I'm still waiting for an iPhone manufacturer that pays its workers a decent wage and respects meaningful safety standards. I'm willing to pay an extra $100+ for my iPhone to not have a guilty conscience. C'mon invisible hand, supply my demand already.
Because you and the other twenty people willing to do this do not a market make.
I keep my people hungry for more -- "hungry people have especially clear minds" - -
"a harsh environment is a good thing" for people who torture kittens. -
It's easy for an out-of-context sound bite to sound awful (or great); but partial second-hand quotes seldom tell the whole story and probably shouldn't be used as a basis for judgment. For reference, here's the full quote from TFA - which is itself excerpting from a book:
Here, let me put those in context for you.
- I keep my people hungry for more -- "hungry people have especially clear minds" -
- "a harsh environment is a good thing" for people who torture kittens.
-
It's easy for an out-of-context sound bite to sound awful (or great); but partial second-hand quotes seldom tell the whole story and probably shouldn't be used as a basis for judgment.
For reference, here's the full quote from TFA - which is itself excerpting from a book:
Prominent on display are biographies of Gou, one of which collects his many aphorisms, including "work itself is a type of joy," "a harsh environment is a good thing," "hungry people have especially clear minds," and "an army of one thousand is easy to get, one general is tough to find."
While I don't agree with the practices in place for humanitarian reasons, I also can't agree with this:
, but they trade with us and what they do is an unfair trade practice. We should sue them, and if they won't change their ways, impose tariffs to address this unfairness
Their culture allows them to do business differently than we do; unfortunately this puts us at a disadvantage. Instead of finding better ways to compete, you're suggesting that we sue them into changing their culture - bringing them down (or raising them up, depending on perspective) to our level simply because we can't keep up?
That kind of argument scares the crap out of me, because I get the feeling people are starting to take it seriously.
Suppose that the soon to be released documents are similar in number and detail to the leaked documents regarding the Afghanistan war. The volume and scope of the information is so vast that any attempt to establish simple cause->effect relationships between the released documents and what might happen in the future is futile.
Then I would say that releasing them without assessing the effects of doings so is doubly irresponsible.
Maybe the FedGov has a point, and the documents will put people's lives in danger from a tactical standpoint. Then again, maybe the documents will cause enough outrage to reinvigorate the anti-war movement and end these operations sooner rather than later, thus saving lives. Maybe the evidence proving that the government always lies to the people will mean that the next military crusade (Iran?) never even happens, thus saving thousands of lives.
I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to sacrifice somebody else's life on that stack of maybes.
This is a case where we're talking about principles.
You're talking about principles. I'm talking about consequences.
An informed citizenry is essential to the basic functioning of a democratic society, and it's obvious that we won't get any true information from the government or mainstream media
Agreed, though I would also argue that the mythical informed citizen is a rare bird indeed -- no matter how much information is out there. In case you haven't noticed, most of the relatively few people who bother to inform themselves only do so to the extent that it supports their own biases.
That doesn't mean that information should be disseminated irresponsibly or without regards to consequences -- simply in the name of an ideal.
I'm all in favor of what wikileaks does (did) - things like the 'collateral murder' video I support fully. That's the kind of information that makes for an informed populace; and the only people put at risk are those who performed wrongdoing. Hell- even the documents they released I'd be ok with, if they took the time to sanitize them. (Asking for help and being refused is no excuse to neglect this - kind of like shooting a random stranger in the head because you wouldn't give me directions.) Even better would have been some actual journalism - instead of releasing a bunch of leaked documents, how about putting it together to present the cohesive picture painted by those documents?
Cheers to WikiLeaks and the patriots who are supplying this information.
And damn the cost - at long as somebody else gets to pay it. That's really my underlying issue - if the people put at risk were the ones publishing this information, then that would be superb. I 'd support it all the way. Instead, we have third parties deciding whose lives they're OK with putting at risk. Come to think of it - this is very similar to what the military is doing to begin with. The difference is that at least in the case of the military, the people making these choices were elected to do so. And the arguable truth that "two wrongs don't make a right".
All that said, I appreciate your reply. Unlike most commenters here and elsewhere, you're not trying to shift the responsibility for the results anywhere else-- but instead said (essentially) that it's worth the cost.
I would say it's because of a few missing features like...
- The ability to transfer money anonymously (all the recipient would get would be a confirmation crypto hash or something, maybe something that I could reveal later in a court, but that they couldn't* pin on me)
- The ability to make a storefront so all of the fund transfer went through "Qubit's Quantum Quickymart"
- Better account management, and a way to group or tag business and bills vs. friends vs. impulse game purchases
Also, we have these to consider:
Well, they seem to limit it to how much I currently have in my account, and if the person I wish to pay does not have a real address (No "221B Baker Street + 2i" allowed), I'll have to hand deliver it instead of getting them to post it for free,
Finally - not giving my checking account data to strangers is a bonus. But that's just a hunch.
(You really just wrote that entire post of things that your bank can't/won't do, then pointed out how paypal is a duplicate service? Though I agree w/ shady and costly...)
Indeed - I can't say that I enjoyed the ending, but I can certainly see that it was the only ending possible. And *man* will people be pissed off if they end the movie trilogy the same way.
Yes. Blame everyone except Wikileaks. Even though Wikileaks makes the choice to publish the documents, the fallout from their choice can't possibly come back on them. It's the army, or the government -- but NOT the people who made the actual decision. Couldn't have that.
Forget whether it's a good idea or bad idea, as that's really not relevant - it's only a distraction from the real issue. The point is that when you knowingly take an action, you share in responsibility for the consequences of those actions. You didn't pull the trigger, but you knew that the trigger would get pulled as a result of your actions. If you take those actions anyway, there's no way to evade your portion of that responsibility -- because if you hadn't taken your action, the consequences would not have occurred.
What I fail to understand is how people can blithely ignore that basic fact in their rabid defense of Wikileaks.
As you can see elsewhere, the apologists like to blame the government for making it necessary. When you blame the government, you don't have to accept responsibility for your actions.
The above post is sadly a growing movement of "don't rock the boat" people who just don't want to hear anything that upsets them. If you tell them their house is on fire, they blame you, not the fire. Shoot the messenger, so you never have to hear anything disturbing. Trust the state, keep quiet and all will be well.
I blame them when they tell me my house is on fire, then hand me in my panic a bucket of gasoline with which to douse it;)
That is unfortunate, but it is not Wikileaks' fault -- Wikileaks is not responsible for the war, and Wikileaks is not responsible for the government misclassifying documents to the point of becoming untrustworthy.
"Well gee, officer, the bartender gave me the drink. If he hadn't, I wouldn't have run over that kid!"
How far do we go to in our efforts to shift the blame onto other people? Does it help us sleep at night?
Though the government didn't cooperate; and wikileaks didn't start the war -- still they are responsible for the consequences of the actions they did take. That burden can't be shifted, no matter how much wriggling is done.
I think that we're enjoying a good period right now where Wikileaks is still useful. How much time will we have before groups start to release faked documents to it in an attempt to discredit their rivals? Poisoning the well must only be a few years away, assuming they don't manage to dismantle the entire organization by then.
I think that the submitter has gotten a bit carried away in trying to getting carried away with words that he didn't know very well.*
Julian Assange has requested a new lawyer to represent him during a rape investigation in Sweden because his previous brief, Leif Silbersky, was not engaged enough with the case
If you didn't want to repeat the word, you might have tried 'attorney'. The closest matching definition of "brief" is...
An attorney's legal argument in written form for submission to a court;
Unless, of course, OP meant for it to be "briefs" and intended to say...
short snug pants or underpants
In which case it would have been more amusing, but still no more correct.
* disclaimer: this is in the context of American English, but I'm pretty sure that "brief" doesn't mean "lawyer" in any of the others...
Okay, back to your regularly scheduled commenting.
I read the one quoted in the summary, and while it is definitely applicable to programming -- none of the examples were programming examples.
Then when I saw this one, I started questioning...
For example, if you are doing web crawling, and you have not saturated the pipe to the internet, then it is not worth your time to use more servers. This guy got me thinking about it, he's doing "Large-scale HTTP fetching" in Clojure. He talks about parallelizing with some queueing silliness, but never mentions how much data is moving down the pipe on any one machine. If you have a 100 megabit connection to the internet, and your fetcher is using 700 kilobits, then figure out why your fetcher sucks. )
Erm -- if your process is not taking up all of the bandwidth, AND you have available CPU, grabbing more sites concurrently would use some of that additional bandwidth. I don't know about this specific example, but generally speaking you might be able to max out your CPU without maxing out your bandwidth depending on the type of processing you were doing.
Finishing the article solidified my conclusion. The author ranted about how nosql sucks (not really a programming thing), how to monitor a process (useful, but not programming - because he's not telling you how to do it within a program), that hardware matters for performance (erm, duh...), and then some mumbling about event loops done by taking a quote out of context without really explaining what he was talking about.
(As a side note, I was talking about that post with Milo's prolific systems administrator, and we could not figure out whether the author was an incredibly elaborate troll or just a run-of-the-mill idiot.
Hmm - I'm sure there's a law similar to Muphry's for this scenario...
Authority? That's what people in general have been parroting to each other for decades. Just look at first comment here which implies the same thing - already +3 insightful, and I'm sure it will make it to +5.
This is a very valid point - and I'd love to see that same training, testing, and costs in place here before you could get a license here in the US. I don't know if ti's in place in Germany or not, but this should include annual retesting (behind the wheel, on the road.) How, GP does also have a valid point - while there's statistical evidence to support increased fatalities and injuries at higher speeds, there's little if any to support the notion of higher accidents frequency.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still waiting for an iPhone manufacturer that pays its workers a decent wage and respects meaningful safety standards. I'm willing to pay an extra $100+ for my iPhone to not have a guilty conscience. C'mon invisible hand, supply my demand already.
Because you and the other twenty people willing to do this do not a market make.
Here, let me put those in context for you.
It's easy for an out-of-context sound bite to sound awful (or great); but partial second-hand quotes seldom tell the whole story and probably shouldn't be used as a basis for judgment. For reference, here's the full quote from TFA - which is itself excerpting from a book:
Prominent on display are biographies of Gou, one of which collects his many aphorisms, including "work itself is a type of joy," "a harsh environment is a good thing," "hungry people have especially clear minds," and "an army of one thousand is easy to get, one general is tough to find."
, but they trade with us and what they do is an unfair trade practice. We should sue them, and if they won't change their ways, impose tariffs to address this unfairness
Their culture allows them to do business differently than we do; unfortunately this puts us at a disadvantage. Instead of finding better ways to compete, you're suggesting that we sue them into changing their culture - bringing them down (or raising them up, depending on perspective) to our level simply because we can't keep up?
That kind of argument scares the crap out of me, because I get the feeling people are starting to take it seriously.
Indeed - the picture I came away with was that it changes for the better just a little bit every time through.
Suppose that the soon to be released documents are similar in number and detail to the leaked documents regarding the Afghanistan war. The volume and scope of the information is so vast that any attempt to establish simple cause->effect relationships between the released documents and what might happen in the future is futile.
Then I would say that releasing them without assessing the effects of doings so is doubly irresponsible.
Maybe the FedGov has a point, and the documents will put people's lives in danger from a tactical standpoint. Then again, maybe the documents will cause enough outrage to reinvigorate the anti-war movement and end these operations sooner rather than later, thus saving lives. Maybe the evidence proving that the government always lies to the people will mean that the next military crusade (Iran?) never even happens, thus saving thousands of lives.
I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to sacrifice somebody else's life on that stack of maybes.
This is a case where we're talking about principles.
You're talking about principles. I'm talking about consequences.
An informed citizenry is essential to the basic functioning of a democratic society, and it's obvious that we won't get any true information from the government or mainstream media
Agreed, though I would also argue that the mythical informed citizen is a rare bird indeed -- no matter how much information is out there. In case you haven't noticed, most of the relatively few people who bother to inform themselves only do so to the extent that it supports their own biases.
That doesn't mean that information should be disseminated irresponsibly or without regards to consequences -- simply in the name of an ideal.
I'm all in favor of what wikileaks does (did) - things like the 'collateral murder' video I support fully. That's the kind of information that makes for an informed populace; and the only people put at risk are those who performed wrongdoing. Hell- even the documents they released I'd be ok with, if they took the time to sanitize them. (Asking for help and being refused is no excuse to neglect this - kind of like shooting a random stranger in the head because you wouldn't give me directions.) Even better would have been some actual journalism - instead of releasing a bunch of leaked documents, how about putting it together to present the cohesive picture painted by those documents?
Cheers to WikiLeaks and the patriots who are supplying this information.
And damn the cost - at long as somebody else gets to pay it. That's really my underlying issue - if the people put at risk were the ones publishing this information, then that would be superb. I 'd support it all the way. Instead, we have third parties deciding whose lives they're OK with putting at risk. Come to think of it - this is very similar to what the military is doing to begin with. The difference is that at least in the case of the military, the people making these choices were elected to do so. And the arguable truth that "two wrongs don't make a right".
All that said, I appreciate your reply. Unlike most commenters here and elsewhere, you're not trying to shift the responsibility for the results anywhere else-- but instead said (essentially) that it's worth the cost.
Sir this is slashdot. Facts are neither appreciated nor welcome.
- The ability to transfer money anonymously (all the recipient would get would be a confirmation crypto hash or something, maybe something that I could reveal later in a court, but that they couldn't* pin on me) - The ability to make a storefront so all of the fund transfer went through "Qubit's Quantum Quickymart" - Better account management, and a way to group or tag business and bills vs. friends vs. impulse game purchases
Also, we have these to consider:
Well, they seem to limit it to how much I currently have in my account, and if the person I wish to pay does not have a real address (No "221B Baker Street + 2i" allowed), I'll have to hand deliver it instead of getting them to post it for free,
Finally - not giving my checking account data to strangers is a bonus. But that's just a hunch.
(You really just wrote that entire post of things that your bank can't/won't do, then pointed out how paypal is a duplicate service? Though I agree w/ shady and costly...)
TV miniseries has to be the lowest form of entertainment. I'd rather watch the local junior high community theater production.
Yeah, it's right up there with "seasons" for story-based shows. Preposterous, nobody would want to watch that crap.
Indeed - I can't say that I enjoyed the ending, but I can certainly see that it was the only ending possible. And *man* will people be pissed off if they end the movie trilogy the same way.
Forget whether it's a good idea or bad idea, as that's really not relevant - it's only a distraction from the real issue. The point is that when you knowingly take an action, you share in responsibility for the consequences of those actions. You didn't pull the trigger, but you knew that the trigger would get pulled as a result of your actions. If you take those actions anyway, there's no way to evade your portion of that responsibility -- because if you hadn't taken your action, the consequences would not have occurred.
What I fail to understand is how people can blithely ignore that basic fact in their rabid defense of Wikileaks.
As you can see elsewhere, the apologists like to blame the government for making it necessary. When you blame the government, you don't have to accept responsibility for your actions.
The above post is sadly a growing movement of "don't rock the boat" people who just don't want to hear anything that upsets them. If you tell them their house is on fire, they blame you, not the fire. Shoot the messenger, so you never have to hear anything disturbing. Trust the state, keep quiet and all will be well.
I blame them when they tell me my house is on fire, then hand me in my panic a bucket of gasoline with which to douse it ;)
That is unfortunate, but it is not Wikileaks' fault -- Wikileaks is not responsible for the war, and Wikileaks is not responsible for the government misclassifying documents to the point of becoming untrustworthy.
"Well gee, officer, the bartender gave me the drink. If he hadn't, I wouldn't have run over that kid!"
How far do we go to in our efforts to shift the blame onto other people? Does it help us sleep at night?
Though the government didn't cooperate; and wikileaks didn't start the war -- still they are responsible for the consequences of the actions they did take. That burden can't be shifted, no matter how much wriggling is done.
I think that we're enjoying a good period right now where Wikileaks is still useful. How much time will we have before groups start to release faked documents to it in an attempt to discredit their rivals? Poisoning the well must only be a few years away, assuming they don't manage to dismantle the entire organization by then.
Assuming it's not already happening.
i write of Elrous glad and big
whose witty words bequeathed a smile:
a most humorous post-or
* disclaimer: this is in the context of American English, but I'm pretty sure that "brief" doesn't mean "lawyer" in any of the others...
Brief definitely means a lawyer.
I've got nothing to say to you copper - get me my brief!
Well sure, *that* slang is perfectly in-context here ;)
Thanks- I tried to check there before posting as well, but the work proxy blocked me
Julian Assange has requested a new lawyer to represent him during a rape investigation in Sweden because his previous brief, Leif Silbersky, was not engaged enough with the case
If you didn't want to repeat the word, you might have tried 'attorney'. The closest matching definition of "brief" is ...
An attorney's legal argument in written form for submission to a court;
Unless, of course, OP meant for it to be "briefs" and intended to say...
short snug pants or underpants
In which case it would have been more amusing, but still no more correct.
* disclaimer: this is in the context of American English, but I'm pretty sure that "brief" doesn't mean "lawyer" in any of the others...
Okay, back to your regularly scheduled commenting.
ANd a couple are just incorrect, or at the very best subjective. I'm not sure how this made it to the front page.
For example, if you are doing web crawling, and you have not saturated the pipe to the internet, then it is not worth your time to use more servers. This guy got me thinking about it, he's doing "Large-scale HTTP fetching" in Clojure. He talks about parallelizing with some queueing silliness, but never mentions how much data is moving down the pipe on any one machine. If you have a 100 megabit connection to the internet, and your fetcher is using 700 kilobits, then figure out why your fetcher sucks. )
Erm -- if your process is not taking up all of the bandwidth, AND you have available CPU, grabbing more sites concurrently would use some of that additional bandwidth. I don't know about this specific example, but generally speaking you might be able to max out your CPU without maxing out your bandwidth depending on the type of processing you were doing.
Finishing the article solidified my conclusion. The author ranted about how nosql sucks (not really a programming thing), how to monitor a process (useful, but not programming - because he's not telling you how to do it within a program), that hardware matters for performance (erm, duh...), and then some mumbling about event loops done by taking a quote out of context without really explaining what he was talking about.
(As a side note, I was talking about that post with Milo's prolific systems administrator, and we could not figure out whether the author was an incredibly elaborate troll or just a run-of-the-mill idiot.
Hmm - I'm sure there's a law similar to Muphry's for this scenario...
Authority? That's what people in general have been parroting to each other for decades. Just look at first comment here which implies the same thing - already +3 insightful, and I'm sure it will make it to +5.
Sooo... might I suggest not purchasing a pass? (And also not getting a driver's license or registering a car?) \
In most states that law is already in effect. The problem is that it's seldom enforced.
This is a very valid point - and I'd love to see that same training, testing, and costs in place here before you could get a license here in the US. I don't know if ti's in place in Germany or not, but this should include annual retesting (behind the wheel, on the road.) How, GP does also have a valid point - while there's statistical evidence to support increased fatalities and injuries at higher speeds, there's little if any to support the notion of higher accidents frequency.