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YOU ARE NOT GONNA GET IT GOOGLE!!! You Do. Not. Need. A. Copy. Of. My. Passport.

How about sending them something like this? Or something like that, but instead of blanking out the birth year, you'd leave that year intact, but blank out the month, the day, and pretty much everything else that could possibly be used to identify you?

This could work well too for privacy-related petition drives. Petition your National government for more privacy, and just leave enough information to infer your nationality. And for those of us in the US who'd like to petition our State Senators, just leave your two-letter State abbreviation, and blank out everything else. And if you'd like to show that you're old enough to vote, you could just show them a glimpse of your double-chin, or something.

This would make for some great online petition mosaics too. Of course, it would be super insecure as well. In terms of privacy it would only be slightly better than signing Facebook petitions (or filling out official petitions), so I'm suggesting this as more of a symbolic gesture than anything else.

YOU ARE NOT GONNA GET IT GOOGLE!!! You Do. Not. Need. A. Copy. Of. My. Passport.

How about sending them something like this? Or something like that, but instead of blanking out the birth year, you'd leave that year intact, but blank out the month, the day, and pretty much everything else that could possibly be used to identify you?

This could work well too for privacy-related petition drives. Petition your National government for more privacy, and just leave enough information to infer your nationality. And for those of us in the US who'd like to petition our State Senators, just leave your two-letter State abbreviation, and blank out everything else. And if you'd like to show that you're old enough to vote, you could just show them a glimpse of your double-chin, or something.

This would make for some great online petition mosaics too. Of course, it would be super insecure as well. In terms of privacy it would only be slightly better than signing Facebook petitions (or filling out official petitions), so I'm suggesting this as more of a symbolic gesture than anything else.

They should get rid of the Little Red Book and go with this one.

And that dull, red flag is so outdated? Here's a much nicer one.

One of the more vocal FOSS advocates defines libertarianism here.

He self-designates as an anarchist (often considered far-to-the-left) but I suspect many would call him a right-libertarian.

As for me, I grew up in several hyper-authoritarian countries (Marcos's Philippines, Lee's Singapore, Park's Korea) and saw the negative effects of such authoritarianism. A trip to Panmunjeom on the border between North and South Korea pushed me over the edge into libertarian thinking. Seeing farmers doing their harvesting being herded by uniformed men with guns left a permanent negative afterimage in my brain. Taking a look at the two Koreas from space at night continues to persuade me that authoritarian governments are bad for humanity.

I was not a geek then (I was an English major who was teaching English as a Second Language at the time) but became a geek later, partly because I saw ("Revenge of the Nerds") the revolutionary possibilities provided by technology. For example, a geek named Dee Hock revolutionized business and commerce by inventing the credit card, one of the tools of a society where individuals are empowered to control governments rather than vice-versa.

It isn't well understood:

http://www.paulnoll.com/Oregon/Birds/migrate-magne tic.html

They are not however, seeking warmth. The intra-trip temperature variation outweighs any seasonal variation, they are navigating by habit or instinct.

"Over crowded China"? How can you say that? Most of China (as in the USA) is close to empty. The vast majority of the population live in very small parts of it.

(BTW, it says on their home page that they've had 61,462,759 hits in 227 locations and a daily hit average of 78,400 - in case anyone wants to measure the /. effect).

Most of Korea is between the ages of 10-39 (http://www.paulnoll.com/Korea/History/South-Korea n-demographics.html/) crappy link.

Compared to Canada which is somewhat evenly distributed and is hard to dissect, however since the even distribution one would assume the majority of the population is average adults with a family (http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/maps/peopleandsoc iety/age/age1996/can_graph.gif/image_view/)

AND America which is about the same as canada's distribtion...(http://www.censusscope.org/us/print _chart_age.html/

The results from this study are interesting, they are either flawed by census irregularity due to cultural differences or its just freakin strange.

"I guess this means North Korea will have to use Microsoft?"

http://www.paulnoll.com/Korea/History/Korean-night .html

You can already see the difference between Microsoft in North Korea and Linux Sourth Korea.

Canola is the fancy name they switched to after marketing figured out why rape seed wasn't selling. (Except for China where they don't know what the word means.)

It is surprisingly hard to find any census data on China (probably for obvious reasons). The data I could find is from over a decade ago. At that time (1986) over 60% of the population fell into the "peasant" category. Even if that number is only 50% now, that is still 600 million peasants who certainly aren't really in the market for wireless access points. Even a majority of those who are "non-peasants" probably aren't doing well enough to squander money on a WAP considering GDP per capita was only $467 in 1997.

I would guess less then 10% of the population of china could realistically be considered a "market" for electronic goods. That is a non-trivial 120 million people, but it certainly does not dwarf the combined western markets.

The Pussy-footing is because of the 1.6Billion ton tiger known as China. Do you think China will sit idley by as US "Coalition" forces stroll across the DMZ?

Don't forget last time we went in there, China sent its own "troops" and pushed us back to the 38th Parallel.

China has 55 recognized minorities, and many more minor unrecognized ones. the Naaxi live around Lijiang, and are a matriarchal ethnic group. There are hundreds of miao, often called hmong, groups in southwest china, laos, and thailand. the US used miao soldiers in its proxy war in laos, I think. Many such refugees live in Minessota now. There are silver, yellow, flower, black and many other kinds of miao people in china. At one time, there was a Miao kingdom in sw china, and they used to kick ass in their heyday. The gui or ge people, also in Yunnan province, are an unrecognized minority, but nevertheless have their own language and customs. I don't think the word means anything in mandarin, since it's in their own language. I got to visit a few of their villages a while ago. There are many such interesting groups, including a tribe of hook nosed, white haired jews who were brought over by Khubilai Khan to be some of his guards. I think they've managed to avoid intermarriage, for the most part. And of course there are muslim uighers(sic) in the northwest, and the tibetans in uh Tibet. Warning that spellings are transliterations and are likely to differ from place to place. Also, my memory is not so good.

It's hard to find good references on the web, put a list of the official minorities + some more info is here