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Comment Re:Seems like a plan to me (Score 1) 71

If this is a plan, it's either a plan for quiet transition to free speech or a bad plan. This kind of censorship is ineffective in the long term. All this can achieve is that anti-government rioting starts not at political rallies but in excited crowds like at the fall of the Berlin Wall. Party officials seem to think that since everyone knows the CCP is corrupt, letting the speak is harmless. This is wrong because the net makes criticism of the government "common knowledge" in the game theoretic sense. This makes dissenters more willing to speak since they know the extent of support they have.

Comment Is this the work of Timothy Gowers? (Score 2) 72

This is very probably the result of a widespread boycott of Elsevier started by Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers and other researchers. Supporting RWA was one of the reasons they were fed up with Elsevier.

How it all started: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

Comment Come on, companies don't hire criminals (Score 5, Interesting) 364

I'm fairly young and I already start getting reactions along the line of "Are you a criminal or what?" when I tell people I don't have a facebook profile. Also, I'm pretty sure the police would be watching people without public social network presence for they are hiding something for sure. Fortunately for me, they're probably too lazy to get up from facebook.

Comment Misleading as usual (Score 1) 157

Hungary's constitution was completely rewritten in 1989: the current one has only 1 common sentence with the 1949 constitution, the one stating that the country's capital is Budapest.

Hungarian politicians are sometimes *too* enthusiastic about the wonders of the West. One time, our President even treated the half-wit nazoid Bernie Ecclestone like a king, simply because he's into Formula 1. This time, they must have read that Eco essay stating Apple is like Catholicism.

Comment Deicide tends to be controversial (Score 2) 387

From the TFA:
"Multiverse theories aren't theories—they're science fictions, theologies, [...]"

Theology is the keyword here. Postulating a multiverse with many similar universes to this one basically eliminates any objective significance this particular planet Earth with its history has. You can nuke everything and "know" that our culture will continue in other universes. So accepting a multiverse theory would destroy ethics: it would kill God.

Comment Re:Also to provide them with food and drink and to (Score 1) 108

This is basically about the selfishness of the living.

First, we think of how the death of a person will affect us, not whether the person is happy after his death or not.
Second, there is fierce competition for resources; taking from the dead (who cannot protest) was always easy.

I think we may be too obsessed about "immortality" i.e. making people remember us and we are really afraid of the spiritual afterlife as described by, say, Egyptians.

Comment Re:he's right (Score 1) 680

Let's just say that if I received $10 every time I read a philosophical misunderstanding of Gödel's theorem, I would be a rich man by now. I've heard many times that it means NO axiomatic system is consistent and complete. Duh. I have also met a philosophy student (who studied mathematical logic as part of the university curriculum) could tell the difference between the Axiom of Choice and the Banach-Tarski Paradox. I've tried for hours to explain a philosophically inclined would-be engineer that 1 is greater or equal to 0. He said it isn't, because it is *greater* than zero, not greater or equal. Duh. Yet, most of my knowledge that I couldn't have learnt from books came from a maths teacher who is both a serious mathematician and a serious philosopher. Mathematics and philosophy should be inseparable; the fact that they are treated as separate fields shows that we, as a society, understand neither.
The Media

Submission + - PR And The Game Media, The Rockstar Way

simoniker writes: Discussing PR and the media, former Rockstar Games PR rep Todd Zuniga discusses how the company tried to manipulate the game press as part of an in-depth article on how the two forces interact: "In part, it's a numbers game... Otherwise, it's history. Who wrote negatively about the games, and who hasn't? We never worked with [gaming website] GameSpot while I was there because 'they just didn't get it.'... Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: 'Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U'."

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