China Anti-Corruption Web Site Crashes On First Day
An anonymous reader tips us to news out of China that the Web site of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention crashed on Tuesday, just hours after its launch, as droves of people logged on to complain about corruption among officials. "The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations," an anonymous NBCP official said.
Well let's see. The geek solution is a technical one (website.) While the common sense solution involves people physically doing something, like their civic duty (do I really need to explain what those are?).
First of all, they'll try to find out why the heck so many people knew about it. I'm fairly sure it was planned as a publicity stunt, showing that only a handful of people will actually use the page, and this in turn was likely tried by not announcing it too widely.
I guess the result of the examination will be the blogging about government activity should be curtailed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Speaking of China and corruption, I had to laugh out loud when I read the quote at the bottom of the [Slashdot] page: "Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American: The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife." There once was an actress named Jiang Qing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing
The death penalty is not a deterrent for anything. There are some pretty draconian laws for capital punishment for street crimes in the US, but it's not like those US states are safer than Canada because of that.
Corruption is deterred by transparency, street crime by welfare, equal opportunities and affirmative action, but the death penalty is a so much more spectacular way of convincing voters you are doing something about it when you are actually not.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y