That's ok, I see what you are trying to say, although it doesn't really invalidate the statement you refer to at all. In reality, every group in history that has tried claimed a communist state has instead established a totalitarian dystopia very much in line with Orwell's fiction. It is not by accident that Russia AND China AND Cuba AND North Korea and every other commie state you can think of happened to evolve into the nightmare you shy away from.
Why are you blaming Stalin? What happened was only natural. The genius behind Orwell's 1984 was that he showed how all the claims of common ownership of resources cannot be realized without a pyramidal scheme of control, freedom is achieved through slavery, and absolute peace is in fact, war. The wonderful "Trotskyist" universe you are defending does not exist, because human nature mandates that it cannot exist. What exists instead are websites with little red buttons on them that you can use to report your friends to the benevolent State.
It makes them uncomfortable - that is the illogical reason. The logical/informed reason is that it(determinism) is not true according to contemporary physics.
When Heisenberg discovered Uncertainty in quantum mechanics, there was a huge rush by the Soviet to oppose him, because Marxist ideology concerning the human mind was founded on determinism. The new relations showed that the universe is (sans gravitation) a conglomerate of superimposed states, all of which are probabilistic in nature, and which provably cannot be determined through "prior knowledge". This is a very difficult, unintuitive concept, and it completely abolishes the idea that you can predict human behavior, even though you may be able to reach better and better approximations as you reach larger scales. Throw in the idea of butterfly effects (chaos) and you suddenly are left wondering how we can make any statement about anything as tightly linked to Quantum Electro-Dynamics(i.e electrons and light) as the human mind is.
This doesn't mean we have "free will", whatever that is. It just means we are not the God we thought we were.
Perhaps this is some strange new meaning of the word, of which I was previously unaware. It's like doubleplusgood, but in another way
No, contrary to your belief, many countries do have banned religions. Yes, we call them totalitarian states, and an unhealthy number of them have been communist. Ditto for discussion of banned groups. In the Free World(TM) people can discuss what they want as long as it doesn't contain libel or slander, and even then the party concerned is the one expected to take legal action against you, not Big Brother.
The current no-longer-communist regime Err, what? But I thought we were always at war with Eastasia?
Finally, you seem to have an objection to the juxtaposition of the phrases, 'living wealthy' and 'with limited resources.' Yes, and he's right. Wealth implies excess; abundance; luxury. Sadly that correlates with waste in many places. But the 4 year old kids making plastic cups in the shanghai factories are not wealthy, not matter how efficiently they manage their hapless rewards, and no matter what big brother tells you about how great everything is, and how much more "wealth" for the "people" we have generated this year over last year.
'Living wealthy' with limited resources is not merely consistent, it is a laudable goal.. What limited resources, comrade? Did you not hear: our supply of corn, beer, and cars has grown 20% over the last year! Seriously though, your usage of quotation marks suggests strongly that you doubt your own understanding of the word wealth, not the parent's.
None of this is to defend the original post Of course not, comrade. The truth(TM) does not need to be defended! Minitrue is there only to make sure the truth gets out, because it is as you said:
charitable
Now be charitable to yourself and read 1984 or Animal Farm. Just don't tell your friends on myspace, it is.. unwise.
Do you think state secrets, and serious talk of government "subversion", are going to happen on a 14 year old's Myspace page?
This looks more like typical totalitarian despotism being exercised freely in Red China. They want that button to be there always, in front of everyone. The constant temptation to become a hero by turning someone in for anything that resembles discontent. You see, in commie states (and other totalitarian ones) the government disallows the concept of changing power. Therefore even peaceful, non-threatening attempts at voicing opinion are immediately painted as radical and similar to treason. The culture is enforced further when you become capable of being "heroic" by participating in the crackdown. In this disgusting case, they are extending the idea even to Myspace pages and probably soon to chat rooms, so that the offhand comment/joke against the government is seen in the same light, and can be reported in the same way.
In civilized, Free nations (not that the US is a shining e.g anymore) the public alerts the authorities when a serious threat to national security is perceived (bomb..etc) and the authorities investigate and act accordingly. You cannot alert the authorities when you discover somebody is "unhappy" or disrupting the "unity" by arguing against something in a civil manner. Pluralism is the goal, not enforced "unity". The only unified agreement is in the preservation of the rights that make that pluralism possible.
Could it possibly be that garbage is a sign of Success? (Yes) And that the more succesfull a human society is, the more garbage it makes (Yes)? And that the more succesfull ANY animal society is, the more garbage they make? So that only the most successfull species pollute their own drinking water, air and food? Pure genius. Microsoft's business model explained perfectly.
Did it occur to you that human stupidity has a lot to answer for? A lot of people on slashdot write software and maintain legacy code. You do not want to ask this question.
Individually we are quite clever animals, but we're also the only creature which will pollute our own drinking water, our own air and poison our own food. Pfff, that's nothing. Try this: we are the only species that sexually assaults our own food, and are then forced to marry it. Unintended consequences? Dude, we rule.
For those who will lose sleep over things like "personalized page" settings, you can send yourself an email with the name of the gadgets (Nytimes..etc) and then later use google's search facility when looking for the tabs to add them back. You'll have your precious personalized page in about 5 minutes.
The only reason Google is frantic is that the MBAs, AOL users and other complete idiots will indeed be clueless and fuming. I think software eng.s and IT people in general are going to heaven, free pass. On the ticket it will say "Dealt with MBA holders, maintained temper".
I would love to jump on the bandwagon here, and I do think this is a silly move, but it is not always easy to pass judgments like this about free speech issues. Slightly offtopic, but this comes up alot on slashdot:
In places where the concerned population is largely homogeneous in their beliefs, interests..etc, the public voicing of sentiment that is aggressive towards the said populace/causes them considerable disturbance is not always easy to defend. This is because the "hate speech" is seen as an affront to the nation as a whole, and the government is supposed to be a collective representation of that nation. Defending the right to that kind of speech in public places/widely publicized media would mean that the government would have to protect the speaker against an overwhelming majority of its own populace, and in recent times that kind of defense becomes food for extremism of all kinds.
The solution is not always to uphold free speech defiantly. That would be a great ultimate goal, but it doesn't happen overnight. Solution: education. The said public needs to understand and embrace the notion of free speech fully before a government can protect those rights.
In this case of course, the internet does not apply, and the proposed law is stupid, taken from any angle. Also, that this is being proposed in Europe of all places is very, very sad. What happened to France, champion of liberty, and the eastern block which remembers the horror of totalitarianism to this day? Haven't they learned from their post-Nazi policies that have produced nothing but xenophobia and racism in their countries?
Excellent quotation there. Einstein was right: the world is strangely non-random and instead comprehensible(so far), to the degree of being mathematically representable in even it's most complex, probabilistic situations. This is probably what he meant also by the famous "God does not play dice with the universe" quote. Fascinating stuff, particularly for those who have seen the maths.
My argument is that this isn't merely unintuitive, but actually non-sensible from the point of view of QM. Physicists have no problem accepting things like relativity and Uncertainty because they are natural (and verified) mathematical consequences of certain axioms. With a broad enough mind, one can eliminate even the most basic of prejudices - just look at how we've accepted curvature! I (and many physicists) are endlessly fascinated by how solid our faith is in the idea that the world is not Euclidean. But these new claims are something else entirely. It doesn't matter that they are unintuitive. What matters is that they oppose current axioms without coming up with alternatives.
I have no access to the article, but neither realism nor locality can be cast aside without introducing an entirely new basis for fundamental physics, and it seems these guys haven't done that. If they can, then they will need to produce more work than all the fathers of QM put together, and in that case I would happily embrace it.
What does common sense have to do with anything? The way we experience the world wasn't set up to be able to understand it, but to survive in it. That is definitely true. But the idea that observables only exist when observed is, while appealing to very small children still undergoing psychological development, plain rubbish. Physics is great because we strive to explain things as mathematical results of certain axioms we postulate (constancy of c, curvature of spacetime, QM postulates), and when we can't, the challenge is to put forward new fundamental claims that would lead to results that both explain and satisfy (experimentally) reality, until they too fail.
These guys are trying to delve into things that make Heisenberg's work look intuitive by comparison - and the fathers of QM died debating the interpretation of what they already had. It is easy to accept things like action-at-a-distance if you are ready to abandon physics. But for those who want to have even a glimpse of understanding, there must be a set of physical claims that ultimately define what is going on, and which are, themselves, comprehensible. Intuition and comprehensibility are different animals.
The internet in China is diverging rapidly from the state that the rest of the world enjoys it. 1) eldavojohn rarely does this, but I believe the first sentence contains a serious grammatical hiccup.
2) Communists finally discovering that totalitarianism needs proper planning/resources to be implemented right on the internet. New age of confrontation begins, but frankly I think the commies will lose this one. When the main battlefields are lost to censorship, Chinese youth will be wondering why they can't access general information websites.
This said, I think wikipedia and other places should begin investigating serious methods of discovering government tampering (as opposed to the lone propagandist). Would it be ok to solicit the help of our intelligence agencies, me wonders?
It's a good thing you stayed indoors. A windows OS...is... CRASHING. If there was ever news in the world, this is it. Most fascinating, unbelievable thing I ever heard. I too am glad that I read slashdot, otherwise I would be mistakenly living on an unshakable faith in MS software. I think I'm going to cry.
*sigh*
Well sacre blur and all that, but ring me up when someone can get Windows up for more than a week without a reboot. That would be worth investigation.
Moderators didn't see you. Anyway, I meant Spanish made a stronger link with the communists he was visiting. Next worst thing would be to carry a picture of Castro and do a video clip wrapped in a Cuban flag. Sheesh.
You people are being treated like cattle, taught to look at the wrong way, at the wrong "enemies", an invented Goldstein for you to vent your daily Two Minutes of Hate Eh? You're making an analogy with a communist dystopia to defend your apparent communist leanings. Ding Dong! Irony alert.
Next, I was not only talking about posting safely, I was referring to the fact that you are referring ME to information delivered from a well known website in the US. The last time protesters got beaten up for peaceful assembly wasn't in the US, but in the almost-soviet-again Russian Federation. The same Russia that is enforcing 50% good news per day(see slashdot headlines). And it was last week. And yes I know the bloggers in Egypt are arrested. Go back and read my post for God's sake. I was trying to point out the nastiness of being in a totalitarian regime, which brings us to the very important question you raised:
Why is the US favoring despotic Arab regimes? I've lived in the Middle East for years, and I can tell you, this is a delicate situation. The friendlier Arab states are still headed by bastards, but they are sane enough not to attack Israel or to allow radicals to come to power, destroying our interests and regional stability. In Saudi, fundies are in power, but they are again "responsible" fundies. They give us oil, and they stop radicalism from waging all-out war against us. Our government shuts up. Now we know this, our press knows this, our opposition groups know it and everybody debates it all the time. They debate it to the extent of ridiculing our presidency over it(and rightly so). This debate is thanks to the freedom that we enjoy, and the US, like all other free nations, exerts sensible diplomatic pressure to try and change the situation, if it CAN be changed.
We are being treated as citizens who can be fooled, but who have rights nonetheless, and whose votes matter in the next election. Your comrades in Russia are being beaten in the streets. The ones in Cuba are rotting in jails. 50% enforced good news isn't going to hover over that very much. Thank you for bringing up 1984.
Governments try to exert control all the time, and are held accountable for it because we still have a measure of free speech (vast compared to totalitarian regimes) that is exemplified by your linking articles from slashdot. Last month, US attorneys were fired because the weren't loyal to the administration. This month, the Big Man responsible is being questioned and asked to resign. Today, you are talking about gag orders, and bloggers in Egypt(far better than Cuba in this respect) will do the same. Tommorow, if you lived in the US, you will be fine. They wont be.
You're linking to wikipedia. Fun fact: wikipedia is being hosted from the US, via an American registrar and registered to a guy who lives happily in Saint Petersburg, Florida.
That's the whole point you see. Nobody claims the history of the free world, as it stands today, is rosy. Nobody even claims that it is rosy right now. The difference between the system you are criticizing and the totalitarian regime the GP is talking about is that with freedom, the horrors committed can be uncovered and pointed to and learned from. In Cuba and similar places, you can't do that, you cannot raise your voice to say the ugly truth, and that makes all the difference in the world.
This is a common fallacy. You are assuming that since everybody is dirty, the scales level out. That's simply not true. RMS has written his cute little song, and when he gets back home he will probably not get thrown in jail, tortured and and made to confess that he is a traitor. If he was Cuban, the situation would've been different. Your attempt at making equal that violations of certain Free countries with the base policies that are a governmental NORM in totalitarian ones, is BS. Remember that the machines serving the text/debate you are reading now would not exist in a totalitarian state. We should go against injustice everywhere, but equating totalitarianism with the (imperfect) is foolish.
Stallman is too damn emotional on some topics, he fails to accomodate practicality and long-term benefit. People like him would always be the small time hero, but never become president. He's singing a song in SPANISH written while visiting a communist state. A man whose image reflects directly on the image of free software should know better than to do this, even if his position is technically correct and I would heartfully sing along with him. We struggle for years to remove the commie/rebel/unprofessional icon taped onto FOSS by certain elements of the industry, and in one happy day a "leader" brings it all down. Sometimes I wish RMS would lie. FOSS would be years ahead.
by GuyMannDude (574364) What a stupid name. Too bad she didn't get married to Jeff Matrix instead. GMD This post has been a announcement from the irony-hurts department.
I was dying to know, so I actually RTFA only to find that they had no answer either. Either they were lying about the initial figure or you are correct.
ultimately your recommended stories could be influenced by the likes and dislikes of your friends/heroes I, for one, want to say that everybody on myspace is a "dislike" of my friends and heroes. What was the submitter thinking anyway? How could he possibly have the nerve to stride up here to slashdot and claim that 14 year old girls experimenting with their socks can somehow serve as a newsworthiness filter? Is it not enough that our dear uber-geek editors, who toil day and night, and who bring unquantifiable knowledge to use in their judgements, STILL consistently fail to satisfy our critical eyes and are slandered mercilessly by our hefty crowd?
Slashdot Mirror
That's ok, I see what you are trying to say, although it doesn't really invalidate the statement you refer to at all. In reality, every group in history that has tried claimed a communist state has instead established a totalitarian dystopia very much in line with Orwell's fiction. It is not by accident that Russia AND China AND Cuba AND North Korea and every other commie state you can think of happened to evolve into the nightmare you shy away from.
Why are you blaming Stalin? What happened was only natural. The genius behind Orwell's 1984 was that he showed how all the claims of common ownership of resources cannot be realized without a pyramidal scheme of control, freedom is achieved through slavery, and absolute peace is in fact, war. The wonderful "Trotskyist" universe you are defending does not exist, because human nature mandates that it cannot exist. What exists instead are websites with little red buttons on them that you can use to report your friends to the benevolent State.
It makes them uncomfortable - that is the illogical reason. The logical/informed reason is that it(determinism) is not true according to contemporary physics.
When Heisenberg discovered Uncertainty in quantum mechanics, there was a huge rush by the Soviet to oppose him, because Marxist ideology concerning the human mind was founded on determinism. The new relations showed that the universe is (sans gravitation) a conglomerate of superimposed states, all of which are probabilistic in nature, and which provably cannot be determined through "prior knowledge". This is a very difficult, unintuitive concept, and it completely abolishes the idea that you can predict human behavior, even though you may be able to reach better and better approximations as you reach larger scales. Throw in the idea of butterfly effects (chaos) and you suddenly are left wondering how we can make any statement about anything as tightly linked to Quantum Electro-Dynamics(i.e electrons and light) as the human mind is.
This doesn't mean we have "free will", whatever that is. It just means we are not the God we thought we were.
Do you think state secrets, and serious talk of government "subversion", are going to happen on a 14 year old's Myspace page?
This looks more like typical totalitarian despotism being exercised freely in Red China. They want that button to be there always, in front of everyone. The constant temptation to become a hero by turning someone in for anything that resembles discontent. You see, in commie states (and other totalitarian ones) the government disallows the concept of changing power. Therefore even peaceful, non-threatening attempts at voicing opinion are immediately painted as radical and similar to treason. The culture is enforced further when you become capable of being "heroic" by participating in the crackdown. In this disgusting case, they are extending the idea even to Myspace pages and probably soon to chat rooms, so that the offhand comment/joke against the government is seen in the same light, and can be reported in the same way.
In civilized, Free nations (not that the US is a shining e.g anymore) the public alerts the authorities when a serious threat to national security is perceived (bomb..etc) and the authorities investigate and act accordingly. You cannot alert the authorities when you discover somebody is "unhappy" or disrupting the "unity" by arguing against something in a civil manner. Pluralism is the goal, not enforced "unity". The only unified agreement is in the preservation of the rights that make that pluralism possible.
For those who will lose sleep over things like "personalized page" settings, you can send yourself an email with the name of the gadgets (Nytimes..etc) and then later use google's search facility when looking for the tabs to add them back. You'll have your precious personalized page in about 5 minutes.
The only reason Google is frantic is that the MBAs, AOL users and other complete idiots will indeed be clueless and fuming. I think software eng.s and IT people in general are going to heaven, free pass. On the ticket it will say "Dealt with MBA holders, maintained temper".
I would love to jump on the bandwagon here, and I do think this is a silly move, but it is not always easy to pass judgments like this about free speech issues. Slightly offtopic, but this comes up alot on slashdot:
In places where the concerned population is largely homogeneous in their beliefs, interests..etc, the public voicing of sentiment that is aggressive towards the said populace/causes them considerable disturbance is not always easy to defend. This is because the "hate speech" is seen as an affront to the nation as a whole, and the government is supposed to be a collective representation of that nation. Defending the right to that kind of speech in public places/widely publicized media would mean that the government would have to protect the speaker against an overwhelming majority of its own populace, and in recent times that kind of defense becomes food for extremism of all kinds.
The solution is not always to uphold free speech defiantly. That would be a great ultimate goal, but it doesn't happen overnight. Solution: education. The said public needs to understand and embrace the notion of free speech fully before a government can protect those rights.
In this case of course, the internet does not apply, and the proposed law is stupid, taken from any angle. Also, that this is being proposed in Europe of all places is very, very sad. What happened to France, champion of liberty, and the eastern block which remembers the horror of totalitarianism to this day? Haven't they learned from their post-Nazi policies that have produced nothing but xenophobia and racism in their countries?
They can make money from concert tours! No wait. Err..wrong number.
Excellent quotation there. Einstein was right: the world is strangely non-random and instead comprehensible(so far), to the degree of being mathematically representable in even it's most complex, probabilistic situations. This is probably what he meant also by the famous "God does not play dice with the universe" quote. Fascinating stuff, particularly for those who have seen the maths.
My argument is that this isn't merely unintuitive, but actually non-sensible from the point of view of QM. Physicists have no problem accepting things like relativity and Uncertainty because they are natural (and verified) mathematical consequences of certain axioms. With a broad enough mind, one can eliminate even the most basic of prejudices - just look at how we've accepted curvature! I (and many physicists) are endlessly fascinated by how solid our faith is in the idea that the world is not Euclidean. But these new claims are something else entirely. It doesn't matter that they are unintuitive. What matters is that they oppose current axioms without coming up with alternatives.
I have no access to the article, but neither realism nor locality can be cast aside without introducing an entirely new basis for fundamental physics, and it seems these guys haven't done that. If they can, then they will need to produce more work than all the fathers of QM put together, and in that case I would happily embrace it.
These guys are trying to delve into things that make Heisenberg's work look intuitive by comparison - and the fathers of QM died debating the interpretation of what they already had. It is easy to accept things like action-at-a-distance if you are ready to abandon physics. But for those who want to have even a glimpse of understanding, there must be a set of physical claims that ultimately define what is going on, and which are, themselves, comprehensible. Intuition and comprehensibility are different animals.
2) Communists finally discovering that totalitarianism needs proper planning/resources to be implemented right on the internet. New age of confrontation begins, but frankly I think the commies will lose this one. When the main battlefields are lost to censorship, Chinese youth will be wondering why they can't access general information websites.
This said, I think wikipedia and other places should begin investigating serious methods of discovering government tampering (as opposed to the lone propagandist). Would it be ok to solicit the help of our intelligence agencies, me wonders?
It's a good thing you stayed indoors. A windows OS...is... CRASHING. If there was ever news in the world, this is it. Most fascinating, unbelievable thing I ever heard. I too am glad that I read slashdot, otherwise I would be mistakenly living on an unshakable faith in MS software. I think I'm going to cry.
*sigh*
Well sacre blur and all that, but ring me up when someone can get Windows up for more than a week without a reboot. That would be worth investigation.
These are indeed queer days, when an article about a MS operating system crashing comes from the "puzzler" department.
More like the because-gates-loves-you dept back in the day.
:)
Moderators didn't see you. Anyway, I meant Spanish made a stronger link with the communists he was visiting. Next worst thing would be to carry a picture of Castro and do a video clip wrapped in a Cuban flag. Sheesh.
Next, I was not only talking about posting safely, I was referring to the fact that you are referring ME to information delivered from a well known website in the US. The last time protesters got beaten up for peaceful assembly wasn't in the US, but in the almost-soviet-again Russian Federation. The same Russia that is enforcing 50% good news per day(see slashdot headlines). And it was last week. And yes I know the bloggers in Egypt are arrested. Go back and read my post for God's sake. I was trying to point out the nastiness of being in a totalitarian regime, which brings us to the very important question you raised:
Why is the US favoring despotic Arab regimes? I've lived in the Middle East for years, and I can tell you, this is a delicate situation. The friendlier Arab states are still headed by bastards, but they are sane enough not to attack Israel or to allow radicals to come to power, destroying our interests and regional stability. In Saudi, fundies are in power, but they are again "responsible" fundies. They give us oil, and they stop radicalism from waging all-out war against us. Our government shuts up. Now we know this, our press knows this, our opposition groups know it and everybody debates it all the time. They debate it to the extent of ridiculing our presidency over it(and rightly so). This debate is thanks to the freedom that we enjoy, and the US, like all other free nations, exerts sensible diplomatic pressure to try and change the situation, if it CAN be changed.
We are being treated as citizens who can be fooled, but who have rights nonetheless, and whose votes matter in the next election. Your comrades in Russia are being beaten in the streets. The ones in Cuba are rotting in jails. 50% enforced good news isn't going to hover over that very much. Thank you for bringing up 1984.
Fun fact#2: slashdot is hosted in the US as well.
Governments try to exert control all the time, and are held accountable for it because we still have a measure of free speech (vast compared to totalitarian regimes) that is exemplified by your linking articles from slashdot. Last month, US attorneys were fired because the weren't loyal to the administration. This month, the Big Man responsible is being questioned and asked to resign. Today, you are talking about gag orders, and bloggers in Egypt(far better than Cuba in this respect) will do the same. Tommorow, if you lived in the US, you will be fine. They wont be.
No no. In Soviet Russia, the news smiles at YOU!
You're linking to wikipedia. Fun fact: wikipedia is being hosted from the US, via an American registrar and registered to a guy who lives happily in Saint Petersburg, Florida.
That's the whole point you see. Nobody claims the history of the free world, as it stands today, is rosy. Nobody even claims that it is rosy right now. The difference between the system you are criticizing and the totalitarian regime the GP is talking about is that with freedom, the horrors committed can be uncovered and pointed to and learned from. In Cuba and similar places, you can't do that, you cannot raise your voice to say the ugly truth, and that makes all the difference in the world.
This is a common fallacy. You are assuming that since everybody is dirty, the scales level out. That's simply not true. RMS has written his cute little song, and when he gets back home he will probably not get thrown in jail, tortured and and made to confess that he is a traitor. If he was Cuban, the situation would've been different. Your attempt at making equal that violations of certain Free countries with the base policies that are a governmental NORM in totalitarian ones, is BS. Remember that the machines serving the text/debate you are reading now would not exist in a totalitarian state. We should go against injustice everywhere, but equating totalitarianism with the (imperfect) is foolish.
Stallman is too damn emotional on some topics, he fails to accomodate practicality and long-term benefit. People like him would always be the small time hero, but never become president. He's singing a song in SPANISH written while visiting a communist state. A man whose image reflects directly on the image of free software should know better than to do this, even if his position is technically correct and I would heartfully sing along with him. We struggle for years to remove the commie/rebel/unprofessional icon taped onto FOSS by certain elements of the industry, and in one happy day a "leader" brings it all down. Sometimes I wish RMS would lie. FOSS would be years ahead.
What a stupid name. Too bad she didn't get married to Jeff Matrix instead.
GMD This post has been a announcement from the irony-hurts department.
I was dying to know, so I actually RTFA only to find that they had no answer either. Either they were lying about the initial figure or you are correct.
Wait, are you saying there's a big red bulldog digging in our back yard?