Slashdot Mirror

Not only that, but for all the people applauding Ecuador, have they noticed that Ecuador declined to renew the US lease at its Manta air base, and turned around and offered it to China? Here's a story from two years ago predicting this, something that has gotten utterly overlooked in this debate.

Does anyone really believe that as China presses its advantage in these areas that the Chinese Communist Party is going to be a better steward of the interests of freedom and democracy, even in light of anyone's opinions on US errors and missteps in foreign policy?

Hohohoho....

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=30&art_id=66841&sid=19216680&con_type=1

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=17&art_id=38649&sid=12309429&con_type=1

I do not have any stats to back that up but you bet that lower band (band: school rating system) Hong Kong schools seem to be full of maladjusted children and incidentally most of the parents of problem children here both work. Contrast that with the children involved in a recent tragedy in a poor neighbourhood.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4238589a12.html
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=12&art_id=55157&sid=15812229&con_type=3&d_str=20071015&sear_year=2007

Those links however do not have any of the positive comments that the SCMP quoted from the officials of the school where the children attended. They say that the children were well behaved top students in their class and they are that in spite of a mother who was not very stable but at home and being part of a poor family.

Show me a passage in any lawbook that equates copyright infringement with theft.

Chapter IIIa of Prosecuting Intellectual Property Crimes (my copy is in dead-tree form, but it's also available online: http://www.cybercrime.gov/ipmanual.htm), by David Goldstone: "the criminalization of large-scale copying even in the absence of economic motivation by the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, Pub. L. No. 105-147, 111 Stat. 2678 (1997). . .

Also, in many jurisdictions copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime.

In the U.S., all copyright cases are Federal, and controlled by the United States Code and stare decisis in the Federal District and Circuit courts, and the Supreme Court. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html#301 17 USC 301. Under the United States Code, copyright infringement can be (depending on the factual circumstances present) either civil or http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506 criminal (17 USC 506).

Many extra-territorial jurisdictions treat, or can treat, (c) infringement as criminal.

U.S.: http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/06/28/1699696.h tm

Viet Nam: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php ?num=06SOC080706

New Zealand:http://www.times.co.nz/cms/news/2006/07/ar t100012268.php

China:http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-07/1 6/content_641731.htm

Special Chinese District of Hong Kong:http://www.thestandard.com.hk/weekend_news_de tail.asp?pp_cat=30&art_id=22887&sid=8816949&con_ty pe=3&d_str=20060715

I saw something in my news clipping service about a recent -- last week -- India conviction and six month jail sentence for (c) infringement, but can't find it on news.google.com.

There is nothing moral about compromising your promises to sell advertising to the largest internet userbase in the world. Being the "most moral" company profiting off of the people in a suppresive regime doesn't make you any better. That stance is a cop-out.

Search is not a product, the searchers are. Google decided access to that amount of searchers was worth the possible backlash. The argument that Google is at least doing some good in China is ridiculous, it was for money.

What good are they doing? Great search results (subjective and censored) can't create food. They don't create democracies. They can't fight along side you in a revolt.

Let's disarm another favorite. Google, as a public business, has a duty to it's shareholders to conduct themselves in the manner that they vote upon in their shareholder meetings. OK - the people who hold a majority of voting rights in Google are........Larry, Sergey, and Eric. So I guess they really have to answer to themselves when it comes to these things. If Larry, Sergey, and Eric really didn't want to enter China - they wouldn't have. They wanted to and they did.

For the good of the people my ass. I ask again. What good can search results that are censored bring to an oppressed people?

Yeah... because Yellow River has connotations for most people besides the Huang He. Especially those in the target demographic: Chinese people. But most people in China won't think of the Huang He when someone says "Yellow Sheep River," they'll think of a small very poor village near the Gobi Desert whose economy is primarilly textile related but people have been trying to make the next technological showcase. Sounds like a really good name to me, as long as you don't have the mind of an 8 year old.

If there were no way for us to record musical works or create movies, artists would still be able to make money through live performances, because those performances would be naturally scarce, without any government intervention. This is in contrast to the situation we have today, where music and movies are anything but scarce. They are all around us, distributed in a wide variety of forms. Yet the movie and music industry would have the government continue to enforce an arbitrary scarcity that bears no relationship to economic reality.

Movies have no direct live performance equivalents, and with live musical performance the scarcity reduces people's ability to enjoy the performance. One may note that today we have a great abundance of these recorded forms of art, in pretty high quality too. The problem is the question of cause and effect - if we remove copyright much of the economic incentive to produce this abundance would disappear, and we would likely to be facing a great decline in both abundance and quality.

One of the best examples of this is the decline of the Hong Kong film industry.

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/Metro/GD28A k05.html

In Hong Kong a list of 20,000 people who had lodged complaints against police was found on a local website. The list included name, address, ID numbers; sufficient for identity theft, but also made many people nervous of retaliation for their complaints. Details of police complainants still on Net.

since you ask, this paramilitary group is continuing to brainwash innocent children. http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/Metro/GE04A k06.html

If China stops pulls their money out of the US, interest rates go up. By historical standards, they're still too low. If mortgage rates go up, the speculators who have interest-only loans with adjustable rates have their payments go up. Many will default, resulting in foreclosure. The housing bubble finally pops. Baby boomers who expect to sell their houses at a profit lose their equity.

Also, the US stock market is overpriced by a factor of 2 or so, based on historic P/E ratios. There's too much money in stocks because debt yields are so low. If interest rates go up, money moves from stocks to bonds. The stock market collapses.

All this is well known. China is using it, too. The position of the Chinese government appears the People's Daily: The US must "break away from the "cultural superiority" theory, which stresses a certain set of values, because we have entered a new era featuring long-term coexistence and blending of various civilizations." That's clear enough, even though written in the rather oblique style of diplomacy.

That's why the US has to suck up to China.

If you don't want to login to NYT, heres my "Top Ten List of New Cool Crap for 2005":

1. Curious Georges new free Wiretap program
2. Birdflu v.2.0
3. Boxing Day sans Tsunami
4. European CIA Jail System
5. Removal of Marti Gras from your travel ideas
6. A (great) Daily Show spinoff
7. The spread of Scientology
8. Marines shooting at and killing escaping hostages
9. Adoption Press Release Kits
10. Stem Cell Magicians

(mentioned in TFA as their source): online here.

No, BSA is the "Boy Scouts of America". The fear shouldn't be of them, but the Hong Kong Scouts Association; they've already created an anti-piracy merit badge.

I couldn't find the details about this badge anywhere in the http://www.scout.org.hk/. Apperantly they have not uploaded the details of this new badge or they're not enthusiastic about it.

From the Standard [1], this badge is NOT a MERIT BADGE. It's a proficiency badge which you cannot put it on the scout shirt. Besides, what you only need to do is to attend a series of seminars/indoctrinations as you see fit, and vola, you got the badge. The local media did try not to twist the story too much. So it's not really a matter of brainwashing after all, and Slashdotters should not really go crazy about this subject. Besides, some1somewhere was right on his post #12424010 http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14823 3&cid=12424010, this does not really matter anyway because no one would really care.

The HK SAR government seems to be quite enthusiastic about this and issued a press release [2].

References:
[1] http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/Metro/GE04A k06.html
[2] http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200504/30/04290 171.htm