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U.S., Japan Ask Sony To Not Outsource PS2 To Taiwan
Payp points to this Digitimes story which says: "Japanese and U.S. governments have asked Sony to stop outsourcing Playstation 2 manufacturing to 2 Taiwanese companies, Asustek and Acer, in fear that they would do the manufacturing in factories in China, which would give the Chinese government opportunies to gain access to the DVD techonology. (I thought some DVD players are already manufactured in China.) Sony originally planned to use the Taiwanese companies to manufacture PS2 to prepare for Microsoft XBox's arrival, the manufacturing of which is also outsourced to some Taiwanese companies."
There are tons of articles all over the place on the web DVD technology - I doubt thats what they are trying to protect. What I think they really fear is access to the PS2's emotion chip technology, which the Japanese said is powerful enough to control weapons such as guided missles.
Cheap ruse, try again.
It appears the "DVD Club" has a new member: China.
I'm afraid the Chinese now have the DVD. This means that they can natively produce and watch pr0n, totally bypassing the Japo-American Pr0n Syndicate. Although details are sketchy, it appears China stole this technology via Sony manufacting plants in Taiwan.
China now has access to the world's most potent encrypting scheme: CSS. We have our cryto boys working around the clock to break that cypher, but it could take years.
Our only option is to flood the Chinese market with Barney and Raffy DVDs. With luck, the Chinese consumer will be so disgusted with those shows that they'll abandon DVD altogether.
A world in which China has DVD tech isn't a world I want to live in.
Which is not to say that this is or isn't a reasonable concern, but I'd be surprised if Sony hadn't already considered that, being a media giant and all.....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
One small nit: right-wingers do not have a monopoly on fearing that which they do not understand.
Unfortunately, it's human nature and happens in any country, race, religious group, social group, ethnicity, or caste, you can come up with.
When people don't know how to deal with something, they try not to. They ignore it if they can. If they can't, they try to get rid of it by ridiculing it. If that doesn't work, they attempt to destroy it. Of course, the sensible and responsible thing to do is learn to understand what they fear. Perhaps there is no reason to fear it after all, or perhaps there is a way to fix it without destroying it.
Don't fall into this trap. Before writing your right-wing classmates off as a group about to fuck up the US, try to understand them instead of ridiculing them. As long as you are ridiculing them without understanding them, you are no better than them.
If China gets a hold of our DVD technology, they might find even more illeagal uses for it. The nerve of people thinking they have the right to *watch* the movies they buy! Dang commies! God bless America!
There's more to DVDs than layers - most DVDs are single-layered anyway.
At first glance, I read this as "There's more to DVDs than lawyers..."And why is the govenment only focusing on Sony then? Or is the XBox not going to support DVD anymore, as it was originally spec'ed to do?
Perhaps if Sony wanted China/Taiwan to actually fab the chips, then there might be danger of intellectual property being stolen.
To assemble stuff requires far less advanced technology (soldering, etc) than actually making the raw components. So, in order to get any useful technology, the Chinese would have to take the chip apart or use other methods of reverse engineering, and I don't see how not letting China/Taiwan handle the assembly would stop this anyways.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Sure, they can have their little encrypted communications, and develop their misiles with an athlon, but DVD technology will give them access to something even worse: illegal DVD copies!! (wich I'm sure they are alredy producing anyway). We can't allow that.
Remember: When you buy a Play Station 2, you are buying COMUNISM !!!
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Hasn't anyone considered the possibility that this is a hoax? I've read four or five articles saying this exact same thing for the past few weeks, and not one has been more specific than "according to our sources".
"According to our sources"? What, like our government would make a silly request like this and then refuse to talk to the press about it? Which branch of the government or military made the request? Which committee debated doing this? Who was ultimately responsible for the decision? What experts solemnly related their opinions that DVD technology is somehow dangerous? Are DVD-ROM drives banned in China? How about DVD players?
The complete lack of such details in any of these articles makes me very, very suspicious of their veracity. Especially when you consider the fact that a lot of people were actually dumb enough to think that Saddam Hussein was somehow interested in PS2 technology for military use -- haven't we heard this story before?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Well, perhaps they want that Emotion chip that Saddam was after. Thing is, Iraq is subject to trade restrictions and doesn't really have the industry to make it's own high-end processors. Taiwan, though, has the resources to make it's own processors if it really wanted, and it has access to Pentiums, Athlons etc as freely as most of us do - so what's the point blocking this one chip in the PS2?
There's been plenty of media coverage about these issues, so the government should be aware. So what's the real danger here (other than giving jobs to people in other countries)? I can't see how the PS2 will provide China with any technology that isn't already freely available to them.
My Mustuk V300 with region-code busting loophole menu :) says "Made in China" plain as day on the back of the unit, so it seems the US and Japanese Govs are up to something that they don't want made public.
I believe they are worried about pirates and generic dvd players. I know this sounds a little illogical but remember Japan and the US are the most corrupt nations in terms ff campaign finiancing on Earth. I bet a few ignorant hollywood executives and shareholders would be afriad that some cheap chinese electronics company could produce a player without giving them royalities! Ohh the horror!
Or that somehow a pirate would reverse engineer the ps2 and make another decss to steal movies. Ohhh bad ( picture an executive at hollywood freaking out at the moment). The taiwanese company would produce them would have the blue prints and specs and a chinese company would go nuts for this. I am sure they are worth gold in the black market. Think about. The dvd constorium makes money for each unit and each disc sold. A chinese one would always have a competitive advantage. Perhaps they may make one without region encoding so hollywood's css would go down the tubes. The military could also produce these and sell them oversea's for funding.
Its all about greed and ignorance. Of course it would be easier for a pirate to find a warez site and take decss and write an extenstion to write discs but perhaps a few lobbyists don't know this or even care. They just want to tell other people what to do with the power of allmightly uncle sam so they can make more money. I love corporate america.
http://saveie6.com/
the DVD application of the console's chip could be used for military purposes
Must be the extremely complex encryption code used in DVD players that the government's so worried about. What's the worst the Chinese military could use the DVD app for, showing training videos?
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Developers: We can use your help.
I'm still trying to figgure out how this matters.... I mean, these are Tiawanese companies right? I wasn't aware that the PRC and the ROC were on speaking terms. Tiawan is the place we were considering selling the new AEGIS cruisers to right? The 7th fleet is parked off their coast right? It is there to defend Tiawan from the PRC? This is confusing.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
The funny part of this is that there are several military areas in which Russia - and friends (China, in particular) have always done better than the West. In particular, missile defence, SAM systems and similar. Admittedly, part of their success may be attributed to a willingness to detonate an explosive near the target - rather than just trying to hit it, but their systems are very advanced. The really funny part is that old Macs (68k and some early PowerPC), old PCs (386s, 486s) are readily available in so-called "rogue states" - in fact, the United States has led the way in giving old PCs to Russia! 3/486s may be a little slow, but they are still significantly more advanced than the chips that guided the original MX missile. They are also a well-established, well-understood technology - and therefore attractive to militaries. (What do you think they are using in Internet Cafes in Iran?)
Personally, I always thought that the "Iraq wants PS2s" argument was a subtle ad-campaign for Sony. While the Emotion Engine is powerful, it is focussed pretty heavily on 3D rendering. While I can think of some uses for it, I'd much rather develop systems on readily available PC parts!
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
You're oversimplifying many of your facts.
Taiwan, (which still is officially) the Republic of China, renounced sovereignty over Mainland China in the late 80s (can't recall the actual date of the law). It also renounced its provincial status in the late 90s by doing away with the provincial government structure (which always had implied that it was part of China, just like Rhode Island has the same political status as California, but both belong to the United States).
I can't say whether or not the Opium Wars are written on Mainland Chinese textbooks, but the historical experience is written on Chinese history books in Taiwan, and many historians consider it as what brought about China's relative decline to the West. This war and many other wars fought with western nations at the time, lead to the growth of Chinese nationalism as well as anti-West sentiments.
China and Japan have traditionally been rivals with one another. Much of the Chinese resentment began after the Sino-Japanese War in which China under the Qing Dynasty lost decisively and had to cede territory (for instance, Taiwan). However, Japan was also host to thousands of Chinese overseas students during the early part of the 1900s, because intellectuals and revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing Dynasty believed that China could learn from the Japanese on how to modernize.
Chinese resentment against Japan turned into national hatred as the result of the atrocities caused during the Japanese occupation from 1937 to 1945. Japanese troops massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, used Chinese POWs and entire villages for chemical and biological weapons research, enslaved women for use as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. To this day, the Japanese government never formally apologized for the actions, which furthers much of the Chinese resentment.
I can't recall the U.S. helping Japan with the occupation of China, but U.S. did help the KMT government re-establish control of major Chinese cities after Japan's defeat and withdrawal by airlifting nearly a million Chinese troops from southwestern China. This was done to prevent the Chinese Communists from taking control.
Japanese and US governments have asked Circuit City, Best Buy, and Sony not to sell any PS2 units or DVD players to Chinese citizens, as this would give the dangerous technology of DVD to China. QUEL HORRUER! The Chinese will now be able to watch the Caddyshack double DVD set! This must be stopped at all expense!
Last time I checked, the ~25 year old Tomahawk cruise missile ran on a 512khz microproccessor that would operate its terrain-following radar setup and also fly the missile at treetop level for hundreds of miles to its target.
Not to mention that my dinky little wristwatch has more computing power than the entire Apollo Command Module, but that's a different story altogether.
So why should we care about these stupid little PS2 boxes getting into Chinese, Indian, Pakistani or Iraqi hands, when they could easliy totally wipe us out by loading a briefcase nuke into a child's backpack, and have him just hop off of a boat, wander into the center of one of our big coastal cities and then have it remote detonated via internation cell phone call or something?
We don't need to worry about the Chinese reverse engineering a stupid little playstation to build a delivery device, they already have a billion of 'em.
Not meant to be a troll or anything, but it seems to me that this high-tech hysteria is pretty meaningless when they (especially the Arab nations) have millions upon millions of fanatics that would gladly become a martyr in the never-ending battle against Truth, Justice and Freedom (aka The Great Satan)
Or have I missed the point entirely, and should be shaking my fist at the MPAA and their Fascistic ways. You're wily ones, you MPAA bastards, wily indeed!
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
And Asus? Huh? They're not worried about the dangers of K7 motherboards, but an MPEG-2 decoder chip is dangerous? But an Athlon can merrily perform all the same functions, if not a bit more!
I think these "sources" sound like a couple teenage kids with a little too much [favorite drug here] on their brains.
Wouldn't it be more dangerous if China got ahold of just one or two well-trained EE's from around here?
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!