You're right, of course, when you say that there are times we just have to roll our eyes and let it pass by. But when we start to do so too early and too often, we are led down a dangerous road. It is precisely when comments with such racial overtones become acceptable and even applauded that we should be worried.

In any event, I felt I had to at least say my part. I tend to write a lot, as a philosophy major. As a wise person once said, "Someone is WRONG on the internet."

I grew up in Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world. We have reached a point where over 50% of the population is comprised of visible minorities. So yeah, I might know a thing or two about growing up in a multicultural environment.

Are those really your arguments for allowing such racially charged comments? That I should suck it up, or that I can't blend in to society? That I'm immature or insecure or embarassed if I can't find such insults funny? Ad hominems abound, but not a single good argument for allowing such racial insults. Let me give you an(other) argument against racial insults that doesn't rely on blatantly precarious logic. Allow me to provide a first-hand account of a minority reader on /..

I am not a frequent contributer to /. discussions, and there are plenty of reasons why that is so. The first is that my primary expertise lies in philosophy and somewhat less so in other disciplines of the humanities, but not particularly in technology. As such, I tend to take a back seat and reap the collective wisdom of the more tech-savvy masses on /.. However, where my expertise does come into play (rarely as it may), my input does tend to stimulate conversation or serve to inform others on relevant issues. I have a background in Philosophy which allows me to contribute to discussions like think-typing (where I link to ideas of Embedded Cognition and Enactivism that are highly relevant in AI research and other "do with just thinking" technologies), the possible problem of over-reductionism in the disciplines generally termed "hard sciences", and whether it is ethical to summarize research in certain areas of study in a biased manner. My background in Criminology allows me to comment on certain legal issues like whether a warrant system is necessary or effective.

At any rate, I feel like I can and do contribute meaningful content to /. discussions. However, there are many more times where I feel I can contribute, but the ambience in those particular discussions are too stifling for me to contribute. This current thread is a prime example of a stifling social environment. There cannot be free and open social discourse in an oppressive environment. This is clear when the state acts as the oppressor (a completely valid criticism against the Chinese government, I might add). This is, however, less clear when society acts as the oppressor.

If the state says that I am free to practice Islam, for example, but whenever I go and pray in a public space (inevitable since there are specific times that prayer is required in Islam), I receive bouts of verbal harassments, can it truly be said that I am free to practice Islam? If I fear that whenever I practice my religious practices, I will be the subject of verbal abuses, am I really free to do so? This is not fear of prosecution - for I will not be prosecuted by the state - but it is a fear of social ostracization. If everywhere there are people hurling insults at Muslims for a cheap laugh, does that not contribute to the social oppression of a Muslim? If I need to, as you say, blend in, presumably by somehow altering my religious practices, could I still be said to be free to practice my religion? The answer that the state allows free religious practice completely misses the point. Whether it is the state doing the oppressing or society doing the oppressing, SOMEONE is being oppressed.

In the case of this story, we have one person who openly generalizes the Chinese people via the actions of their government (would it be fair to say that all Americans were war-hungry when Bush and Cheney were in power?). We have other people who mock the Chinese, and we have still others who tell the person who has a problem with that mocking that they are somehow a weaker human being (in that they are lacking a sense of security or maturity or a sense of humour). When I stand up for myself and my ethnicity, I am assailed with verbal assaults coming in at all sides claiming that I am somehow a lesser human being because I am voicing my protest against a certain racially charged practice. How can I feel like an equal part of this community? When an important part of my identity is openly attacked, and I cannot defend it without having ad hominems and additional insults hurled against me?

So while it may be the case that /. paints itself as an open, welcoming, and accepting community, if the population is openly hostile against a particular identifiable group, then that particular group can hardly be said to be equal members of the community. As the case is such, I feel that I, as a Chinese person, am casted as an inferior human being in the /. community at times. I do feel oppressed by many members of the community who choose to engage in open mockery of Chinese people, and especially those who defend them. This makes me less willing to contribute to /., and depriving the /. community of a voice that speaks from a different perspective.

If it is a shame for a project to lose contributors or potential contributors due to oppressive circumstances (Wikipedia is an example of being analogous to "state oppression"), is it not equally a shame for /. to lose contributors or potential contributors to its discussions due to socially oppressive circumstances (analogous to "popular oppression")?

So to answer your final question: no, I am not embarrassed that my family cannot blend in. Sorry, I am proud that my family WILL NOT blend in. We are solidly middle class, if not upper middle. I am well educated, attending one of the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the world, studying under some of the leading minds in my chosen fields. We are Canadian, but we are also Chinese. We have our cultural differences. We have different practices. If the point is to blend in, then it takes away the significance of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is good PRECISELY BECAUSE we are all allowed to act differently and NOT to blend in and fully adopt all western practices. If we were required to blend in or risk social ostracization, then there is no point in multiculturalism. People practicing cultures different from the mainstream would be socially ostracized. I am happy that we will not blend in, and that we are different, and that we do not face popular oppression in Toronto.

You seem to be confused when you bring up multiculturalism, then make a point about cultural homogeneity. So maybe you should look in the mirror and try to examine where your beliefs truly lie. Examine what multiculturalism really means.

I hate to double post, but I would just like to illustrate my point more vividly.

There's a difference between an acknowledgement of sociological fact and racism. For example, I can say that there is a higher rate of reported offences and convictions amongst the Black population without being racist. That does not entail that I can say that many Afro-Americans are gangsters and should be locked up.

Likewise, you can criticize the policies and practices of the Chinese government. But that does not entail that you can start throwing around Chinglish as a cheap laugh against Chinese people.

He could easily have made his point without using Chinglish, but he chose to throw that insult against Chinese people, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In my opinion, it's even worse if he did it unintentionally - if racist insults are trivialized to the point where a cheap laugh at the expense of an entire race is considered insightful and someone who raises a voice in protest against such a racial insults is considered a troll, then we have reached a point where racial minorities are oppressed on /. in a way that is socially harmful for the community as a whole.

Overreacting? I merely pointed out that his racial denigration of Chinese people was completely unnecessary for the point he was trying to make. For a relatively liberal, left-leaning community that embraces the concept of open contribution to society, /. seems generally pretty intolerant when racial minorities point out posts that are unnecessarily racist. We are labeled trolls or whiners or, as you say, someone who overreacts. However, is this not exactly the type of unfair treatment that a considerable section of the /. population professes against?

People who share music or exchange whatever form of information or entertainment they wish are labeled pirates, thieves, crooks in the media or by corporations. This is a malicious misrepresentation of a minority (a sizable minority, but a minority nonetheless) group of people. But when racial minorities complain of the same malicious misrepresentation, we are posting flamebait? We are being too sensitive? We should "man up", as it were?

Just because this "Chinglish" concept exists, and may indeed be prolific amongst lay Chinese who do not have access to quality education, it's okay to make fun of it? Would it be okay if I generalized all Blacks as gangsters or muggers since violence is relatively prevalent in Afro-American communities with low socio-economic standing?

I remember reading a post on /. that said that we are letting the corporations dictate the game when we allow them to label us as pirates. When we openly embrace such a derogatory label. So no. I will not let insensitive, racist clods dictate the game in /. conversation by allowing them to throw in racial insults willy-nilly.

Besides, I was under the impression that /. is a place where people should feel comfortable reading, commenting, and otherwise participating in the community. Allowing such casual racial insults and then categorizing people who are genuinely offended by this type of behaviour as somehow weak or, more vulgarly, as pussies does no service to that end. I am not some bleeding heart liberal who is attacking certain types of speech for the sake of whatever conception of racism is out there. I am a Chinese person, offended by a Chinese slur. Just because I can take it doesn't mean I should stay silent and allow such hostile behaviour to proliferate in a supposedly open and welcoming community.

Hilarious! What a great rendition of the broken English of all Chinese people! Especially those who often deal with foreign, mainly English-speaking businesses. Not a racist comment at all! Completely appropriate AND necessary for the point you're trying to make.

Oh, sorry, I must have forgotten that I'm Chinese for a moment.

Me love your post long time!

True enough. I made a reply to one of your sibling posts that relates to this. If this technology were to be implemented, it would also require something to provide input for your normal brain-body feedback loops in order to be functionally effective. Without those feedback loops, your cognition in typing may be severely impaired, because you're essentially taking away (actually making invisible) the interface through which you communicate with your environment.

Try, for example, to type on an imaginary keyboard with your fingers in the air. For me, and for most people who are adept at typing I would imagine, it's much more difficult to do so than to type at an actual keyboard. That's because we're taking away the tactile input for the feedback loop, and thus taking away a major part of the cognitive process for typing.

Now of course this technology isn't directly analogous to typing. You're actually thinking of letters. So try to imagine just thinking of letters instead of typing. It's a lot slower, isn't it? You have to think of the words, then you have to think about how you spell it, and then you think about the actual letters themselves. A much more effective technology would be one that can read your brainwave patterns in a way that it can read what WORDS you're thinking about. This letter-based tech is an important stepping stone towards a word-based tech. But even then, I'm somewhat sceptical of how well it would work without providing sufficient input for your brain-body feedback loops which are a big part of your cognitive capacities.

This actually comes really close to a pretty recent argument against brain-in-a-vat thought experiments. Envatted brain thought experiments try to illustrate that cognition resides solely in the brain. However, if you really think about the experiment carefully, an envatted brain would require something so similar to a body that it could be said to be a surrogate body. This article written by a Philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, Evan Thompson, explains this argument in much greater detail.

The take-home is that you're exactly right. Complex feedback loops between brain and body seem to play a huge functional role in cognition. So any "do X only with brain waves" not only fails to capture the fact that there is a very complicated mechanism in place to actually capture the brain waves, but it also misses the point in that doing things with just your brain is HARDER than doing it with your body, because you are deprived of the input required for those brain-body feedback loops.

If this typing experiment is implemented, you would have to put a keyboard layout on the screen or at least SOMEWHERE so it can provide feedback input. Without that keyboard (either on-screen or elsewhere) providing input for feedback, your cognitive capacities are actually severely hindered.

I only speak for myself here, but it seems like thinking about letters is actually harder than typing on a keyboard. I don't really think about what letters I'm pressing when I type, I just think of the words and the vast majority of the time, it's just muscle memory doing its thing. Perhaps for novel words or words that I don't quite remember how to spell, I'll think of the letters individually. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Further, it's not entirely clear that our cognitive capacities reside solely in our brain. The rest of our body could have a role to play in cognition. It could be the case that when we're typing, a big part of our typing cognitive process actually depends on our body executing typing actions. For more info, see Embodied Embedded Cognition, Enactivism, and other related philosophy of mind or AI theories.

You seem to ask an awfully odd question, sir. Those purposes (and other related purposes, such as Facebook status updates, etc.) are precisely the main point of these services!

"Aside from watching TV and playing video games, what's the point of a TV?!?"

"Aside from being able to read many books without having to physically carry them all around, what's the point of the Nook?!?!!??"

Isn't that kind of begging the question? The problem here is, as you said, not being able to discriminate between useful and useless data. So how do we know what's relevant (a.k.a. useful)? Do we only collect data by using humans interpret the data? If so, then the role of the computer is much diminished. Do we automate the process by having computers discriminate between useful and useless data? Well, that's exactly the problem - we can't figure out how to do that yet. Even if we only have relevant data, how do we assign semantic value to the data in order for the computer to properly parse the data and give us semantically useful results?

It's not as simple as just collecting relevant data. Even if it were, that in and of itself is a major hurdle.

Thomas Nagel famously argued against the reductionist approach of physics and other "hard science" disciplines in his paper "What is it like to be a bat?". A rough summary of the paper is that he thinks science may be able to tell us how something works, like the echolocation abilities of a bat, but it's much harder to give an account for how it's like to actually experience something, like what echolocation actually feels like.

This is all by way of saying that you're spot on. Reductionist approaches are problematic and have widely known to be problematic for at least decades if not longer. This is not to say that reductionism is necessarily wrong - it could be the case that if we know everything physical about the world, we will know everything about the world - but it seems less and less likely to those who are not in the "hard sciences". Psychology and Neuroscience remain two distinct disciplines. You can't tell sociological phenomena simply by observing and describing in physical terms physical phenomena. And etc.

This may be an example of the latter. The sociological phenomena of groups have been well-studied by sociologists and psychologists, and we do have quite extensive explanations of group and social dynamics from these disciplines. Yet here, some physics students come in and try to study what has been studied and come to some questionable conclusions that seem to be problematic if examined from a sociological or psychological perspective (as pointed out by GP).

As a product of both Western and Eastern cultural influences, I think that a remark like that is not necessarily off the mark. Freedom isn't something you can just give to a people and expect them to do great things with it. It depends greatly on the socio-cultural norms and lifestyles of a people, and how well their infrastructure can support it. Without proper education, for example, radical freedom can result in someone throwing their lives away by making poor choices.

Now you can argue that freedom means that it's their choice if they throw their lives away, and it's none of your business. And it's true, that's a great thing about freedom. But you have to keep in mind that that very viewpoint is a product of your socio-cultural upbringing. We Chinese have many sayings that refer to other Chinese as brothers or sisters, as one big family. If a member of your family suffers, the entire family suffers. To the Chinese, that's not a good thing. So with even this one facet of freedom, the freedom of others to throw their lives away and the freedom for you to ignore them, is both a strength and weakness depending on your point of view.

Now I'm not a cultural/moral relativist. I very much dislike relativism as a philosophy in general. However, that doesn't mean that we in the West can feel smug about our superior cultural values. It just means that there may be some true measure of how to live a good life, but we don't necessarily know what that measure is. Freedom is, in my view, definitely a part of that measure, but there still remains several questions. How much freedom? Which aspects of life should be subject to freedom, and which should be subject to regulation? Questions like these have not been conclusively answered, and it's up to the people of a certain culture to try to determine for themselves what those answers are. Isn't that a part of freedom? To be able to decide, as a people, what rules should govern your own society?

So yes, I think that Obama is showing at least some cultural insensitivity. Not because of some far-left cultural relativist reasons. But because a part of freedom lies in the ability to define the boundaries of freedom in your own society.

(I realize that there will inevitably be replies that will ask how the people of China are determining their own freedoms, since their system of government is not democratic. There are several responses to these replies. One of which is that the people of China are not sufficiently inclined to pursue the Western style of democracy because the Chinese government is working well enough for them. China's growth as an economic powerhouse has not been an accident. Another response is that they do have some elected regional representation, but that their power is simply not as great as their counterparts in the West. And it's not an oddity that the power structure in one government is different from another. -- In any event, regardless of whether you think each individual Chinese person has the power to change the circumstances, the fact is that it's not Obama's place, or any American's place, to decide for them whether they want to pursue freedom, how much of it to pursue, and in which aspects of life they should pursue it.)

Claims like this have been answered many times over. Just because Snow Leopard and Jaguar share the OS X prefix, it doesn't mean they are the same OS in the sense that XP SP1 and XP SP3 are the same OS. We're not just talking about the number of advancements or features introduced in between, rather, computers that shipped with Jaguar cannot run Snow Leopard and vice versa. They run on entirely different architectures (PPC vs x86). So no, there isn't this single release of "OS X" that costs $500+++.

Why is getting high or gambling enjoyable? These are all addictions of some sort, they can't be explained purely by giving an account of perceived entertainment value versus other perceived life values.

A survey doesn't need to access your personal data, but the developers/publishers of those surveys may want to access your personal data (for whatever reason, nefarious or mundane). I suspect that it's just much more convenient and less labour-intensive for Facebook to have the same policies for personal data disclosure for all apps than to have different types of disclosure for different apps. Even if we assume the technical/programming aspect of it is easy enough, there would need to be a screening process for each individual app to ensure that it actually needs the data it's requesting, or complies with certain conditions, etc. A lot of policing would have to be done, and I'm not sure it's entirely fair to ask Facebook to hire more people to essentially protect its ignorant users from themselves.

As to why people allow this, they just don't see the harm in it. Whether they should see the harm in it or not is a different question altogether, but the fact is that they're just ignorant to the risks. And we're so conditioned with "OK click-throughs" that most people probably click the allow button without even realizing that they're giving permission for the app to access their data.