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A quick google turns up 1.1 million links for the phrase "chinese exploited workers"

Ah, I see the first link is to Canada Tibet Committee. I agree Tibetans are being exploited and persecuted by the Chinese. Because Tibetans aren't Chinese. The sovereign nation of Tibet was invaded and conquered by Mao's army in 1959. Free Tibet!. Now change "Chinese" to "United States" and the number of results increases from 1,160,000 to 1,770,000, an increase of more than 500,000. Does that mean there are more workers exploited in the US?

Go take a gander at Frontline's Is Wal-Mart good for America video

Walmart doesn't just buy from China to sale in the US, Walmart also has stores in China. In the not too distant future China will be Walmart's biggest market. It is partnering or buying Chinese retailers, Wal-Mart plots bid for Chinese retail giant. Chinese employees of Walmart are even unionizing.

Chinese who are employed in one of these factories make more than those who can't get a job at one

That doesn't mean they aren't being exploited. Work & safety conditions play a large part. Ask a coal miner.

You're right it doesn't mean they aren't being exploited, but if they are fighting to get those jobs I'd say they are very willing work and accept the work conditions, thus they aren't being exploited.

As far as I know they are the same now. In Dicken's time, UK copyright only applied in the UK. Even worse, the pirate editions were often 'improved' by some hack editor to appeal to the proles. You get the same situation now, where Hilary Clinton's autobiography was ripped off by a Chinese publisher.

http://www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/2003/9/28_5.html

They stole it, translated it and significantly altered sections of it. Actually, in the Dickens case he seems to be almost as concerned by the alterations as the stolen income.

Maybe Ayn Rand was on to something after all - this reminds me of The Fountainhead, where the architect's vision is stolen by big businessmen and then corrupted to please the base tastes of the mob. Of course, in the Chinese edition of The Fountainhead, the architect is a happy drone designing tiny parts of Stalinist wedding cake buildings in the People's Ministry of Architecture, learning his trade through a series of 'self criticism' sessions.

Bullets are cheap, and the CCP knows it.

This is just in the last years: in fact, before 1996, when a man was executed the family had to pay for the bullet. Nowadays it's probably not worth to have them pay, since burocracy costs are higher than the cost of the bullet. As reference, see http://www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/1994/3/27_3.html .

Is this the line that goes straight to the Dali Lama's monastary that he can no longer occupy? Or is it the one that will carry the 5 year old, kidnapped Panchen Lama (2nd in command to the Dali Lama) back to his homeland. China is communist people -- they invade other lands (at least the US isn't communist). Free Tibet!

Almost forgot... http://www.petrifiedtruth.com/archives/000505.html Of course the International Organization Human Rights Watch is a propaganda machine right? and His Holiness the Dalai Lama lies??? http://www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/1997/3/12-2_9.ht ml Derechos.org is one of the most respected Human Rights organizations.. but they too must be lying... http://www.derechos.org/news/archives/000776.html Oops almost forgot Amnesty International... http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGASA1705319 99 http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/chn-summary-eng But heck, you know where to look if you are interested....

The difference (to you and me) is that Science has demonstrated its validity by means of experimental testing. Infinite Knowledge is the god of the scientist, Hypothesis and Experiment its worship, and Reason its ethos. But it's still a belief system, in the sense that it attempts to explain the nature of our existance.

It's hard to declare Reason as any more (or less) valid than Faith - it's more practical in the short term, I grant you, but religions often take a longer view, citing the Afterlife as the goal of human existance.

I would add that I see Reason and Faith as both separate from Stupidity and Callousness - examples of the latter can be found in any belief system, including Science, and are not inherent to religion. Oh, and for a benign example of a spiritual and secular leader, try the Dalai Lama as head of state.

Dalai Lama does not want Tibetan independence

... does this mean that we can stop sending them economic aid? (http://www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/2004/4/6_5.html )

Better still, hire half a dozen and RAID them.

not to be -too- political, but china's already done that...

Here is an old article on the subject: the more-left and more-right Republicans and Democrats were mostly pushing for human rights, and the centrist Democrats and Republicans were mostly pushing for free trade. Kind of strange, huh? Clinton, in fact, flip-flopped on this one; he was in favor of granting MFN here and here, and finally pushed for and got permanent trade status for China. That last article also mentions that it happened on GW's watch when they finally entered the WTO.

You might want to check your facts about China's prison population. It's closer to 20 million. I guess I should add an obligatory "I hate bush" comment since that seems to ensure a few extra karma points.

Despite recent advances in economic freedoms, China is still a dangerous totalitarian regime. In the west, we rail against the abuses of the State, and rightly so, but the abuses of the west are nothing compared to China.

To say "Go China" is to deny the real and substantial differences between liberal democracies and repressive regimes. I can say that W is a dummy with impunity in the US. Chinese citizens can't do likewise. These freedoms make forums like slashdot possible, and are directly responsible for the wealth and privilege that I and many many others in western democracies enjoy.

I hope that China will join the community of nations that protects the rights of the individual. Maybe the power they now have will help them, and the rest of us, fulfill the promise of the American Declaration of Independence. In the meantime, don't make the deadly and dangerous mistake of confusing interesting technology with "good." Linux and spaceships can be used for good and evil.

With regards to tibet, the military significance of a country is influenced to a large degree by its economic importance. With massive mineral wealth, including minerals needed for high technology and the space programme, china had to invade them. Add that fact to the fact that the China-Russia oil pipeline is on schedule and underway, you can see why America has to take more resources from other nations just to maintain the balance of power.

Why do you think we went to war in iraq? If we were concerned with humanitarian issues, we would be all over Uzbekistan.

We're not.

Why? Their main wealth is derived from cotton, which is deminishing because massive use of agrochemicals has destroyed their environment and ariable lands. Furthermore, they're useless as a base right now, but that may change in future.

With regards to Imperialism, yes since the 20th Century empire building was frowned upon. Instead the superpowers started up client states which they armed, used to extract natural resourses and committed to proxy wars. The only major difference between a colony and a client state is that a colony has a Governer General, and a client state has a Benevolant-President-For-Life.

The bottom line is that Empires never went out of fashion since the day they were invented in ancient sumeria. Some people ran from them and settled out in Australia, or Northern Europe or Central America. Some empires fell over and died, because running empires is hard to do. But eventually one empire or another will come for you.

Unless you are an empire yourself, you are screwed.

You've got the attitude backwards, it is not "the rest of the world be damned so long as we are wealthy and safe."

The hard truth of the matter is "To remain alive, safe and reasonably well off, we must damn the rest of the world."

The planet earth is closed. Few things fall from the cosmos to provide us wealth. Under this atmosphere it is a zero sum game.

Anybody who uses a computer or a cell phone has funded the violence in the congo because both sides are arming themselves with the sale of the mineral coltan which is used to make capacitors for high technology electronics like cell phones and 802.11b. We don't stop buying from the militias, simply because there is no other source to mine. Instead we let people like you buy a computer or a car or a nice pair of jeans or a public transport ticket or any number of other blood soaked consumer products knowing that you will never truly find out how the atoms which come together to provide those products and services are actually the result of untold human misery.

This is the truth in which we live. Once upon a time, when the first human beings (or their ancestors) could travel faster than they could overpopulate and area, we were able to spread from messopotamia and walk over oceans during the great ice age. We didn't have to take the fruits of creation from another person's mouth just to feed our own.

I propose to use any means needed to go back to those days. If it takes a nuclear rocket to take us to the stars. So be it. If it takes research which might produce a stable negative strangelet (a particle which reacts with normal matter to produce more stable negative strangelets) so be it.

We have to get off the planet, and begin spreading the human empire to other stars. If we don't we will mine this planet dry and strangle each other fighting over the scraps. And if we somehow avert that, then somebody else who beleives in imperial power will get us.

In fact, I would even hazard a guess that somebody who belie

Taiwan is a major source of investment capital for China, and only seems likely to increase in importance as one in the future. Taiwan recently eliminated an official requirement that investment in the mainland had to be chunneled through third parties, and removed its cap on mainland investment of $50 million last year.

Considering that the single largest threat to the CCP is probably the economic instability and mass urban unemployment that comes with state-owned enterprise reform, market liberalization and WTO accession, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the CCP will take any steps whose immediate consequence will inevitably be a sharp reduction in foreign capital inflows -- inflows the top leadership (or at least Zhu Rongji) seems to recognize is absolutely vital to maintain rapid growth in the country and prevent the financial sector from choking under the weight of insolvency.

THAT being said, if Taiwan actually makes a move towards independence, as seems increasingly likely, it's anyone's guess what might happen, since much of the political legitimacy of the CCP also seems based on catering to Chinese nationalism. Could they afford not to react?

All this being said, having actually read "Unrestricted Warfare" (in English), I think the threat of China as a digital renegade is completely overblown, if it is politically convenient for those with other reasons to dislike/distrust the country. There is nothing in the report that any other military institution isn't already considering. And lest we forget, the US itself targeted civilian communications infrastructure in Serbia during the Kosovo War. In any event -- its likely that air superiority will continue to be the decisive factor in contemporary military conflict -- and China doesn't have remarkably good aerospace airforce and knows it.

The oeganization, Students For Change have been working on this problem.

Not only are they working on their computer skill,s but small-business skills as well. Although I'm not sure what they'd use SB skills for, being a tiny, isolated rural communtiy, but it might be a good idea.

Really big sheets of metal? No, we can't make that now.

According to this site we throw away 350000 tons of aluminum foil every year. That's a lot of foil. Check out what the area of one roll is compared to how much it weighs. Now tell me that we cannot weld smaller, easier produced pieces together. Tell me that we cannot have thousands of robots doing this welding at inexpensive prices in a hundred years (they can already do this now, but they are not super cheap, they aren't mass produced).

So we can make really big sheets of metal now with existing technology. It's just rather expensive, that's all.

Try to get permission to use them, even on Venus.

I intentionally ignored this aspect. My fundamental assumption was that humankind would have to actually *WANT* to do this and focus on it somewhat to be able to accomplish this. This is merely a political problem. Also, china wants to use nuclear devices to help build a dam to generate hydroelectic power. If they can do it, we can do it on another planet.

We can poke around genetically, but we have very little control. You're proposing totally reworking an organism on a scale that's totally beyond what we can reasonably envision today.

True, our current biotech is *NOT* very good, however it's the fastest growing field of science and technology, and developments in nanofabrication, femtosecond pulse lasers, atomic force microscopes, and nanotubules has been giving us a much finer control in the realms of biomolecules and DNA. Biotech will most likely be the science where all the action is in the next century, as bioinformatics is slowly coming into the light, and our manipulation technology is growing by leaps and bounds (they are working on ways of reading the entire genetic code of a cell from a single copy of the DNA). What I proposed to do with the microorganisms may actually mostly be a "simple" matter of combining traits from different microrganisms, with the modifications necessary to make the genes compatable. This is very different from designing the organism from scratch, and I can forsee this within the next 100 years (we can already cross-transplant genes between species, look at the mouse that grew a human ear).

Where are you finding this "nuclear drive"? In as much as treaties ban nukes in space, I have to say that this surprises me.

I'm not sure where you have been, but NASA had developed this stuff in the 60s and early 70s. I believe they had some working prototypes even, however they were not allowed to fly these for political reasons (*sigh*). Also, NASA has been renewing its work in nuclear propulsion. A friend of mine received two PhDs from MIT, and one of his graduate thesises was on Nuclear Propulsion Using Magnetohydrodynamic Vorteces for Containment and Propulsion. So there's plenty of work going on with nulcear drives, in fact had we not stopped in the 70s, we could be using them for all sorts of things right now.

Also one other idea being pursued is the idea of an antimatter-fusion hybrid drive, using antiprotons to spark fusion reactions. This is being developed currently at Penn State University, and was the subject of my younger brother's science project a few years ago. NASA moved the site about it, so I couldn't find it for you.

We also have chemical rockets. Neither will be enough to move an asteroid from 3 AU to 0.7 AU with anything like a reasonable cost.

Chemical rockets are not worth mentioning here, as they lack the necessary specific impulse. Ion engines could do this, but they would take a very very long time. The actual moving process could take 30 years, in which case things like solar sails and nuclear propulsion become rather viable. Also, if we use a near-earth asteroid, it would only be 1 AU to .7 AU, a much smaller distance, and we may even be able to bring it close enough to earth to give it a "reverse gravitational slingshot" in which kinetic energy is transferred to EARTH rather than to the asteroid, thus saving us most of the work with our rockets. It's okay if moving the asteroid has a very high cost ($1 Trillon) in that if you can get 1 billion people to eventually live on Venus, that's only $1000 per person. Not too bad...

Grounded loosely in today's science, yes. But so is Star Trek.

Are you KIDDING?!?!?! Star Trek blatantly violates both relativity and quantum theory (warp drive and transporters, respectively) not to mention constantly gets their technobabble wrong (no, you cannot use ejected antimatter to create an electrolytic reaction to cause a space monster that ate your ship to throw up, like that one episode of voyager). Anything remotely scientific in Star Trek is nothing more than a plot device (I used to be and still am a big fan of TNG, but the more physics I take, the more I see is wrong with it, especially any time they do time travel). *ONCE* in a while they get something right.

What I am saying is *NOT* loosely based on science, it's actually possible today (granted current technology would require an amount of time and energy that would make it nonfeasible, and yes the biotech part isn't yet possible). Going to the moon was once science fiction, and there was nothing in the laws of physics to say it couldn't be done, but the physics said that the amount of energy required to do it was enormous. So it took a while until we learned to do it. It's the same way with this. It's just a matter of time/energy put into it. Eventually construction techniques, energy sources, robotics and biotechnology should be able to tackle all of these problems, as solutions can already be envisioned and planned today.

I'm not talking about doing this in 50 years. I'm talking about starting it in 100, and it possibly taking several hundred to finish. Few can argue that it's impossible, though. Politically infeasible? Maybe. Expensive? Perhaps, depends on whether or not we have self-replicating robotics and inexpensive intra-system travel. Those last two, may for now be science fiction, true. For now.