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Riot Breaks Out At Foxconn
Presto Vivace writes with news (as reported by Engadget) of a riot at Foxconn's Taiyuan plant, reportedly over guards beating up a worker, and writes "Something is going on at Foxconn. Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?" Reports of the riot are also at Reuters, TUAW, and CNBC, to name a few.
I was trying to find the plant in question on IOS Maps, but I don't see it.
Yes, and slashdot readers are a great source of news from Chinese sweatshop plants because demographics are, like, so close.
"Something is going on at Foxconn. Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?"
This is China. There won't be any news.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Who cares? I'm sitting in a coffee shop sipping on fairtrade coffee on blogging on my retina macbook pro about Obama and talking on my new iphone 5.
Scumbag western liberals: claims to support the working class, gladly buys products from a communist dictatorship with an abysmal human rights record
Makes me wonder how much an iPhone would cost to manufacture in the U.S. I wonder how automated the production line could be.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Western countries starting buying products made there?
Maybe the Western countries aren't the problem. Maybe China is the problem.
BTW, it's Taiwan guys. They're still relatively democratic, co the news sources are probably ok.
(-1: Clueless). Foxconn may be headquartered in Taiwan, but the Taiyuan plant is in the province of Shanxi, in Mainland China.
almost all the money they make is from sales of hardware. It is their entire business model.
Do any Slashdotters know of a good source for news about Chinese labor disputes?
I am sure, Foxconn, Apple, CIA, Chinese Communist Party and Dalai Lama have plenty to say about those things. Or, by "good" you mean something that is not pure spin? Then no.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Key points:
Sounds like old days in USA where workers faced the same work conditions.
They need real workers rights fast or soon the workers may just burn the factory down.
Chairman Yang would approve.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
No, not hemp; it's rainbows shat out by unicorns and then sun-dried.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Drat! If only there was someone on the scene with a smartphone with a really good camera and fast data connection!
The guys at wehateapple.com are saying it's the worst thing in history and that Apple will finally get what's coming to them for all teh evils. But the guys at appleisgreat.com are saying it's no big deal and stuff like this happens all the time.
Meanwhile, the guys at mindyourownbusiness.com don't have a report about it at all, but they do have some good reports that seem relevant to my own life. At mindsomeoneelsesbusiness.com, they're extremely interested in whether African tribes that make their own beer are at a greater risk for gout from too much yeast and they think it's the fault of the US government for some reason.
At newsfornerds.com, they're just trolling for clicks, so they put up a story with no information to get Apple haters and Apple fanboys sniping at each other. Later, they'll be posting stories about evolution, Mitt Romney's failure to announce any female cabinet members, an ask newsfornerds.com question about whether Dragon Age 3 will be more heterosexual-friendly than Dragon Age 2, and a statement from RMS about how the government should stop paying school teachers because they should be sharing their knowledge for free.
"a fight among workers from different production lines,"
From the local news "" Translation: Foxconn security started the fight, which triggered riots in Shandong and Henan.
How could this become "a fight among workers" in international news I wondered.
The only thing international news coverage is correctly accounted for is that the root cause is still a mystery, but we would imagine it should be more along the line of suppression under high working pressure.
If the Chinese aren't careful, they're going to have a communist revolution on their hands.
Sorry, I might have trotted that one out before; but it has fit so perfectly the past decade or so.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
First riot, with a good attitude back to your village with no pension - many many years later. Your extended family is watched, no promotions.
Second riot, you have contact with outside NGO, CIA, MI6.... the questions start and never stop.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Behold the sense of iHumor.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
2. Communism and Dictatorship are mutually exclusive (at least in theory).
In implementation, they end up one and the same. See the USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, and post-WWII China.
3. China doesn't have the best human rights record, but they don't exactly have anywhere near the worst one either. The US isn't any saint either:
* The US set up Guantanamo Bay to purposely get around constitutionally guaranteed rights when they were inconvenient.
I see your GITMO and raise you one Tiananmen Square Massacre. In order to put down the event, the CPC brought in military from the countryside to guarantee enforcement of orders. In addition, involvement meant that you would be completely disappeared.
With GITMO and other places, you're not completely removed from existence as deeply as performed in China. Never mind that GITMO treats its detainees quite well compared to China's equivalent - to the point where detained Uighurs are not sent home to China.
In addition, the United States does not have closed regions like Tibet that restrict foreigners from entry.
* The white people who settled in the US basically killed all of the existing red people.
Then you might explain the flood of Han Chinese in Tibet - the same region that has excluded foreigners for purely political reasons.
In addition, the monks get the same treatment if not worse by CPC policies(as implemented, not as written).
* Privacy as a right went out the window a while ago with all the warrant-less wiretaps, GPS vehicle tracking, etc.
* From my understanding, anyone can be detained without trial or attorney, as long as they are classified as a "terrorist".
It takes a LOT more effort to fall foul of those provisions in the US. As for China, you can just tell a bad joke about a government official and you are gone. Even high-up officials like Bo Xilai are not immune to such provisions - even if their family has favor.
In China, there would be no equivalent to the Tea Party or Breitbart that survives in the open.
* The "Child labor" that bleeding hearts in the US complain about was considered normal and routine in the US not all that long ago, and is still considered
normal and even desired in many countries overseas.
Those practices refer to a society that willfully forsakes freedom for all. 50 years will pass and China will still be as despotic towards its workers in deference to its little princes that run their factories like fiefdoms.
The closest I know is some domestic model Sony Vaio models (the most expensive ones) are supposedly 100% "made in Japan" - even those will probably have at least some parts from Taiwan, Korea, etc.
With IBM, some machines do have an order code for a US-friendly setup. That is, the machine will be made from parts that would pass muster with the DoD as being from the US and close allies with the US - China not being one of them. At one time, this also included US assembly of laptops for government contracts but is primarily for their midrange machines.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The biggest problem is that at this level of assembly you have to account for variations in parts. Just try to use a robot to snap a clamshell. A human will apply the right amount of force where it is needed, and he will immediately see if something goes wrong. The vast majority of consumer electronics is not designed for easy assembly; they are designed for low cost, and as result half of the assembly is on glue, another half is snaps, and yet another half is all sorts of tiny special screws. You have to keep fragile flex connectors plugged correctly, you have to check that no wires are sticking out, you have to make sure that all 17 pieces of the puzzle are in before you put the last one on top.
Robots are very good with pick and place because these operations require minimal feedback. Once your activity starts depending on the feedback the first thing you need to develop is fingers with a good number of pressure sensors and with fine motors that can drive those fingers just like human hands do. Those robots will cost you more than the peanuts that a Chinese worker costs you today. There are only a few experimental fingers that are getting close to what is needed.
It's certainly possible to design for robotic FA&T, just as through hole PCBs were replaced with surface mounted parts. However this will impact the end product. It will be hard to make enclosures that look like solid pieces of material, with no seams or with no obvious means to open and close them. You would have to give up on technologies that only humans can do efficiently (like mating of small connectors.) You would want the assembly to consist of very few basic moves, with blind mates for all parts and with easy means to check that the mating is complete.
I don't want to sound like automation of the final assembly is impossible. I only want to mention that it is not a simple replacement of the worker with a robot.
On top of that, imagine that 1000 factory owners own all factories in the country and they need no workers. Owners still want money to pay for the raw materials, for the investments into robots, and for their wear and replacement, and for taxes, and for their own profits. Who is going to come up with the money to buy their goods if hardly anyone in the whole country is employed? The current thinking centers around the government becoming the center of ownership of robotic factories and of distribution of their products. IMO, this only changes one boss for another boss; even worse, you can never leave the new boss.
Is his job a joke? Is his love-life DOA?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Major customers of Foxconn currently include:
Acer Inc. (Taiwan)[40]
Amazon.com (United States)[7]
Apple Inc. (United States)[41]
Cisco (United States)[42]
Dell (United States)[43]
Hewlett-Packard (United States)[44]
Intel (United States)[45]
Microsoft (United States)[9]
Motorola Mobility (United States)[43]
Nintendo (Japan)[46]
Nokia (Finland)[41]
Sony (Japan)[8]
Toshiba (Japan) [47]
Vizio (United States)[48]
You don't care about these workers, you are only bothered with your Apple hate so that you even ignore the facts. Only on slashdot this can be modded up. Sickening !
Hmmm, I've seen that list somewhere before.
http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3138293&cid=41431711 in the last Apple story (and in other /. Apple story too but life is too short to go looking).
Is this now the standard reply trotted out to rebuff the iOS6 map problem?
'Think Different' sounds more like Scientology every day.
I think the answer is you could pretty well 100% automate phone assembly and packing if you had the right design. The downside would be that repairability might be low (it's easier to dispense glue than insert screws) and the design might be more constrained. The cost of the equipment would vary according to the complexity of the final assembly and the expected volumes, but we are probably talking in the 1-10 million dollar range for an assembly system. Re-tooling is the expensive part. Ideally you want to decide on a form factor and stick to it until the tooling wore out, which is the most economical approach. But the basics of an assembly machine - pick and place, automatic screwdrivers, robot arms- would stay pretty constant.
Which is cheaper? The short answer is that in the long run automatic assembly will be cheaper again, it is just a question of when. Every Chinese riot brings that day a little closer.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The robotic automated control systems are typically shit, but that doesn't mean it's not doable, it just means that mechanical and electrical engineers should not write robotic control systems, they should leave it to software engineers. In other words, it's the same problem that the Diamond Viper video cards had back in the day when they let EE's write the video BIOS, instead of hiring a software engineer to do it.
I recently spent some quality time programming a Toshiba CA10-M00 controller interfaced robot for the purposes of doing testing on capacitive touch devices, such as trackpads, and the programming interface at the lowest level was, to put it bluntly, incredibly badly designed. The one saving grace was "palletizing" mode, and all that let you do was do things like fill columns in a biological sample tray while moving the pallet on which it was situated over one row at a time, and then repeating the previous instruction.
In any case, the controller was pretty terrible, very limited in capability, and only capable of controlling 4 degrees of freedom without being ganged to another controller for the next 4 degrees of freedom; even then; you'd want to install optional interface modules to use for step-signalling between the controllers, rather than ganging them, based on the limited number of steps available under the control of a single controller, and the inability to do anything remotely useful in only 1000 steps (with 4 degrees of freedom, 1000 steps was pushing rationality as it was).
As delivered, the hardware didn't actually function (had to send it back once to have a servo replaced), and when driven from other than the EEPROM, the command language is insufficiently rich to perform motion on more than a single axis at a time (which basically meant writing a program to write a program, rather than controlling it directly). Additionally, the plat was oriented incorrectly, and there were no registration marks on any of the manual adjustments, and the robot was not set up to be capable of non-2-d self interference (read: if incorrectly programmed, it could beat itself to death).
To top all this joy off, they very much expected you to use a "teaching pendant" to do a single static program, and I had to reverse engineer how to talk to the thing with a documented list of serial functions, with no documentation of order or the requirements for baseline settings.
All in all, to get a suite of repeatable test motions that could be applied to multiple devices with different form-factors required some fairly clever hackery. What I ended up with was a library of code that could be used to write a program that could program the robot. The most interesting of those are not in the public repository, but the rest of the code is here: http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromiumos/platform/touchbot.git;a=tree
The bottom line is that by using meta-programming, instead of using the default crap interface you get by applying teaching-pendant programming, it'd be pretty trivial to change over the location of a screw, or even radically alter the layout.
And just practically speaking, fetching a screw is a subroutine, putting in a screw is a subroutine, and where to put the screw in is a point in the X,Y,Z,R point table, if you wrote your code correctly in the first place, which you'd be unlikely to do if using the teaching pendant, but which was still technically possible using one. Which'd mean just rewriting the point table after issuing a region erase command to the robot controller over an RS232C link, after jamming the robot into a receptive mode with 5 other command would move the screw.
But doing the metaprogramming approach, it'd also be possible to radically alter the robot behaviour pretty trivially and be up and running on the real assembly line once you got your test line working correctly to the new model.
Which is to say, the argument that you can't as trivially recon
Yep, SuperKendall, BasilBrush, and a few others are there to try to eliminate adverse talk about Apple Corp.
I don't know why, but I assume they work for them. I can't really see why they'd die in a ditch defending Apple's relentless unethical and stupid decisions if they were only fans.
I guess there's more to Apple marketing than black turtle necks, rounded corners and misleading ads.
Yeah, all your examples are from 2010, and from cursory glance, they're all resolved. Also you included at least one link to errors that were appearing in Google Places, not Google Maps.
You might think it's unfair that we're judging a map that's been out for less than a month to one that's been out for years, but if you're going to release a new product it's going to be compared to what is currently available. The fact is, there are too many errors in obvious stuff - misspelled capital cities, duplications of entire islands, famous landmarks with incorrect coastlines. It's a complete abandonment of the philosophy of "It Just Works".
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Really, that touchy? It is one of the most common premises of humor - you have a case of obvious issues with/focus on "X", that makes room for funny exaggerations
Humor is usually based on truth. There is nothing true about that image. The whole feed until that images has been humor based on truth.
If you start mixing in fabrications you are polluting all the real examples of issues. Are they all humorously real problems? No-one can tell any more. And it's simply less funny to boot.
yeah, I guess you can claim that most jokes are 'outright fabrication
No. Again, most humor is based on exaggerations with some core truth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Guards are "workers" too by many definitions. A fight among workers can easily be spin from "clash between guards and assembly workers."
Lots of spin going on here. That a simple fight can turn into a riot? With cars turned over? Doubting it. Most such fights are simply watched by people as a form of entertainment. But when the dispute is something close to the observers' hearts (such as working conditions and abuses) others joining in and working together is natural.
I have a number I can give you for a good stick-remover. You know, if you get tired of having one up your ass.
Based on, but not necessarily true.
Except, ofcourse, as an exaggeration of the other issues that Apple's map software currently has.
No, the whole feed until that image has been Humorous Truths. Now we have a Humorous Exaggeration.
And, as sibling post said, pull the stick out your arse and laugh once and a while.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Why arent more linux people promoting OSM.
Why isnt Ubuntu using it in its desktop maps app?
Why isnt slashdot using links to OSM maps when ever a map is needed.
The fact that you can download all 9GIG and have a 100% local maps kicks but over all maps, and its OSS for gods sake.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The map is fine - you're just reading it wrong.
My local town doesn't exist on their map.
It is, however, in the Domesday Book.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I wonder why in many examples of capitalism, all markets are free except labor. If a nation is truly based on capitalist ideas, why not have a market for labor. In this case workers could band together and sell their labor to the highest bidder. For some reason, this is never considered a part of capitalism, which I believe is just a convenient inconsistency by the rich.
Because China does not have a free labor market, it is not a shining example of capitalism. It is a shining example of the powerful taking advantage, which happens everywhere.