. Now, is this a reason to arrest members merely for practicing it? How are they a threat to others? Please explain.
3) Afghans were merely a proxy in the fight against the russians.
Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. What is news in this? How is this relevant to whether China should import Han chinese into its western territories and into Tibet in order to better assimilate those areas?
So far, the only thing you've offered in defense of China's practices is that "y'all did it anyway, so you ain't got no right to tell anybody else about anything." In the process, you make two mistakes: lumping everyone's comments into crude categories that allow you to disregard the content of the criticism, and substituting a weak argument of historical and political equivalency for a discussion on the nature of events.
In another post, you complained about the hypocrisy of your country that censored a cartoon about self-censorship, and how this was part of your decision to see China as the "better" nation.
All this tells me two things: you care actually very little about acts of freedom. If that would be the case, you would not prefer a country where abuses of freedom are systematic rather than sporadic. Two, what you care about is pride and strength. Congratulations, you are fitting right into the current mold of Chinese nationalists. You'd also be right at home with American nationalists, French, Japanese, Swedish and many more. Why? Because these two traits are trademarks of nationalists. That and arbitrary decisions of what is part of a country (i.e., decisions that are not based on the opinions of the people who actually live in those lands), belief in abstract of what it means to be of a certain nationality, and so on.
I guess that's the difference between you and me, and why we don't see eye to eye on China. I believe in people and their right to decide their own lives. You believe in nations and their right to decide the lives of their people.
I'll just leave you with one question: what is a country without people?
Somebody mod this insightful. This is not the first time I've heard MMORPG players say that they haven't bought (never mind played) another game since they got into EQ/WoW or other variations.
In my opinion, there's three reasons why gaming is down, and especially PC gaming: 1) Consoles are actually good alternatives to PC games now, both from a technical and game-type perspective. 2) MMORPGs. 3) Copy protection that's more like play-protection.
It seems the Tibetans disagree with your statement. Does that give the PRC apparatchiks the right to essentially destroy the way of life of the Tibetans, as well as meddle with their religious traditions? It seems to me that it is more important to you that China be large and prosperous, rather than people be free and prosperous.
I'm a little late to the party, but I figured I'd still join the fray here.
I've also worked with genetic algorithms, and on top of that, I've also worked with real genes. I can tell you categorically that real genes are far, far more complex than the piddly little algorithms I used. You're already aware of how difficult it is to just find an appropriate representation of the problem, not to mention finding a good fitness function. Then you have to worry about local optimization versus general optimization (less of a problem than annealing, but still an issue) and the fact that your machine really isn't beefy enough to go through a good size run (I'm talking millions of generations with millions of individuals). Now combine that with the fact that evolution is not simply the mutation of a few DNA strands, the reshuffling of some allels and the subsequent culling of failed experiments, and you'll realize that what you've and I have been doing with genetic algorithms is like playing with those giant Lego/Duplo blocks for 1 year olds. It sort of looks like construction or engineering, but it really isn't.
Want an example of evolutionary complexities that aren't represented in genetic algorithms? Symbiosis that leads to the wholesale absorption of an organism - see mitochondria. The cells that fused together like that just performed a huge, directed evolutionary step - nothing like that exists in the current realm of genetic algorithms. There's a lot more to it, but I'm sure you can figure it out if you read up on evolutionary biology, genetics and biochemistry.
In short - just because you can't figure out how people built the Colossus of Rhodes or the Space Shuttle by playing with Duploblocks doesn't mean that someone created these things ex machina. It simply means that we have a whole lot of distance to go before we can claim to understand biology, genetics and evolution.
My dad designed paper mills for a living. I was lucky enough to peer over his shoulder and have him explain to me how a tree gets turned into nice, white paper. The process is far dirtier and expensive than you'd ever believe.
Problem #1: cellulose. Trees have lots of it, and it makes for terrible paper. Generally, it needs to be dissolved with some rather nasty chemicals. Problem #2: tree soup is dirty. Lots of resin, minerals and all kinds of particles. It needs to be washed out. You need water - lots of it. Paper is actually one of the most water-intensive processes known to man. Problem #3: tree soup is... well, soup. You need to make it sticky. So you add glue. Glue is nasty, and full of ugly chemicals. Problem #4: Basic paper is pretty grey. To turn it the pretty bright white, you need more chemicals. Lots of them. One major breakthrough in the 80s was the use of hydrogen peroxide instead of some of the nastier stuff (think clorox).
And this is just of the top of my head, after about 15 years of not having looked at it. Paper processing is an ugly, dirty job that sucks up a ton of energy. Oh, and trees are generally not close to the processing plant. Processing plants are huge beasts, and you need only a few per country. There is no such thing as a "local" paper mill. Considering the amount of stuff you take out of a tree before you get to paper, it is a lot more expensive to carry trees (not to mention less efficient) around then it is to move used paper around.
In short, you have no clue what you're talking about. Instead of remembering that one study you might have read, you might want to read up on how paper is actually made. Or work for Kimberley-Clark as paper plant designer. Either which way, get some real knowledge, not just some information snippets.
It's not impossible to be an absolute skeptic. It just means that the body of knowledge you operate with is close to zero. In short, you'd live in a cave and subsist on hunting and gathering, with a bit of agriculture thrown in. Cuz, you know, that new-fangled "clay" that everyone keeps talking about might just be a bunch of baloney.
People thorougly overestimate their deduction quality when they state something like "doubt everything". At some point they will make a decision based on incomplete information - it is inevitable. And quite often, they'll make the decision based on what feels right - cuz, you know, "who knows whether anything is right?" What they actually mean is "I doubt everything that doesn't agree with my gut feeling."
While that was the logic of the french crown at the time, there was also considerable ideological support by a large swath of the french intelligentsia and general population. Some even went over to participate in the battles themselves. Google for Lafayette and Tocqueville for some more info.
Once you are a billionaire, how much money would it take to make you do things that right now, as a "thousandaire" would only cost a few thousand? Do you think (for example) that any amount of cash would convince Bill Gates to brutally kill his parents?
Point taken, and further supported by the fact that he didn't simply bail. Otherwise, it would be possible that he just figured it's a good time to start something new.
I'm just not quite sure what the benefit is. Some people mentioned that this creates the most vertically integrated company since... well, since the other media companies. With the significant advantage that the company is a leader in three critical areas: distribution, movie appeal and brand recognition.
I'm curious though how his 7% (?) stake and seat on the board is gonna pan out. Will he be able to tie Disney/Pixar to Apples Itunes and Ipod? If yes, that could really put it ahead of all other Movie studios. I guess that's the payoff - and you're right, that's a worthwhile risk to take.
How Disney's new CEO fares has yet to be decided, but the prognosis is positive, especially if Steve is willing to trust one of his three greatest creations to him.
Either that, or Jobs figured that even if the deail fails and Disney/Pixar goes south, a couple of billion dollars in pay off are enough to allow him to start over.
Everyone has a price. Some are just more expensive than others.
If you have a pool of potential atheletes the size of the U.S. versus the size of Finland you are statistically going to have a better group of atheletes to choose from.
Not sure how that differs from what I said. Unless you are arguing that it is more likely to find top-notch athletes in a smaller pool of people. In which case I have no idea where you got your statistics from.
In fact most U.S. atheletes are self trained until they get to a national level and even at that they often work with their own coaches, if they had a coach, or move to the Olympic Training Center where they become part of the program.
Uh... I guess all those athletic centers and high school sports and college sports and community clubs and community centers and training classes that I have in my neighborhood are all for show, right? By your definition, all athletes are self-trained unless they are in a national program. Which is a bit far-fetched, if you ask me.
Wow - nationalism reaches a new level. If you want to go that route, you'll have to realize that there are only about 3 countries as popolous as the US: China, Russia and India. All of which have economic and social problems that prevent them from investing heavily in sports. We're talking a small sample here. Besides, your assertion that "It's easier to find and train 5 Gold-Medal Olympians in a pool of 100 than 25 in a pool of 500" is complete and utter invention. Especially if you take into account the sports fanaticism of the US. Simple statistics dictate that if you have the right environment, you will identify the athletically gifted person, regardless of the probability.
Finland could devote its resources to being the master of only 7 events per each Olympic cycle and the US would have to dominate the rest of the world in the other ~400 events for them to be considered "equal" by you!?
What, but its fair that Finland should have to devote more resources per person and win more medals than its resources would indicate to be considered on par with the US? Man, it's okay to occasionally say that the US sucks. It's only way it can improve, you know. Unless you like simply pretending to be the best, rather than being the best.
I think that on the contrary, it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is no need for DRM for the content industry to flourish. Porn has got to be the most ripped content there is. And yet, it is raking in profits that make every other industry green with envy. So when traditional media companies say that they need DRM because of the Internet... I say shove it.
AI-driven interfaces predicting user desires based on billions of aggregated and sorted decisions will reduce clutter and confusion.
They've done studies on this. And without fail, changing or intelligent UIs fared far worse in terms of how fast users got to where they needed to go. This was completely independent of how deeply nested the static UIs were.
You can actually test this yourself - how much do you like the intelligent interface in Word? I know it rarely shows me what I need. The good stuff has keyboard shortcuts that I can memorize, for the rest I want to see the entire UI, and I always expand it completely.
Wow. Every last one of my moderated posts in this thread has gone from insightful/interesting to troll/overrated and back at least twice. I must have touched a nerve with some people.:)
I do load testing and application monitoring for a living. Like F Scentura said, I can assure you that websites are the most trivial applications both to simulate and to maintain. Streaming video? Peace of cake. You got your bandwidth, you got your content servers, your web servers, and, if you're really big, an application server somewhere in the middle. All those servers have to handle is an inbound connection with a request for some data and then serve that data. CPU usage comes strictly from the OS serving requests, bandwidth is simply a function of users * file size and memory is again strictly a feature of users connected to the system. I can do a full-scale simulation for that for about 100K. This includes hardware, software and my time. Time to do this: two weeks. Your mileage might vary.
With that in mind, I would never, ever pretend that I can give Blizzard any type of estimate on what will happen when AQ opens. How many users will log on? What will they do? What instances will they try to access? Where will they be? At best I might be able to give them an estimation on when WoW will crash, but I will be completely unable to say how probably that scenario is. As a result, Blizzard is indeed completely on their own when it comes to stuff like this. They can minimize the risk, but it's always a question of how much money you want to throw at a problem that has an unknown probability.
This time, Blizzard chose badly. Give them some time to fix it, and start complaining if it looks like they are not doing that. Until then, keep in mind that webservers are small fry in the world of networked appplications. MMORPGs are among in the heavyweights.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. Your example is absolutely correct: credit cards are great when used right. This means that they get paid off at the end of the billing cycle, which is exactly what you did. What I was referring to is having a total saving of 2k, and relying on credit cards if that saving gets blown away.
Millenias earlier, there might not have been a Theory of Evolution. There were, however, other theories that fit the then current data quite well. The reason the theories were wrong was not because the people were stupid, but because the people did not have enough data to formulate the proper theory. Now we have more data, and our theory of how we came to be improved. People who do not understand how this process works are prone to believe snake oil salesmen, quacks and demagogues. They are also more likely to be either willfully ignorant or just not that sharp. All increase your chance for getting a Darwin award.
Don't confuse knowledge with intelligence. One was always present, the other is slowly accumulated (if we play our cards right).
Did the kids die instantly? Or is it more of a slow, lingering death?
It's a slow, lingering death. Or quick. Depends on whether you get into the Darwin award category or not. I wonder if believing in ID means you can't get a Darwin award. Or does it mean you get an extra big award?
What's the price of a quotation dictionary?
Threefitty?
Yeah, nevermind what those people want. They're only the majority.
Interesting. You want to have a majority vote on whether you get to succeed or fail? I take it you've never heard of another pithy quote: "Democracy is when 3 wolves and one sheep vote on what's for dinner."
Slashdot Mirror
But it's all okay as long as there are actual laws on the books about how to deal with groups like Falun Gong. I mean, nothing's bad as long as it's lawful and properly approved by the authorities. Especially if the authorities invoke social stability and national security as the reasons for the laws. After all, country above all!
Yeah, that's the ticket. [cynic mode=off]
Before you make even more of a fool of yourself by making rash assumptions about people you don't know, I'll point out that my experience with countries is far closer to yours than you think. Something about being a European in the US with some unusual language skills and all that. Now that that's out of the way, let's deal with your poorly presented points.
1) Americans have perpetrated one of the largest genocides in human history.
True. No argument from me here. I wasn't even aware that this was the topic. I thought we were talking about China? Let's stick to one problem at a time. Otherwise, you will degenerate into Fox News style expulcations about how other places are worse.
2) Falun Gong is a sect, not a political organization.
Possible. Even somewhat plausible. Now, is this a reason to arrest members merely for practicing it? How are they a threat to others? Please explain.
3) Afghans were merely a proxy in the fight against the russians.
Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. What is news in this? How is this relevant to whether China should import Han chinese into its western territories and into Tibet in order to better assimilate those areas?
So far, the only thing you've offered in defense of China's practices is that "y'all did it anyway, so you ain't got no right to tell anybody else about anything." In the process, you make two mistakes: lumping everyone's comments into crude categories that allow you to disregard the content of the criticism, and substituting a weak argument of historical and political equivalency for a discussion on the nature of events.
In another post, you complained about the hypocrisy of your country that censored a cartoon about self-censorship, and how this was part of your decision to see China as the "better" nation.
All this tells me two things: you care actually very little about acts of freedom. If that would be the case, you would not prefer a country where abuses of freedom are systematic rather than sporadic. Two, what you care about is pride and strength. Congratulations, you are fitting right into the current mold of Chinese nationalists. You'd also be right at home with American nationalists, French, Japanese, Swedish and many more. Why? Because these two traits are trademarks of nationalists. That and arbitrary decisions of what is part of a country (i.e., decisions that are not based on the opinions of the people who actually live in those lands), belief in abstract of what it means to be of a certain nationality, and so on.
I guess that's the difference between you and me, and why we don't see eye to eye on China. I believe in people and their right to decide their own lives. You believe in nations and their right to decide the lives of their people.
I'll just leave you with one question: what is a country without people?
Somebody mod this insightful. This is not the first time I've heard MMORPG players say that they haven't bought (never mind played) another game since they got into EQ/WoW or other variations.
In my opinion, there's three reasons why gaming is down, and especially PC gaming:
1) Consoles are actually good alternatives to PC games now, both from a technical and game-type perspective.
2) MMORPGs.
3) Copy protection that's more like play-protection.
None of it is down to piracy.
It seems the Tibetans disagree with your statement. Does that give the PRC apparatchiks the right to essentially destroy the way of life of the Tibetans, as well as meddle with their religious traditions? It seems to me that it is more important to you that China be large and prosperous, rather than people be free and prosperous.
I'm a little late to the party, but I figured I'd still join the fray here.
I've also worked with genetic algorithms, and on top of that, I've also worked with real genes. I can tell you categorically that real genes are far, far more complex than the piddly little algorithms I used. You're already aware of how difficult it is to just find an appropriate representation of the problem, not to mention finding a good fitness function. Then you have to worry about local optimization versus general optimization (less of a problem than annealing, but still an issue) and the fact that your machine really isn't beefy enough to go through a good size run (I'm talking millions of generations with millions of individuals). Now combine that with the fact that evolution is not simply the mutation of a few DNA strands, the reshuffling of some allels and the subsequent culling of failed experiments, and you'll realize that what you've and I have been doing with genetic algorithms is like playing with those giant Lego/Duplo blocks for 1 year olds. It sort of looks like construction or engineering, but it really isn't.
Want an example of evolutionary complexities that aren't represented in genetic algorithms? Symbiosis that leads to the wholesale absorption of an organism - see mitochondria. The cells that fused together like that just performed a huge, directed evolutionary step - nothing like that exists in the current realm of genetic algorithms. There's a lot more to it, but I'm sure you can figure it out if you read up on evolutionary biology, genetics and biochemistry.
In short - just because you can't figure out how people built the Colossus of Rhodes or the Space Shuttle by playing with Duploblocks doesn't mean that someone created these things ex machina. It simply means that we have a whole lot of distance to go before we can claim to understand biology, genetics and evolution.
My dad designed paper mills for a living. I was lucky enough to peer over his shoulder and have him explain to me how a tree gets turned into nice, white paper. The process is far dirtier and expensive than you'd ever believe.
Problem #1: cellulose. Trees have lots of it, and it makes for terrible paper. Generally, it needs to be dissolved with some rather nasty chemicals.
Problem #2: tree soup is dirty. Lots of resin, minerals and all kinds of particles. It needs to be washed out. You need water - lots of it. Paper is actually one of the most water-intensive processes known to man.
Problem #3: tree soup is... well, soup. You need to make it sticky. So you add glue. Glue is nasty, and full of ugly chemicals.
Problem #4: Basic paper is pretty grey. To turn it the pretty bright white, you need more chemicals. Lots of them. One major breakthrough in the 80s was the use of hydrogen peroxide instead of some of the nastier stuff (think clorox).
And this is just of the top of my head, after about 15 years of not having looked at it. Paper processing is an ugly, dirty job that sucks up a ton of energy. Oh, and trees are generally not close to the processing plant. Processing plants are huge beasts, and you need only a few per country. There is no such thing as a "local" paper mill. Considering the amount of stuff you take out of a tree before you get to paper, it is a lot more expensive to carry trees (not to mention less efficient) around then it is to move used paper around.
In short, you have no clue what you're talking about. Instead of remembering that one study you might have read, you might want to read up on how paper is actually made. Or work for Kimberley-Clark as paper plant designer. Either which way, get some real knowledge, not just some information snippets.
It's not impossible to be an absolute skeptic. It just means that the body of knowledge you operate with is close to zero. In short, you'd live in a cave and subsist on hunting and gathering, with a bit of agriculture thrown in. Cuz, you know, that new-fangled "clay" that everyone keeps talking about might just be a bunch of baloney.
People thorougly overestimate their deduction quality when they state something like "doubt everything". At some point they will make a decision based on incomplete information - it is inevitable. And quite often, they'll make the decision based on what feels right - cuz, you know, "who knows whether anything is right?" What they actually mean is "I doubt everything that doesn't agree with my gut feeling."
While that was the logic of the french crown at the time, there was also considerable ideological support by a large swath of the french intelligentsia and general population. Some even went over to participate in the battles themselves. Google for Lafayette and Tocqueville for some more info.
How is two sets of people having two different opinions on some topics hypocrisy? Need a dictionary maybe?
Interesting analogy. I guess that means that we're all dogs to our herd/clan/mob bosses?
... that was when Internet connections were subject to the per-minute charges levied by the local phone loop owners.
Am I missing something, or does this just smack of wanting to roll back time?
Point taken, and further supported by the fact that he didn't simply bail. Otherwise, it would be possible that he just figured it's a good time to start something new.
I'm just not quite sure what the benefit is. Some people mentioned that this creates the most vertically integrated company since... well, since the other media companies. With the significant advantage that the company is a leader in three critical areas: distribution, movie appeal and brand recognition.
I'm curious though how his 7% (?) stake and seat on the board is gonna pan out. Will he be able to tie Disney/Pixar to Apples Itunes and Ipod? If yes, that could really put it ahead of all other Movie studios. I guess that's the payoff - and you're right, that's a worthwhile risk to take.
Either that, or Jobs figured that even if the deail fails and Disney/Pixar goes south, a couple of billion dollars in pay off are enough to allow him to start over.
Everyone has a price. Some are just more expensive than others.
Not sure how that differs from what I said. Unless you are arguing that it is more likely to find top-notch athletes in a smaller pool of people. In which case I have no idea where you got your statistics from.
In fact most U.S. atheletes are self trained until they get to a national level and even at that they often work with their own coaches, if they had a coach, or move to the Olympic Training Center where they become part of the program.
Uh... I guess all those athletic centers and high school sports and college sports and community clubs and community centers and training classes that I have in my neighborhood are all for show, right? By your definition, all athletes are self-trained unless they are in a national program. Which is a bit far-fetched, if you ask me.
Finns are tough fuckers.
No argument from me there.
Finland could devote its resources to being the master of only 7 events per each Olympic cycle and the US would have to dominate the rest of the world in the other ~400 events for them to be considered "equal" by you!?
What, but its fair that Finland should have to devote more resources per person and win more medals than its resources would indicate to be considered on par with the US? Man, it's okay to occasionally say that the US sucks. It's only way it can improve, you know. Unless you like simply pretending to be the best, rather than being the best.
I think that on the contrary, it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is no need for DRM for the content industry to flourish. Porn has got to be the most ripped content there is. And yet, it is raking in profits that make every other industry green with envy. So when traditional media companies say that they need DRM because of the Internet... I say shove it.
They've done studies on this. And without fail, changing or intelligent UIs fared far worse in terms of how fast users got to where they needed to go. This was completely independent of how deeply nested the static UIs were.
You can actually test this yourself - how much do you like the intelligent interface in Word? I know it rarely shows me what I need. The good stuff has keyboard shortcuts that I can memorize, for the rest I want to see the entire UI, and I always expand it completely.
Wow. Every last one of my moderated posts in this thread has gone from insightful/interesting to troll/overrated and back at least twice. I must have touched a nerve with some people. :)
I do load testing and application monitoring for a living. Like F Scentura said, I can assure you that websites are the most trivial applications both to simulate and to maintain. Streaming video? Peace of cake. You got your bandwidth, you got your content servers, your web servers, and, if you're really big, an application server somewhere in the middle. All those servers have to handle is an inbound connection with a request for some data and then serve that data. CPU usage comes strictly from the OS serving requests, bandwidth is simply a function of users * file size and memory is again strictly a feature of users connected to the system. I can do a full-scale simulation for that for about 100K. This includes hardware, software and my time. Time to do this: two weeks. Your mileage might vary.
With that in mind, I would never, ever pretend that I can give Blizzard any type of estimate on what will happen when AQ opens. How many users will log on? What will they do? What instances will they try to access? Where will they be? At best I might be able to give them an estimation on when WoW will crash, but I will be completely unable to say how probably that scenario is. As a result, Blizzard is indeed completely on their own when it comes to stuff like this. They can minimize the risk, but it's always a question of how much money you want to throw at a problem that has an unknown probability.
This time, Blizzard chose badly. Give them some time to fix it, and start complaining if it looks like they are not doing that. Until then, keep in mind that webservers are small fry in the world of networked appplications. MMORPGs are among in the heavyweights.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. Your example is absolutely correct: credit cards are great when used right. This means that they get paid off at the end of the billing cycle, which is exactly what you did. What I was referring to is having a total saving of 2k, and relying on credit cards if that saving gets blown away.
Millenias earlier, there might not have been a Theory of Evolution. There were, however, other theories that fit the then current data quite well. The reason the theories were wrong was not because the people were stupid, but because the people did not have enough data to formulate the proper theory. Now we have more data, and our theory of how we came to be improved. People who do not understand how this process works are prone to believe snake oil salesmen, quacks and demagogues. They are also more likely to be either willfully ignorant or just not that sharp. All increase your chance for getting a Darwin award.
Don't confuse knowledge with intelligence. One was always present, the other is slowly accumulated (if we play our cards right).
Mmh - care to explain? I was not aware of this.
It's a slow, lingering death. Or quick. Depends on whether you get into the Darwin award category or not. I wonder if believing in ID means you can't get a Darwin award. Or does it mean you get an extra big award?
What's the price of a quotation dictionary?
Threefitty?
Yeah, nevermind what those people want. They're only the majority.
Interesting. You want to have a majority vote on whether you get to succeed or fail? I take it you've never heard of another pithy quote: "Democracy is when 3 wolves and one sheep vote on what's for dinner."
Yes, because public education accessible to everyone is an evil that must stopped. What planet do you live on again?
That'll teach me to use non-RFC HTML in my post. This was supposed to say: "Missing tag: [sarcasm]".