...think that's what I said - the oppression is a response to perception of a greater evil of instability. Scratch any country's leadership and you'll get the same kind of result. The question is whether that is justified, and historically seems to be more usually a case of paranoia, micro-management, and control freakery.
People don't sit around on their bums for too long - it's just not in our nature. If they weren't slaving away in factories they might end up as a society that primarily produces cultural capital (huge social stability there) or they might develop a service-based economy. In the wider scheme, Chinese manufacturing is probably more important to the west than China.
Wasn't that the whole idea - for them to stop producing and polluting the planet? That giving them food would be cheaper. Of course it would threaten our dependence on cheap clothes and expensive gadgets.
I'm talking about a sudden catastrophic global effect. To some extent we got lucky with Chernobyl and it was contained, have yet to see with Fukushima.
Surprising that nobody here acknowledges the black swan nature of nuclear power. The comparative average is precisely not the point.
FWIW I once had dinner with an architect of one of the early nuclear plants. They had been lied to about the prospects of a solution to waste disposal and no longer considered it a sensible approach.
As far as I understand, public unrest is one of the greatest fears of Chinese leadership, hence tight control and censorship. That may speak volumes about the willingness of their public to take control along with protesting (as opposed to the West where protest is seen as a safety valve and therefore encouraged in proscribed forms).
Article makes no sense to me. He is just advocating for RESTful architecture in API design, which hardly matches the controversialist tone. At the same time it completely ignores anything but the simplest read-only API with a 1:1 mapping to public resources. It's like trying to make an argument about aircraft design whilst referencing a bicycle.
I feel like I'm kind of getting it but in quite an abstract sense. Do you have any thoughts around how this might look put into practise in software development?
> gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also
Not in the English language. It's debated by some whether this might have a subliminal effect and reinforce social gender stereotypes (though no evidence for that hypothesis as far as I'm aware) and therefore whether masculine prepositions _should_ be treated as neutral but that's in the same category as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform.
There's nothing wrong with that of course and it can be an interesting hypothesis to pursue - but I find it depressing that a self-proclaimed educated and science-based open source tech community so easily engages on a witch hunt based on pure speculation.
Are these people illiterate? Are they not aware that in the English language masculine pronouns are correct for both gender-specific and gender-neutral uses? Mankind refers to everybody. It may seem awkward, particularly to over-literal types, but so is our spelling, grammar, and pronunciation generally.
I once travelled from the US with a guitar a few years back. I was told at check-in that instruments travelled free and had to be taken onboard. Was even ushered to the front of the boarding queue when I got there so I would be able to stow. Assumed I'd discovered an airline hack and had been considering a guitar case as a sneaky second suitcase in future.
People have been worrying about mass starvation due to overcopulation since the Victorian age (I believe it was a big motivation for the missionary movement).
You mean spoilt kids behaving badly? You can be given material needs without having to work but you will still need to work hard to become a dancer, ride a skateboard, play the piano etc. Maybe the root problem leading to antisocial behaviour isn't financial but a lack of cultural values?
There's something off about that cosy consensus view, quite apart from the fact that it is so open to manipulation. It's basically highly conservative and only accepts the status quo.
The reality is that what may have seemed a completely out there view can become the new normal within a surprisingly short time when the environment or culture changes. Apart from politics, you see this in everything from fashion to music, business etc. (e.g. predicting the death of print or record shops, or 'did I really think I looked good in that - what the hell was I thinking?')
Counterfeiting money is an example of something which is relatively easy but can be hugely damaging if done on a large scale - we try to make it harder for the casual counterfeiter but mostly we rely on draconian penalties around it precisely for this reason.
There is also an important cultural aspect that makes certain behaviours abhorrent/unacceptable that would need to be tapped into.
Research is a legitimate and beneficial activity that you would therefore expect to be licensed and controlled.
I feel you are both missing the point that the kind of abuse we are opening ourselves up to inevitably includes catastrophic abuse as well as everyday injustices. Two examples that spring easily to mind - jury nobbling by organised crime, market manipulation by foreign powers. This is the job of government, legislation, and society, and is not within the remit of private corporations or something that can be left to a theory of market self-regulation. The example that a restaurant left to its own devices could get into collecting data so easily underlines that this needs legislative teeth.
I suppose in the case of future clandestine organizations developing individually targeted assassination viruses, they would be able to obtain their own sample from the individual.
It doesn't really matter who is collecting. It's the aggregation and storage that is the root problem - because sooner or later that data will get into all the sufficiently determined wrong hands. If the NSA can't secure data or even know what has got out, California or 23andMe or Google have no chance.
The problem we have is that it is now easier to collect everything than to be selective and this represents a huge risk to security down the line in all kinds of ways. You could say our data footprints have become a form of pollution. To mitigate we need to flip it and make non-collection the default - e.g. introduce strict regulations around destroying non-critical information with a very high bar for even temporary storage and anonymisation wherever possible.