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Linux Continues March On China
"The source code for Yangfan was made available last week under the GNU General Public License. The group is now collecting feedback and will continue improving the operating system.
The group has also done significant work localizing the operating system to support Chinese-language characters, which will be contributed back into the Linux community, according to Jon 'Maddog' Hall, director of Linux International.
Yangfan is based on two distributions of the Linux operating system. One is the distribution developed by Chinese Linux vendor Red Flag Software. The second is a version of the operating system called Cosix Linux, developed by China Computer Software Corp."
Reader kchris59 points to these articles at The Screen Savers and at chinadaily.com.cn which provide some more insight on what's going on behind that firewall.
Is Open Source Communism? Discuss among yourselves. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Choise Linux - a billion Chinese can't be wrong
I really do think this is great for China BUT I cannot see this effecting me. I do not think I am going to rush out and get a copy to play with... I think any tools etc. that they develop will be specific to thier needs and unlikely to be of use to me. Good luck to them and I wish them well.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
They make rather interesting products and concepts Redflag Linux, including this Internet ready Microwave Oven design concept. Thanks for posting this article Timothy, these companies seem like worth following!
... Thats one billion windows licences microsoft wont sell... i wonder if the calculate that as a loss?
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
That could provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?
.5 dollars and Linux at .5 dollars linux wins.
As an american slashdotter, i'd like to point out why the US doesn't more readily adopt linux.
1. Microsoft lobbyist
2. Microsoft license sweeps
3. Microsoft Strongarm tactics
4. [insert your own M$ reason]
Technically from what I know of Bill Gates (throwing a fit at ppl pirating his altair basic) and what I know of chinese copyright laws (nearly non-existant) I guess the only conclusion is it's quality that is winning out in china.
I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at
Sorry, I was just kinda scrapin for some insightfullness there.
Whenever I hear "linux" and "chinese" in the same sentence, I always get this image of Microsoft waging a 1950s-mccarthy propaganda war:
m p3.jpg
"When you use Linux,
you're using COMMUNISM"
I guess I've been tainted by http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0004/propaganda/
Of course, the difference is, digital information can be copied infinitely, while labor can't.
I wonder, if we had replicator technology today would it create a star-trek style utopia, or would manufacturing companies rush to try to protect their 'intellectual property'?
Btw, the Chinese government no longer considers itself to be "Communist".
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Windows 2k supports Chinese (and japanese/korean) for things like filenames and anything else you might want to do out of the box, as long as the apps support it.
I was also able to get Chinese characters in word 2000 with windows 98 after a free download from Microsoft.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That China, a country with draconian human-rights laws has open, flourishing Linux use and development? It doesn't quite seem to work so well (at least on a government and regular user level) in the west.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
I don't think anyone uses UTF32, in UTF16 it would just be 0 then 65.
Anyway, while it might be wasteful, I think the world would be a better place for programmers if everyone stuck with UTF16 rather then other crazy encodings.
Compression can take care of the rest, besides how much of the large, space-taking-up information is plain text anyway?
What about if somebody needs to mix in Korean in the same document, for example. Very, very, complicated issues.
How so? It dosn't seem like it would be complicated to me.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Imagine tens of millions of kids growing up learning Linux rather then windows (I'm not going to pretend like a large percentages of Chinese schools are going to have computers. check out the film not one less)
it'll mean a lot more software and stuff for Linux. Eventually.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Chinese people have no problem pronouncing "L"s, it's the Japanese who make that mistake.
Thanks in advance.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It dosn't really seem that ironic to me. What does computer use have to do with political freedom?
While many people in the west consider Free Software a bit 'subversive' and politicized, they are right in line with the communist rhetoric that the nation was founded on.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
BAYANIHAN is a Filipino tradition where people in a community help their neighbor in physically moving their house to a different place.
What a bizarre tradition! I mean I realize there are times when it might be convenient to move a house, but still. Such a strange idea.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The population of china is huge, if they wanted to they could easly mobalise a workforce the same saze as the UK who only work on linux. After a coupld of months a few thousand man years of work will have been done.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The Taiwanese still use Traditional Chinese characters, while the mainland uses Simplified ones. A mainlander might have trouble using a Taiwanese distro and vise versa.
Ironically, computer technology has completely negated the need for simplified characters
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why is the parent flamebate?
Personally I would call opensource, P2P networks &co comunist.
DMCA and all the RIAA lobying is capatilist.
If you don't believe me then lookup what the words comunist and capatilist mean and go and read the communist manifesto
Moding as flame-bate is the only flame here.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
One *big* problem that I've found trying to use Linux with Chinese is in inputting chinese characters. There is software available (e.g. 'xcin'), but it's not anywhere near as easy to use and smooth as in Windows.
... so any progress in this area is very welcome.
This is a difficult problem to solve - there are a large number of different methods to input Chinese which all have to be supported. Then this input method has to be easy to use across all potential applications (i.e. if you change from your Abiword window to a shell to an emacs window you still want to be able to use the same input method).
It's still at the 'doable-but-painful' stage in Linux (heh! What's new there?), but something as fundamental as entering text needs to be really simple for Linux to be useable natively in Chinese.
At the moment Windows beats Linux hands-down on this front
This is the question I always want to ask
How to use Chinese characters on Linux system ?
On Windoze, there are several ways to achieve the goal. But on Linux, so far, it's kind of hard to do so.
So, anyone out there who know the answer ?
Please share !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Here: "We are allowed to change our government, why not our software?"
There: "We are allowed to change our software, why not our government?"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Well you could look at it this way.
take 1 Billion(US) Chinese
say 0.1% are exelent coders and 1% are ok coders that gives you.
900,000 coders and 100,000 UBA coders to hand.
when you take into account 'given enough eyes all bugs are shallow'
I'm sure between them they can produce quality code.
The Chinese are well known for there technical exelance.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
So how long before there are stegonographic comments in Linux source coming out of China to get around the gvernment censorship of the media, but not of source code?
"Take the first letter of each fortune in the fortune file, and then..."
-- Terry
UTF-8 is somewhat ascii compatible, and an efficient coding for mostly ascii data. Looks like the unix world, ietf protocols etc. are moving in this direction. For more info check out
UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux.
My company is beginning the switch to linux terminal servers for the 90% of the machines at our work. The decision is soly based on that they do not want to pay $500,000 to microsoft so workers can browse the web and write memos. And we are really just a fairly small company - i cannot imagine what a large company or government must pay. Most amusing the top managers really have no idea what linux is, they just refer to them as the penguin machines.
Linux is devleoped in a way that requires no profit margin, unlike microsoft. so unless microsoft finds a killer app it seems that companies,governments and any other organization that acts in their own self-interest will naturally swtich to the 'ultimate undercut' : linux.
KDE3 has greatly improved international support - all the Unicode/il8n stuff support is built in.
This means that at the GUI level it's just(!) a question of all the apps supporting and translating this - take a look at this table for information on the translation status for (Traditional) Chinese.
If you've got a full (with international support/fonts) installation of KDE you should be able to try it out fairly easily - just change the language via the GUI configuration tool.
Heard from ENRON just before they collapsed.
"When I said burn all the books I meant , 'put them on the fire', not 'copy them onto CD'"
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Is there any Chinese Slashdotters...that can provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?
,not abstract principles. ,natural resources, and gold bars are preferable to intangibles like illiquid securities or intellectuals properties.
.5 dollars and Linux at .5 dollars linux wins.
First of all I would like to state that I am of pure Chinese descent.
To answer your question, I believe there are 3 factors that make China very open to open source: Confucianism, the WTO, and Microsoft licensing.
The centuries-old mentality of being extremly frugal with one's money or possesions. Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship. This article from Time Magazine titled "Overeating Dying in China" further explains:
"In the early 1980s when some nouveau rich squandered their money on restaurants delicacies and government officials took advantage of their jobs to attend luxurious feasts, a distorted concept was built up in most Chinese's minds: the wealthier one is, the more fatty foods are on your dinning table.
The grumbles about upstarts' arrogance and the government officials' corruption turned into general disapproval. People began to look favorably at the ancient Chinese maxim which praises abstinence in consumption....Considering the 30 million destitute Chinese struggling in remote mountainous areas and those laid-off work who are living a hard life, traditional virtues like fighting one's way up and building the country through hardship and thrift are still highly encouraged by the Chinese government. "
This "frugal ideal", reinvigorated in the minds of mainland Chinese, compounded with ancient Confucian values of filial piety encourage the development and acceptance of open source software over propeitery ones in China. The bit about filial piety applies to the corporate environment of Chinese businesses. Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members' to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member (typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials (formerly occupied by older family members).
In most, if not all jobs in China involving internal technology, the IT manager must find software that will create a stable infrastructure while saving as much money as possible. This is where the "frugal mentality" and the rigid set of priorities converge to brighten the appeal of open source software. Because China is attempting to gain full membership within the WTO, which requires its adherance to strict IP rules, the country began an enormous crackdown on the "pirated" software industry. Using pirated (MS) software no longer was an option, as it used to be 10 years ago. Another path would be to purchase MS software licenses. However, the thought of accepting the dinosauric financial demands of Microsoft licensing contracts clashed with the frugal mentality prolific with Chinese tech companies, and the set of priorities spawned by Confucian filial piety led them to consider the amount of funds that could be saved and allocated for other departments by not buying licenses. In turn, Chinese techs were left with another option: Open source software, more specifically Linuix. The legal and cost-free nature of the penguin OS became an appealing option to the Chinese techs, and in turn took the opportunity to develop and integrate it in to their corporate infrastructure.
Chinese cultural traditions of filial piety and frugality are further explained in this excerpt of the site "Paul Herbig's Working Papers":
Chinese Network
The Chinese commonwealth is a group of small Chinese companies from all over the world affiliated with each other, protecting and taking care of each others businesses. They are also referred to as 'Greater China', or the 'Chinese Network'.
The survival mentality and the Confucian tradition of patriarchal authority, form the values of a typical Chinese entrepreneur - one who seeks to control his own small dynasty. These so call life raft values are:
l.Thrift ensures survival.
2.A high, even irrational, level of savings is desirable, regardless of immediate needs.
3.Hard work to the point of exhaustion is necessary to ward off the many hazards present in an unpredictable world.
4.The only people you can trust are family-- and a business enterprise is created as a familial life raft.
5.The judgment of an incompetent relative in the family business is more reliable than that of a competent stranger.
6.Obedience to patriarchal authority is essential to maintaining coherence and direction for the enterprise;
7.Investment must be based on kinship or clan affiliations
8.Tangible goods, like real estate
9.Keep your bags packed at all times,day or night (Kao,p.25).
Unlike the Japanese Keiretsu, the Chinese network is an open system for all Chinese entrepreneurs all over the world. They watch for each others businesses and help those who are in need. These Chinese entrepreneurs have a give - and - take relationship. The network is usually formed by joint ventures, weddings, political opportunities and common cultures. Ownership of the company are usually passed to relatives, regardless of their educational background or competency (the classic example is An Wang's passing of his company, Wang Computers, to his mediocre son instead of professional managers--which ended in failure). Generation after generation, no matter in what culture they were brought up, every Chinese seeks control and security of their businesses.
The first Chinese generation has a survival and Confucius mentality. Every business decision is made for the future of the family. Unlike the old generation, the younger generation are born in other countries outside of mainland China. They do not only carry the Chinese culture, but the one they were born in as well. This generation, especially if born in a western country, has a sense of individualism. Companies like Winbond,a high-tech company in Taiwan, which considers themselves to be a Chinese company , believes that you should respect your family and love ones but you have to set your mind on what is right for the company. D.Y. Yang,owner of Winbond, says, "A Chinese company depends less on data and more on intuition,feelings,and people." But on the other hand, he also mentions, "Of course you have to respect the family business structure, but since this is a high tech company,individual contributions are important (Kao,p31)."
---snip
I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at
On a side note, frugality, combined with Communist ideals and Confucian values led to the explosive growth of the pirated software and media industry in China, as this essay written by Rutgers Univesity student Sheng Ding explains:
"Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on the social nature of language and invention arose from very different ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s."
Well, I am confident that this reply answers your question. More information about Chinese philosophies and other ideals that are involved in China's flourishing open source movement can be found below:
Paul Herbig's Working Papers
A Paper on IP Rights in China, by Sheng Ding
The Chinese Way with Money, an article from the Shanghai Star
Hospitals don't make a profit =p
It's so rediciously regulated, we have to charge 5x the cost of an item to break the origional purchase price in the amount we get from insurance companies.
If one were to abolish all regulation in the field everyones hospital bills would plumit overnight (though other bad things would happen also, but thats a diffrent topic). Currently my hospital to choose a random item has a 17.41x multiplier on the cost of using a X-Ray machine for a "standard" x-ray (eg broken arm), this will net us a few cents to a dollar after we get done collecting real hard cash from your insurance company, who will thusly start paying us less so we have to charge more. It makes medical treatment a imposibility for the non-insured. A simple ER visit for a non-trivial issue can easily break 1k in the course of a few hours because of it, which is absolutly disgusting.
I live in a giant bucket.
However, as far as converting the workstations over to Linux, it's not even being close to economically feasable. What you save on the licenses would quickly be surpassed by the cost of A) disposal of the old workstations and making sure they are wiped clean of all information (there's been alot of problems with this lately), B) training of some very brain-dead users who believe that a computer without Windows is not a computer, and C) everything related with dismantling an ENORMOUS existing infrastructure and getting all of the new systems to work seamlessly (which equals alot of time and $$$).
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I find it intriguing that the developing countries are some of the world's largest users of the Linux system. Africa and China are now almost exclusively using Linux and/or unlicensed Microsoft systems, a fact which Bill Gates would no doubt like to set right. But aren't they right?
Why pay for buggy pieces of crap when you can get a decent operating system for free? Not to say Linux is the be all and end all but as operating systems go it is more robust.
I think countries like China who will now be developing more and more applications for Linux could finally get the proverbial show on the road and give companies a very useable option to forking out truck loads of money for Microsoft licences.
One of the major fallbacks of Linux is the lack of applications especially those for development. The day there is an equivalent to Visual Studio in Linux is the day that companies will realistically think more about changing to Linux.
That's my opinion anyway.
...what sort of position can you see Microsoft fulfilling when it rolls out Palladium in concert with Passport?
Drop the P to see what Passport actually is... and remember that the `My' in `My Computer' is William Henry Gates III.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
They'll find a way, you watch and see! )-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Second, see for example this post. MS pays hardly any tax as it is.
`Fraud! ' came the cry! Microsoft overvalues shares.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There will be a threshhold at which the number of linux boxes will make for a target rich environment for virus writers. This is something that should be anticipated and dealt with now before it becomes an embarrassment. Let's learn from others mistakes!
You do now. In fact since IE v5, Alexa has been spying on you. I guess they must really despise competition if they forbid other remote management software (in the XP EULA).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Which rock have you been hiding under for the last decade?
Very few people, even technicians, ever have to do anything like that today, let alone all of it.
As an aside: 99% of Windows users would refuse to try installing their OS. A GUI doesn't magic complexity and problems away, it just makes them prettier. A modern Linux install is actually simpler, faster and easier than a Windows install. Even RedHat, hardly the holder of a reputation for pushing the envelope, is easier to install than W2k, even though the W2k tested was a set of manufacturer's recovery CDs!
My wife (SWMBO) uses Mandrake Linux 8.2, Kmail, Konqueror (or Mozilla for sites that break Konq), OpenOffice.org, The Gimp, XMMS and about twoscore of the games. She fears the toaster, that's how technical she is (not so her sister, who flipped the PSU switch on the back of her own computer from 220 to 110 and blew it up).
Last week, I shut down SWMBO's machine for the first time in about 8 months to add some new hardware to it. She came home as it was booting and asked me what the startup screen is (text in a fancy framebuffer border with a progress bar) because she'd never seen it before, never knew textmode or the boot screen existed, never rebooted her machine. She doesn't know that it has a kernel, or that it has a USB webcam that I use as a kiddie monitor, or that her printer talks to it through USB; and your reward for asking her how the dual-scroll-wheel AOpen optical mouse connects (PS/2, in fact) would be a blank and concerned look. No worries.
Are we there yet?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Red Flag Linux is being run by the Emperor's son or something like that. I'd expect this little QANGO pressure-cooker to be attached to power in a similar fashion. It's not entirely ethical from our PoV but we can be grateful that number-one-son didn't get employed as head of Microsoft in China.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How much $$$ in taxes would the US loose if microsoft would be a much smaller company?
The US would gain taxes from moneys saved, hence increasing taxable income, by companies not so adept at avoiding tax as Microsoft. A rather substantial gain I would imagine.
LOL, that is seriously pretty funy dude :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Of course, this is a pretty gross simplification. I have seen people online call the current Chinese system 'fascist'.
:P
I don't really know all that much about fascism per se, but if you remove the 'national identity' or 'racial identity' component, there are a lot similarities with Confucianism. IE Confucius believed each person should be in a strict hierarchy with the emperor at the top. Of course, the ancient Chinese believed they were the only actual nation in the world (everyone else was one of 4 types of barbarians, barbarians from the east, barbarians from the west, barbarians from the north, and barbarians from the south)... so obviously they would have no 'national identity' concept
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If one were to abolish all regulation in the field everyones hospital bills would plumit overnight (though other bad things would happen also, but thats a diffrent topic)
"Other band things" hrm. hehe. "Clean needles? Pff, who needs 'em"
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Of course, you guys don't mind charging the artificially inflated price to your patients who have no health insurance as well. I know from personal experience. You also like to make billing mistakes, and instead of eating the mistake you send a bill for the difference three months later and expect payment immediately. Imagine booking a flight, and then months after you return getting a bill because you were undercharged. Could you imagine the airline being able to get away with that?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
They have some escape stuff built in... but those would only be used in extreemly rare situations.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, I asked one chinese person if they 'heard' the characters when she read them, and she said she did.
And I do usualy think "and" or "or" when I see those symbols in code.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is now a standard reply, so i've included links and copytext!!!
.
What,
Please goto www.m-w.com look up capatilist.
Main Entry: capitalism
Pronunciation: 'ka-p&-t&l-"iz-&m, 'kap-t&l-, British also k&-'pi-t&l-
Function: noun
Date: 1877
: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
Main Entry: state capitalism
Function: noun
Date: 1903
: an economic system in which private capitalism is modified by a varying degree of government ownership and control
Sound like what the DMCA/RIAA are based on?
DMCA and the RIAA are enforcing strict ownership and copyright that is capatilist.
Your thinking about free market which differet from capatilist. Read Wealth of the nations be Adam Smith
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Communist country?
Check your facts, troll.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
I would prefer neither policy, but at least China isn't hipocritical about it.
You're right, the U.S. could be considered a socialist country, but not because of Social Security. Rather, it is its heavily-subsidized industries (military, aerospace, hi-tech, biotech, agriculture) that make it ressemble the socialist model...to a point. In fact, apart from individual liberties - including the fact that mom and pop could have a store - the U.S. of the cold war was strikingly similar to the U.S.S.R. It is safe to say that they were rivals (for oil, mostly) instead of enemies.
BTW, there are very few "capitalist" countries left in the world. After 1929, everyone pretty much understood that "pure" capitalism didn't work. So most industrialized countries now have mixed economies - the sad thing is that the U.S. forces its client nations to adopt the capitalist models and therefore become markets for american goods, even though it also ensures that their economy won't develop normally...
Reminder: find a new sig
I believe many of the traits (maybe not all) you are depicting are not specific to the Chinese society, but are rather those of traditional societies. Many African and Islamic societies function the same way. I am from Morocco (An Islamic, African, Arabic and Berber country, yes all that in the same time :) ) and this is the way many moroccans do business too.
Capitalism is the exploitation of men by other men :)
Communism is the contrary
After 302 posts, no one caught this guy repeating old /. story.
/. editors' ability to recognize old news. I think he got the answer. :)
I think he's just testing
Suck on that, libertarians!
Also, I should point out that, despite libertarians' consistent inability to grasp this basic point, government underfunding in particular cases does not prove that socialised healthcare can't work.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Because all the documents for this stuff are in Chinese!
once code is relased under GPL you no longer 'OWN' it, it is free to run wild and you can't stop it.
Unless. someone else trys to 'OWN' the code and prevent it from running wild, then you can stop them owning it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I was afraid this was going to happen.
What I have said before now begins.
Countries will not use nor build thier societies economies or government bodies on information technology that unfairly gives the US/Europe an edge.
They will use our own laws against us and defeat us in the economic arena, just as we did with the USSR, as American companies quickly find they cannot sell products abroad in such markets that do not recognize DMCA or Copyright laws as they are written in US/Europe.
This is just the beginning.
There will come a time when China and the Soviet Union will awaken economically, and the US and Europe are going to be very very sorry implementing laws based on simple greed.
Greed doesn't work, quick and very fast innovation does, and with heavy laws and legal fees to bear American/European companies will not stand a chance.
The only logical move will be exactly what we see today happening in the manufacturing base in our society. It will be moved.
In this case, American and European companies will move the construction and design of software to the Soviet Union and China to escape the copyrights, patents, DMCA and all the legal expenses to build software in the US.
Companies already do this to escape the tax laws, they most certainly will do this as well when the time comes.
Which is very soon I am afraid.
Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
but the Soviet Union doesn't exist any more.
And it also proves, along with gnutella, napster etc that socialism does work at least for technology
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Pure capitalism isnt how the USA was founded to begin with. USA had labor from slaves to build up the country, this was never a true capitalist nation.
Public schools didnt always exsist but they do now, police, libraries, healthcare, we are moving toward socialism.
Pure socialism we arent ready for, pure capitalism we have moved beyond. Some people want to go to pure capitalism but they dont understand in pure capitalism, the losers or people who dont benifit from it, will become terrorists, steal, rob and so on, theres no such thing as 100 percent employment, and even if there were, without a minimum wage employment wouldnt be fair employment, pure capitalism would create class warfare to the highest degree.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Dan Rather? What the hell are you talking about, you brainwashed moron? Do you think I waste my time with U.S. network news? Another thing, asshole (you had to insult me, now, didn't you?), if you think Germany and Japan have economic problems then perhaps you should take a trip through this great big world of ours. Just because they sometimes hit recessions or suffer from the economic woes that invariably affect industrialized nations doesn't take away from the fact that they are the #2 and #3 economic powers of the world. And that, after suffering a major military defeat 57 years ago.
Client countries would indeed include most of Central America, except for Nicaragua and Cuba, the two officially "socialist" countries. Note that, if it hadn't been for constant U.S. harassment/blockade (and an earthquake to boot, in the case of Nicaragua) these countries would have among the healthiest of economies. But all the other central american countries can be considered "client states" of the U.S. who is forcing them to adopt "free markets" by equating this concept with that of democracy (a fallacy, since you can have a free market in an otherwise autoritarian society). Implying that Honduras, Costa Rica or El Salvador are "socialist" reveals how little you know about that part of the world...
In any case, about the comparison between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the cold war, you'll notice that I did write "apart from individual liberties ", which covers the jeans situation. As far as natural resources are concerned, that's certainly true if you look at the two individual nations themselves, though if you include the resources of their client states, then it was probably pretty much the same.
Finally, when I say "everyone understood after 1929 that pure capitalism didn't work", I mean the governing elites of the industrialized nations, who since then have incorporated parts of the socialist model of govt. intervention in the economy, the U.S. being a champion of this. You may think that governments consistently screws things up (typical), but without that govt. and its development of the american economy through the Pentagon system, you wouldn't be typing your idiotic drivel on a PC to then post it on the Internet at all. Understand this before continuing this conversation, otherwise you're not worth my time.
Dickhead.
Reminder: find a new sig
No I didn't read the definitions, because those aren't words that have arcane definitions. I don't need a weatherman to tell me which way the wind blows, nor some "scholar" to tell me what capitalism is.
And the DMCA does NOT enforce ownership, it DIMINISHES it. If I own the DVD, certain uses of that DVD are taken from me and given by statutory decree to someone who is no longer the owner of the physical object. You cannot tell me that capitalism smiles on a situation where I need a licence to access the contents of my own propery.
Open source, 'I trade my IP for yours' what I've never known anyone who thinks that way about open source.
You should get out more.
Most people promote open source because they don't believe it should be owned, GPL prevents ownership by giving the author some rights.
This is almost unintelligable. At best you are badly stating a common myth and misconception.
Open Source is not the same thing as public domain. Open Source retains and DEPENDS ON active retaining of copyright ownership. If NuSphere violates the MySQL licence, they get sued.
I have no idea what the hell you mean when you say " GPL prevents ownership by giving the author some rights." The GPL does not give the author any rights. The Copyright Act creates those rights, and the GPL retains them, but grants OTHERS, not the author, certain LIMITED permissions.
The limitations are designed to assure that code written to extend the original will be passed back to the original author, which is why I say open source is "my IP for yours".
(though other bad things would happen also, but thats a diffrent topic)
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I don't think so. I think this sort of thing is best handled through consumer groups, not mandated government decrees.
If I want medical care from a substandard facility and doctor - why can't I get it? It's my life, isn't it?
Engineering and the Ultimate
60 percent socialist and 40 percent capitalist
There arent any real socialist or communist countries.
China never was communism, and there never was a true socialist country. Communism can only work when all the people are equal. Socialism can only work when theres true democracy. China or Europe never had true Democracy, hell USA doesnt have it either, we all have republics. Socialism can only work in a true Democracy where everyone can vote on anything.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac