heya,

I like your post, bar one thing.

The idea that the Chinese people are somehow "uneducated", or "retarded", and hence they need a "strong" government to control them.

That same line has been used by tyrants, dictators and bullies since the beginning of time. I'm probably Godwinning this, but Hitler used the same line to justify exterminating the Jews. And Stalin, Kim Il Jong and Burma's junta also used it - for the "good" of society

I know it's some weird Asian cultural thing, that the government somehow needs to "manage" it's people, for the "harmony" of society, but I think that's absolutely bollocks, and smacks of cowardice on the part of the people.

We've moved beyond that time, when warlords and tyrants held power by simple brutality, or how many henchmen they had. Modern China, in some ways has not:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2097372,00.html

However, this is simply how things right now. Ultimately, I hope that the Chinese people man-up, and try and take responsibility for their own choices.

Cheers,
Victor

Hi,

Hmm, "illegal", I don't think that word means what you think it does...lol.

You claim Google is killing off small flight search companies by "illegally" promoting their sites. What exactly is "illegal" here? *sigh*.

What, they don't run ads for their competitors? Big whoope de do. *sigh*. In what sort of idiotic world do you live in where you *have* to do that?

Now, if Google was filtering search results to actively remove those companies, and claiming that it's search results were virgin and untampered with, that's an entirely different kettle of fish. But they're not. They just happen to usually have links at the top saying "hey, you searched for flight results, did you know we also have a flight search engine". That is not illegal, and never has been - it's called cross-promotion, and is as old as the hills.

And in fact, the funny thing about Google is that A. they actually *do* provide information about their competitors and B. They make it very easy to switch - e.g. Chrome makes it easy to change default browsers, unlike the nightmare that is the IE startup wizard, and Google even lets you export your data with them (www.dataliberation.org) - something nobody else does.

You still haven't backed up your "illegal" claim with anything that Google has actually done.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Lol, actually he did a lot wrong (apart from being an cocky little dickwad who somehow magically manages to pisses off *everybody*, including Wikileaks themselves...*rolls eyes*).

Espionage has always been illegal.

This isn't a new trend - governments and diplomacy have always had secrets, and it's been that way since ancient times. It's how diplomacy is conducted. Anybody who claims otherwise is obviously completely ignorant or deluding themselves. And let's be really honest, we all have dirty little secrets we'd like to keep - we've all made plenty of screwsup (myself included), and blunders, or things that we thought we'd get away with.

If anybody actually wants to argue with me on this, I challenge you to reveal right here, on Slashdot - your name, your address, your employee, your salary, how much tax you cheated the government out of last year, your marital status, how many times you've cheated on your spouse/partner, how many times you've thought about another person other than your spouse/partner, how you really feel about your company, how you really feel about your boss. Any takers?

Anyhow, Assange and Brad Manning committed espionage, plain and simple. So yes, they would both be arrested - Bradley being American, he did, Assange isn't, so he hasn't been arrested on those charges yet.

Whether what they did was right, ethically/morally is separate to the legal issue here. Sure, you can say they were sticking it to the man, and fighting for freedom (cue Mel Gibson impression), but you can't argue yourself out of the fact that they committed a crime.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Yup, I'll have to agree 100% with the parent.

What really irks me is stupid, affluent, middle-class suburbanites, sitting around sipping their latte decafs, bemoaning the awful, awful state of affairs and how they're "oppressed", and the "Man has them down"...*sigh*.

Really? Why don't you get off your a*ses and maybe do some travelling and see what the world is really like. In places like China, the CCP can have it's local thugs come and beat you up if you try and stand for election:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2097372,00.html

Heck, in Singapore, supposedly a bastion of "democracy" in Asia - you get hauled in front of a court on trumped up "anti-sedition" laws if you try and start a protest march without a "license".

I don't know if it's something to do with our Chinese culture or whatever, but it seems we're just not very compatible with democracy. Or if we do, we try to implement it with a "Chinese twist" *rolls eyes*, which basically means that whichever incumbent party is in power wields a iron fist of power and quashes opposition, all in the name of "promoting harmony and social well-being". What a farce.

And I'm sure many countries in Africa, the Middle-East, you name it, are the same.

I live in Australia, and I count myself very lucky and very fortunate that our society is open, and respects the rule of law. Sure, I don't agree with everything my government does - and I can vote, protest and file petitions accordingly (or just call our PM a tosser in public), but I never try to erect some ridiculous straw-man argument or spout hyperbole about how my government is "oppressive and tyrannical" and "destroying democracy".

To generalise, you silly Americans don't actually know how good you have it *sigh*. I'm not saying that you shouldn't protest or challenge your government (in fact, that's my whole point), but you seriously need to get some perspective and open up your eyes to the real world, and countries outside yourselves.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Lol, why the heck did the parent get downvoted.

He/she is right, "How do I love thee, let me count the ways" is from Elizabeth Browning's Sonnet XLIII.

However, then again, I'm not sure where in this article the "Let me count the ways" reference is even from...?

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Yeah, Java is firmly entrenched in enterprise, and I don't see massive rewrites happening.

However, that's not to say you can't subtly encourage new projects to go in different directions.

The problem is - what is the best alternative? C# and the .NET family simply lock you into Microsoft.

Personally, I'd love to see Python take hold, but it's still lacking traction in many enterprise settings (although that's changing slowly).

And hmm, why is your lawyer automatically a her? I was always curious whether people's choice of pronouns was directly related or inversely related to their own gender. Would be interesting to a stat analysis on that.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Hmm, ok, so the parent was a bit sensationalist with the 100% claim, and the pseudo-moral overtones are a bit weird.

But he does have a point - practice safe sex goes a long way to cutting down on HIV.

You can talk all you want about all the other possible transmission vectors, but in the grand schema of things, they're a drop in the ocean compared to the number of cases via unsafe sex.

And look, at the end of the day, a person who screws around and does it with random people from bars is a lot likely to contract HIV (or some other STI) than somebody who stays married to the same person for 55 years and doesn't cheat. And this is a broad brush, but that sort of person is probably not likely to get random tattoos every Sunday, or engage in drugs or other risk-taking behaviour.

Like it or not, but as humans, we do reap what we so. Sure, it all boils down to percentage. But you don't do stupid things - whether it's drugs, tattoos, or jumping out of buildings or cagefighting - and chances are, your odds are less of stupid things happening to you. Of course, I'll be the first to admit that stupid things can often be fun or tempting *grins*. But meh, that's life for you.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Every time this comes up, all these people come out of the woodwork, trying to wave about their "knowledge" of the bible.

Please cite your references for any of the previous wild claims. I'd be quite curious to see where you gathered any of this knowledge. Cereal boxes? Overheard at the hairdresses? In the latest copy of E! Weekly?

The bible doesn't "support" slavery, not in the sense that it says slavery is a good thing. Slavery was a common feature of most cultures in the ancient world (Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman etc.) and a integral part of commerce, taxation and how people interacted. The Bible set strict controls around it (e.g. slaves were to be treated like extended family, they were not to be harmed, slaves were automatically freed after 7 years), but it didn't actually outright tell people to ignore the slavery that was around them.

The NT likewise set controls on slavery, and Christian owners were encouraged to free their servants. However, the Bible didn't tell people to order Christians to go demand non-Christians free their slaves. Ultimately, the Bible regarded regarded as all the same - "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28), in the sense that everybody was an equal brother in Christ.

So within Christian circles, slavery was pushed away, but they didn't go so far as to outright tell people to go against society and try to free people outside Christian circles.

This isn't that out of line with the rest of the NT - for example, when a Jew asks Jesus if he really had to pay taxes to Caesar (the Jews obviously weren't happy about being subjugated under the Romans), Jesus tells the Jew to give to Caesar what is his (the coins were stamped with Caesars likeness), and to give to God what was God's.

In the grand scheme of things, things like taxes weren't important, but what mattered was how you served God - since ultimately, for a Christian, this would all come to pass, and what really counted was your spiritual life.

And this is all ignoring the Christian inspiration behind the abolitionists of the 1800's, like William Wilberforce, who used the verses above as well as others to try to push people around them to all abolish slavery.

Regarding the daughters thing, I'm not sure what your source for this, but it sounds like some cute soundbyte trotted out by atheists to justify why they haven't seriously considered spiritual things.

Finally, the wearing two fabrics - off the top of my head, that sounds like Deuteronomy. God set down controls for his people within a specific context - to set his people apart. It sounds strange, but it was part of God's grand plan (don't ask me, lol, God asked for a lot of weird things in those days, which ultimately actually ended up being quite smart).

Also, you won't see any Christians these days refer to these clothes? Ever wonder why? =). You should ask them.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Err, which version of the Bible are you reading...?

I'm fairly sure the bible never commands anybody to kill non-believers. In fact, last time I checked, it stated quite unequivocally "Thou shalt not murder". (Exodus 20:13). Note that it says murder, not kill (http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/001102_ThouShaltNotMurder.html).

The giving/taking of life is God's alone to command - and barring some explicit command from him (as happened in the OT), to take a life is considered by most Christians to be tantamount to blasphemy and trying to supplant God's role.

So sorry, but your post is really full of ignorance.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Ok, this is just getting silly and pointless.

Other posters have already pointed out the factual inaccuracies in the summary (e.g. Leaving Google+ affects your other Google services - no it doesn't, etc.).

However, all these whiney privacy screaming privacy advocates are ignoring one very important fact of life - nobody cares.

In your pathetic, mundane, meaningless life, who (God aside) actually cares? I myself will readily admit I'm a boring person. I mean, sure, I care about my hobbies, my friends, my faith, my likes/dislikes. But seriously, you thing some mindless drone in Mountain View cares? Or somebody halfway around the world?

Unless your name happens to be Barack Obama, or heaven forbid, Lady Gaga (or whatever her real name is, frankly I can't even be bothered to Google it), I doubt anybody outside your circle of friends or families would actually take five minutes out of their day to read up about it.

Nobody is going to stalk you buddy, sorry. Please. Don't be so conceited. There's no global conspiracy with people shadowing your every move. Worst case, some guy is going to try and sell you a breakfast cereal cause the algorithm tells him you like breakfast cereal. Big frigging whoop.

I mean, jeez, do you have a Wikipedia page? Are you of note? Pftt. I'm certainly not.

Heck, if they can make ads more targetted, so I don't have to sit through ads selling me useless c*ap I wouldn't need (e.g. swimming lesson, or hair dye, or woman's products), I'm all for it.

And for a tech-oriented site, people here are surprisingly un-tech savvy.

Do you really think some intern is sitting there look at the sites you visited? There are probably 3.1 billion people out there more interesting than you. It's an *algorithm*, alright. They put in a couple petabytes of data, and it spits out gross aggregated trends. I doubt they even have the capability of picking out a single person, let alone any reason to pick you. Heck, if they picked somebody at random every day of the year, it'll be the heat death of the universe before they pick you.

Look, the only people that care to stalk me, or pillage my personal data are probably friends, family or somebody I have some kind of relationship with. If I had a friend at Google with access to that data, sure, I might be worried. Lol. But I suspect very few people have access to that data. It's not exactly like they'll publish it on the company intranet.

One of my parents works for a financial institution. They told me that one of their colleague was dismissed for opening up a friend's file at the bank, just for curiosity. Companies aren't idiot. They do understand things like need-to-know-basis, and audit trail.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Haha, if you're going to correct somebody, at least try not to be wrong yourself:

"Disposable income is total personal income minus personal current taxes"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_and_discretionary_income

So yes, you do have disposable income, "dumbass" (sic)...

Also - you're on Slashdot, meaning you have access to a internet-connected computer. Last time I checked, that isn't even essential like say food, water and shelter - so you also have discretionary income as well.

So now by your own admission you're greedy, stupid and a "dumbass"...oh, and posting an AC. It all makes sense now.

You realise if you hadn't come out guns blazing like that, and calling people names, people would be more forgiving of your ignorance?

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Yes, but you're saying "Oh, the products may be similar, but they DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO COPY IT!".

Oh please.

This might be semantics, but the way I understand it, Apple isn't saying explicitly that Samsung took an iPad or iPhone and copied it - but that they infringe their patents because they're too similar.

It doesn't matter if Samsung did a complete clean-room implementation, the mere similarity of the two products is apparently somehow enough to stop them from selling it. And therein lies the collossal stupidity of the current patent regime, and Apple's patent trolling with patenting stupidly absurd things like "slide to lock", or "using more than one finger on a touchscreen". I mean, really?

So yes, LG and Apple is exactly the same as Apple and Samsung, except that before this point, LG wasn't as trollish as Apple.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Yeah, I have to agree with the parent and all the other repliers.

This is frigging ridiculous - my old Nokia could record my calls fine. Heck, Windows Mobile 6.5 phones can record the damn call.

Yet on Android - the inablity to record calls has been an outstanding bug for what...2 years?

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2117

And guess what - it's also currently ranked number *eight* by users for Android bugs:

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=-stars&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars

I think it goes to show that Google isn't very good at the "listening to user's part". Lol. I mean, they make cool projects, and I'm sure they're brilliantly smart and all. But actually listening to users is definitely not their forte. Pft.

All the current workarounds require you to root your phone, and even then, work reliably on all handsets they will not...

If this trojan can actually do what it claims to do - I hope somebody dissects it, and packages the functionality into an application on Android Market.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Well, I started reading the top and it sounded reasonable (terrible English aside)...lol....

But then I got to the gist of it. The guy wants Google (and Google Plus) to list his real name as "CopyLion". Like, seriously?

Ok, I know HK's have zany names (one of my best friend's is called "Alpha"), but really? *shakes heads*.

I mean, my name is "Victor" - that's an anglicisation we picked up. My Chinese name is "XiaoKang", which is rendered as my middle name in English. Whenever anybody asks for my name, I give it the same as it's written on my birth certificate, or passport. I'm not going to try and inject something weird like Victor "THE AWESOMENESS" Hooi is my real name...

All of these whiney HK people have real names, jeez. Just render them as PinYin, as I did, and put that as your real name.

This CopyLion dude even gives us an example himeself (or herself) - CHAN, Tai Man . There you go - his name is "Tai Man Chan". Problem solved.

It's funny how they're trying to fly the OH NOES YOUR RACIST!!! flag to try to sneak in using nicknames, and get around rules...lol.

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

They're antangonisers, and that's the reason Israel clearly gave for refusing them entry.

I mean, really, I don't come over into your house, inciting your kids to rise up against you - and if I did, you're well within rights to tell me to go away. That's exactly what Israel did - they put out a big "You're not welcome" mat, and said, please don't here, and if you do, we're pull you on the first plane and send you back home.

The average Palestinian rocket goes nowhere? *sigh*. You're quite silly. It doesn't matter if only one rocket in fifty hits a civilian, the very fact that they're firing rockets at all is wrong. Hamas supports that strategy, as do they support bombing Israeli civilians, and they've never rescinded that support. That, and they're a widely recognised terrorist group. Sorry, but if you decided to ask them to come and run your government, it's hardly unreasonable if other people stop dealing with you.

And Israel didn't "occupy" the territory fifty years ago. It was created by a U.N. mandate. And your assertion that they "kicked" out people who lived there for thousands of years is childish - please go read up on the history of the nation of Israel. The Jews originally inhabited that land since around 1200 BC until they were booted out by invaders later on, they've simply come back and claimed back a small portion of what they had before.

And using your same logic, we should "boot" out all the whites from Australia, as well as from America, Canada and New Zealand. I'm sure they can all fit back into Europe.

Hmm, and possibly we should send those Anglo-Saxon dogs back across the seas, and restore the original Briton and Pict tribes (barring the fact they're essentially extinct).

Cheers,
Victor