I'm sure most people here have heard about the Documentaries made by Peter Kuran, but in case you have not, I suggest watching this movie http://www.vce.com/nuc911.html (Nuclear 911) about nuclear weapons accidents, and also the other films from the same director. All of them have superb scenes and music.
The view I collected from most Chinese I know (which might be slanted since I met most of them in the west) is that they are willing to put up with censorship and all that crap as long as the party keeps providing economic growth. And this is true for most countries, U.S. included, most people won't want to change the system even if it's full of shit, while they have a decent job and can provide for their families.
That was why Clinton was always so popular (even if he was one of those responsible for the Bank deregulation and the shit that came with it); Bush was reelected (because the economic woes only started to bite in his second term); and why Bush senior was not reelected (because the effects of Reagonomics started to screw the country, and the tax raises) even though he is one of the few republicans that I respect. And that was why Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were not reelected regardless of policies that benefitted a large portion of America socially.
I lived in Brixton (no less) for 3 years until 2009, and although a person was stabbed to death in my street, I have never felt threatened myself at any point in time. I might be naive, but if the main crime is knife crime, you need to be one of the two to get killed: drunk and/or confrontational. I come from a relatively safe city in Brazil and I never felt safer than in Britain.
Aside from your last comment, I could not agree more. And I think it is completely fair and right that the people toiling away at code for free get to decide what they do with their free time. Now as for Linux, although I think that his original work was brilliant, in recent years I'm not so sure he is not stifling other volunteers from working in the Kernel, and the people who are being rejected do have a lot of merit and have put a lot of effort into the kernel, but no significant say in the direction it is taking.
Your comment about ebay got me in a remembrance mood. Too bad Sony killed Lik Sang a while ago, I would bet it was pretty popular down under exactly for that purpose!
You are absolutely right in that, but the point I was trying to make is that 2 million dollars (for example) go a much longer way to mitigate the consequences of actions in Europe than it would go in the US. With a couple hundred thousand Euros you can pretty much do all the home modifications you need to live well at your own home and be productive in Europe, since you can count on having doctors, hospital bills and drugs paid for by the state, whereas half a million dollars in the US would go away pretty fast in the American healthcare system.
The side effect of this is that there is a *very* profitable business here (in the U.S.) for lawyers to try and squeeze every last penny of a lawsuit even beyond what would be reasonable, with a large drain for the person pursuing the case, and a large potential for abuse all along the line.
In any case, I think people are free-er in Europe exactly because things do not turn around money as a requirement for survival. At least I felt a lot safer to protest about the causes I believe in while I lived in London (before coming to the US) than I do here.
But on the flipside, in Scandinavia (and most of Europe) if you need a hospital or support for some physical limitation, you won't have to pay through your nose to get it, as this is seen as a basic human right. In the US, if you need constant medical attention and you don't have a steady revenue stream (or a big hoard of cash) you are pretty much screwed.
Well, I love London and the UK having lived four years there, but technically the Brits do not drive of the right side of the road, since they drive on the left...
Depending on the amount of time you spend there, and on how many war museums you visited in the US (which I'm has plenty more than the UK), you might want to spend a Sunday on the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. When I lived in London these two IWMs were always very special to me. At the right times of the year they fly WW planes and you can even hop on one passenger plane of the era. All year round you can see the staff at the museum restoring old aircraft in their 6 hangars full of pretty much all the important planes of the era.
As I said, you'll need a day to visit Duxford, and some planning to leave home early, since you will have to take a train to Cambridge first, and the buses to Duxford are not terribly frequent. On the bright side, you can take time to visit Cambridge before and after the IWM, so it's a good combo.
I don't mean to insult Rio or anything, but I disagree with you about Rio being the best choice in Brazil (BTW, I am Brazilian myself). I think plenty of other cities would be a better place to host the Olympics than Rio, mainly because of the security and infrastructure. Belo Horizonte and Curitiba being the best choices both for their cities. Belo Horizonte is nicer as a city than Rio both in infrastructure and in sights (not everybody thinks beaches are the nicest views in the planet, mountains and historic cities are just as nice if you ask me). And Curitiba is by far safer and with better infrastructure (and has very nice views).
As far as beaches go in Brazil, the Northeast (Salvador, Recife) of the country beats Rio hands down. So, from both a subjective (beauty) and an objective (security and infrastructure) point of view, Rio was a very bad choice.
In the end, Rio won because the other countries were not acceptable to many people in the IOC. Almost everybody in Asia hates Japan, so Tokyo was out. Since the next Olympics will be in London, Madrid was out for being in Europe. And also as everybody mentioned in this post about Chicago, but missed one thing, (and I'm being objective here), there is still a very strong anti-Americanism in the world that lingers even after Obama was elected, so this pretty much eliminated the US location.
You might argue that because Rio is in total chaos as far as security goes, the money influx from the Olympics would be welcome. But this is missing a *very* important point. Economically, Rio is probably the second largest state in the country, as attested by the budgets of their state agencies,, so it was never a matter of lack of funds for Rio to fix itself. What needs to change is the politicians (in the whole country as a matter of fact, this is an acute problem in the country nationwide, but worse in Rio, Sao Paulo and the Northeast), which will not change because of the Olympics.
Moreover, is the world cup after Africa not going to be in Brazil? And will Rio probably not be one of the main venues? So in the end Rio did not really "win". It as a process of elimination.
A single S in Portuguese implies a Z sound, depending on the presence of vowels and consonants around it (for example, S always has a Z sound when between vowels). Cedilla always has the S sound regardless of the surrounding letters. It is somewhat redundant, I will give you that, but in terms of strict necessity, it is similar to the case of C and K in English, you could do without C in English by using S and K depending on the circumstance. But I bet it is still being used out of some arcane inheritance from French or German or something.
I live in London and I haul all my shopping on a backpack to the nearest bus stop, and then to my home. I grew up used to driving a car for everything in Brazil, which, sadly, tried to copy the US in trashing the rail network and investing in roads rather than public transport, and thought that was madness not to have a car when I moved to the UK. But in all honesty, I feel that it works brilliantly well not to have a car here. Even my 40 minute commute from south London to the Strand (that's in one of the main centers in London), without a car, lets me read a book a week on the bus I take.
Hell, if this analogy works then we should all disable our Spam filters and cower in shame for our prejudice, after all, these guys believe in us seeing the best Pr0n on the internet as well as giving us the opportunity to enhance our manhoods.
This might sound like a pun, since I am posting a link to an article that needs a subscription to be read, but it's not it is in the Communications of the ACM, talking about the problems with peer-review committees in the Systems area: Program Committee Overload in Systems (this should be accessible to anyone in a computer science department network. But the moral of the paper is that because of the increasing number of people in the field versus the number of people willing to do peer-review in conferences and journals, less relevant science gets published. They put very good arguments criticizing a lot the way in which science tends to get published nowadays. If you can access it, I think it's a good read about this particular subject.
If I may add to this thread of discussion, large teams are not necessarily conductive to scrutiny. I know of instances of teams led by big BS writers, which have a large team. The catch here is that in teams in which there is a lot of BS going on there seems to be a lot of changes in the team over time and personnel turnaround time seems to be low.
My analysis of this kind of situation is that people in teams led a hack/cheat tend to get fed up and just leave, but not report any misconduct because they are afraid of retaliation by said hack. Conversely, teams led by people who do solid research tend to attract and maintain people over the long time.
So, ultimately, I mean to say that most people doing research are indeed honest and want to do solid and valuable research, since from my experience, (most) honest people tend to abandon ship when they see that they are involved with a cheat. After all, there are not many incentives for becoming a researcher (at least in academia), since we get paid a lot less than working in any industry. Personally, my incentive to be a researcher is to create good research and to interact with people, be them other researchers to bounce ideas or students, who hopefully will look up to me. And this social aspect is, I think, a pretty good deterrent to trying to cheat results, because if one gets caught, all the social profile you worked for years to achieve may come down crashing in a moment.
I can see why this may be happening a lot in the medical field because there is huge influence being exerted by big pharma on academics, both at the economic level (see the large amounts of funding for new drug patents), and socially, since it is not unheard of from these companies to try to do character assassination on people who refuse to comply.
Why was this guy tagged as a troll? I mean, despite his borderline vitriol about Microsoft, his concerns about the legitimacy of the website seem pretty sensible to me, if one bothers reading the article and following the link to said website.
Also, pay teachers reasonably enough that smart and motivated people may want to stick around the education sector rather than wanting to move to better paying administrative positions.
The thing is, that people who actually do usually get paid a lot less than the people who bullshit and go to admin. Creating high quality classes is a lot of work, and each in-class hour is worth at least four hours preparing it.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, LaTeX won't be replaced by word for large documents (e.g. PhD theses) exactly because of that.
The beauty part is just a bonus IMHO, the main thing is that LaTeX documents are *reliable*, you don't want to see the work of your last four years just vanish in a bug.
The military-industrial complex could very well switch purposes and go back to manufacturing consumer goods, that the US have outsourced to China (which now has a stranglehold on the US economy).
Just a thought.
Yeah, but the carbon in the CO2 they emit by breathing was trapped in the grass they eat, and will eventually recirculate through plans (that another generation will eat), keeping the circle closed. When you burn gas in a lawnmower, you are releasing CO2 that was trapped for millions of years in the earth's crust, adding to the system.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal website is hosted by a Norwegian provider (great service).
I'm sure most people here have heard about the Documentaries made by Peter Kuran, but in case you have not, I suggest watching this movie http://www.vce.com/nuc911.html (Nuclear 911) about nuclear weapons accidents, and also the other films from the same director. All of them have superb scenes and music.
The view I collected from most Chinese I know (which might be slanted since I met most of them in the west) is that they are willing to put up with censorship and all that crap as long as the party keeps providing economic growth. And this is true for most countries, U.S. included, most people won't want to change the system even if it's full of shit, while they have a decent job and can provide for their families. That was why Clinton was always so popular (even if he was one of those responsible for the Bank deregulation and the shit that came with it); Bush was reelected (because the economic woes only started to bite in his second term); and why Bush senior was not reelected (because the effects of Reagonomics started to screw the country, and the tax raises) even though he is one of the few republicans that I respect. And that was why Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were not reelected regardless of policies that benefitted a large portion of America socially.
Exactly, but that's mostly a US thing. I was astounded to find that All-Bran in the US has HSFC in it, I expected what the name tells, ALL-BRAN.
I lived in Brixton (no less) for 3 years until 2009, and although a person was stabbed to death in my street, I have never felt threatened myself at any point in time. I might be naive, but if the main crime is knife crime, you need to be one of the two to get killed: drunk and/or confrontational. I come from a relatively safe city in Brazil and I never felt safer than in Britain.
Aside from your last comment, I could not agree more. And I think it is completely fair and right that the people toiling away at code for free get to decide what they do with their free time. Now as for Linux, although I think that his original work was brilliant, in recent years I'm not so sure he is not stifling other volunteers from working in the Kernel, and the people who are being rejected do have a lot of merit and have put a lot of effort into the kernel, but no significant say in the direction it is taking.
Please tell me you are cloning Darklands. Ok, it's not rather obscure but I loved that game so much!
Did you mean the country Colombia, the district of Columbia or the poetic name for America?
Your comment about ebay got me in a remembrance mood. Too bad Sony killed Lik Sang a while ago, I would bet it was pretty popular down under exactly for that purpose!
You are absolutely right in that, but the point I was trying to make is that 2 million dollars (for example) go a much longer way to mitigate the consequences of actions in Europe than it would go in the US. With a couple hundred thousand Euros you can pretty much do all the home modifications you need to live well at your own home and be productive in Europe, since you can count on having doctors, hospital bills and drugs paid for by the state, whereas half a million dollars in the US would go away pretty fast in the American healthcare system.
The side effect of this is that there is a *very* profitable business here (in the U.S.) for lawyers to try and squeeze every last penny of a lawsuit even beyond what would be reasonable, with a large drain for the person pursuing the case, and a large potential for abuse all along the line.
In any case, I think people are free-er in Europe exactly because things do not turn around money as a requirement for survival. At least I felt a lot safer to protest about the causes I believe in while I lived in London (before coming to the US) than I do here.
But on the flipside, in Scandinavia (and most of Europe) if you need a hospital or support for some physical limitation, you won't have to pay through your nose to get it, as this is seen as a basic human right. In the US, if you need constant medical attention and you don't have a steady revenue stream (or a big hoard of cash) you are pretty much screwed.
Well, I love London and the UK having lived four years there, but technically the Brits do not drive of the right side of the road, since they drive on the left...
Depending on the amount of time you spend there, and on how many war museums you visited in the US (which I'm has plenty more than the UK), you might want to spend a Sunday on the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. When I lived in London these two IWMs were always very special to me. At the right times of the year they fly WW planes and you can even hop on one passenger plane of the era. All year round you can see the staff at the museum restoring old aircraft in their 6 hangars full of pretty much all the important planes of the era. As I said, you'll need a day to visit Duxford, and some planning to leave home early, since you will have to take a train to Cambridge first, and the buses to Duxford are not terribly frequent. On the bright side, you can take time to visit Cambridge before and after the IWM, so it's a good combo.
Like send Venusian Androids?
I don't mean to insult Rio or anything, but I disagree with you about Rio being the best choice in Brazil (BTW, I am Brazilian myself). I think plenty of other cities would be a better place to host the Olympics than Rio, mainly because of the security and infrastructure. Belo Horizonte and Curitiba being the best choices both for their cities. Belo Horizonte is nicer as a city than Rio both in infrastructure and in sights (not everybody thinks beaches are the nicest views in the planet, mountains and historic cities are just as nice if you ask me). And Curitiba is by far safer and with better infrastructure (and has very nice views).
As far as beaches go in Brazil, the Northeast (Salvador, Recife) of the country beats Rio hands down. So, from both a subjective (beauty) and an objective (security and infrastructure) point of view, Rio was a very bad choice.
In the end, Rio won because the other countries were not acceptable to many people in the IOC. Almost everybody in Asia hates Japan, so Tokyo was out. Since the next Olympics will be in London, Madrid was out for being in Europe. And also as everybody mentioned in this post about Chicago, but missed one thing, (and I'm being objective here), there is still a very strong anti-Americanism in the world that lingers even after Obama was elected, so this pretty much eliminated the US location.
You might argue that because Rio is in total chaos as far as security goes, the money influx from the Olympics would be welcome. But this is missing a *very* important point. Economically, Rio is probably the second largest state in the country, as attested by the budgets of their state agencies,, so it was never a matter of lack of funds for Rio to fix itself. What needs to change is the politicians (in the whole country as a matter of fact, this is an acute problem in the country nationwide, but worse in Rio, Sao Paulo and the Northeast), which will not change because of the Olympics.
Moreover, is the world cup after Africa not going to be in Brazil? And will Rio probably not be one of the main venues? So in the end Rio did not really "win". It as a process of elimination.
A single S in Portuguese implies a Z sound, depending on the presence of vowels and consonants around it (for example, S always has a Z sound when between vowels). Cedilla always has the S sound regardless of the surrounding letters. It is somewhat redundant, I will give you that, but in terms of strict necessity, it is similar to the case of C and K in English, you could do without C in English by using S and K depending on the circumstance. But I bet it is still being used out of some arcane inheritance from French or German or something.
I live in London and I haul all my shopping on a backpack to the nearest bus stop, and then to my home. I grew up used to driving a car for everything in Brazil, which, sadly, tried to copy the US in trashing the rail network and investing in roads rather than public transport, and thought that was madness not to have a car when I moved to the UK. But in all honesty, I feel that it works brilliantly well not to have a car here. Even my 40 minute commute from south London to the Strand (that's in one of the main centers in London), without a car, lets me read a book a week on the bus I take.
Hell, if this analogy works then we should all disable our Spam filters and cower in shame for our prejudice, after all, these guys believe in us seeing the best Pr0n on the internet as well as giving us the opportunity to enhance our manhoods.
This might sound like a pun, since I am posting a link to an article that needs a subscription to be read, but it's not it is in the Communications of the ACM, talking about the problems with peer-review committees in the Systems area: Program Committee Overload in Systems (this should be accessible to anyone in a computer science department network. But the moral of the paper is that because of the increasing number of people in the field versus the number of people willing to do peer-review in conferences and journals, less relevant science gets published. They put very good arguments criticizing a lot the way in which science tends to get published nowadays. If you can access it, I think it's a good read about this particular subject.
If I may add to this thread of discussion, large teams are not necessarily conductive to scrutiny. I know of instances of teams led by big BS writers, which have a large team. The catch here is that in teams in which there is a lot of BS going on there seems to be a lot of changes in the team over time and personnel turnaround time seems to be low.
My analysis of this kind of situation is that people in teams led a hack/cheat tend to get fed up and just leave, but not report any misconduct because they are afraid of retaliation by said hack. Conversely, teams led by people who do solid research tend to attract and maintain people over the long time.
So, ultimately, I mean to say that most people doing research are indeed honest and want to do solid and valuable research, since from my experience, (most) honest people tend to abandon ship when they see that they are involved with a cheat. After all, there are not many incentives for becoming a researcher (at least in academia), since we get paid a lot less than working in any industry. Personally, my incentive to be a researcher is to create good research and to interact with people, be them other researchers to bounce ideas or students, who hopefully will look up to me. And this social aspect is, I think, a pretty good deterrent to trying to cheat results, because if one gets caught, all the social profile you worked for years to achieve may come down crashing in a moment.
I can see why this may be happening a lot in the medical field because there is huge influence being exerted by big pharma on academics, both at the economic level (see the large amounts of funding for new drug patents), and socially, since it is not unheard of from these companies to try to do character assassination on people who refuse to comply.
Why was this guy tagged as a troll? I mean, despite his borderline vitriol about Microsoft, his concerns about the legitimacy of the website seem pretty sensible to me, if one bothers reading the article and following the link to said website.
Also, pay teachers reasonably enough that smart and motivated people may want to stick around the education sector rather than wanting to move to better paying administrative positions. The thing is, that people who actually do usually get paid a lot less than the people who bullshit and go to admin. Creating high quality classes is a lot of work, and each in-class hour is worth at least four hours preparing it.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, LaTeX won't be replaced by word for large documents (e.g. PhD theses) exactly because of that. The beauty part is just a bonus IMHO, the main thing is that LaTeX documents are *reliable*, you don't want to see the work of your last four years just vanish in a bug.
The military-industrial complex could very well switch purposes and go back to manufacturing consumer goods, that the US have outsourced to China (which now has a stranglehold on the US economy). Just a thought.
Yeah, but the carbon in the CO2 they emit by breathing was trapped in the grass they eat, and will eventually recirculate through plans (that another generation will eat), keeping the circle closed. When you burn gas in a lawnmower, you are releasing CO2 that was trapped for millions of years in the earth's crust, adding to the system.