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What you are describing have been happening in Japan for 1~2 decades now. Local youngsters are refraining from breeding for reason exactly as you mentioned. Population in Japan in decreasing at 300k/yr.

The StarChase system is a pursuit reduction technology that contains a miniature GPS module encased in a tracking projectile/tag and a launcher mounted on a police vehicle. It is neither a bullet nor a weapon as the BBC story claims. It doesn't use gunpowder, it uses compressed air. The word bullet does not appear anywhere on the company's website - except where another ignorant journalist has used it. You'd think the BBC would be better and more educated than the Des Moines, Iowa local news. You would also be incorrect in that assumption.

You can argue that 'weapon' means 'tool used to achieve a goal' - but come on, this is the BBC we're talking about. You put the words "American police" and "bullet" together and quite naturally scare words like "weapon" come out. Look at the quote on the page: "There are other ways to track vehicles and this could raise some civil liberties issues." What does that even mean? Fleeing from the police, endangering the lives of everyone on the road and all the BBC can think of is how the criminal's rights might be violated...somehow. Unfortunately this mental rot extends throughout the entire organization and its journalists are simply no longer able to think straight. I doubt anyone even thought for a second about the bias. Sad, because once the BBC was a paragon of honesty. Look back at newsreels and 80s broadcasts and you will see a very different organization.

There are guns that fire projectiles with compressed air and have been since at least the 18th century. This is the Star Chase system, to me it looks like a compressed air gun and that fires a bullet like projectile so the BBC is essentially right. It seems to me that you are getting worked up over nothing because you don't like the BBC and have no made up 'EU wants circus performers to wear hard-hats' type story to get worked up over this morning.

The StarChase system is a pursuit reduction technology that contains a miniature GPS module encased in a tracking projectile/tag and a launcher mounted on a police vehicle. It is neither a bullet nor a weapon as the BBC story claims. It doesn't use gunpowder, it uses compressed air. The word bullet does not appear anywhere on the company's website - except where another ignorant journalist has used it. You'd think the BBC would be better and more educated than the Des Moines, Iowa local news. You would also be incorrect in that assumption.

You can argue that 'weapon' means 'tool used to achieve a goal' - but come on, this is the BBC we're talking about. You put the words "American police" and "bullet" together and quite naturally scare words like "weapon" come out. Look at the quote on the page: "There are other ways to track vehicles and this could raise some civil liberties issues." What does that even mean? Fleeing from the police, endangering the lives of everyone on the road and all the BBC can think of is how the criminal's rights might be violated...somehow. Unfortunately this mental rot extends throughout the entire organization and its journalists are simply no longer able to think straight. I doubt anyone even thought for a second about the bias. Sad, because once the BBC was a paragon of honesty. Look back at newsreels and 80s broadcasts and you will see a very different organization.

LOL. What is this, 1955? Labor unions don't exist to help workers. Labor unions exist to help labor union bosses and funnel money to one particular political party. That's it.

Maybe once upon a time, a long time ago, labor unions had a point. Not any more. They are corrupt cannot even keep their own members from deserting. Why are their members deserting? Because labor bosses don't give a shit about their members. Moreover unions are racist.

The cure you propose is worse than the disease.

Apple is a failure in China

No I used Amazon to verify average costs of a Chinese Android phone and the what you get for that cost, based on what the Largest Online retailer stated are in realtime was the most popular Android phones, and then quote the price and specifications of that model. To quote myself "1,165 yuan...so a little less than average. its a Motorola; dual-mode dual standby 1.2GHz dual-core Android 4.0 system 4.3-inch phone" Its actually been overtake by "ZTE ZTE U930 3G Mobile Phone (Black) TD-SCDMA/GSM, Android4.0, 4.3-inch IPS screen, 1.2Ghz dual-core" for 650 Yuan and you can see why. All the phones in the top ten are this price or over all with >4" screens and dual core processer over >1.2Ghz. The lie that the Chinese are using some kind on Android Dumbphone is insulting everyone's intelligence, as it pushes the bounds of Logic. http://translate.google.com.hk/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Famazon.cn

Most smartphones in China are sold at $79

Not according to the Chinese who claim the average is 1,393 yuan(about $220) admittedly I agree the iPhone has priced itself out of the market for short term profitability in the American market.

What can you get for 1,393 yuan in china...lets have a look at the Chinese Amazon.cn http://translate.google.com.hk/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=amazon.cn unsurprisingly their top selling phone is 1,165 yuan...so a little less than average. its a Motorola; dual-mode dual standby 1.2GHz dual-core Android 4.0 system 4.3-inch phone. Its a better phone than I own :) Interesting that its a Motorola too, as I haven't heard much good news about them in a while. The bottom line is check your fact before posting them.

Lets be honest about Apples market share...Its a localised phenomena in US and UK,

Tell that to Japan, Germany and China. And quarter by quarter numbers seem good in many other markets too.

Not sure where you are getting your data from. :) This is the latest article I can find [sorry about the Google translate] http://translate.google.com.hk/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://data.eguan.cn/yidonghulian_147283.html It shows Apples market share *dropping* from 6.2% to 4.2 while Android continued to rise to 90.1%. To put that in perspective. Apples market share is 21times smaller...do you seriously want to claim that the Chinese Developers are developing any Applications. Apple is a dead platform in the largest market in the world.

As an example:

Go to http://www.google.com.hk/
and put in
tiananmen square massacre

It'll show those three words in red everywhere on the page.

link to test out yourself: https://www.google.com.hk/?esrch=SearchNotices::OptIn&q=%E9%95%BF%E6%B1%9F&hl=en

Screenshot of Google banning the term Freedom of Speech: http://image.dude-suit.net/albums/userpics/10002/googlecensor.png

and it's google blocking it, since I'm in the states unlike their blog where they make it sound like it's china blocking before the search gets to them, which is untrue.

Yes, now if they only got rid of censoring Tienanmen and other bullshit..

Um, okay.

Did you try the Chinese character search?
http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=en&safe=off&qscrl=1&q=%E5%A2%9E%E5%9F%8E+%E6%9A%B4%E4%B9%B1&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=
I doubt the government cares about controlling the foreigners.

Google still seems to be keeping search results good - http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=Liu+Xiaobo .. But then I am not up to date on whether google is blocked or not. Either way I sense a streisand effect about to woop some commie butt.

Yet http://www.google.com.hk/images?hl=zh-CN&safe=strict&q=tiananmen+1989&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=_WdHTJLKIYqOjAfC-uT0Bg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQsAQwAA&gbv=1&ei=AWhHTJ2zEYj-vQOcuOW1Ag

http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=porn&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=CBd_8519HTLjeOYGwNO_s7YsEAAAAqgQFT9B6Nz0

Including myself I know 3 regular slashdot posters in China.
Right now the google.cn front page is one big image (which looks like a variant of the google basic page) link to
http://www.google.com.hk/webhp?hl=zh-CN&sourceid=cnhp

with three text links to
http://www.google.cn/music/homepage?sourceid=cnhp
http://translate.google.cn/?sourceid=cnhp#
and
http://www.google.cn/products?sourceid=cnhp
underneath it.
The only other item on the page is a small text link to http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/, which looks to be a license or copyright statement.

So much for do no evil.

To be fair, when I search for the (WARNING, graphic images) taboo words on the HK site they take me to from Google.cn, I find the "social stability" threatening images linked to by Google.

If bowing to China is making the user take a single additional click from the google.cn landing page and bringing them right to unfiltered internet searches, that's some pretty lame bowing. I guess if both parties are happy and the Chinese people can very easily get to unfiltered search then I'm happy. Or does Google's Hong Kong search work differently inside China? If it works the same way as I see, I don't know how you could consider that evil. I perceive that Google has succeeded in granting the people of greater China with unfiltered search if they can tolerate an additional mouse click. This is assuming the Great Firewall of China or some government monitoring agency isn't watching these Google.cn -> Google.hk transactions.

How is attempting to bring unfiltered search to the people of China evil?

So subtle a difference, really, from a practical point of view. Yet this is acceptable where the other approach wasn't.

Yeah since it's not really buying China much I see it more as a demonstration that at any point in time China can force Google China to do whatever it wants. Google.hk is (NSFW) unfiltered so now the Chinese government has made the user take an extra click to get to the search box that produces unfiltered results. I bet it has more to do with a display of dominance and control than any real effective censorship concerns. Baidu remains ahead of the curve and actively pleases the government to maintain a facade of faux independence but is really just kowtowing in advance. Either way they're both obeying. If you are a Chinese National and are loyal to the current Chinese government, your selection of search engine is perhaps influenced by these two distinct images.

We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.

It's kind of funny, the "landing page" is a false image of a search box and when you click anywhere on the page, you go to Google Hong Kong. How this is okay as opposed to a redirect, I'll never know ... and once that page starts eventually taking users to unfiltered results of Tiananmen Square, I think the Chinese Government will take a few more steps to stop it.

Of course it looks like ibtimes has a policy that only allows them to link to more ibtimes sites instead of -- you know -- the original source of all their quotes.

We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk—where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.

It's kind of funny, the "landing page" is a false image of a search box and when you click anywhere on the page, you go to Google Hong Kong. How this is okay as opposed to a redirect, I'll never know ... and once that page starts eventually taking users to unfiltered results of Tiananmen Square, I think the Chinese Government will take a few more steps to stop it.

Of course it looks like ibtimes has a policy that only allows them to link to more ibtimes sites instead of -- you know -- the original source of all their quotes.

http://www.google.com.hk/search?num=30&hl=en&ei=xF60S9qqNMKB8gbkhtFC&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAkQBSgA&q=chinese+earthquake+detector&spell=1

As far as I understand, the kind of filtering China is doing here is based on URLs, so that the firewalls don't have to be too stateful. That's why people in China can contact Google HK just fine, but when they try to search for "tiananmen" or "tank man", boom, timeout.

However, when using SSL, the URLs aren't actually transmitted in plaintext; it would take China a CPU-intensive man-in-the-middle attack to break it. So why can't Google just retaliate by redirecting http://google.com.hk/ to a special https://google.com.hk/ or something to that effect? Further blocking would become cat-and-mouse, and would require China to block Google outright.

As far as I understand, the kind of filtering China is doing here is based on URLs, so that the firewalls don't have to be too stateful. That's why people in China can contact Google HK just fine, but when they try to search for "tiananmen" or "tank man", boom, timeout.

However, when using SSL, the URLs aren't actually transmitted in plaintext; it would take China a CPU-intensive man-in-the-middle attack to break it. So why can't Google just retaliate by redirecting http://google.com.hk/ to a special https://google.com.hk/ or something to that effect? Further blocking would become cat-and-mouse, and would require China to block Google outright.

Google just posted to their blog what they're doing.

They're redirecting all their users to http://google.com.hk/ and are maintaining a China service availability page to update on the status of their services in mainland China.

They also plan on maintaining their presence in China for sales and development, though they say that sales will be dependent on whether the .hk page is blocked.

no sir you got it all wrong, it means drooling over Alexa Vega on google images:

http://images.google.com.hk/images?rlz=1C1GGLS_enHK291HK303&sourceid=chrome&q=vega&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

I don't speak Chinese, but it seems not to be censored. For instance, the last line on this results page says (putting it through Google Translate) "According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown".

(The query is for Tienanmen Square, I think, which I used Wikipedia to "translate". The google.com.hk results for the same query are very different).

I think you need to search it in Chinese. (The English-speakers in China already know about the censorship).

I don't know any Chinese, but using the title of the article on zh.Wikipedia and an image search: .cn .hk

Here you go.

http://images.google.com.hk/images?q=de_aztec&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

you can paint them like leo did:

Fondle me!

Vietnam, Korea, India.
That's three.

Vietnam, Korea, India.
That's three.

If this kind of thing happens here in Canada, there will be alot more mean stream media coverage.

There are tons on more information on the web, but all written by various Chinese media in North America: http://news.google.com.hk/news?hl=zh-TW&tab=wn&ie= UTF-8&ncl=http://hk.news.yahoo.com/060210/12/1l4d1 .html