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China Blanks Nobel Peace Prize Searches
1 a bee writes "CNN is reporting that China is attempting to block all communication regarding Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Even texting is affected: 'Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: "My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize."' Might as well add Slashdot to the censored list."
Further coverage is available from NBC.
China is just trying to protect it's citizens against the terrorist and child porn. Sheesh.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Somebody ought to write an exploit for Chinese iPhones and Android based phones that autotexts the name "Liu Xiaobo" to everyone in a person's contact list, then goes on to force their phone to do the same thing. Within a matter of days the entire population of the two most popular smartphone platforms in China would have their favorite toys censored. I am pretty sure that could cause an effective public outrage.
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Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Believe me, it's just your observation. At least he knows how to post on-topic.
Qxe4
I don't. I'm an American. Given my government's current track record, I think such efficiency and attention to detail would only cause the destruction of American civil liberties and rights to come that much sooner. Personally, I like government inefficiency. It is one of the only things that helps keep my government from going on a totally batshit-insane, effective power trip. Just imagine if all those tomes of laws, at both the federal and state level, were actually enforceable on a wide scale. We citizens would be royally fracked.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason?
No, it's something that is resonant with people that want to suppress speech. Look at recent articles and you will see similar lame excuses (ie. stopping terror, child porn, copyright protection) for allowing the NSA/FBI/etc to spy on citizens or try to take down their computers.
most Chinese are aware of the award. Honestly, most of them don't care that much.
So a Chinese man is kept in prison purely because his opinions disagree with the government and he gets a Nobel prize and now the government will censor your website, email and even deactivate your cellphone if you as much as mention his name. If they really don't care they most definitely should.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
There are only two things that can get you that much notice from the U.S. government: 1) Try to start a war they don't want. 2) Try to stop a war they do want.
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I see you've never taken an introductory logic course before.
It is historically sound - People who are named in the Bible have been found to exist.
People named in the Futurama cartoon exist too, therefore it must be historically sound!
I'd continue, but actually I think I will go watch some historically accurate Futurama episodes instead.
lol Tax cuts don't cost money. Spending cost money.
North Korea's artillery, and its nukes, are not a sufficient deterrent.
The only thing keeping it alive is China. And the only reason we don't liberate North Korea is that it would cause a shooting war with China, which, if it were democratic, would join with us.
Freeing Tibet is the world's problem, just as much as imprisoning Tibet is China's problem.
Taiwan wants to be free of China, but can't even discuss it without getting China's saber rattled at it.
No, it's very different, it is as different as it can be. One billion people, zero message about the news.
Isn't it interesting that liberals never miss a chance to defend an evil regime and downplay their evilness?
Frankly I think that's a bunch of bs. First of all, how do you know what Chinese people want? Have they perhaps had a referendum to decide that they would prefer to live under a one party dictatorship rather than democracy? As an experiment, ask Chinese people in Hong Kong would they prefer to give up their relative freedom and exchange it for the "stability" in mainland and see what they tell you. How many Chinese people moved to mainland China from Hong Kong over the last few decades, especially before the transfer to China, because they preferred the stability there?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
This is an example of real censorship. Please reserve this word for things like this, and not your boss preventing you from using company computers to chat with someone about whatever you want. Thank you.
And please don't pretend to be a Chinese expert. We (Chinese) know your kind, and we know why you live in China. We despise you.
Care to share your insight on why he lives in China?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Pi is only 3 if you assume that bowls have no thickness.
Which is a pretty dumb assumption, really.
6000 years isn't anywhere in the Bible, and was created via a priest who added up essentially random strings of numbers from geneologies. Given that he lived within the last few centuries, this is far from essential church doctrine. Similarly, interpreting the beginning of Genesis as anything other than poetry is extremely recent - most well respect theologians have historically held this to be true - see Aquinas, for example.
Even if you are to ignore the poetic elements, you quickly run into issues - measuring time would be devilishly tricky without any matter to establish a reference frame, for example.
It's not like there's a verse that says "And then YHWH took Moses away for seventy years, starting him on basic mathematics and proceeding through higher and more accurate models of the universe, until Moses was an expert in the most advanced and arcane of physics, adept at quantum and a master of relativity. And then He said unto Moses 'Now that I have shown you all this, I will relate unto you an in depth account of exactly how I created the universe'."
At least Liu Xiaobo did more to earn his Nobel Peace Prize then just not being Bush.
The Chinese state may not be happy about him winning now, but hopefully in the future, the Chinese will fondly remember him as their first Nobel price prize winner.
No matter how much the government thinks that they can hide that he won this year, the information is still leaking through the blocks.
They is a large Chinese scientific community that follow the Nobel prizes each year, and most will notice that there will be omissions in the reporting this year.
Right. I figured that was the extent of your insight. Just wanted to make sure.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
The middle-class will never rise up for human rights and freedoms. All over the place, from Turkey to India, from Russia to China, the burgeoning middle-class is a hotbed of bigotry and hysterical nationalism.
In fact, everywhere, it's the middle-class with its fucking "values" who has sabotaged again and again any idea of fairness and liberty.
Thank you for proving my point. Yep. Chinese Community Party is at least better than George W Bush.
Yep.
Seems like a bassackwards solution to me. There's plenty of things the government should be taking care of that they're not, and plenty of things that they should be doing, and are, but in an unnecessarily inefficient way. Rather than gunning for more inefficiency so that the government can't do things they shouldn't, which they seem to manage to do just fine anyway, why not elect leaders and enact laws that prevent the abuse from happening in the first place?
Advocating increased inefficiency as the solution to bad government is like saying that you can't run very well in clown shoes so we can lower the crime rate by making everyone wear clown shoes so they can't get away from the cops. It doesn't really address the root of the problem, barely addresses the symptoms and brings a host of new problems along for the ride.
It's a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch serves little purpose beyond being a figurehead, like many, many other developed countries, including a large amount of Western democracies. If you think that's equivalent to the human rights violation machine that is the Chinese government, you are absolutely insane.
"On the topic of valuable materials too where do you think we're even going to get the rare-earth metals for our iPhones, and LCDs, or communication grade lasers given that China has pretty much all the worlds supply"
Pretty much every country that has a rare earth mine (and they're not really that rare) put it back into production after last month's fiasco.
Again I like the ideal but the though is shallow and the consequences are more far reaching than you could imagine.
Oh, kid, I got the grey hair to remember what it was like before we started whoring ourselves out to the Chinese government. I can remember when a blue-collar job could buy a house and put your kids through college. Meat-packers and construction workers used to make comfortable livings. Now airline pilots in charge of hundreds of lives have to apply for food stamps.
The United States, unlike Japan or Britain, is not a tiny little island with few natural resources. We don't HAVE to do business with the outside world. Unlike North Korea, we are capable of feeding ourselves. We can supply all of our own manufacturing inputs for steel, plastic, electronics, etc.
The ONLY people who benefit from trade with the Chinese are the wealthy in this country who get access to slave labor by proxy, who get to shirk their environmental responsibilities because the monsters in Beijing don't care if entire peasant towns die from cancer. You and I don't benefit from it because prices are already set as high as the market will bear. All that trade with the Chinese does is cut the legs out from underneath labor, allowing the wealthy to roll back all the gains that were made when the muckrakers ruled.
Welcome back to the bad old days.
As for those Chinese kids who will suffer when we pull our trade? Believe it or not, I actually do worry for them. My hope is that pulling our trade will spark the revolution that will save their future from the slave labor that now lies ahead. I WANT to see China join the civilized world. I WANT to see a real democracy in China. I would love to think those three thousand college kids did not die in vain.
But what I want more than that is that my own children do not join those Chinese kids in servitude, which is precisely where we're headed.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Are you sure it was because of that?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm